Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web.Instead of telling telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar, you can now tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box.

If you have tried it for more than 10 minutes I’d love to hear from you - both the good and the bad. If you’ve never heared of it have a look at the short video below:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The industry giant Intel can more than just create micro processors (CPU’s).

Yesterday, at the California firm’s annual developers forum in San Francisco, Intel’s chief technology officer Justin Rattner showed off a wireless electric power system that analysts say could revolutionize modern life by freeing devices from transformers and wall outlets.

Electricity was sent wirelessly to a lamp on stage, lighting a 60 watt bulb that uses more power than a typical laptop computer. The technology, Wireless Energy Resonant Link, is transmitting energy using the magnetic field not the electric field which does not affect human bodies.

“The trick with wireless power is not can you do it; it’s can you do it safely and efficiently,” Intel researcher Josh Smith said in an online video explaining the breakthrough.

The technology is still in an early stage of development and much research remains before it can be brought to market. However, the implications seems endless. Imagine a world without cables, that would really be something wouldn’t it?!

Some of us may not live to see this happen, but then again technology develops faster than one might think (most of the time). Can you see this happen in the near future, and would you consider it safe?

Source: Yahoo News

What do sex, drugs and software have in common? They are the top three things purchased off spam email.

Have you ever thought about why you receive so much spam every day (for me it averages between 20 and 50 messages a day even after SpamAssassin has done its filtering)? Well, you can blame the 29 percent of Internet users that admit to purchasing items from spam email, according to a recent survey. Often these goods are pirated, counterfeit, or cheap knock-off’s that would be difficult to come by through the legitimate market.

More than 150 billion spam messages circulate daily, accounting for more than 85 percent of the total number of emails sent throughout the world. The sheer volume of spam consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth and remains one of the Internet’s biggest security problems.

And there’s little incentive to stop the spam. Recent FBI prosecutions of “bot-herders” suggest that the going rate is as little as $5 to $10 per million messages. Response rates are generally low - approximately 10 purchases are made for every million spam messages sent - but enough people purchase from spam to make it worthwhile for spammers to continue waging battle on your “Junk” folder in the hopes that one will slip through into your Inbox.

The top spam sellers include sexual enhancement pills, software, “adult material” and luxury items such as watches and jewellery.

The survey of Internet users was done by in June and July of 2008 by Marshal’s Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team. Marshal’s research indicates that just five botnets account for 80 percent of the world’s spam.

In 2004, only 20 percent of Internet users copped to purchasing items off spam email, according to a similar survey by Forrester Research. The increase in the last few years has led to a dramatic influx of spam email; reports indicate that global spam volumes doubled for the year ending June 2008 from the previous year’s levels.

The trend is not moving in the right direction as you’ve probably noticed. The question is how to fix it!? Maybe the ISP’s should be more active along with all hosting companies offering email services? What do you think could make this problem go away?

I’m sure some of you have noticed already but for the rest of you (us) I’d like to announce that the number one database management tool has finally reached version 3. To see what’s new have a look at the release notes.

I don’t think all of you can start using it immediately as it requires PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5.0+. However, if you are running a local server it shouldn’t be a problem.

First impressions are very good and the opening page looks better than ever. Congratulations to the development team for reaching yet another milestone!

Feel free to let me know what you think and if you encounter any difficulties during upgrading.

Download and test the latest release from the official download page.

The Engineering Windows 7 blog, or E7 for short, is hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven, along with members of the engineering team will post, comment, and participate in this blog.

The main goal is to maintain a little bit more control over the communication around Windows 7 (some might say that this is a significant understatement) and also have an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how they balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. The blog team promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

So if you are interested in partisipating in the development of the “Vista upgrade” this blog is definitely a good place to start. Stop complaining and let them know what you would like to see instead. Great ideas and constructive critisism could benefit the whole Windows community (which is like 90% of us).

I’d like to suggest less focus on GUI and more focus on functionality and speed. Wouldn’t it be great if you could fire up Windows in 10-15 seconds and start working immediately?