New MacBook

Apple has launched new generation of MacBook. This new MacBook starts at USD 1299 or SGD 2088.









From one solid piece of aluminum comes a MacBook that’s thin and light, beautifully streamlined, and durable








Ultrathin 13.3-inch LED-backlit display.
Seamless glass and instant full screen brightness make everything you see flat-out spectacular. Including the display itself.








Up to 5 times faster NVIDIA graphics performance.
Advanced NVIDIA integrated graphics provide more responsive gameplay and more realistic 3D environments.









All-new, smooth glass Multi-touch trackpad.
It’s redesigned with even more room for even more gestures. Now the entire glass trackpad is also the button, so it’s clickable everywhere.







Meanwhile, original MacBook (now it is called as MacBook White) is sold slightly lower at USG 999 or SGD 1588

Google Chrome, new browser from Google

This article is quoted from Google Blog

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.

Screen shot is taken from here


The service’s logo


Screenshots of Google Chrome from the service’s frontpage


The auto-completion of the so-called “omnibox” address bar.


The homepage showing 9 thumbnailed pages to access, along with more pointers in the side-bar, to appear “[e]very time you open a new tab”, as Google says.


This screenshot shows Google Calendar and a dialog reading “Create shortcuts in the following locations”, listing Desktop, Start Menu and Quick Launch Bar.


Zooming in on the browser tabs.


The Google Chrome task manager, e.g. to monitor if certain sites cause memory problems.


A screen showing the “Google incognito” mode for allegedly more private browsing.


Another auto-completion example.


A star near the address input bar lets you bookmark a page, apparently.


A look into the settings menu.


Google in their tour says with Chrome “you see your download’s status at the bottom of your current window.”

can cuil overcome google?

"can cuil overcome google?"
That question crossed my mind after reading the article about cuil on detikom.

As you can guess, cuil is search engine like google. According to the detikom, cuil is developed by Anna Patterson, ex google scientist, along with her husband, Tom Costello and few others ex google scientist. Costello claimed that with 120 billion web pages, cuil is much bigger than its rivals.

On cuil's about us page, it explains that Cuil is an Irish word for knowledge, and it also stated the below:

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

After goes through some searches using this two search engines, i conclude that google is still much much better than cuil on some ways.

Let's discuss in what extend i prefer google than cuil:
1. appearance

both of them has simple interface. it sure makes the loading more faster (if compare to yahoo), but what i dislike about cuil, is the color background. i have no idea why cuil choose black. i just feel my eyes is not comfortable with this (yet). on the other hand, google has a clean background and sometimes has a theme on its logo. i am always entertained by it.
(1 point go to google)

2. search by simple keyword
simple keyword here means that the keyword is in the domain name, e.g. google or cuil itself.
for this searching, i start with my blog keyword: "sugilee". As you can see in below image, cuil cannot find anything that match sugilee, meanwhile with google my blog is 5th of the list.


Probably you think that this is not fair as blogspot is belong to google. ok, let's try another one. this time i use my company name "starhub" as the keyword. Here is the result and see the different.



So where does the "120 billion pages" claim comes from????
(another point for google)

3. search by a question
For this purpose, i use question "how to convert c# to vb.net" as keyword. See the result...


(3-0 to google)

4. search by special keywords
I try to search a currency converter from SGD to IDR.


(4-0 to google)


Conclusion:
This is why google is called a smart ass search engine, it knows exactly what people are looking for and what people wish to search for. Google's inteligence is much beyond than cuil.
So to answer the question i raised before, there is an absolute NO for cuil to be able to overcome google (not now yet, probably)

Facebook

mungkin semua uda tau ttg friendster, tp masi byk yg blum dgr ttg facebook, yang katanya skrg lg booming di US sana n segera akan menggantikan kepopuleran friendster.

Berikut ini sejarah singkat FaceBook spt dikutip dari wikipedia...
Facebook dibuat oleh Mark Zuckerberg, seorang lulusan Harvard pd tgl 4 Feb 2004.
Keanggotaannya pada awalnya dibatasi untuk siswa dari Harvard College. Dalam dua bulan selanjutnya, keanggotaannya diperluas ke sekolah lain di wilayah Boston (Boston College, Boston University, MIT, Tufts), Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, dan semua sekolah yang termasuk dalam Ivy League. Banyak perguruan tinggi lain yang selanjutnya ditambahkan berturut-turut dalam kurun waktu satu tahun setelah peluncurannya. Akhirnya, orang-orang yang memiliki alamat surat-e suatu universitas (seperti .edu, .ac.uk, dll) dari seluruh dunia dapat juga bergabung dengan situs ini.

Selanjutnya dikembangkan pula jaringan untuk sekolah-sekolah tingkat atas dan beberapa perusahaan besar. Sejak 11 September 2006, orang dengan dengan alamat surat-e apa pun dapat mendaftar di Facebook. Pengguna dapat memilih untuk bergabung dengan satu atau lebih jaringan yang tersedia, seperti berdasarkan sekolah tingkat atas, tempat kerja, atau wilayah geografis.

Hingga Juli 2007, situs ini memiliki jumlah pengguna terdaftar paling besar di antara situs-situs yang berfokus pada sekolah dengan lebih dari 34 juta anggota aktif yang dimilikinya dari seluruh dunia. Dari September 2006 hingga September 2007, peringkatnya naik dari posisi ke-60 ke posisi ke-7 situs paling banyak dikunjungi, dan merupakan situs nomor satu untuk foto di Amerika Serika, mengungguli situs publik lain seperti Flickr, dengan 8,5 juta foto dimuat setiap harinya