ANKUR JAIN

I got the Yahoo Mail Beta Invitation today and there was no reason to skip/miss it.

It took some time to initialize, first time I launched, but since then it’s been working blazingly fast, just a Desktop Application. Includes a Left Pane, where you got all the links to the Mail Folders, Calendar and Notepad. RSS feeds can also be added within in the mailbox only.

You click on a Mail folder and it is loaded in the right-pane of the Window, and that’s where it is fast at. You can right-click on Mail Folders as well as on the messages to perform most of the tasks

Double-click on a message in the list and it is loaded with full height, without a preview window. With Keyboard shortcuts similar to Gmail, the experience is much better and simpler.

Sign up for Yahoo Mail Beta here.

Those who’ve already joined Yahoo Mail Beta, can join this Yahoo Group

Alcatel is planning to buy the rival Lucent Technologies creating World’s largest telecom equipment supplier with combined sales volume of $25.33 billion.

The talks revive the negotations that sparked off five years ago and fell over due to issues with structuring of the new company. This time, the 2 companies are talking about a “merger of equals” that would be “priced at market”. Lucent chief Patricia Russo is likely to become the CEO when Alcatel chief Serge Tchuruk retires in June.

Pressure had been mounting on telecom equipment majors after the consolidation of telephone service providers that buy the gear. Major customers like AT&T have already been consolidating, with the latest move being the $64.5 billion AT&T bid for BellSouth; Cisco agreed in November to buy Scientific-Atlanta Inc. for $6.9 billion to enter the growing market of Internet TV.

After the merger talks, share prices of Alcatel & Lucent jumped to $3.05/share, 13.14 euros/share respectively.

Alcatel has a market value of $21.9 billion, and Lucent, the largest U.S. maker of phone equipment, is valued at $12.6 billion, based on closing prices yesterday. Their combination would produce a company with sales larger than the market leader, Cisco Systems taking telecom mergers to almost $200 billion in the past 18 months.

ATI launched first Graphic Accelerator card with the capacity of 1 GB memory. The graphics accelerator card features an extremely powerful ultra threaded, parallel processing GPU, and the famous ATI’s Avivo video & display technology.

Featuring full Shader Model 3.0 support and a scalable ultra-threaded architecture with true 128-bit floating point precision, 8 parallel geometry engines, 16 pixel shader processors, and an ultra efficient 512-bit ring bus memory controller, ATI FireGL V7350 provides the graphics horsepower for today’s professional applications and tomorrow’s technology innovations.

ATI’s Avivo video and display platform brings an increased level of visual fidelity to the professional graphics market with features such as automatic gain control, gamma correction and increased colour bit depth. With a 10-bit per RGB component graphics pipeline, instead of the standard 8-bit, the FireGL’s colour palette increases to over a billion colours.

The result should be a finer level of detail throughout the visible spectrum, enhancing details in shadows and making highlights come to life. In addition, high-end displays supporting 16-bit per RGB color component can be fully utilized by the graphics cards. Two dual-link connectors also give end users the ability to drive multiple ultra-high resolution displays, yielding a massive desktop display over 5000 pixels wide.

Based on a cutting-edge 90nm process technology and a 512-bit ring bus memory architecture, the FireGL V7350 and FireGL V7300 are able to take advantage of higher speed memories and support 1GB and 512MB frame buffers respectively. The high clock rates of these new graphics cards, combined with full 128-bit precision and extremely high levels of parallel processing, result in floating point processing power that exceeds a 3GHz Pentium processor by a staggering seven times, claims ATI.

Long awaited by FC users, Fedora Core 5 has been released. The latest release includes latest Gnome 2.14 and KDE 3.5 versions. XFce 4 has also been bundled alongwith.

Running on the 2.6.15 kernel, Fedora Core 5 disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules.

FC 5 offers the recent releases of other standard softwares like Mono, Java, Firefox and GIMP. It installs GCC 4.1 and tools built with it like Eclipse.

Yes, Mono will be installed by default now. The Gnome Menu is a little streamlined and needs to be adjusted for user-defined behaviour. Mono based applications like Beagle, Tomboy and FSpot have also been offered alongwith the distro.

New look package managers are available by the name of Pirut and Pup, with sleek interfaces, though YUM is being used at the command line. The new look GUI Interface based package managers are not much efficient at packages management.

FC5 is quite sluggish in performance with high system requirements. The release notes for FC5 suggest a minimum of 256 megabytes of RAM for a graphical system, and recommend 512. Even a command-line system requires 128 megabytes.

Screenshots

Mozilla 2.0 Alpha 1 is leaking out as an undeclared Tinderbox Build release available for download from the Mozilla FTP server. Tinderbox builds are released as intermediary versions to the final release, and are often quite similar to the official version release.

Downloaded it and installed this new release; feels a little faster, though most the extensions failed to work with it. Didn’t find much of a difference in this release, except the close tab button available alongwith the tab name.

You can try it here:

Windows EXE - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe
Windows ZIP - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.win32.zip
Mac - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.mac.dmg
Linux - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Linux - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz

TechCrunch has released some cool screenshots of Yet-to-be-launched Google Calendar.

Google Calendar is supposed to be under testing by a closed-group of 200 participants, who are required not to share any details of the product with anyone.

Have a Look

Firefox 2.0 release shall be released in another 3-4 days, as per the minutes of the Status Meeting held on March 7, 2006 as per the given link .

The new release shall be incorporating the following features:

1. A new User Interface
2. Undo Close Tab Feature
3. Focus on performance, stability and toolbar drag & drop
4. Extensions’ blacklisting
5. Spell as you type
6. RSS parser
7. Session Saver, and
8. Anti Phishing

AT&T is buying BellSouth Corp for 67 billion in stock, in a bid further expanding its reach in SouthEastern United States & acquire the rest of Cingular Wireless, it doesn’t already own.

AT&T Inc. was formed by SBC’s acquisition of AT&T Corp. in November. The deal added a substantial national reach to the former Southwestern Bell’s local business, which is concentrated in 13 states, including Texas, California, and the Midwest.

Post merger, AT&T would reach out to 70 million local-line phone customers, 54.1 million wireless subscribers and nearly 10 million broadband subscribers in the 22 states.

The deal would substantially expand the reach of AT&T, already the country’s largest telecommunications company by the number of customers served. AT&T currently owns a 60 percent share of the nation’s No. 1 cell phone provider, while BellSouth has 40 percent.

NASA alongwith its European & Japanese partners have set a new plan to complete the International Space Station (ISS) by 2010, earlier than originally planned to ensure they were functioning by 2010, when the orbiting space laboratory is to be fully assembled.

The new sequence moves up launch of Europe’s Columbus module to the seventh shuttle flight and moves up launch of Japan’s Kibo module two flights, to the ninth mission.

The first of three components for the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) – or Kibo – are slated for 2007, one flight earlier, during the eighth scheduled orbiter mission, said Keiji Tachikawa, head of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The remaining two components are set for the ninth and twelfth shuttle missions, he added.

All rumours about the secretive Microsoft Origami Project might be clearing off by March 9, as per the latest update on the website.

To say the least/predict, Origami is expected to be the size of a paperback book, able to play music, games, connect to the internet and run software. Information from Microsoft on Origami is sketchy to say the least. Industry experts predict it is the Microsoft’s long-awaited offering hoping to take a bite out of rival Apple’s all-conquering i-Pod.

It may just be coincidence, but March 9 is also the launch in Hannover of CeBit, the world’s largest annual trade show for the information and telecommunications technology industry.