What users searched for in 2007?

What users searched for in 2007?



A review of Yahoo searches reveals global warming, celebrity meltdowns, social networking and a literary boy wizard's final adventure captured mankind's attention in 2007.

The US Internet giant sifted billions of searches made this year by its hundreds of millions of users worldwide to identify trends regarding what piqued people's interest.

Here we bring to you the 10 most searched tech words on Yahoo in 2007. These are the words for which the users clamoured for information on in this past-one year.

And are also the words which as Raj Gossain, Yahoo's senior director of marketing search, says reflect broad consumer trends that dominated the year 2007.

YouTube




Gadgets and games weren't the only thing to push the tech limits. In 2007, the popular video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips -- YouTube -- ruled the Yahoo search results.

YouTube made headlines for its US Presidential debate, its YouTube Video Awards, and of course its soft porn videos.

According to a new report from research firm comScore, Google's YouTube continues to rank as the top US online video property, drawing the most unique video viewers and most videos.

Wikipedia




The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet was the second most searched word on Yahoo in 2007. The foundation that runs Wikipedia recently agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work.

However, it won't pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages -- just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The year 2007 was also full of controversies for one of the biggest online brands with reports of companies including Microsoft trying to edit wiki entries. The site was also banned in some US schools.

Facebook



Corporate stakes accelerated the growth of social networking and the biggest example of it is Facebook.

The social networking site which has been giving tough competition to the Internet giant google recently got support from its biggest rival Microsoft. Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 per cent stake in the company this October.

Facebook has also raised $60 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, adding to its list of financial heavyweights backing the online hangout's rapid growth.

The second largest social network on the Web behind News Corp's MySpace.com launched a marketing initiative called Beacon last month. The marketing tool agitated thousands of Facebook users because it circulated potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activity

iTunes



The digital media player application introduced by Apple in January 2001 once again showed its popularity: the music app is fourth on the Yahoo tech search trends for 2007.

Now users can turn songs from the iTunes Store into custom ringtones for their iPhone and download music from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store on their iPod touch or iPhone.

Also, following a dispute over pricing issues in August, NBC has now officially ended its deal with Apple and their content has been removed from the iTunes Store, despite the company being the largest supplier of video downloads.

Some shows that are broadcasted on NBC are still available at the iTunes Store, however, as they are produced by other studios, rather than NBC Universal.

iPod




The portable media player leader iPod comes was the fifth most tech searched word on Yahoo. iPod which was launched by Apple in 2001 again revamped its line-up this year.

Apple unleashed a slew of new iPods, including its all new iPod, the iPod Touch. Also dubbed as 'the God machine', the new iPod seems to have borrowed interface technology from iPhone -- except that it is no phone.

Apple also reduced the price of its best-selling 8 GB iPhone model from $599 to $399, barely two months after it started selling them. The smaller 4 GB phone, which had sold for $399, was discontinued. Apple executives said that the revamped and expanded iPod line -- which recasts the iPhone as the top model -- is the company’s most robust lineup ever for the holiday season.

iPhone



Apple seems to be in a habit of ruling the charts, iPhone is third offering from the company in the Yahoo's most searched tech words list.

The phone which made its international debut in June gave a new lease of life to smartphones and compelled phone manufacturers to rethink their strategies after their products look shadowed in iPhone halo.

In fact, the iPhone success seems to have claimed its first victim with many analysts believing that iPhone success contributed to Motorola's CEO Ed Zander exit. Many feel that RAZR 2 was released too late and has been overshadowed by iPhone.

However, iPhone too has its share of controversies, after initial network glitches on AT&T, the iPhone is now facing a lawsuit from Klausner Technologies over its voicemail. New York-based Klausner has filed a $360 million suit against Apple and AT&T Inc over voicemail patents that Klausner claims the Apple iPhone infringes.

Nintendo Wii




Nintendo Wii debuted in late 2006, amidst predictions of a stiff competition from the Sony PlayStation 3 and the new Xbox, however, Wii sales gained on both the 360 and the PS3. Little doubt then that it was among the Yahoo's 10 hottest search words for 2007.

The company's 2007 releases include "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Metroid Prime 3: Corruption" (for the Wii) and “The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass” and “Brain Age 2” (for the DS).

The company also announced that it will let individuals and outside game studios create and sell downloadable Wii games with a tool called WiiWare. Gamers will be able to purchase the games through the console's Wii Shop channel starting in early 2008.

Xbox



Giving competition to Nintendo's Wii is Microsoft's Xbox 360. While Wii racked up 350,000 unit sales during Thanksgiving week in the US, Xbox 360 wasn't very far behind with 310,000 units sold during the same period.

Based on these figures, analysts believe that it will be a fairly tight battle between the Wii and 360 during December, with the Wii having a slight edge.

In this, Nintendo seems to be taking a page from Microsoft Corp's play book. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker's XNA Game Studio tools let developers design video games for its Xbox 360 console.

Recently, Microsoft is said to have issued a warning about a one of the features of the new dashboard update for the Xbox 360. The update allows users to change the email account (Live ID) associated with their Xbox Live Gamertag and one that has been requested since the consoles launched.

Sony PlayStation 3



Ninth on the Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) games console sold 183,217 units in November in Japan, outselling Nintendo's Wii's 159,193 units for the first time, according to media reports.

This may be a turning point for Sony's struggling games division. The PS3 has lagged the Wii in sales since the devices were launched late last year due to the Sony machine's high price and scarcity of strong game titles.

Sony Computer Entertainment America reported similar success in the United States, where PlayStation 3 hardware sales have increased by nearly 300 per cent.

Sony launched a 40 GB model for Y40,000 ($361) in Japan in November and cut prices on 20 GB models, which ignited sales and could provide the next-generation console with the momentum it needs through the holiday shopping season.

Analysts said this year's Christmas season is crucial for Sony's PS3 in terms of winning the “perception wars.”

Guitar Hero



Tenth on the Yahoo list is the popular game Guitar Hero, one of the hottest and most surprising hit.

Musical games have long had their niche in the video-game industry. Fans of “Dance Dance Revolution” or “Pump It Up” like to show off their footwork; “SingStar” and “Karaoke Revolution” attract “American Idol” wannabes. Such games can be fun at parties and they've always had a devoted audience, but they never really attracted the masses.

That changed with the 2005 release of RedOctane's “Guitar Hero.” Suddenly, every gamer had a fake Gibson connected to his PlayStation, and plenty of music lovers who don't usually play games got hooked as well.

The creators of “Guitar Hero” are now developing “Rock Band” -- which adds drums and vocals to the formula -- for Electronic Arts and MTV Games. Activision is preparing “Guitar Hero III” for the holidays.

And plenty of other studios have music games in the works. Fans of the genre are no longer a cult today it seems every gamer wants to be a pop star.

Activision Blizzard recently announced plans to "exploit" its successful franchises like Guitar Hero by bringing out titles on an annual basis.

How-tos of an online interview

How-tos of an online interview



Rajeev Dogra spent a sleepless night before reaching the local office of a large banking company. Quite nervous at the thought of taking a video conference interview for a position in operations, there was nobody he could turn to for tips.

His friends had bunch of advice for face-to-face interviews, but they had little help to offer on virtual format. And the very thought of the situation intimidated Rajeev. With more and more companies opting for virtual interviews, by phone, conference call or videoconference, rather than the traditional face-to-face ones, there may be many like Rajeev biting their thumbs.

Here are a few steps to keep in mind to help clinch the deal.

Time it right



Arrive at the videoconference site with enough time in hand to get comfortable with the equipment and ensure that everything is working properly. You should be primed and ready to go when your interviewer joins the conference.

Don’t bother too much about what can go wrong, be positive. That should help you perform better.

Appearance counts



Remember, appearance matters here just as much as in any regular interview. Just because you are not meeting your potential employer face-to-face does not mean you can afford to dress sloppy.

Instead, dress professionally -- even soberly. Avoid over-bright colours and glittery jewellery that catches the light and distracts the interviewer.

Sit smart and relaxed through the interview. That says a lot about your personality and comfort with technology.

Practise the technique



Speak slowly and clearly in well modulated voice. Avoid excessive movements and look straight into the monitor to make direct eye contact with your interviewer.

Also, keep in mind that in an interview like this, there will be a slight delay in receiving the audio and the video. So, practice pausing a bit before speaking to ensure that the other person has finished speaking and again, when you’ve finished, so that the people at the other end know that you’re done.

Mind your language



End your interview with a smile and ensure that your videoconference equipment is completely switched off before making any comments about the interview.

Don’t let an indiscreet comment or gesture spoil the entire process for you.

Send a thanks note




Like in any other interview, send a thank you note, thanking your potential employers for their time and outlining your interest in the company. Politeness always helps!

Java EE 6

Leading-Edge Java
Java EE 6

A Conversation with Bill Shannon and Roberto Chinnici
by Frank Sommers

November 6, 2007

Summary

In this interview with Artima, Bill Shannon and Roberto Chinnici, spec leads for JSR 316, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6, discuss the key design considerations for the upcoming version of the enterprise Java specification.

Frank Sommers:
The JSR for Java EE 6, JSR 316, was submitted to the JCP in July. What are the main themes for EE 6?

Bill Shannon:
We've been doing Java EE for quite a while now, and the EE community has become a vibrant place, with lots of things going on. There are now alternatives being created to various facilities in the EE platform, and lots of pseudo-competitors emerged.
We are looking at all the great stuff going on in and around Java EE, and have really been inspired by that. For EE 6, we are trying to find a way to manage those things, and embrace this very rich world of Java EE in a manner that makes sense for developers. That desire is among the main drivers for the direction we're going with Java EE 6.
One of the main themes for EE 6 centers around extensibility. Already, it is clearly possible to build a lot of facilities on top of Java EE, but we think there is a lot more we can do in that area to make it easier for people to build technologies that work well with Java EE, that integrate more easily with EE, and that make it easier to develop applications that use some other technologies that aren't part of the platform, but work well with the platform.
So we're going to focus a bit on extensibility in Java EE 6, have more pluggability points, and make it easier to compose applications out of many of the different technologies that are available in the enterprise Java world and beyond.
Another thing that we're going to focus on is the introduction of profiles to the EE platform. The JCP defines a very specific notion of profiles, and we're going to take advantage of that notion here.
Java EE continued to grow over the years and mature, but it's also gotten bigger. There are a lot more facilities than there were when we started, and we're finding that some developers who might be interested in Java EE are intimidated by the amount of stuff that's there.
To attract more of those developers, and to make it clear that they can actually use EE for simpler things, too, we are considering introducing a new profile, the Web Profile, focused at Web application developers.
The Web Profile would effectively be a subset of Java EE, providing just the important capabilities that Web application developers need. You're clearly not going to write all of your complete, high-end enterprise applications using a Web profile product, but there's a wide variety of simple applications that you could write with this profile. Combining that with the extensibility support, it would provide a very good base for building on and adding additional Web frameworks and capabilities that you might need.
We are also going to define additional profiles of different sorts in the future. What those might be, we haven't gotten that far yet. We think there are other opportunities to define profiles to attack particular markets or application development needs, and we'll be looking at that, after EE 6.
The third major focus in EE 6 is something we call pruning. As I said, the platform has grown over the years, and part of that growth has been the accumulation of technologies that are not quite as important or interesting now as they were at the time we added them. Some of them were replaced by newer technologies that we think are a better match for what developers need these days.
In pruning out the parts of Java EE that are not as widely used and not as much needed as they once were, we'll basically be following a process that was defined by the Java SE folks for SE 6. It's a multi-step process that effectively means that something goes from being a required component of the platform to being an optional component, over multiple releases. First, we declare that some technology is a candidate for this type of pruning, and in the next release we might actually move it from the required state to the optional state.
There are a couple things we discussed pruning out. One of the bigger ones is JAX-RPC [JSR 101, Java APIs for XML-Based RPC]. It was an older technology that's effectively been replaced by JAX-WS [JSR 224, Java API for XML-Based Web Services], which is a better match for the Web services support we need.
The other thing is the whole EJB CMP [container-managed persistence] support, the entity bean support that's been there for a very long time. It had some issues, and wasn't getting quite as much traction as we might have liked, and effectively it's been now replaced by the Java Persistence API [JSR 220, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0]. We think that's a much better approach to solving that same problem. So we don't think there is a great need for the EJB CMP support any more. Those are the two big things listed in the Java EE 6 JSR for pruning.
There are additional things we've been discussing in the expert group that may also end up in that category. One of them is the JAXR API [JSR 93, Java API for XML Registries 1.0], an API for accessing [Web service] registries. It's one of those things, again, that hasn't seen quite the use that we anticipated when we added it to the platform.
Our initial plan is to deliver the final Java EE 6 spec in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Frank Sommers:
You said that the communities formed around non-Java EE enterprise technologies are one of your main inspirations for Java EE 6. Why do you think those communities formed outside of Java EE in the first place, and how do you plan to address their initial concerns about Java EE in version 6?
Bill Shannon:
There are a lot of reasons those communities sprang up. One is that we have been so incredibly successful with Java EE, and that success both enabled the Java EE community and inspired people to consider competitors to that technology. So in part it's our success that enabled those communities.
In some cases people have looked at what we've done and they thought of better ways to do it. There is no one perfect, final answer to all programming problems. There are alternatives being considered. The incredible growth of the internet and the Web has inspired more and more people to develop applications for this environment, so there are lots of alternative ways of doing things. Even Java technology is not the only technology being used here. With the incredible range of applications being delivered, it's natural that there would be alternatives.
Frank Sommers:
How do you view the role of the Java EE specification in a world where there are increasingly alternative technologies to accomplish the goals defined for Java EE?
Bill Shannon:
Part of what we're trying to do in EE 6 is to embrace some of the alternatives by making it easier for people to choose which alternatives they want to use with, or on top of, the Java EE platform. The extensibility support that we'd like to add would help with that.
It's not always possible to support all the alternatives. Sometimes, you do have to make a choice. Where possible, we'd like to leave the choices in hands of the application developers. Different applications and different developers with different needs and backgrounds will prefer different alternatives.
Frank Sommers:
Some emerging alternatives for enterprise development are not based on Java. To what extent will Java EE 6 embrace non-Java enterprise technologies?
Bill Shannon:

There are a few ways we're looking at non-Java technologies. One way is interoperation with those non-Java technologies through Web services. That's a very core capability, and is very important to the platform. And it allows to connect Java and non-Java things together.
In addition, we're also looking at ways to add other, non-Java, language support to the Java platform. There are now a lot of things that will help you write your applications in different languages but still deliver them on the Java platform.
The JRuby work is now being done at Sun to deliver support for the Ruby language on the Java platform. There's the Groovy language, which is a JCP standard [JSR 241, The Groovy Programming Language]. Roberto Chinnici has been doing some experimental work to support JavaScript for Web applications. We'd like to enable more of those things to happen with Java EE.
Which of those we'll eventually bring into the platform and endorse as part of a standard, required part of the EE platform, that's not clear yet. We definitely want to enable that level of experimentation and some of those alternatives to be used in the context of Java EE applications.

Frank Sommers:
To what extent do you see a room for "opinionated software" in the EE spec? By that, I mean the conscious decision to narrow down the choices developers can make in the interest of simplicity, or at least to guide developers toward a common development style. Are such decisions anathema to Java EE's desire to embrace all kinds of enterprise technologies and APIs?

Bill Shannon:
What we're seeing now is developers increasingly embracing the notion of freedom of choice. Our original approach to J2EE and Java EE was that we'd make decisions that would define the one standard way of doing things, and we would then incorporate those decisions into the platform. Sometimes we got it right, and sometimes we didn't.
We're now moving to the world where there are so many choices available, and developers would generally prefer to have the choices in their hands rather than us making the choice for them.
You're right that things like Ruby on Rails, they made a lot of those choices for you, and forced you into a particular style and framework that, if you buy into that, gives you many benefits. But that does restrict some of your choices. We'd like to have some of the ease of development attributes of something like Ruby on Rails, but in an environment that doesn't restrict you to just that style of development.
Our goal with the Web profile, for example, is to define a class of products that are simpler than the full Java EE stack. The Web profile doesn't have all the capabilities of Java EE, but it has enough capabilities that you can build on for a wide range of simpler applications.
In the future, we could define additional profiles targeted at different needs. If your goal is to write applications for some telecommunications environment, for instance, we could define a profile that has the right collection of technologies for that type of application.

Frank Sommers:
How do you see the role of vendors evolving in an enterprise Java world where developers have more and more choices, and where many of those choices come from open-source efforts?

Bill Shannon:
Vendors will still have a very important role, because they are still the primary means for developers to get access to the platform's capabilities.
If you look at what the major vendors in this space are doing, most, if not all, of them, are approaching things similarly to what I described here: They are embracing some of the open-source and alternative platforms in their product lines. Some of them are supporting things like Spring in their Java EE products, for example. They're well-aligned with what we're doing in EE 6.

Frank Sommers:
How will Java EE 6 make it easier for developers to compose an enterprise application from their choice of frameworks and components?

Roberto Chinnici:
That's still in the early stages. From a developer's point of view, we'd like to see a pain-free way to use multiple frameworks, especially for Web applications. Thus far, developers have a hard time having to juggle the requirements of several frameworks in an application—Spring and Hibernate, WebWork, and things like that, especially when trying to mix them. The goal is to define a hassle-free way to use these together in an application.

Bill Shannon:
Combining Web frameworks into a Web application usually requires that you pick up all the different pieces, and put them together, and then you have to edit this one descriptor that talks about everything and how all that fits together.
To figure out what to edit in that one descriptor to make all the pieces work together properly, is kind of a pain. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just pick up the pieces and drop them into your application, and they would combine in ways that you didn't have to describe, but would still make sense and would allow your application to work? That's the sort of simplicity we're aiming at.

Frank Sommers:
What is the most important design lesson you've learned in your years as a key architect of Java EE? What do you consider to be the biggest design mistakes?

Bill Shannon:
Everything is a compromise. That's what you learn. We're always trading off content and date and resources. Nothing we do is ever perfect, because if it was perfect, it would be late, and being late would make it not perfect.
If we had more time to do some of these things, we could have done a better job the first time around, but would also have been much more delayed, and that would have completely changed the market, and would have opened the door for other competitors to come in because we were moving too slowly. You just have to make the best decisions in the time you have. The timeline of the work you do is an important factor to consider.
This always leads to interesting discussions in the expert groups, where some people come in and say, Well, we want to be the absolutely best we can ever be, and we'll take as long as we can to do that. I think we need to balance that desire with the need to actually deliver something in a finite amount of time.
As for individual choices that we made, if you look at some of the things that are on the list for pruning, you might conclude that those were mistakes. That's not a fair characterization of them, however.
We included JAX-RPC in the platform, because Web services were becoming incredibly important, and we already felt that we were late in delivering Web services support in the Java platform. If we hadn't included that and took more time to come up with a more perfect version of that, the first version might have been wonderful. But it would have been so incredibly late that people would have concluded that Web services and Java EE were never going to come together. It was a tough trade-off.
EJB CMP is on our pruning list, too. That was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time we introduced it. I think we did the best job that we knew how to do at that time. There weren't a lot of better choices. Based on years of experience using that and trying alternatives, we discovered a better way to do things. Was it a mistake the first time around? No, I don't think it was a mistake, but over the years we learned things that allowed us to do that better.

Frank Sommers:
Sun open-sourced its Java implementations over a year ago. How has open-source Java changed the evolution of Java EE?

Bill Shannon:
We have Glassfish, which is the reference implementation for Java EE. It's been open-source for something like a year and half now, and I think we're just starting to see some of the changes as a result of that.
We're seeing more participation from the community, and from some of the other vendors as well in terms of contributing to the reference implementation. The extent that it opens the ability for other parties to contribute to the reference implementation is great, and it's no longer the case that Sun has to do the initial implementation work itself. We get other parties involved. We're definitely seeing that.
While it's still the case that most of the reference implementation is done by Sun employees, in the Glassfish project, we're seeing now some other companies delivering major components. Oracle is delivering the Java persistence component, and we're hoping that RedHat/JBoss will deliver the Web Beans technology, JSR 299, and we intend to include that in Java EE 6.
Also, if we do a good job of following the open-source model, we're delivering things to the community constantly, and getting feedback from them. That can't help but improve what we're doing.
Open-sourcing Java has changed Sun's role in different ways, too. We're definitely seeing improvement in our product, and in the perception of our product, related to Java EE 5 and the open-source work that we'd done. Glassfish is getting quite a bit of traction, and that's a core of our product—that is our product. Having an open-source application server opens a lot of new markets to us. The fact that it's the first one implementing the new Java EE standards helps us a lot, too. The open-source process definitely allowed us to build a much better product than what we had before.

Roberto Chinnici:
I should add that many developers contribute by picking up the latest build from the open-source sites, and then kicking the tires. There are people who are passionate about an API, for example, and they would use that implementation and API, and identify issues and bugs. Even if they do not contribute code, that feedback truly makes the outcome better

Jess 7.0p 1

Jess 7.0p1 (Stable)



About:
Jess is a fast, light rule engine and scripting environment written entirely in Java. You can build Java software that has the capacity to "reason" using knowledge you supply in the form of declarative rules. It is supplied as a programmer's library, making it ideal for embedding in larger applications. Jess includes development tools built on the Eclipse platform. It is free for academic use and can be licensed for commercial use.

Release focus: Minor bugfixes

Changes:
Several minor bugs from the 7.0 release are fixed. Formatting and syntax coloring in the JessDE are no longer confused by multiline strings and comments. The JessDE contains a few new selection and formatting commands.

NetBeans - The Only IDE You Need

NetBeans - The Only IDE You Need

The NetBeans IDE is a free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. You get all the tools you need to create professional desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, in Java, C/C++ and even Ruby. The IDE runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris; it is easy to install and use straight out of the box.

The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.

Highlights

Easy-To-Use Java GUI Builder

Create professional-looking Java GUIs by placing and aligning components on a canvas.




Visual Web and Java EE Development

Build standards-based web applications visually using Ajax, CSS, and JSF. Full set of tools for EJB development.

Visual Mobile Development

Create, test and debug GUI applications that run on mobile phones, set-top boxes, and PDAs.


Visual UML Modeling

Separate software design from implementation with UML Modeling.

Ruby and Rails Support

Powerful Ruby editor (with code completion), debugger, and full support for Rails. Includes the JRuby runtime.


C and C++ Development

Full-featured C/C++ editor, debugger, project templates, and support for multiple project configurations

Edit, enhance pics with ease

Edit, enhance pics with ease

Digital camera screen shots look great. But their printouts are often moderate or poor. This distortion can be removed by photo editing software. These tools help turn ordinary pictures into great ones and also make you look more professional. Although, all digital cameras come with photo editing tools, a large number of these do not match professional software. One of the best professional tools available is the Adobe Photoshop - CS3. The version for photographers comes for $649 (about Rs 27,000). That's lot of money considering that a decent five mega-pixel camera itself costs much less. That is no reason for disappointment though. There are several photo editing tools available on the Internet for free. You just need to know how to use these freewares.

The one that closely resembles Adobe Photoshop but is less known is GIMP, and it’s absolutely free. GIMP, an image manipulation program, packs several features that your built-in digital camera software may not have provided.

Google’s Picasa, tools like Paint.Net, FxFoto and Saint Paint Studio are other freebies that can work miracles on pictures taken on digital cameras.

“GIMP’s features allow it to be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image producer or an image format converter,” says a GIMP user. It offers a full suite of painting tools, including brush, pencil, air-brush, clone all these allow photographers to make those little changes, here and there, to touch up the pictures.

GIMP also supports layers and channels — meaning, you can superimpose one picture on the other. The channel mixing allow you to change the look and the feel of the images. Multiple undo/redo options allow you to do away the changes as often as you would like to.


It also has a powerful gradient editor and blend tool to improve colour tones. Great transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip. The software supports almost all file formats that you might ever use.

Selection tools include rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent — all those are available in Adobe Photoshop as well. Plug-ins are small patches that allow easy addition of new file formats and new effect-filters. It comes built-in with over 100 plug-ins. Plus GIMP supports custom brushes and patterns. There is, however, another small piece of programme called ‘Gimp Tool Kit’ (GTK) that needs to be installed before GIMP is installed.

As far as other tools are concerned, Google’s Picasa scores on ease of use. It also offers an array of retouching features that allow you to enhance pictures a great deal. According to download.com, Paint.Net is another popular tool. “It’s an open source freeware editor with essential features, including those for cropping, rotating, re-sizing, adjusting colours, and creating collages. It has inbuilt capabilities for red eye removal in addition to allowing for finish like emboss, mosaic, and oil painting,” notes download.com on its website. Download.com is a website that checks all software and allows free downloads, too.

FxFoto and Saint Paint Studio are pretty much the same but with a few minor differences. Next time you invest in a digital camera, keep photo editing software in mind as what you shoot and print depends a lot on such nifty tools.

Meet America's gamer no.1

Meet America's gamer no.1



SEATTLE: Geoff Robinson does not fit the stereotype of a hardcore geek gamer. The 22-year-old student is sociable, an avid weightlifter, studies English and history -- not computer science -- and wants to be a teacher.

But Robinson is also the best American at a computer strategy game called StarCraft: Brood War and he is one of about 700 gamers from 74 countries competing at the World Cyber Games (WCG) 2007 Grand Final in Seattle, USA.

Organisers of the WCG said these players are athletes with tremendous hand-eye co-ordination, who simply happen to be competing in ‘e-sports’ or electronic sports.

“We would love to see the stereotype of the geek gamer smashed,” said Michael Arzt, senior vice-president, WCG. “It’s not that lonely kid in the basement that people think it is.”

In playing StarCraft, Robinson estimates that a good player will do about 300 different actions per minute on either a keyboard or mouse, and the best players can push that to 500 actions per minute.

“It’s about hand speed,” said Robinson, who has been playing the game since 1998. Robinson said he practices three hours a day and kicks that up to five to six hours a day in the weeks leading up to a tournament.

But his work doesn’t come at the expense of school, time at the gym or his social life. “I probably lost a few hours of sleep,” said Robinson. “I don’t think it ever crossed my mind to make my living playing video games, but I would like to see where this takes me.”

Well-rounded, media-friendly players like Robinson are key to move professional video gaming to the mainstream and gaining wider acceptance.

Professional video gaming has not reached the mainstream in most countries, but it’s already closely followed in South Korea, where tournaments are regularly televised and the best players can make over $1,00,000 (Rs 40 lakh approximately) a year.

The WCG Grand Final’s format is similar to the Olympics: Competing players represent their country and try to win medals for their national team. Of course, the $4,48,000 (Rs 1.76 crore approx) in prize money is an added incentive. “(Our) goal is to be recognized one day at par with the Olympics or the World Cup,” said Arzt