Windows 7 Beta now Ready for Download

If you’ve been out of the loop for the past couple of days, it might interest you to know that Microsoft has made available a public beta version of their upcoming operating system, Windows 7. You can download a copy by clicking here and installation is pretty easy. Just burn the Windows 7 image to a DVD, boot up from the DVD discand run the installation .

So, if you’re already raring to give Microsoft’s latest OS a try, then by all means download it now and tell us how it goes for you.

“Inflation is at a two-year low but that’s not the way it feels for those of us shopping for groceries,” said Avery Shenfeld, senior economist at CIBC World Markets.

The cost of food rose 7.3% in 2008, inching up 0.3% in December for a fourteenth straight month of increase, Statistics Canada figures showed Friday. Marking the sharpest increase was the cost of fresh vegetables, which were 26.9% higher than in December last year. Other notable increases included a 18.9% rise in fruit prices, a 12.4% increase in bakery product prices, a 6% rise in the cost of dairy products and a 5.5% increase in meat prices.

Source and More : www.financialpost.com

Revenue rose 118 percent in the nine weeks ended Jan. 16, the London-based retailer said today. Growth accelerated from the 107 percent pace of the first half.

U.K. Internet retail sales climbed 14 percent in December, Capgemini said this month, defying the economic slowdown as online retailers offered bargains and the ability to shop around. Discounts and free weekend delivery offers reduced Asos’s gross margins by a “a couple of percentage points,” Chief Executive Officer Nick Robertson said by telephone.

“Sales have come in well ahead of expectations, but margins have been a bit disappointing,” Jean Roche, an analyst at Arbuthnot Securities with a “strong buy” recommendation, said in a phone interview.

Asos fell 17.25 pence, or 6.2 percent, to 262.25 pence at 9:35 a.m. in London trading. Before today, the stock had gained 11 percent this year, compared with larger rival Next Plc’s 9.8 percent advance.

“We have had another great Christmas,” the CEO said in the statement. “Sales, visitors, conversion and average basket value were all at record levels.”

Profit Estimates

Asos expanded its offer with an ‘AsosRed’ discount section, international Web sites, childrens’ wear and more products with other retailer’s brands, such as Ted Baker Plc and Whistles.

Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering at Google, said in a blog post that Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service that lets users share their locations with friends, would be closing in the next few months and that further details would be forthcoming.

Jaiku, however, will live on as an open source project. Gundotra said that Google engineers have been porting the microblogging service to Google App Engine and that when the migration is completed, the company plans to make the code available under the Apache license.

“With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups, and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine,” he said. “The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we’re excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.”

He also said that Google would be shutting Google Mashup editor, a tool for making Web service mashups that has been in closed beta testing. Much, if not all, of the functionality of Google Mashup Editor is available through Google App Engine, and Gundotra is encouraging users to transition their applications to Google App Engine.

In a separate blog post, Punit Soni, a Google product manager, said that Google Catalog Search is scheduled to close Thursday. The service, launched in 2001, provided the ability to search the full text of thousands of product catalogs for the few who used it. The technology developed for Google Catalog Search went on to provide the foundation of Google Book Search.

The cessation of the ability to upload videos to Google Video in a few months is unlikely to affect many video makers, apart from those seeking to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes, with some exceptions, in part as a way to keep storage costs down and to prevent the unauthorized uploading of complete half-hour TV shows and longer-format, professionally produced content.

Burger King Logo

In a statement released today, Burger King said: “While Facebook was a great sport, they did ask for changes that would have resulted in a different approach to our application, counter to what we developed.

Ultimately, based on philosophical differences, we decided to conclude the campaign and chose to ‘sacrifice’ the application.”

Facebook had said the notification feature of the Burger King application violated its privacy rules. Members are not normally informed when they are removed from friend lists on the social network

How come RFID hasn’t taken off in Pakistan?

Better late then never but not really true. May not at a mass level but there are quite a few RFID projects on experimental basis that had been initiated in Pakistan by technology enthusiasts. On government scale, we can name ePassport at NADRA and eTAG by National Highway Authority as pretty good initiatives. These fascinating projects are suffering due to the negligence and lack of vision of the project owners who are either too busy or already cashed its commercial aspect in terms of deployment. Proper infrastructure to back up has not been provided and neither the projects been advertised to educate people what benefits they can gain by using the RFID. ePassports are currently being issued using a 2D Barcode and only a few ePassports carry RFID chips being used for experimental basis.

RFID Tag

On private scale the RFID is mainly used in the time and attendance management purposes in Pakistan. This is one area where RFID implementation can be seen spreading at a high speed. Although advances in radio frequency identification technology have enabled the early adoption in other commercial applications like supply chain management, logistics and transportation as well but I believe that although RFID has an advantage over plain vanilla bar-coding in logistics, it will take a while for it to become mainstream.

We know what makes RFID so useful. What makes RFID so expensive?

Expensive is a word that’s frequently associated with RFID, most commonly regarding the tags, but ‘unwieldy’ – well, there is no doubt some that might agree, but any major technology investment implies change, which can indeed be painful. Could a move towards RFID be complex? Yes. Would it imply process change? Yes. Is it necessarily ‘unwieldy’? Not so sure. Unwieldy tends to imply little long term benefit, and just a headache to implement. I think RFID ultimately offers significantly more than that.