Friday, November 20, 2009

YouTube Audio Transcription

YouTube added a feature that generates video captions. 'We've combined Google's automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video.'

The feature only works for English and it's been enabled for a small number of channels that usually feature talks and interviews: UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke,UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic.



Another new feature is auto-timing, which lets you upload the transcription of a video and it automatically generates the time codes. 'All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we'll use Google's ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video.'

Since Google's speech recognition technology is not perfect, it would be useful to generate the captions and then to manually edit them to correct the mistakes.

Automatic captions make YouTube videos more accessible: you can watch videos with the sound off and you can translate the captions into another language using Google Translate.

Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

In July we announced that we were working on Google Chrome OS, an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web.

Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.

We want to take this opportunity to explain why we're excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing.

First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS.

There is still a lot of work to do, and we're excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts.

Google Chrome OS will be ready for consumers this time next year. Sign up here for updates or if you like building your operating system from source, get involved at chromium.org.

Lastly, here is a short video that explains why we're so excited about Google Chrome OS.



Update at 8:55PM: Watch the video of our Google Chrome OS event, which took place earlier today.


Posted by Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director

Thursday, November 12, 2009

The World’s Top 50 Most Attractive Employers

The World’s Top 50 Most Attractive Employers World's most attractive employersUniversum, the employer branding company, presents the world’s Top 50 most attractive employers. From the world’s leading economies, nearly 120,000 students at top academic institutions chose their ideal companies to work for.

This is the first global index of employer attractiveness and highlights the world’s most powerful employer brands, those companies that excel in talent attraction and retention. The global rankings are based on the employer preferences of students from US, Japan, China, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Russia, Spain, Canada and India.

see the link for details .. http://universumglobal.com/IDEAL-Companies-Rankings/Global-Top-50-Rankings

Monday, November 9, 2009

Microsoft's COFEE Spills All Over Internet, First Exclusive Images On Internet

Microsoft's COFEE Spills All Over Internet, First Exclusive Images On Internet: "

COFEEAs quite expected Microsoft's automated computer forensic utility COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) meant for law-enforcement agencies got leaked on internet and is now readily available on torrent portals and file-sharing websites.



These Are The First EXCLUSIVE Images Of COFEE Utility

Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor

How Cofee Works


The utility is designed EXCLUSIVELY for crime-investigators allowing quick and fully-automated extraction of forensic data from computers suspected of containing criminal activity evidence letting investigators search through data on-site, the utility is provided for free by Microsoft to law-enforcement agencies world-over in a USB device which executes more then 150 commands to collect forensic data offering features such as the ability to decrypt passwords, search the computer's Internet activity, and analyze the data stored on it even including the data stored in volatile memory.


read more

"

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Windows 7 already bigger than Snow Leopard and Linux combined

Windows 7 already bigger than Snow Leopard and Linux combined: "It's only been a couple of weeks since Windows 7 was released, but Microsoft's new OS has already captured a larger percentage of the market than Apple's OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Linux (yes, all of Linux). This doesn't come as a huge surprise, considering how many Windows users were clamoring for Win7 after the flop that is Vista. Microsoft says Windows 7's launch outdid Vista's by 234%. Those brisk sales have already netted Windows a 2% share of the world's OS business, compared to just over 1% for Snow Leopard, and just under 1% for Linux.

Despite the strong sales of Win7, Windows as a whole dropped a quarter of a percentage point in October, with Mac and Linux both making small gains. That quarter of a point hardly matters when you've got 90% of the OS market and your new operating system is being adopted quickly, though.

I expect to see Windows swing back up after Windows 7's been available for a while. I mean, we're talking about an operating system that outsold Harry Potter in the UK. Right now, it's only got a 2% share, compared to 19% for Vista and 70% for XP, but that's after only two weeks. Expect that number to zoom upward by the end of November.

[via Ars Technica]

Windows 7 already bigger than Snow Leopard and Linux combined originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Introducing Closure Tools

Millions of Google users worldwide use JavaScript-intensive applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Like developers everywhere, Googlers want great web apps to be easier to create, so we've built many tools to help us develop these (and many other) apps. We're happy to announce the open sourcing of these tools, and proud to make them available to the web development community.

Closure Compiler
Closure Compiler is a JavaScript optimizer that compiles web apps down into compact, high-performance JavaScript code. The compiler removes dead code, then rewrites and minimizes what's left so that it will run fast on browsers' JavaScript engines. The compiler also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about other common JavaScript pitfalls. These checks and optimizations help you write apps that are less buggy and easier to maintain. You can use the compiler with Closure Inspector, a Firebug extension that makes debugging the obfuscated code almost as easy as debugging the human-readable source.

Because JavaScript developers are a diverse bunch, we've set up a number of ways to run the Closure Compiler. We've open-sourced a command-line tool. We've created a web applicationPage Speed to conveniently see the performance benefits for your web pages.

Closure Library
Closure Library is a broad, well-tested, modular, and cross-browser JavaScript library. Web developers can pull just what they need from a wide set of reusable UI widgets and controls, as well as lower-level utilities for the DOM, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and much, much more. (Seriously. Check the docs.)

JavaScript lacks a standard class library like the STL or JDK. At Google, Closure Library serves as our 'standard JavaScript library' for creating large, complex web applications. It's purposely server-agnostic and intended for use with the Closure Compiler. You can make your project big and complex (with namespacing and type checking), yet small and fast over the wire (with compilation). The Closure Library provides clean utilities for common tasks so that you spend your time writing your app rather than writing utilities and browser abstractions.

Closure Templates
Closure Templates grew out of a desire for web templates that are precompiled to efficient JavaScript. Closure Templates have a simple syntax that is natural for programmers. Unlike traditional templating systems, you can think of Closure Templates as small components that you compose to form your user interface, instead of having to create one big template per page.

Closure Templates are implemented for both JavaScript and Java, so you can use the same templates both on the server and client side.


Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That's why we're particularly excited (and humbled) to open source them to encourage and support web development outside Google. We want to hear what you think, but more importantly, we want to see what you make. So have at it and have fun!

that accepts your code for compilation through a text box or a RESTful API. We are also offering a Firefox extension that you can use with
By the Closure Tools team

source : http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html