27/01/2012
Video hosting & group albums added to Photoshop.com
August 24, 2009 by aashishverma
Photoshop.com may be Flash-y and Air-y with photo-editing capabilities, but it surprisingly still seems to lag sites like Flickr and Facebook when it comes to various sharing features. For instance, only this week has Adobe launched video-hosting and group album capabilities (available for free accounts as well as paid), long available from its competitors.
If you e-mail an invite to someone at an e-mail address other than the one connected to their Adobe ID, there’s no way to link the addresses or even allow the person to reply to you with the correct address.
People you invite as Collaborators to Group Albums aren’t automatically added as your friends. And while it notifies you via e-mail of updates to the album there don’t seem to be other notification options, like posting Twitter, Facebook, or even an RSS feed.
Posted in web | Tagged adobe, album, editing, email, facebook, flash, friends, hosting, twitter | Leave a Comment »
Windows 7: Gaming experience
July 31, 2009 by aashishverma
With the release of Windows 7 in October, PC gamers will finally have another platform on which to play their favorite games. Those who didn’t quite enjoy Windows Vista as a game platform or have stuck with Windows XP are probably looking forward to the opportunity to buy some new hardware, install Windows 7, and get the most out of their favorite games.
Windows 7
Development of Windows 7 is over and now is the time to peep into it. How will it be beneficial to the gamers. Does it have features that will help it beat out Windows Vista or Windows XP in the game space?
Let’s check this out:
DirectX 11
DirectX 11, which is set to run on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, is highly anticipated. A recent blog post on Advanced Micro Devices’ official blog asserts that DirectX 11, “in combination with new graphics hardware, and in some cases Windows 7, brings significant changes to the computing experience, changes that mean upcoming games and other applications are about to get a lot better.”
AMD believes that with the help of “a beast called the tessellator,” game developers will be able to create even better-looking games. The company contends that titles will be “smoother, less blocky, and more organic-looking.”
Thanks to better support for multithreading and GPGPU compatibility, game developers should be able to get more out of their games on Windows 7 than any previous version of the operating system.
AMD contends that games will have “higher frame rates” and “more realistic characters.” It also believes that game development costs might be kept down, thanks to a simplified, more efficient Windows 7.
Performance
In a recent posting on the Windows Partner blog, Intel’s Brandon LeBlanc wrote that Windows 7 will be a far more efficient platform than its predecessor. According to LeBlanc, Microsoft worked with Intel to implement “a new feature called SMT parking, which provided additional support for the Windows 7 scheduler for Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, enabling better performance on hyperthreaded, multicore Intel processors.”
Nvidia product manager Chris Daniel wrote on the Windows Team blog last week that Windows 7 is “the first Windows operating system to treat the graphics-processing unit as a real peer to the CPU.” He went on to say that Windows 7 is doing a fine job of making its platform more appealing to gamers.
“Microsoft is really opening up the immense parallel-computing horsepower of the GPU natively right in the operating system,” he wrote.
Those are just a couple examples, but most companies, albeit with a vested interest in seeing Windows 7 succeed, are saying the platform is more powerful than its predecessors. Regardless of the motives, that can only be good for gamers.
Games Explorer
Perhaps Games Explorer won’t top the list of the features that will help make Windows 7 a great gaming platform, but it could help.
Although that feature originally launched with Windows Vista, Microsoft has promised that the Windows 7 version of Games Explorer will make gamers much happier with what they find.
Once they add titles to their PCs, gamers will be able to update those games from the Games Explorer pane, rather than open up each title and download updates in the software. If they want in-game statistics, they can have that too.
Posted in technical | Leave a Comment »
Dell ‘s suffering with profit loss upto 50%
March 1, 2009 by aashishverma
Dell’s profit sank drastically during the final quarter of 2008.
The PC maker reported fourth-quarter revenue of $13.4 billion Thursday, a 16 percent drop from $15.9 billion reported the same quarter a year ago. Dell’s profit for the quarter totaled $351 million, or 18 cents per share, compared to $671 million and 31 cents per share the year before. That’s nearly a 48 percent drop in profit. Analysts had been anticipating earnings per share of 26 cents.
Dell had reported last month it would be forced to take a pre-tax charge of $280 million, or 11 cents per share, related to cost-cutting and restructuring measures taken during the quarter.
The company continued to cite the “challenging” global environment and the reduction in IT spending by large corporate customers, a segment in which Dell is heavily invested.
Many of the company’s customers began to defer spending starting in the summer, and it “continued to deteriorate through the second half of the year,” Chief Financial Officer Brian Gladden said during a conference call with reporters. “We expect continued weakness during the current quarter.”
Gladden tried to keep the focus on the company’s progress on cutting costs. Dell cut operating expenses by 16 percent, or $363 million, during the fourth quarter.
He also said there would be more to come. Gladden said the company will be able to take $4 billion of costs out of its budget by 2011, up from the previous goal of $3 billion announced last year. The costs will come from improving on manufacturing and supply chain costs, as well as operating expenses. When asked if that included more job cuts, Gladden didn’t deny that it would. It’s “not just labor, not just people,” he said.
