Big Day for GMail

The one field that Google still trails Yahoo! by far is that of the email services, where of the two, Yahoo! is king and Google isn’t even close to being a serious runner up, when it comes to the numbers of users.

That’s nothing, says Google, I’ll just add
some features and work my way up to the top. But by doing this, besides the latest update that added rich emoticons and group chat, the question that burns a hole through all my GMail related thoughts remains without an answer: will there be a client for Gtalk or has the project been completely dropped? Time will tell, but the time it takes them seems to be just more than bearable.

Group chat is the first addition and it can be accessed by clicking the "Group Chat" from the "Options" menu, while chatting. The next step is to enter the names of those you’d want to add and that’s about it, you’re in your very own chat room. All the previous functions, like chat archiving and taking the chat off the record, are also implemented and work just fine.

The smilies that have been added are actually what had been bothering me for a long time, the blasted buggers just wouldn’t look pretty and there was no news update about somebody working on them. I guess it was worth it after all, they do look pretty cool now. The button that opens the available emoticon menu is nice and fits in with the overall appearance of the chat window, and it also gives you the option to select the style of the smilies you send, old dull style or the two newer rich emoticon styles.

The feature only works with GMail 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6.

It’s been 25 years and a couple of months since the first smilie face has been drawn by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman, and look how far it’s come.

Vista SP1 – Too Little, Too Late?

While Service Pack 1 had the potential to be the second coming for Windows Vista, Microsoft chose to sweep the refresh under the rug in order to focus both home and corporate customers on the RTM version of the operating system. With 88 million Vista copies shipped worldwide after the platform was released to manufacturing back in November 2006, the latest Windows client follows in the footsteps of the predecessor main cash cows from the Redmond company. Microsoft in fact applauded Vista for its record revenue in the 2006 Fiscal Year and in the first quarter of FY 2007. Still, the operating system fails to deliver a convincing performance, and speaking of performance, Service Pack 1 has already been crucified for delivering nothing on top of Vista RTM. The last time that Microsoft actually talked performance improvements for Vista SP1 was in the white paper for the September release of the
first Beta of the service pack.

"The following list describes some of the performance improvements that Windows Vista SP1 will include:

- Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
- Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
- Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
- Improves performance of Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and speeding JavaScript parsing.
- Improves battery life by reducing CPU utilization by not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain computers.
- Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
- Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected," Microsoft revealed.

But while the company is not going public with the figures for Vista SP1 improvements, Mary Jo Foley got a hold of some internal data associated with the service pack. In this context, Microsoft plans to boost copying speeds between locations on the same Vista computer by 25%, and to speed up remote file transfers to Vista SP1 from a non-Vista Windows operating system by 45%. On top of this, Vista SP1 machines will be able to swap files for up to 50% faster than the RTM version of the operating system could. In addition, the periods of time Vista SP1 spends on standby resuming, image reading and user login will also be kicked up a notch. SP1 users will no longer be asphyxiated in User Account Control prompts when managing items in protected locations, third-party diagnostic programs will be better integrated following the release of the service pack and the sign in process will be complemented with the traditional password hint. Overall, it is obvious that Microsoft is doing nothing more than soften all the rough edges of Vista. It remains to be seen if it will not end up being a case of too little too late.

IT Professionals Ignore Major Security Measures

I'm a pro, I know what I'm doing,' a famous quote says. Well, this time it's somehow different because the IT professionals ignore major security measures and publish their information on very large and popular websites. According to ITPro, a study conducted by
Microsoft and security vendor Facetime revealed that 35 percent of the IT professionals posted their birth date on the web while 27 percent of them uploaded even more valuable information such as addresses. In comparison with the professionals, the employees are more careful with their private details as only 29 percent of them join web networks.

"We assume IT pros are more technical and aware of things like phishing, but our research suggests the contrary," said Stephen Lamb, IT security expert at Microsoft, according to ITPro. "People don't appreciate the risks. We need to raise awareness that things people believe are only open to a group of friends are in the public domain," Chris Boyd, security research manager at Facetime, added for the same source.

Obviously, the most important threat is represented by the social networking websites which attack millions of consumers every day. For example, Facebook said at the time of signing the deal with Microsoft that about 250,000 new users are creating accounts on its social network. In fact, it's well known that large websites such as MySpace and Facebook are real threats when it comes to the information provided by the registered users because some malicious persons could use the details for dangerous activities.

"We [IT pros] think we know it all, and we don't put enough thought into security. I had a call from an IT professional who was caught by a MySpace music group hack. This guy said 'I know what I'm doing' but he switched his brain off," the Facetime expert added.