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pcworld:  Xerox researchers are developing a way to change the colors in a computer document using natural language commands such as “make the background carnation pink” or “make the blues slightly less purple.”

Color control systems tend to be complex, so most consumers who need color images and documents have trouble making adjustments, Xerox Innovation Group research scientist Geoff Woolfe notes in a paper that describes prototype “natural language color editing” technology and will be presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council in Kansas City, Mo.

“Today, especially in the office environment, there are many non-experts who know how they would like color to appear but have no idea how to manipulate the color to get what they want,” Woolfe says in a press release. “You shouldn’t have to be a color expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset.”

Xerox has made prototypes of natural language devices that would let users change colors by giving voice commands or typing words and phrases like “slightly less yellow,” “much darker,” “more saturated,” “greener,” “significantly punchier,” or a “smidge lighter.”

These expressions are less precise than numerical color encodings used in color image-processing and device-control applications , but more useful to typical consumers, Woolfe writes. Facilitating the use of natural language is not easy: Xerox researchers have faced complications while developing a mapping structure that translates natural language color specifications into the more precise numerical descriptions.

“First, there is no uniquely defined natural color language,” Woolfe writes. “The words and grammar used to describe color can vary based on culture, geographical location, professional affiliation and individual preference. Second, the boundaries between named colors are not precisely defined — indeed; they are somewhat fuzzy and can vary, to some extent, between individuals.”

pcworld: We all thought that the floppy disk had joined punched cards in the IT graveyard. But Lindy Electronics has used a USB port to resurrect this traditional device.

Long left behind by USB thumb drives in capacity, Lindy’s USB-connected floppy drive can read and write 1.44MB floppies. Data is transferred at 12Mbit/s; that is a faster per-second transfer rate than the floppy diskette’s capacity. It is bus-powered and there is no need for an additional power supply.

Barry Edmonds, Imation’s UK MD, says that floppy disks are still being purchased for use in the education sector. Their manufacture by Imation has not yet ceased.

Stephen Fawcett, Lindy Electronics’ senior product manager, said: “We know that customers are using 3.5-inch floppies, because we are still seeing a demand for them.” It’s an obvious way of retrieving data from a legacy device and there are situations where a floppy drive can be useful: “Even those of us who prefer pen drives and the like, have probably found ourselves presented with a floppy of “important data” and wished we still had an easy way to access it. So our USB floppy drive can be a useful tool.”

Once upon a time, over a quarter of a century ago, floppy diskettes stored a computer’s operating system — DOS was, originally a floppy disk operating system. Nowadays you would need more than a thousand floppies to store Windows XP or Vista.

Lindy’s USB floppy, compatible with Windows (98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista), Linux and Mac OS 8.6 and above, is priced at £29.99 (US$60) and available now.

pcworld: Google Inc. took a step closer on Thursday to being able to search everything: its desktop search application is now available in 29 languages, including Hindi, the company announced.

Seven weeks after launching the English-language version of Google Desktop 5, the company localized the software in 29 languages, including French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Russian — and Hindi, the first time a version of the application has been offered in that language.

Google Desktop 5 is an application for Windows Vista, XP or 2000 that, once installed on a PC, can be used to search the hard disk for documents using an interface similar to that of Google’s Internet search engine. Like its Internet counterpart, it can be used to preview the contents of documents without having to launch the application used to create them. Version 5 also includes updated “gadgets,” small applications that can display new email, weather forecasts, diary entries or a to-do list.

The company faces renewed competition on the desktop since Microsoft Corp.’s introduction of new desktop search functionality in Vista, its latest Windows upgrade. Microsoft also offers desktop search for Windows XP as a free download.

With Version 5, Google tried to play on users’ fears about the security of Microsoft’s browser and OS, introducing an early warning system designed to protect users from phishing attempts and Web sites harboring malicious code.

Google Desktop was itself the subject of two warnings by security researchers in February. However, Google software engineer Xiyuan Xia gave no indication in his posting to the official Google Desktop blog on Thursday whether the new localized versions patch all the reported flaws.

Google also released a version of the desktop search application for Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X operating system three weeks ago.