Even with my current job as a systems analyst, a software developer/programmer, I felt a need to document my learning, so I have something to always look back to, especially with my advancing age. But no, I'm not that old yet...
List of Microsoft Windows fonts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
30-April-2014
This would be a quick post.
I could say that I was so happy that I was able to install Ubuntu Linux 14.04 in my Windows 8.1 laptop, and in the process of customizing things in the new environment, I would honestly say that some things got broken.
One is that for Opera browser, Yahoo! Mail didn't show up properly, as well as most of the websites - after I installed my custom fonts in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/MyFonts directory. Of course, /MyFonts is a collection of some fonts that I like very much, as you would guess, in Windows.
After learning how I can get them over to Ubuntu Linux, I ported them without hesitation. Only to find that Yahoo! Mail in Opera would show me a blank face!
That isn't the case in Firefox and Chrome, so I narrowed it down to Opera browser.
When I checked on the fonts used in Opera, it was DejaVu family, so I was wondering, which font face caused the problem?
I suspected Droid, so I got that deleted. I restarted the PC, opened up Opera, but no, Yahoo! Mail is still a blank face, and if some showed, the letters were overlapping.
I put back Droid*.ttf, and removed Segoe family of fonts (from /MyFonts, to be clear), restarted my PC, and opened up Opera... and Yahoo! Mail?
Well, it was back to normal!
So that is the cause! It may be different from your experience, but for me, this was verified:
1. Put back Segoe family of fonts, reboot, open Yahoo! in Opera: blank face.
2. Remove Segoe family of fonts, reboot, open Yahoo! in Opera: show nicely.
At least 3 times I verified, and I am very sure, it was the Segoe family of fonts that caused the problem for Yahoo! Mail in Opera browser.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer intends to keep the regulatory heat on Google as his company strives to lessen its rival's dominance of Internet search.
In an appearance Tuesday at a search engine conference, Ballmer said Microsoft believes Google Inc. has done things to gain an unfair advantage in the Internet's lucrative search advertising market. He didn't specify the alleged misconduct.
"We are expressing some of the issues and frustrations we see" with antitrust regulators, Ballmer said. "Sometimes (it's) unsolicited, sometimes because we have been asked."
Google declined to comment Tuesday. But it has said its actions are aimed at providing better experiences for Web surfers and advertisers.
Yahoo Inc., which is about to team up with Microsoft in search, seems less inclined to get regulators involved as the two companies gang up on Google.
"I am actually not interested in government intervention in anything," Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told reporters during a Tuesday lunch to celebrate the company's 15th anniversary. "I think for the most part markets work. I don't wish antitrust on anyone."
Microsoft already has helped convince U.S. regulators that Google would break antitrust laws in two proposed deals: a search advertising partnership with Yahoo that was scrapped in 2008 and a digital books settlement that still needs federal court approval. Yahoo also lobbied regulators to oppose the agreement that would give Google the electronic rights to millions of hard-to-find books.
Ciao, an online shopping comparison service owned by Microsoft, has filed an antitrust complaint against Google in Europe. Regulators there say they are looking into those allegations and similar ones made by two other sites, Foundem and ejustice.fr.
Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, has had its own troubles with regulators. Its bundling of personal computer software triggered a court dispute with the U.S. Justice Department that forced the company to change the way it packages software with its Windows operating system. Microsoft later tussled with EU regulators, too.
Since Microsoft's own antitrust showdown started in the late 1990s, more people have been relying on their computers chiefly as a conduit to the Internet. The evolution has turned Google's Internet gateway and other online services into a major threat to Microsoft, which has tried to respond by investing billions of dollars in search technology.
Microsoft has made little headway. Even with some progress since unveiling an upgraded search engine called Bing nine months ago, Microsoft remains a distant third in the U.S. search market.
Ballmer is counting on Microsoft's 10-year search partnership with No. 2 Yahoo to help close the gap. Regulators cited Google's 65 percent share of the U.S. search market as one of the reasons for allowing Microsoft and Yahoo to work together.
When the alliance kicks in late this year, Microsoft will start processing search requests on Yahoo's Web site and pay most of the ad revenue to its new partner. As Microsoft fields more search requests, Ballmer expects the company to collect more data that it could analyze and use to help improve search results. That, in turn, could help the company lure away Google users.
"There is an advantage to having the power of two, as opposed to the power of one," Ballmer told the crowd at the Search Marketing Expo.
When asked whether he thought Microsoft would overtake Google in Internet search, Ballmer indicated it probably will be a long time before there's a changing of the guard.
"I don't know how old I will be when that will happen," said Ballmer, 53.
As part of its efforts to challenge Google, Microsoft has sought help from Twitter and Facebook two popular services for sharing information and photographs.
Microsoft, like Google and Yahoo, pays an undisclosed sum for better access to Twitter's index of short messages. In a bigger partnership, Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook and processes search requests on that site.
Responding to questions, Ballmer played down the possibility of Microsoft buying Twitter or Facebook, which are both privately held.
Shares of Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., fell 56 cents, or 1.9 percent, to close Tuesday at $28.46. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., gained $8.37, or 1.6 percent, to $541.06, while Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo lost 6 cents to $15.73. - AP
From GMANews.tv; see the source artice here. ----------
BEIJING - In a rare reversal, China's government gave in to domestic and international pressure and backed down Tuesday from a rule that would have required personal computers sold in the country to have Internet-filtering software.
Just hours before the rule was to have taken effect, the government said it would postpone the requirement for the "Green Dam" software. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it made the decision partly because some PC markets were having difficulty meeting the deadline. It did not say whether the plan might be revived.
The change of course averted a possible scuffle with Washington. Top US officials had protested the plan after it was imposed abruptly in May, calling it a barrier to trade. Angry Web users circulated online petitions protesting Green Dam, while industry groups warned the software might create computer security problems.
The controversy reflected the conflict between the communist government's desire to control information and China's high-tech ambitions. The country has an increasingly informed, vocal public and tighter links to companies that create urgently needed jobs and tax revenue.
The decision was a "victory for China's civil society," said Li Fangping, a Beijing lawyer who had demanded a public hearing on the plan.
"Many citizens worked together and voiced their opposition to the forced installation of this filtering software and forced the government to at least think more deeply about it," Li said. "We hope now that they will go ahead and completely drop this order."
News of the announcement spread in China quickly via Twitter and the Chinese mini-blogging site Fanfou. Some bloggers said they expect the government to look for a way to carry out Green Dam that attracts less attention.
"They are using the word `delay,' instead of saying they stopped the plan," said Wen Yunchao, a Chinese blogger who has been among the most vocal critics of Green Dam. "I think that it's possible that at some point in the future the government could still enforce their policy and install software on personal computers that filters the information people are able to look at. So, I am calling this an intermediary victory."
China's communist government encourages Internet use for education and business, and the country has the biggest population of Web users, with more than 298 million. But authorities try to block access to material deemed obscene or subversive, and Beijing operates the world's most sweeping system of Internet filtering. US companies such as Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. have cooperated in way or another with government requests to tamp down criticism.
The Green Dam software would raise China's controls to a new level by putting a filter inside each PC. Chinese authorities said it would be needed to shield children from violent and obscene material online.
Analysts who have reviewed the program say it also contains code to filter material the government considers politically objectionable. Separately, a California company claimed Green Dam contained stolen programming code.
Chinese Web surfers ridiculed Green Dam by saying it would block access to photos of animals and other innocuous subjects. State media reported extensively on the complaints, a rare move. Chinese media usually uncritically support government policy.
Green Dam already is in use in Internet cafes in China and has been installed since the start of this year in PCs sold under a government program that subsidizes appliance sales in the countryside.
China accounted for 14 percent of the 63.5 million PCs shipped worldwide in the first quarter, according to the research group IDC. Beijing-based Lenovo makes the most computers for China, capturing nearly 27 percent of the market in the first three months of the year. It is followed by Hewlett-Packard Co., whose laptops and desktops make up about 14 percent of shipments.
Other large PC makers such as Toshiba Corp. and Taiwan's Acer Inc. said they were ready to provide Green Dam on disks beginning Wednesday. Worldwide industry leaders HP and Dell Inc. had declined to discuss their plans, possibly waiting for a diplomatic settlement.
Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn said the PC maker was happy with the Green Dam delay. He would not say what Dell had done to prepare for China's deadline.
"We respect the Chinese government's stated goal of protecting children by filtering access to pornography through the Internet," Blackburn said in a statement.
Representatives from US-based technology groups, including the Information Technology Industry Council and the Software & Information Industry Association, were in Beijing trying to stop Green Dam.
"We welcome the delay in implementation of the Green Dam mandate, and we look forward to working closely with the US government to find market-based solutions that enable consumer choice and protect children on the Internet," said John Neuffer, vice president for global policy at the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents companies including Dell, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Apple, Inc.
The Green Dam initiative coincided with a tightening of government controls on Internet use. Last week, China's Health Ministry ordered health-related Web sites that carry research on sexually oriented topics to allow access only to medical professionals. Also last week, the government issued new rules on "virtual currency" used by some game Web sites, saying it cannot be used to purchase real goods.
On Green Dam, the industry ministry sounded a conciliatory note. It promised to "solicit opinions from all parties" in an effort to improve its work.
"I think the cost of the move from trade friction and generally a public relations black eye was becoming pretty clear to the government," said Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA China Ltd., a Beijing research firm. Postponing the filtering rule "gets them out of the scrutiny of the international media and business." - AP
Pedestrians walk past a Yahoo! billboard in Beijing. (file pic)
WASHINGTON: Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz staunchly defended the Internet company's business practices in China on Thursday and said it was "not our job to fix the Chinese government".
Bartz, appearing at her first shareholders meeting since taking over the Sunnyvale, California-based company in January, said Yahoo! respects human rights.
"We actually hosted a business and human rights summit for high tech companies a month or so ago," she said. "Yahoo! has gone overboard on this point to really be sympathetic, serious and so forth.
"We have done a lot," she said.
"The board does its best, the company does its best to run a good business, to look out for our population around the world, both the people who work for us and the people who come to visit us," she said. "That's our commitment."
Bartz added that Yahoo! "was not incorporated to fix China".
"It was incorporated to give people a free flow of information," she said.
A number of US companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Google and Yahoo!, have been hauled before the US Congress in recent years and accused of complicity in building what has been called the "Great Firewall of China".
Yahoo! was thrust into the forefront of the online rights issue after the company helped Chinese police identify cyber dissidents whose supposed crime was expressing their views online.
Alluding to the case, Bartz said: "Ten years ago the company made a mistake, and you can't hold us up as the bad boy forever.
"We have worked better, harder, faster than most companies to respect human rights and to try and make a difference," she said.
"But it is not our job to fix the Chinese government, it's that simple.
"We will respect human rights, we will do what's right, but we're not going to take on every government in the world as our mandate," she said. "That's not the mandate that the shareholders gave us."
Yahoo!, other technology giants and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct last year aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy.
China exercises strict control over the Internet, blocking sites linked to Chinese dissidents, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement, the Tibetan government-in-exile and those with information on the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
China and Google are currently engaged in a dispute, with Beijing accusing the Internet giant of providing links to pornography in its Web searches.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said China may be violating World Trade Organisation obligations by requiring that all computers sold in the country from July 1 have the "Green Dam" program.
Beijing said the software will filter out pornography, protecting young people within the world's largest online population.
DETROIT - Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer on Wednesday downplayed expectations for the success of the newly launched Bing search engine, but said the company was committed to challenge Google over the long-term.
"When you're sitting there as we are in the search base, you've got eight percent share and there's a kind of a big dog competitor out there in the market place, you can do very big things," Ballmer said.
The initial response to Bing has been "very good" Ballmer said, but it will not displace Google anytime soon.
"I don't want to overset expectations. We're going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time," Ballmer told an economic summit in Detroit, Michigan.
"We may be successful, we may not, but we can't be successful without being committed to changing things, changing the approach, changing the business model and you can't give up in six months, or a year or two years."
Microsoft said that Bing, unveiled at the end of May, is designed to intuitively understand what people are seeking on the Internet and challenge online king Google.
The US software colossus described Bing as a "Decision Engine" aimed at helping people make buying decisions, plan trips, research health matters or find local businesses.
Bing's launch came in the wake of Google and Yahoo! announcing refinements to their search services and the launch of a Wolfram Alpha query engine that delivers answers instead of lists of websites.
Bing replaces MSN Live Search, which has languished in a distant third place behind market-leading Google and second-place Yahoo!
Bing relies predominately on algorithms and key words to provide results for online searches but has infused some semantic technology that deduces intended meanings of phrases, according to Microsoft.
Ballmer declined to comment on what Bing's launch meant for Microsoft's attempt to acquire Yahoo!
Online tracking firm comScore said Wednesday that Microsoft saw its share of search result pages in the United States continue to climb during the second week of Bing's introduction.
Microsoft Sites' share of search result pages in the United States increased to 12.1 percent June 8 to 12, up three percentage points from the May 25 to 29 period prior to Bing's introduction, comScore said.
Microsoft's average daily penetration among US searchers also increased by three percentage points to 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8 to 12, comScore found.
ComScore on Wednesday also released US search engine rankings for May, before Bing's introduction.
Google grabbed 65 percent of the US search market for the month followed by Yahoo! with 20.1 percent and Microsoft with eight percent. - AFP/fa
A new research report identifies the most dangerous Internet search words
Searches using "music lyrics" and "free" attract malicious software sites
Expert: "We've seen a dramatic increase in malware"
Dangerous topics include screen savers, free games and "work from home"
Searches for words such as "free," "music" and "download" put users at increased risk for malicious software.
HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."
A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.
The study examined 2,600 popular keywords on five major search engines -- Google, Yahoo, Live, AOL and Ask -- and analyzed 413,000 Web pages.
"Just in the past year, we've seen a pretty dramatic shift in what we call malware," David DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, told Richard Quest for CNN International's "Quest Means Business."
"It went from a hacker in a basement, to organized cybercrime to now, literally, terrorism and other forms of organized geopolitical attacks," he said.
Categories that had the highest risk of run-ins with malware: screen savers, free games, work from home, Olympics, videos, celebrities, music and news.
Riskiest terms: word unscrambler, lyrics, myspace, free music downloads, phelps, game cheats, printable fill-in puzzles, free ringtones and solitaire.
The study shows how cyber criminals are increasing in sophistication.
"We can have massive outages with a hacker in the basement. We saw that recently with the 'Twitter worm,' a 17-year-old in his basement basically perpetrated tens of millions of (computer) outages. Or, we can see an organized attack bringing down infrastructure," DeWalt said.
Antivirus software companies lag behind the latest developments by cyber criminals, he said.
"We've been way behind, that's true for the entire world, the global infrastructure of the Internet has grown dramatically -- 50 percent of the world's PCs are unprotected," DeWalt said.
Despite the increased risk, DeWalt doesn't believe there will be a "cyber Armageddon" causing widespread destruction of computers and Internet infrastructure.
"Last week, you saw President Obama in the United States talk about a major cyber-security initiative sponsored by the government, other governments are sponsoring this as well," DeWalt said. "I think we're learning this can happen, and if we get ahead of it, we can prevent it."
SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a new search engine, Bing, designed to intuitively understand what people are searching for on the Internet and challenge online king Google.
The US software colossus refers to Bing as a "Decision Engine" and said it will begin deploying it online at bing.com in the coming days.
"Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.
"When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web."
Bing search employs semantic technology intended to help it recognize not just key words but what is intended by phrases typed in as online queries, according to Microsoft.
Bing is built to "go beyond today's search experience" by recognizing content and adapting to query types, according to the Redmond, Washington-based company.
Bing takes aim at Microsoft arch-rival Google, which dominates the online search market. Bing will replace MSN Live search, which has languished in a distant third place behind Google and Yahoo!.
THERE has been plenty of buzz online about Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com), a unique online tool that tech pundits say could beat Google Search at its own game.
Unlike conventional search engines, Wolfram Alpha does not generate links to information from across the web to answer your search query. Instead, it tries to understand what you’ve asked and presents factual data from a database of curated content (currently only 10TB in size). Thanks to its algorithmic-rich backbone, Wolfram Alpha can present its results in tables, charts, diagrams and other visual means as an answer to your query. And there’s no guesswork needed to ascertain the data since it comes from valid sources.
Here’s what we found when we compared the results generated by Wolfram Alpha with other search engines.
Search: GDP of Singapore
>> Wolfram Alpha: In its results, Wolfram Alpha presented the 2007 estimate of our GDP (gross domestic product) and charted a useful graph of our country’s GDP growth overtime. It also displayed relevant information, like the country’s inflation and employment rates.
>> Google Search (www.google.com.sg): The first link on Google’s search results was a sponsored link by a bank — hardly useful. Next in line was a link to the website for the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency, which has Singapore’s 2007 GDP figures.
Search: Earthquakes in Indonesia
>> Wolfram Alpha: It displayed a graphic map littered with dots pinpointing the areas in Indonesia that are affected by earthquakes. The dots vary in sizes to illustrate the magnitude of the earthquake. With the aid of simple drop-down menus, you can filter the earthquakes by magnitude and by the period of time they occurred.
>> Yahoo (sg.search.yahoo.com): Related links to news stories from different media outlets formed the mainstay of Yahoo’s search results.
Search: Big Mac
>> Wolfram Alpha: It’s not localised yet, so Wolfram Alpha won’t recognise food items like rojak or nasi lemak. In fact, for a little surprise, see its response when you query this: “Do you speak Malay?” So, we fed McDonald’s almost universal Big Mac into Wolfram Alpha and were treated to a detailed list of the fast food’s nutritional values.
>> MicrosoftLive Search (search.live.com): Two Wikipedia entries on the Big Mac made the top of the list on the search engine’s results, with the link to the official UK website for McDonald’s appearing at number three on the result list.
Search: Singapore weather in May
>> Wolfram Alpha: Not only did Wolfram Alpha state the average temperature and range of conditions, humidity and wind speed, it also provided charts indicating cloud cover and temperature.
>> rednano.sg (www.rednano.sg): The local search engine churned out a list of largely irrelevant results. Under its web results tab, it displayed a link to news stories on Indonesia and China, followed by a blog listing “wild happenings in singapore” while under its news results page, it listed links to technology-related sites. Huh?
Wolfram Alpha won’t quite render search engines obsolete. Its strength lies in providing you ways to crunch factual data and manipulate it to your liking. Because it lacks information on pop culture or news, users who try to use it like a conventional search engine might be disappointed.
This “computational knowledge engine” can be daunting because it isn’t very flexible with processing certain phrases or queries. We sometimes had to rearrange our queries to get the right results.
However, Wolfram Alpha holds much potential and is a step in the right direction for a web tool that serves as an encyclopedia on steroids.
Microsoft might be unveiling a new search engine next week. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Microsoft plans to demonstrate the search engine, code-named Kumo, at D: All Things Digital, a conference organised by the WSJ. Said to be a revamp of Microsoft’s Live Search, Kumo aims to provide a better web search experience by shortening and grouping search results into relevant categories.
From TODAYOnline.com, Tech – Friday, 22-May-2009; see the source article here.
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