Watch non-stop videos with inifinitube

Here's an addition to youtubes' videos. Infinitube.net claims to play videos non-stop. All you have to do is to enter a search string. Infinitube searches for relevant youtube videos on youtube and creates a playlist which is played nonstop. The buffering is quite fast when compared to youtube.

Amazingly, infinitube doesn’t just let you play videos non-stop. It also lets you watch videos full-screen if your heart so desires it. If you want to visit the video on the original YouTube page, there’s a page for you to go to. Infinitube even supplies a link for you to download the video in .flv format, so if you have the correct codecs in your computer, you can watch your favorite videos offline too.

To sum it up, to use infinitube, all you have to do is to:

• Enter whatever search term you like into the searxh bar on top
• A list of videos related to the search term will come up.
• You can either choose to play the first video that comes up or check the playlist for something you like
• infinitube will go through the automatically generated playlist non-stop
• links are provided at the end of the playlist, so you can either visit the original link or download the video in .flv format.
• if you’re too lazy to search for your own keywords, the column at the righ lists some of the recent searches, or you can even seacrh infinitube for random playlists.

Infinitube has become one of my favorites and a convenient tool to watch videos with just a search string

Sprint joins the lay off race

Faced with persistent subscriber losses and questions about its long-term prospects, Sprint Nextel Corp. is slashing its already shrinking work force by 8,000 people as it seeks to cut annual costs by $1.2 billion.

The layoffs, announced Monday, are just the latest attempt by the nation's third-largest cell phone carrier to right its financial ship in the face of tough competition and a brutal economy. They come slightly more than a year after the company cut 4,000 jobs and closed 125 retail centers as Chief Executive Dan Hesse, then new on the job, aimed to show he was serious about streamlining operations.

Sprint said it expects the latest round of layoffs, which represent a 14 percent reduction of its 56,000 employees, will be largely completed by March 31. The company said it will take a first-quarter charge of more than $300 million for severance and other costs.

About 850 of the layoffs are voluntary, through employees taking buyouts. They will make up about $45 million of the total severance costs, the company said in a securities filing.

In addition to the cuts, Sprint said it will suspend its 401(k) match for the year, extend a freeze on salary increases and suspend a tuition reimbursement program.

Yet another company to join the race, hope the situation improves soon.

Tweaks to make firefox perform better

Some tricks to make firefox perform faster

Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for its cache feature

1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the adress bar in the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
3. Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)

Increase the Speed at Which Firefox loads pages

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.

This means it will make 10 requests at once.

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)

Reduce RAM usage to 10MB when Firefox is minimized:

This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

Long Term Evolution (LTE)

Today I came across the term LTE viz Long Term Evolution. It is the technology into which the 3GPP and WCDMA networks will evolve. In other words, it can be called the 4th Generation network. I remember the times at University where I produced a report on the study of mobile technologies. The report contained technology till the convergence of the 3G and CDMA networks to WCDMA networks. Technology advances so fast that we are already thinking of 4G.

LTE has a new kind of access scheme, a new modulation technique OHFDM (Orthognal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and an antenna technology called MIME (Multiple Input Multiple Output) which should enable 10 times as many users per cell as 3GPP’s original W CDMA radio access technology. It also enhances the use of Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (ULTRA), which would increase the spectral efficiency by 4 times comared to ULTRA.

Would be quite interesting to work on emerging technologies like these, to be a part of it.

Microsoft slashes jobs due to economic cricis

Microsoft joins the rest of the world in layoffs, pertaining to the company's dismal second quarter financial results. Sales of microsoft windows have decreased considerably due to the economic situation. To help it cope with that lower base of demand, Microsoft said that it would lay off up to 5,000 employees, or about 5 percent of its work force — the first significant cuts in the company’s 34-year history.

Intel also a leader in chip industry announced the plan to lay of around 5000-6000 employees and shut down some production plants. Rather than recession companies are witnessing a fall in consumer base. Of course this seems to be a loop around effect, with individuals and business units cutting costs thus leading to declined sales. In turn this causes further unemployment. This may on for a while unless governments eases the cash flow into the economy.

Free.fr provides unlimited calls to Indian Landlines

With the voip call rates touching ground level, yet another French Internet Service Provider will be providing unlimited calls to landlines in India. This service is included in the monthly package of 30 euros. This promotion is scheduled to take off from Feb 2009. Free.fr is the largest Internet Service Provider in france having around 60% of customer base in france. Very well known for its connection speeds, Ive heard both positive and negative reviews about this operator. I my self have been using free for the past two years and haven't faced a problem till now. Although if a problem arises, I think the customer service is not that good, as this is what I heard.

Apart from providing unlimited calls to India, they also provider unlimited landline calling to 86 other destination all over the world. Check out their site to get more info. If you are in France and looking to change your internet service provider, then heres one reason to switch to free.fr, and join the huge community of free users in France.

Nymgo

Nymgo - Yet another cheap Voip provider

Nymgo is a recent addition to cheap calls to India. It is provided by Splendor Telecom UK. As the other voip providers have, nymgo also has a client to make calls over the internet. They have two kinds of plans, charge per min and flat rate monthly (of course theres a limit you can talk). The scheme which attacted me was the monthly plans. For example the asia and australia plan costs $20, which comes to approx 15euros. This plan gives you monthly talk time of 1750 minutes, hence the cost per min comes up to 0.008 euro cents, even less than 1 cent. This is the cheapest viop provider I have come across till now in comparison to Freecall.com (2 cents/min), justvoip and others.

Their pay as you go scheme is also quite comptetive compared to other schemes. The voice quality is superb. I havent had any problems with the voice quality. Although when I signed up there were acute problems with call setup, but the support team are very prompt in their reply and fix issues quite fast. I would say its a rather reliable voip provider.