Planet Lowyat

As we know Google used simple, clear and default homepage for the past few years and hasn’t changed too much. Again, Google do provides an alternative to the “classic” homepage iGoogle.

Recently, Google Japan, Korea and China homepage have a different looks.

Google China Blog says that the three homepages were a part of bigger project meant to improve Google’s interface and to adapt it to local cultures. For example, Chinese users found it difficult to navigate to other Google services, since they were listed on a different page, so Google decided to place the links more prominently on the homepage.

Personally, I like Google China’s homepage that included animations to display icons and small descriptions for Google services like: Image Search, Google News or Dao Hang.

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Red Hat is proving you can make money from Open Source and Linux.

Red Hat Inc. said Thursday its fourth-quarter profit rose 7 percent as the software distributor worked to expand the footprint of its open source products with costly internal investments.

New CEO James Whitehurst believes Red Hat is now ready to continue rapid growth through an economic downturn as the Raleigh-based company pitches its free software to organizations looking to cut their tech budgets.

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Finally, this is going to come true!Another challenge for Asus Eee PC.

According to Engadget, HP’s slick UMPC 2133 was going sport VIA processors, and now got some more info to back that up.

What appears to be a full spec list for the upcoming machine, and it’s VIA C7-Ms all around, with graphics courtesy of a VIA Chrome 9 chipset. According to our source, these will hit on April 7th, and it looks like those pricing whispers were pretty accurate as well:

$600 will buy you a 1.2GHz C7-M, a 120GB drive, 1GB of RAM and Vista Home Basic, while $749 bumps you up to 1.6GHz and Vista Business and adds Bluetooth, another gig of RAM, and a bigger battery. There’s also a mysterious $849 Vista Basic model listed as having “regional” availability (the others are listed as “Smart Buy”) with Bluetooth and bigger battery, but we don’t see why it’s more expensive than the Vista Business version. Regardless, what really caught our eye was the $549 model that shares the same specs as the $600 unit, but looks to be running SuSE Enterprise — another rumor that’s come true. That could be the one that HP expects to sell like hotcakes — after all, the goal is to have people buy these “without a thought,” and that’s certainly not going to happen at $749. We’ll see soon enough, we suppose.

Full spec sheet after the break.

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Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 management tools for the Hyper-V release candidate are now available.

This update package installs the Hyper-V remote management tools on a computer that is running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). This package includes the following:

• The Hyper-V Manager. The Hyper-V Manager is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that provides management access to a Windows Server 2008-based server that uses the Hyper-V role.
• The Virtual Machine Connection. The Virtual Machine Connection is a remote connection tool that you can use to establish an interactive session on a virtual machine.

Hyper-V provides customers with efficient and cost-effective virtualization infrastructure software. It enables customers to reduce operating costs by increasing hardware utilization, optimizing infrastructure and improving server availability. Customers and partners can download the release candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V by 10 a.m. PDT today.

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The Windows Serviceability team is pleased to make available Windows XP Service Pack 3, Release Candidate 2 Refresh (XP SP3 RC2 Refresh).

The purpose of RC2 Refresh is to validate improvements to the Windows Update experience with Service Pack 3. Therefore, this beta release will be available only on Windows Update, in English, German and Japanese. Beyond fixes for common Windows Update issues and the inclusion of support for HD Audio, there are no substantial differences between this beta release (build 5508) and XP SP3 RC2 (build 3311).

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