Last week, Audible Magic in Lost Gatos, Calif,. demonstrated their new content recognition software by downloading a video clip from Youtube. The system was able to identify the clip as a scene 49 minutes and 37 seconds into "Kill Bill: Vol. 2." even though the clip had been recorded on a camcorder and dubbed in Chinese.

MySpace said last week that it would use Audible Magic's system to identify copyrighted material on its pages. However, YouTube is still one major hold-out resisting the new system.

The system works by comparing a file to a database when it is uploaded to a website. Then it either allows the file to be posted or blocked depending on if the file is licensed for use on that website.

Creative has responded to the Inquirer reguarding their article on Creatives Lack of vista support. Story can be seen here. The creative PR responded "We have been working on the Vista project for quite some time, having released beta drivers late last year for the beta community and endeavored to keep our customers up to date regularly via our Vista update site and forum feedback."

For those who wish to have a timeline for the release of more polished creative drivers here are a few dates to look for. March 5th, and March 8th. On March 5th Creative targets delivery of the Audigy series drivers, this is suprising to many seeing that the X-Fi series is newer than the Audigy Series and is being released at a later date.

Until recently, if you wanted a Gmail (GoogleMail for us here in the UK) account, then you would either need to request a message sent to your mobile, or if your country wasn't on the list for that service you would need to receive an invite from a current Gmail user. That's all changed now - anyone anywhere in the world can now sign up for over 2GB of storage with Google for free in the same way that you might open a Hotmail or Yahoo email account. Although it may take a few hours, the service should go live immediately. Gmail remains a beta version, but it could soon be finished and become another powerful weapon in Google's arsenal of free software and services. You should be able to sign up for the service by visting Gmail and clicking on "Sign up for Gmail" in the bottom right corner.

Since the very first public beta campaigns, Windows Vista Ultimate was said to have "extras", which would be unveiled once Vista was public. Now, Microsoft has stashed those extras in with Windows Update. At this point, those extras include Texas Hold 'Em, Bitlocker, EFS enhancements, and various security patches. There will probably be more as Microsoft makes them.

AN JOSE, Calif. - Jan. 29, 2007 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Microsoft, back in May, began promoting it's new "Windows Media Photo" standard, which has been since renamed HD Photo. Microsoft is very clear with it's ambitions: They want to replace JPEG as the primary format for pictures. While some would argue that overtaking JPEG as the most popular picture format is a bit overzealous, Microsoft has two figurative ace-in-the-hole's. The first is that Microsoft will be shipping it with Windows Vista. That means that people who use Windows Vista will be able to see HD Photo, regardless of the photo viewer. This isn't exactly the kind of thing you need to switch people to a picture format. So Adobe systems will patch Photoshop CS3 after it is released to support HD Photo. This will allow users to save their pictures in HD Photo. CNET editors call these methods "pervasive", but they could very well be effective. The picture below shows what the difference is between JPEG and HD Photo when talking about compression. The less color in the picture, the less distortion there is, so ideally a perfect compression would be pitch black.

G80 owners worldwide are probably wondering why they do not have even a beta driver for their high-end expensive graphics card. The reason is very simple: the driver is not stable. Games that are stable on any other video card using any other driver are great on Windows Vista. However, once the G80 was plugged in with the current driver, the test system was prone to frequent and unpredictable reboots. With Windows Vista launching in a matter of days, we sure hope NVIDIA can make a stable driver for the launch of Microsoft's brand new operating system.

For a limited time, Sun is offering a free DVD media kit which includes the Solaris 10 Operating System for both SPARC and x86 platforms as well as Sun Studio 11 software.

Take this opportunity to get familiar with the most advanced operating system on the planet and the tools which enable the highest optimizations and best runtime performance on the Solaris Operating System, bar-none.

Surfing the internet can be troubling for seniors. With this in mind, Cranky.com became a new search engine that is specifically designed with the elderly in mind. The results are shown in big text, it is very user friendly, and the page is less cluttered with things that would confuse and elderly person. Cranky.com also shows less results per page, and the results it shows are more tailored toward the elderly demographic (defined by Cranky.com as 50 or older).

In an interview with the CEO of Apple, found here, Steve Jobs explains that the iPhone will not have any third-party applications. While the iPhone uses a copy of Mac OS X, Steve Jobs made sure that users could not install custom content for several reasons. The first is profit. Steve having complete control of what can and cannot go on the iPhone means that things like ringtones and songs have to be allowed by Apple to go on the iPhone (various premiums might be charged). The second and hopefully more important reason is security. If the iPhone could accept third-party or homemade applications, it could potentially be used to take down AT&T (service provider for iPhone). Finally, the iPhone is limited for the same reason iPods are: Macintosh sells products that they know work, and want them to stay in working condition for as long as possible.

Both AMD and NVIDIA are having trouble making good Vista compatible drivers for their graphics cards. The main problems lie in multi-GPU support. While both companies will certainly have a driver for Vista x86 by January 30th, it will be harder to support than the XP version. NVIDIA has also hinted that they will work on an x64 driver after making an x86 driver, instead of doing both at once.

People who were testing the RC1 copy of Windows Vista, the most distributed of all the betas, got a nasty holiday surprise on new years eve. Windows Media Center uses MPEG 2 decoder and Dolby Digital components, which are definitely not free. Microsoft pays the respective owners of the decoders for a license, which expired for Windows Vista RC1 users on December 31st. Microsoft cannot renew the license, and has declined to say whether or not the license could have been extended. The rest of Windows Vista RC1 will still work until June 2007.

AMD has a basic driver for it's R600 ready for action, though they definitely want to polish some things before releasing it. AMD knows that CrossFire and OpenGL performance are huge problems in Windows Vista, so AMD is working hard on tweaking these things. The R600 is confirmed to use an 80nm process, have a 512-bit memory controller, unified shader architecture, DX10 support, and enough performance to "make G80 run for its money." The launch is expected to take place in early February, though the launch date has been moved several times.

Microsoft has sponsored a study into its latest operating system and the new Aero theme, which has come to the conclusion that it doesn't slow PCs. Apparently the new interface "had little or no negative impact on Vista's performance". Matt Ayers, a program manager at Microsoft, wrote "We put quite a bit of effort into making sure that the new visuals were as efficient as possible, and it really paid off," continuing "You can run Aero without guilt!" Many people have criticised the resource-hungry Windows Vista which has put some gamers off using it, and this report may make people sceptical as to why Microsoft recommends a noticeably more powerful system when running the Aero interface. Although the report comes to this conclusion, it does not appear to contain any benchmarks related to gaming or 3D applications.

A new flaw has been exposed in Google's Gmail service which could allow hackers to get hold of your contacts. When you log into your Gmail (Googlemail in some countries) account, Google will put your details into a JavaScript file. Because of this, if you browse other websites whilst logged into your account, any of them could potentially declare the function "google" and be able to get hold of all of your contacts. The only two ways to ensure your privacy is safe are to disable JavaScript in all websites except those you trust or to not browse other sites whilst logged into any Google service. Admittedly Gmail is still only a beta, but a fault like this could be quite serious.

Update: Disabling JavaScript did not solve this problem, however it appears that Google has now fixed this issue and your contacts list should be safe.

Everyones favorite game Duke Nukem Forever wins Vaporware '06, the king of Vaporware returns!
Wired wrote a nice list of the Vaporest(?) Vaporware of 2006, programs and hardware that should have been but are not.

• Duke Nukem Forever
• TiVoToGo for Mac
• Skype for Symbian
• Spore
• SED Televisions
• Airbus 380
• Gran Turismo 4 Mobile
• The "IPod Killer"
• Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
• Optimus-103 Keyboard

An impressive list of nice stuff to have, most of them should be available once hell freezes over.
For full details on these wannahaves follow the linky.

Today my good friend Unwinder announced the final release of his RivaTuner v2.0 utility. Since its existance the tool has had over 5 million downloads, which just shows how much there is a need for good overclocking software.

Unfortunately with this version Unwinder steps down from Rivatuner development, at least for a few months. I am very sad to see this happening and will miss the countless discussions we had about how to interface with hardware to achieve things like monitoring, overclocking and fan control.

Head over to Guru3D to grab the final RivaTuner 2.0.

In fact, a lot of DX10 games are delayed. Crysis and Flight Simulator X have both pushed off their release dates to at least late Q1 07, if not Q2 or Q3. The main reason behind this is the lack of DX10 hardware support for these games, and we will be lucky if there is a DX10 beta of Flight Simulator X on the launch day of Windows Vista.

BBC Worldwide has announced that it plans to release many of its programmes for free viewing via file sharing. Anyone living in the US and using Azureus' Zudeo software will be able to download titles such as Little Britain, Doctor Who, Monty Python series and Red Dwarf. Zudeo is Azureus' version of YouTube (Zudeo it offers high definition videos), although they are most famous for their controversial BitTorrent software. The BBC said this move is part of a drive to reach the largest audience possible.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom - the founders of Skype, one of the largest companies in VoIP calling - are planning for a peer-to-peer IPTV service. About 6,000 users are already beta testing this service (codenamed the Venice Project) which is intended to allow people to share any videos that they own the copyright to, almost like a peer-to-peer YouTube. Although this is an interesting idea, many connections will be unable to handle the upload speeds that would be required if thousands of people were looking to stream the same video from a few users.

Google Inc. has released a customized version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) browser in which Google, not Windows Live Search, is the default search engine. In addition to using Google as the default search engine, Google's customized version of IE 7 also provides users with the Google Toolbar and a Google homepage they can personalize. Google's customized version of IE 7 can be downloaded from here.

Microsoft Website gets a faceliftIf you take a look at www.microsoft.com you will notice that the site now has a new layout, giving it a more modern and fresh look (old shown on the left, new on the right). Pages based on a similar template have been appearing for newer software such as Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista for some time now, but Microsoft have only now transferred it to their main page. They seem to be aiming for a simpler design to make navigation easier for the average user. If you want to read the frequently asked questions about the new site take a look here.

Every HP computer that is "Windows Vista ready" and shipped with a Windows Vista upgrade coupon will get a free copy of Windows Vista when it is released. However, they will also get a free DVD full of various drivers, as well as a small guide on upgrading to Windows Vista, to make the upgrade process as worry free as possible. HP has worked since 2001 with Microsoft to ensure an easy upgrade path.

Back in August, we reported that Microsoft would let amateur game programmers have a go at making games for the Xbox360. Based on Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft .NET framework, XNA Game Studio Express allows anyone running a computer with Windows XP to make Xbox360 games. Of course, for the games to actually run, the author has to be a member of the XNA Creators Club, which costs $99 a year through Xbox Live. Members of the XNA Creators Club get the ability to publish games on Xbox Live, forum support, and various assets. You can download Game Studio Express and the framework required from MSDN.

The Inquirer learned that NVIDIA plans to release the G80 driver for Windows Vista, DirectX10 enabled and fully functional, in mid December. NVIDIA is not giving away "review samples" of the driver, but internal sources say that the driver is very nice and works quite well. NVIDIA hasn't released a public Vista driver yet because the mainstream version of Vista is not due for release until January 30th, and NVIDIA wants time to work all the bugs out.