Little Efforts Can Make A Big Difference

The original article Seeking to End World Hunger, One Search at a Time by Jenna Wortham
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/seeking-to-end-world-hunger-one-search-at-a-time/#more-6439
The trio of students built Hoongle.org, a custom Google search engine that promises to donate 20 grains of rice per search to schools in the developing world. To date, they raised about $1,500, enough for about 6,000 meals.

This Week Terms And Definitions

Baud - the number of signal changes transmitted per second during data transmission by modem.

Baud rate - the speed at which a modem transmits data, or the number of "events" it can handle per second.

Encode - the conversion of data to a machine-readable form.

Emulation- to simulate otherwise incompatible software or hardware to make it compatible - running Microsoft Windows on a Macintosh computer, for example.

Human-computer interaction - a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra

YouTube gathered a whole Symphony Orchestra from around the world!

http://youtube.com/symphony

The world's first collaborative online orchestra performed at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2009. Selected by the YouTube community and several members of the world's most renowned orchestras, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is made up of over 96 professional and amateur musicians from 30+ countries and territories on six continents and represents 26 different instruments.

They have been chosen  out of thousands of musicians - who posted audition videos on the popular website.

The talented musicians learnt the piece via internet tutorials - before coming together for the first time this week in New York.

This Week Terms And Definitions

CMS - Content Management System - a computer application used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text. They are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures.

Browser chrome - the borders of a Web browser window, which include the window frames, menus, toolbars and scroll bars. When designing a Web page, the browser chrome must be added to determine the width of the page. Viewport - the remaining viewable space in the browser window.

Task-oriented schemes - schemes that organize content and applications into a collection of processes, functions, or tasks. These schemes are appropriate when it's possible to anticipate a limited number of high-priority tasks that users will want to perform. On the Web, task-oriented organization schemes are most common in the context of e-commerce web sites.

Microsoft Will Deploy Internet Explorer 8 Through Automatic Update

The original article "Prepare for Automatic Update Distribution of IE8"

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/04/10/prepare-for-automatic-update-distribution-of-ie8.aspx

Microsoft plans to distribute Internet Explorer 8 to computers running previous versions of IE (IE 6 or IE 7) via Automatic

Updates starting from the 3rd week of April. The update will be rolled out gradually from a small user

base to large number of users. The update will be a ‘high priority‘ update for systems running Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and is an ‘important‘ update for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The final version of IE8 was distributed via automatic update recently to users still running pre-release versions of IE8, Beta 2/RC1.

Organizations can use the IE8 Blocker Toolkit to block automatic delivery of IE8. The blocking tool has to be in place by the week of April 20th. IE8 will be released to Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) in July 2009 and will be classified as an Update Rollup.

P.S.' Why to use a blocker?' - we wondered at the office. Then we were told that "the IE8 blocker is meant for admins to delay the installation until they are ready to install them for the entire organization due to certain issues (such as ocompatiblity issues, security issues, or testing for reliablity)". At our office the machines will be updated as soon as our geek-aid aministrator has a chance to do it.