I was asking myself a week ago what will Google plan for 1st of April this year. A first approach is taken by Gmail. As you probably know, there is a small counter on the front page that shows the continuously increasing storage space for your e-mails.

With the new update, here’s the new space targets and how many days until that much space is hit by the counter on the page:

2800MB: Already reached
2835MB: In 18.22 days
2980MB: In 384 days
3125MB: In 749 days
3270MB: In 1114 days
3415MB: In 1479 days
3560MB: In 1845 days

So at a glance, Gmail will increase with just 700MB in 5 years. That doesn’t look so promising. However, noting the history of Google events that took place on the 1st of April, I took the liberty of guessing a few directions regarding this issue.
* Google could announce the new quota will be actually available now, instead of 5 years, and everyone would be happy.
* Google could speed up the increasing process and a realistic quota will be available much sooner.
* Google could keep things just the way they are (regarding Gmail) for 1st of April this year and focus on another prank.

That’s for Google to plan, and for us to find out.

Google already started at the end of the past year, a beta session for its Audio Ads, which later became quite successful. However, today, Google needs more beta-testers for the above mentioned AdWords system.

“The beta has been going well and, in fact, the Audio Ads Team is looking for more testers. In terms of feedback, the Audio Ads team has heard that beta testers like the simple and clean user interface and the targeting and reporting options. Beta testers also find the audio ad creation process easy and fast since it only takes them a few days to create their ads and launch their first campaigns (as compared to potentially weeks for traditional radio ads)”

Vivian, Inside AdWords crew

The system’s procedure is simple enough for anyone to understand. Google collects audio ads from multiple AdWords publishers and redirects them to several radio stations that are part of older partnerships. This way, the advertisers can reach their target customers and attract a certain category of the offline users to their online services.

Google already had several attempts of expanding their advertising solutions towards the offline area. Although the audio tests were very popular, numerous users hearing them at multiple US radio stations, there were more beta tests: newspapers ads or TV ads. Some time ago, Google selected multiple AdWords publishers and sent their adverts to several US newspapers, representing the first Google attempt to become a powerful offline advertising platform.

Shortly you can sign up for beta-testing for Google, by following this link.

After a big dilemma debated here, I’ve stumbled upon an interesting topic three days ago. I understood you are not going to trust Vista with your life, but will you trust Linux?

This is another area where the two major operating systems are struggling into gaining as much terrain as possible in front of each other. It’s a commonly known fact that health care is one of the fields with a strong resistance towards IT automation. Red Hat, the biggest distributor of business-oriented Linux distributions got allied with McKesson, a well known company in the health care field. This means that Red Hat will provide the Linux core and some additional software in order for McKesson to run its applications.

On the other hand, the Redmond giant introduced a suite of health-care-focused software a week ago. Like I said health care is one of the few fields that are not using the technical improvements of IT&C at their full capacity, but Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft predicted a quick change in the upcoming period of time.

“Health care is one of the greatest opportunities our company has seen in basically our 30-plus years of existence” Ballmer told 24,000 health care professionals at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems conference in New Orleans last week.

I am not going to talk about this topic further here, because health care is none of my interest of activity, but you can read the full article here.
Is the term of “Blue screen of death” ending up on a literally perceived conjuncture?

You can’t call yourself a computer expert if you haven’t tried at least once one other operating system on your own computer. Bonus points if you tried multi-booting. Either way you want to take it, I am going to share a few suggestion regarding the most popular combination of dual-OS systems. Windows and Linux. A pleasant combo, but accessed separately. By default you cannot view your files from the Linux partition while booting Linux for example.

While Windows uses NTFS or FAT(32) as a file system, Linux uses EXT 2 or EXT 3. Definitely not compatible. However, I have searched and found the following two applications that are meant to do this process way easier for the end-users.

Ext2 Installable File System For Windows
It provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/2003 with full access to Linux Ext2 volumes (read access and write access). This may be useful if you have installed both Windows and Linux as a dual boot environment on your computer. The “Ext2 Installable File System for Windows” software is freeware.

If you currently have Windows running and you realize that you need some files for your work which you have stored on an Ext2 volume of your Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux. Furthermore, Windows will now be able to handle floppy disks which have been formatted with an Ext2 file system. Linux Ext3 volumes can also be accessed. Isn’t that nice?

Freeware Linux Reader for Windows
This program plays the role of a bridge between your Windows and Ext2/Ext3 Linux file systems. This easy-to-use tool runs under Windows and allows you to browse Ext2/Ext3 Linux file systems and extract files from there.

There are a number of evident merits of the program, which you should know. First of all, DiskInternals Linux Reader is absolutely free. Secondly, the program provides for read-only access and does not allow you to make records in Ext2/Ext3 file system partitions. This guarantees that the interference in an alternative file system will not affect the work of Linux later. Apart from this, it is necessary to note, that it gives you an opportunity to use common Windows Explorer for extracting data. A preview option for pictures is one more pleasant point, which is worth mentioning. While saving, it ignores file security policies. It means that it is possible to access absolutely any file on a Linux disk from Windows. The program can create and open images of Ext2/Ext3 disks.

Hope at least one of these two programs suit your needs.

Guess what, even if HD-DVD’s are being outsold by Blu-Ray discs, the first format has recently launched a high capacity disc, taking the lead on the market from this point of view. The disc is created by Toshiba, and based on a triple layer technology, adding up to three layers of 17GB each. That sums up to 51GB.

That extra gigabyte is all they needed to beat the Blu-Ray record. The highest capacity Blu-Ray discs at the moment are those dual-layered 25GB each disc that can store 50GB the most.

This was rumored even since this year’s CES, but the current rumors say this could be released late this year, in the 4th quarter most likely. Currently, there is no valid information on manufacturing costs, other features or side-effects. However, it’s obviously the so-called format war is far from being over.

Since sales reports show that Blu-Ray discs are being sold in better numbers than the HD-DVD ones, would you consider switching to the last just because of that extra GB?

Unless you have been wandering around with a bucket on your head, you have probably seen that Apple launched a heavily debated campaign last Christmas, trying to prove you once more the multitude of reasons why you’d need a Mac. However, the PC fought back, and the battle continues. This is overall a quite interesting concept and many people have tried to follow.

I have found this funny comic strip that is trying to represent the differences between an iPhone and a Smartphone and which I will be reproducing further. I’m looking forward to hear your comments.
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Yahoo recently launched a suggestion site that uses the Digg mechanism and resembles graphically with the well known news promoting website. However I don’t understand all the fuss around this, since Yahoo initially credited Digg for this in a post on the official blog.

“We call it a Suggestion Board — you can browse suggestions from other site visitors or post your own. Digg-style voting means we can quickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback. Though we aren’t always going to immediately act on it, it’s incredibly helpful to us in making the best sites we can… and we’ve even been known to reward great suggestions with some Yahoo! schwag.”