Google launches voice search on desktop

San Francisco: Making Google search requests on many office and home computers soon won’t require a keyboard.
A feature announced Tuesday will allow people to speak their search requests while sitting in front of their desktop computers just as they already can on smartphones running on Google Inc.’s Android software.
The spoken-request option will be available only on Google’s Chrome browser. It will be activated by clicking on a microphone icon inside Google’s search box. Chrome users will get the new feature within the next few days.
Google also unveiled a way to get results by dragging digital images into its search box.
The technological tricks are the latest Google innovations aimed at making it quicker and easier to search.

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JCODEC - Java Implementation of Media Codec

JCodec is an open source pure java implementation of video and audio codecs and formats. Currently H264 baseline profile decoder was fully implemented.

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How to Install Linux Kernel 3.0 rc2 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Linux kernel RC2 was just released few hours ago. It has some bug fixes and additional drivers. You may want to try it in your Ubuntu 11.04 installation because it may solve problems and work good for you.
Don’t remove previous Linux kernel after installing it, new kernel may cause new problems and previous can be used for resume.

• Download the debs from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.0-rc2-oneiric/
• There are three packages need to install in this order: linux-headers-*-all.deb, linux-headers-*-generic-*.deb, and finally linux-image-*.deb.
• As you prefer, you can also download and compile the source code from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/testing/
• Once installation finish, reboot and it should be listed in grub boot entries. Just select to boot it. If you get into problems with this kernel, reboot and select to boot into previous Linux kernel and remove linux-headers-3 and linux-image-3 in synaptic-package-manager.

If newer versions are released, check out here

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Linux Kernel 2.6.39 Officially Released

Among the newest features included in Linux kernel 2.6.39, we can mention the new drivers for high-end graphics card AMD, ipsets to simplify firewall maintenance and implementation, improved filesystem EXT4, new drivers for better hardware support, and many bug fixes.
The following is a statement of Linus Torvalds in the official announcement.

"So it's delayed A Few days, and I really was struggling with the decision of whether I wanted to cut a final release at all: it Could Easily have made more sense to just do an-rc8."

"However, since I'm going to be at LinuxCon Japan in two weeks, the choice for me whether I ended up Should just release, or drag it out * three * more weeks, or have Some really messy merge window with a break in. Between."

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List Files and Directories by Size on Linux

To get a list with the size of each item in a folder, we can use the du command like this:
du -sm *
The -m argument will return the listing in megabytes (note that you can use -h for human readable, but it won’t sort correctly)
Now we will want to run this through the sort command, sorting in reverse order -r and numeric -n:
du -sm * | sort -nr

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