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2009-07-26T09:13:00.001+05:30

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Skype On IPhone

2009-03-30T20:27:00.005+05:30

Here’s a good news for Iphone owners across the world. Now it’s Apple’s turn, Skype’s compatible version already exists for Windows Mobile and Google’s mobile technology Android. Don’t worry Blackberry users as you will also get this software on your device very soon. Skype has decided to launch their Iphone compatible version. Now you can enjoy the cheap calling rates on your IPhone. Skype grew with a small VOIP application to a calling technology. It uses VOIP protocol which allows one skype user to call other free of cost, like today’s messengers do. They also introduced the landline calling facility in their service long back which has some charges which depends from the country to country. Very soon all the Nokia mobile will have skype as a built in application as last month they have signed a deal at Mobile World conference 2009.

This application is not only for Iphone users, even Ipod touch users can make use of this service connecting their headsets and mic. Skype has officially confirmed that they will release this application for Apple on Tuesday in a a press conference at the CTIA Wireless 2009 Trade show in Las Vegas.

Google’s News

2008-09-20T01:46:00.004+05:30

Google an internet giant and a very efficient web search provider is in news from quite some time now. This is not new to us, but the news can be of competition with Microsoft, the FCC auction, the mobile services, the ads search and etc.. etc….

The news never stops, few of the items which flash lights on Google are..

Ad deal with yahoo

The justice department is still in a dilemma whether to give green signal for this deal or block it. But Google is campaigning hard for this deal. It was discussed to move forward with the partnership and to help assure that Yahoo would remain an independent company. The two companies also signed the ad partnership after merger talks with Microsoft failed. It has been 3 months now that this deal is on hold at the Justice department. But Google says they will go ahead with this deal on or around Oct 11 with or without the green signal of the justice department.

Google Chrome

Google’s new browser named Chrome will now support Add-Ons. Released earlier this month, Chrome saw a amazing downloads of about 2 million in its first week. After seeing this, Microsoft, Mozilla and others have started working on upgrading and adding new features to their browsers. Google Chrome has a new technique in which all the web pages are virtually separated which results in no magic in case of explorer crashes, like most of the today’s explorers does. There are lots more new features in Google Chrome which will be adapted by other explorers very soon. Download your copy of Chrome here.

T-mobile for Android

Very soon, T-Mobile and Google are expected to unveil a new smart phone which will be the first phone to run Google’s Android mobile operating system. The phone will be running on 3G network and will be in market probably by mid next month.

Sergey Brin’s Blog

It’s been more than 5 year now that Google has acquired Blogger and it’s now that the compay’s co-founder Sergey Brin started taking advantage of his service. He wrote his first post on his blog named TOO is his personal writing about his mother and her ills. This is very inspiring post in which he says that he has a better guess than anyone else for what ills would be his and he is all prepared for it.

Google Site Search

2008-06-10T18:21:00.003+05:30

Google has enhanced it commercial site search traditionally known as Google Site Search. Google site search is a hosted search engine which can be hosted on your site to increase the loyalty of your visitors, this can be used to find information on your site instantly. This is so simple that you can design a search engine for your site in few minutes. This site search box falls into the same category in which Microsoft’s Fast search and Rival suites from stand-alone vendors Autonomy. Google site search provides ad-free search results, it is highly customizable, it is also for the developers who uses API and who are rather interested to peep into the raw code for a search result and it also provides the feature of reporting, the basic reporting structure allows you to check how often people search with your search engine and what are they looking for. Presently Google site search supports the following languagues, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian.

Below are the new features which has been recently updated by Google on this product.

Date Biasing: As per the older standards, all the recent product documents are given more weightage than the older ones, but now the site administrator can set the levels of influence of their sites under low, medium, high or maximum category.

Synonyms: You Google Site search box on your site has now got the intellengence to find the abbreviations. If you type in fd, you can get Flexible benefits, if you type in car, you can get the results of cars.

Enhanced Indexing: As per Google, they have enhanced their indexing when compared to their previous versions. It is now possible to search even the deeper products in your site.

Top Results Biasing: You can now target the top search results from a specific section of your site, in a way making a catalogue of your site search.

Tips for New IT Managers

2008-05-15T22:50:00.006+05:30

The new manager’s role is very challenging job in the early phases. You have to manage the growth from being a technical person to an expert manager. But as you get experienced and follow the rules, you will start loving it.

Communication: Regularly meeting with your team members and your boss, discussing work related issues, challenges and ways in which they can learn and develop is part of day to day job for a manager. Arrange outings, this will strengthen the working relationship within your team. Things have changed now, other people are relying on you. A good way to build trust is to do what you say you are going to do, it would be better if you keep the secrets with you rather than revealing then to your team members. A manager would definitely have good presentation skills and he/she undertakes training program. Have informers who can gives regular updates regarding the team to you. Always take suggestions even to enhance your skills. No, no I don’t mean you to take suggestions with your peers to enhance your communication skills. Learn the internal politics in your organization.

Management: Be conservative to your boss and open to your peers. This is a strategy of a clever manager. Take recurring issues and problems to your boss, but don’t take day to day problems to him\her. Don’t pull your staff member to save money. It’s very easy job to fill your project with extra staff as long as their salaries are included in the cost of implementing the project. You can find this more easy if you prepare the matrix reports of the work load on each member of the team.

Support: As you are the leader, you are the responsible person at the time of disaster. Design and follow your disaster recovery plan from the starting phase of your project. Have your staff members to work from a disaster recovery site once in 6 months. If you have a helpdesk kind of environment where the user put their queries and you find that you are getting lots and lots of them, then try various other options like making few more members part of the team who takes calls, or outsource this function if it is possible. But if you are doing so, then keep well defined SLA’s (Service Level Agreements)

Environment: Try to be very patiet. If you cannot be patient, try to act as if you are have patience. Listen to your employees very patiently. Provide your staff with clear objectives and help then to reach their goals. Arrange outings and some other recreation activities. If you control budget, you can manage this cost. Don’t always expect high standards from your team members. Praise and encourage your employees in their areas and provide training to them to improve in their weak areas. Never pass the heat to your employees, this will break their courage and the mutual understanding between you and him\her, approach towards the mistakes very friendly.

HTC Launches its 3G Microsoft Based Phone.

2008-05-06T23:14:00.005+05:30

HTC (High Tech Computers) well known for its smart phones, which has sold nearly 3 million units since its launch last year, this smart phone has been upgraded to support 3G network, which was much awaited as the next IPhone feature. Touch diamond as it is called would hit European market early next month and would reach US markets by second half of this year.

The Touch Diamond offers a high speed internet access of 3.5G with the technology called as WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). Qualcomm is the manufacturer of the chipsets for HTC Touch Diamond. Thats not all, there are lot of other features in this new upgraded Touch smart phone from HTC. The TouchFlo software will provide 3D effect to screen images. The web browser has been upgraded, this has been built from Opera software but specifically designed for HTC. The turn around feature of IPhone has been added to touch. Just turn around your touch diamond and the image will automatically rotate. This device has a internal card slot to support SD cards, an additional business card scanner. It has a GPS system built into it, a customized application to watch Youtube videos and a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus would be some thing you would love. The battery has been rated for 4 hrs of talk time. It runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional.

I hope in the coming months, HTC will launch an upgradable model for this with the memory capacity competing with IPhone which would be 16 or 32 GB when compared to the 4GB memory that it has. With this new product, there comes a new website of this company, yes HTC has launched a new website www.htc.com

Yahoo Getting Closer to Google

2008-04-11T06:33:00.004+05:30

Oh, it was a busy schedule. At last I found some time form my busy schedule to write a post on this blog. The Technical Herald team sincerely thank to all those visitors who visited this blog in last 40 days. Our log reveals that there were more than 5K. So 5 thousand thanks to all those Liable Visitors. We hope to work hard to take this blog to even more greater heights.

So coming to today's post. No No Do not thing that this post is all about what is listed in the title. But the title is part of what's the newz is. Its all about the deals over internet.

It’s a deal again, but this time it’s between Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL internet unit. Looks like this deal has been freezed at around $10 billion. Yahoo is really kind to Google, with this deal, Yahoo would outsource web search advertising operations to Google.

But Microsoft is never gonna stop. There were speculations that Microsoft in combination with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is looking to jointly bid for Yahoo. If this deal happens, then Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and News Corp’s MySpace would come under same roof. But sources say that Yahoo has an alliance with News Corp’s MySpace. Ufff, Microsoft is really trying harder and harder to overcome the dominance of Google. Even after Yahoo’s board formally rejected the Microsoft Corp’s bid saying it undervalues the company.

Since then, Yahoo is also striving hard to come up in the market, alliance with Google Inc, News Corporation’s MySpace and Time Warner’s AOL, but what about Microsoft. There will be time, when Microsoft will be left all alone and all the other companies would form an alliance. If Yahoo joins hands with Google, it would be impossible for Microsoft to complete for all of its life span. Just kidding, Microsoft is also looking around them to find some fresh bones. Kidding again. But these talks turn out to be an advantage for stock market investors.

As of now, Yahoo is facing a three weeks deadline from Microsoft to reach a deal and Microsoft is eager to offer higher than what it has announced now.

Check for other big deals of the day at Guardian

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

2008-03-07T16:13:00.006+05:30

The first Beta of the whole new Internet Explorer 8 is all set for download with its new features. There are many features which are enhanced in this version. The IE 8 can be installed on Vista SP1, XP SP2, Server 2003 SP2 and Server 2008. The first Beta can be downloaded from Microsoft site. The Zoom feature which was shipped in IE 7 has been enhanced and renamed as Zoom Version 2. Web developers can design their web pages in considerations with the Zoom API’s.

Now there is no need for administrative rights to install Active x controls, a subset of features present in Vista operating system has been built into this application. The new feature named Loosely coupled Internet Explorer is an effort to separate the dependences of the different components on one another. The Data Execution & Prevention (DEP) and No-Execute (NX) are the features which exists in IE 7 to prevent the buffer overflow attacks. These features are enabled in IE 8 by default. Managing Add-ons is more easier and user friendly in IE 8.

The link bar of IE 7 has been renamed to Favorites bar in IE 8 allowing users to easily access their favorite web contents like links, Feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. IE 8 has a build in Automatic Crash Recovery Feature to prevent the sudden process killers in case of uncertainty. The Phishing filter has been improved with a more comprehensive feature called Safety filter. Apart from blocking known phishing sites, safety filter also blocks sites known to contain malicious software that could harm your computer or steal your information. Don’t worry about your speed, Microsoft has also done some home work to make your browsing experience safely and quickly. This application is compatible with web designing tools and technologies like CSS, Expression Web, Visual Web Developer Express and many more.

IT Administrators will have access to block unsafe sites over the group policy in an Active Directory Domain.

Want to check IE 8, download the First Beta of IE 8 from Microsoft

Read more about this product at Microsoft Resources

Know the Weekness of this product. But don’t worry, this is the first Beta of this product. The real version is yet to come in which would be a bug free IE 8.

Time to Purchase your IPhone

2008-02-23T21:40:00.004+05:30

Yes the time to purchase your IPhone is very near. With the new updates released and also with the new 16GB model in market, the only thing we should wait is to check the price cut.

There are news that Apple will cut short its IPod and IPhone prices in next few months, this is definitely to create room for the upcoming 3G model to speed up your browsing experience. Apple is also expected to release its SDK which will help its customers a lot. There are also speculations that Apple is looking forward to get the support for the most popular web based voice call engine, “Skype”.

So your patience in purchasing your IPhone has proved to be fruitful. There would be a $100 cut in the present models, the 16GB IPhone would be around $399 when compare to the current price $499. With this, you can see the price of an 8GB IPhone to be $299, this also tips the price fall of the 32GB IPod touch from the present $499 within next few months.

With the recent software update of Jan 8, Apple has rectified many bugs and enhanced its features. Now you can re-arrange your home page icons. Movie rental have come to ITunes. With Wi-Fi or cell towers, you can get the best out of Google Maps. Create your own web clips and add them for one touch viewing. Send text message to a group. With this update, purchasing music is a touch away.

The reason for such a drastic price cut is due to the fall in Flash NAND based memories. According to sources, the price of a 4GB flash memory has declined over 73% since Aug 2007.

Read the guess about how the 3G IPhone would be with all the enhanced features.

$44.6 Billion is not a Fare Deal for Yahoo

2008-02-15T22:11:00.003+05:30

Jerry Yang, the CEO and the co-founder of Yahoo revealed the reason for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to takeover Yahoo @ $44.6 Billion. According to him, this amount is too low, he also wrote that Yahoo has emerged as an independent player in Internet market, they are expecting a growth of almost 75 % till 2010. By then, Yahoo would be a $ 75 Billion company.

Yahoo is a recognized brand, said Jerry! They have about 500 million users accessing its free service across the globe every day. He also disclosed his partnership with some of the top players like Comcast and eBay

According to me, this is very good news for Google as they have already planned to oppose this bid on legal grounds. As internet is a free bird which Microsoft is trying to make a licensed availability. But no worry as both Microsoft & Yahoo even when together cannot defeat Google.

Microsoft to bid $44.6 billion to take over Yahoo

2008-02-03T19:25:00.000+05:30

Microsoft in its ever made boldest bid of $ 44.6 Billion is aiming for Yahoo to beat their competitor Google. As I have mentioned earlier Google has attracted around 58% of the total search market in US, whereas both Microsoft and Yahoo could'nt go more than 40%.

Yahoo is the most visited site on the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang, Yahoo began as a hobby and has evolved into a leading global brand. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with a presence in more than 20 markets and regions around the globe. Even Yahoo has acquired many companies starting from Four 11 to recent Right Media's acquisition. There are also speculations that they are aiming at popular social networking site MySpace. The Q4 2007 results state that there was a 20% growth in marketing sector this fiscal year.

Yahoo in its official statement disclosed that they would take quiet a bit of time to review Microsoft’s agreement in which they would look Yahoo as an individual company.

Sony Vaoi X 505 or Apple MacBookAir

2008-01-20T15:34:00.000+05:30

Yes, that’s the question which everyone is asking since the recent release of Apple's MacBook Air. Both are quality laptops, but hear is my view about them.

Sony claims that the battery life is 2.5 to 4 hrs, however Mobile tech review of Sony’s X 505 laptop reveals that the battery life is only 2.5 hrs on charge when using the built in power management. Sony X505 has 10 inch LCD display, where as MacBook Air has 13 inch LED display is the largest display in a 3 pound laptop and is just bright as the MacBook Pro’s 15 inch LED display. The processor used in X505 is Pentium M Processor with 1.1 GHz clock speed, where as Apple has a special kind of processor designed by Intel for its thinnest notebook computer, It is a Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 1.6 (upgradable to 1.8 GHz at an additional $ 300). This is 64 percent smaller than the normal Core 2 Duo processors. The most interesting feature about MacBook Air lies in its touchpad, which has a pinch of the feature of a Surface Computer, apart from pointer functionality, it also allows you to rotate, enlarge your photos. I know you all have something in your mind, that’s about the touchscreen feature, however the touch feature is limited only to the touchpad and not to the screen, if touchscreen feature is included, it would be a ground breaking news same as that of the IPhone news. Sony offers 512 MB DDR RAM however the Apple MacBook Air comes with 2GB DDR RAM. The hard disk in Sony’s X 505 notebook is 20 GB, however Air has 80 GB Hard disk with 4200 RPM (a bit slower than the normal hard disks used).

All the above features, definitely reveals that Air is the most affordable thinnest laptop. The only reason you will go for Sony’s X 505 is the price, if it is less than that of Air, you would go for Sony. If any of you are willing for, here’s one @ $1,000. I see one more advantage of going with Sony is the way of replacing the battery, its user-friendly process however you have to take you MacBook Air to Apple’s service center for the surgery.

Check the Crunch Gear for detailed comparison between X 505 and Air.

Apple MacBook Air

2008-01-17T19:49:00.000+05:30

Apple has released its much awaited laptop earlier this week, which is named as MacBook Air. Yes you got it right, I am talking about the second thinnest laptop of the world after Sony's X505 which was launched in December 2003. Earlier this week, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs have surprised everybody at MacWorld Expo by taking a laptop out of an interoffice mailing envelope. Air is all set to come in market within two weeks and the estimated price of this thinnest notebook will be $ 1,799. Presently it is launched only in Silver color, but Apple would definitely have plans to launch this product in other different colors as Dell did a few months ago. It is just 0.16 inches at its thinnest point and weighs about 3 pounds. Considering the design, this notebook is outfitted with 80GB hard disk.

Other features like a flip down door on side with connectors like, USB 2.0, Micro-DVI for external display, head phone jack and MagSafe connector for power which comes with 45 watt power adaptor existed on other MacBook laptops. It also has an 802.11n based wireless network support and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Apple estimates that the battery life of MacBook Air with Bluetooth enabled is 5hrs.

Perhaps the thinnest MacBook ever, it is encased in a 0.16 to 0.76 inch of aluminum case. At just 3.0 pounds, MacBook Air becomes the most conveniently portable notebook computer. A 13.3 inch widescreen LED display is same as the other MacBook laptops. The 1280 X 800 resolution give you a polished display with rich colors. A full sized keyboard is just like the one used in MacBook, the additional feature in MacBook Air is the backlit key illumination making it easy to work even at the time to power failures in your place. The track pad is much bigger than the other models.

Compromises

Apart from all the above stunning features, there are few things where Apple had to compromise with space, I will mention few of them here. There is no internal optical drives (CD or DVD drives), a USB based add-on SuperDrive will be supplied on extra $99 cost. But as always, Apple had come up with a new software for the users who do no opt to get that extra optical add-on SuperDrive. They have developed “Remote Disk” which enables you to use the optical drive of another Mac or PC which is on the same network as MacBook Air. The battery is so compact and tightly placed, that a novice user will not be able to replace it with a new one. You have to take the laptop to the service center to get the battery replaced. There is no RJ-45 port, that’s again a $29 for additional USB based RJ-45 port.

Processor

There is a special Core 2 Duo processor designed by Intel for this product, it is based on Merom technology with clock speed ranging from 1.6GHz to 2.2 GHz. It is a Low Voltage Merom based Core 2 Duo instead of the traditional Ultra Low Voltage Merom. The only reason why Apple went with Low Voltage against Ultra Low Voltage is because of the lower clock speed ranges of Ultra Low voltage, however the advantage of Ultra Low voltage Merom based processors is that they operate on even less voltage when compared with their Low voltage competitors. The present processor is the older version of the current Intel’s processor. Apple used a 65nm Merom based processor whereas Intel has just launched its much smaller 45nm Hafnium based processor Apple would definitely have a plan to use the current 45nm Hafnium based Core 2 Duo Intel processor in its MacBook Air. Check more about the processor used in MacBook Air. Let me also mention about the processors which MacBook has been using in past. The MacBook Pro first used Intel’s Core Duo processor, which were replaced with Intel Core 2 Duo processors in mid 2006. The Core 2 Duo was a 64 bit processor designed by Intel corp. for laptop computers. This was developed under the code name “Merom”, it had a FSB speed of 667 MHz and supports the Virtual interrupt technology called as “Vanderpool Virtualization Technology”. This processor was upgraded last year with a FSB speed of 800 MHz

Eco Friendly

There were lots of speculations about the Apple’s strategy towards the ecosystem. Infact last year, Apple was in crosshairs of the environment group Greenpeace. But MacBook Air is truly eco friendly, it has fully recyclable aluminum case, and is the first to have a mercury-free display, the display is LED but not LCD. Even while packaging, the retail packaging of MacBook Air uses 56 percent less material than other MacBook packaging.

Specifications

In the end, lets see the specifications once again.

3 lbs
0.16” - 0.76” x 12.8” x 8.94” (H x W x D)
Full Size keyboard from the MacBook
13.3” 1280 x 800 LED backlit screen
2GB DDR2-667
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB shared L2
80GB 1.8” 4200RPM HDD or optional 64GB SSD
802.11n/Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Starting at $1799

My next post will be a true comparison between the Sony X505 Ultraslim and MacBook Air Ultraportal notebooks.

Editor’s Note: For Our Readers

2008-01-12T21:07:00.000+05:30

For next few weeks, I would be writing about the future of today’s high profiled companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo etc.., Truly speaking this would be my research about these companies, in which I would be answering few questions like How did they started? What are they doing?and What will they be in future? Offcourse, to make it more interesting, I would truly cover the technology part of these companies rather than their history, economics and blah blah blah….

We had a internal discussion about, Which company to start with? and after thorough study, we decided to start with the powerful search engine and the high profiled advertising company which is Google. So lets start off, I am sure, you would be loving this idea. However we would also continue to post the technology news and latest happennig in the world of internet.

Citrix The Software Of the Year

2007-12-31T21:00:00.000+05:30

Citrix is definitely the software of the year 2007 and is growing bigger and bigger. Recently they have released a free utility called Power Smart, which contributes to the green revolution. This is the first version of this utility. Power Smart helps in power off the most idle presentation server in your citrix farm during off business hours. Once installed and configured, this utility monitors the users during off business hours using Citrix Presentation Server SDK and power off those serves which are not active or have disconnected users. Things can be back to normal when in business hours. More over, it gives the flexibility to run basic administrative scripts on the server.

This tool is designed for the organizations seeking to reduce the datacenter power consumption. HP is the first server vendor in this line, they have demonstrated support for Power Smart in combination with their own power management tools for HP ProLiant Server family.

Download this utility here

Download the user guid here

The best part of citrix comes now. The products from citrix such as Go To Meeting, Go To Webinar and Go To Assist has been rated as the Year’s best softwares by PC magazine. Go To Meeting is the online meeting service from Citrix online, which is a division of Citrix, the best of 2007. Citrix interaction solutions magazine recognized Citrix GoTo Webinar and Citrix Go To Assist remote support and online event service with two product of the year Awards. On the whole, GoTo Meeting is an easy to use meeting solution for conducting meetings or trainings. GoTo Webinar is a webinar solution to conduct events from your PC with nearly a 1,000 attendees. GoTo Assist is a remote assistance tool to view, control and troubleshoot client’s desktop

GoTo Assist . GoTo Meeting . GoTo Webinar

Latest… To Reduce Global Warming

2007-12-13T22:18:00.001+05:30

CNET reviews few of the latest happenings to reduce Global Warming and its effects. We have covered the Green Tech solutions by various vendors under this tag earlier. Electronics and computing can really help in reducing Global Warming and its effects up to some extents. Check this out on CNET’s one of the best post. The sports car, the energy plants, Solar panels, Massachusetts’s clean energy area and many more.

Click the below Image for more........

In our post about Global Warming, we have covered about the Virtualization vendors of which HP has come up with Blade Server to virtualize your Data Centers. There was also news about Google’s step in energy area last month. They will be funding esolar for their innovative energy plants. Just wondering, how you can contribute to reduce Global Warming, now worry, just efficiently utilize your power. You kow better than me.... :)

Dell has got its First Every Tablet PC

2007-12-11T22:31:00.000+05:30

Dell has introduced its first Tablet PC today. This tablet pc is believed to have a touch screen facility. Dell is not new to the touch screen business. This facility was also equipped in the recently launched entertainment computer from dell named XPS. This tablet PC would be named as Dell Latitude XT. The tablet weighs 3.6 pounds making it the lightest tablet pc available. It runs on Intel core 2 solo or Duo processor, the 12.1 inch display, the integrated ATI Radeon graphics card, comes with 1GB RAM which is upgradable to 2 or 3GB. The hard disks supported are 40GB to 120GB RPM drives and also comes with support for 32 to 64GB Solid State Disk drives. The present operating system’s supported are the Tablet version of XP i.e.. Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005. Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate both 32 as well as 64 bit versions are supported. The Dell wireless support and the Dell Bluetooth support are the added advantages. Dell has also introduced two different broadband compatibilities which are in co-ordination with Sprint, Telus and Verizon Broadband services. The device also offers up to 9hrs of battery life.

There is also a news for Toshiba supporters, Toshiba has released the Portege M700, which is the 2nd tablet pc from this company. Toshiba has been selling tablet pc’s from over an year now. When we compare the features of both these tablet pc’s, the only difference lies is with the price. Toshiba offers its tablet pc for a basic configuration of $1,699 where as Dell’s price tag starts with $2,499 when it starts shipping at the end of this year. Infact, when we enter into more details, Toshiba offers a more faster laptop with the processor’s clock speed of 2.2GHz where as Dell’s is 1.2GHz, it has 4MB L2 cache when compared to the 2MB L2 cache in Dell’s device. However the processor used by Toshiba is not the standard Intel’s Core 2 or Duo one, it is T7500 rather.There are also speculations that other companies who has licenses for Touch screen technologies have registered a defending case against Dell. In future, Dell has also plans to introduce multi touch facility like the Microsoft’s Surface computer and Apple’s IPhone and the recent IPod.

HP’s Software Side

2007-12-01T00:04:00.001+05:30

Being in the hardware industry for quite some time now, HP (Hewlett packard) has also started improving its software side. Presently it has a software business of $ 42 billion which makes them the sixth largest software business holders in the world. This is really a great success for this second largest hardware manufacturer. Recent announcements from HP were the Data center Products and the IT task automation product.

The HP Automated Operation 1.0 is the set of products which was launched earlier this week. These products will be part of what HP calls as “Strategic Focus” group. These products will be aimed in streamlining the IT side of an organization and reducing the risk. Broadly speaking, they can be classified as IT Service Management, Business Service Management and Business Service Automation. Last year HP has purchased Mercury for $ 4.5 billion, mercury is a software maker under whose banner they have developed some very good hit products like Mercury Quick Test Professional and many more...

Earlier this year, HP has also announced their new strategy about the next generation Data center products. The Linux community will be closely working with HP in this area. They have a plan to Virtualizes the present Data centers with their powerful hardware and software. This would be the same concept which was covered earlier on Technical Herald. In July this year, HP had a very aggressive acquisition strategy. They acquired Opsware at an estimated cost of $ 1.6 billion. Opsware is the software maker, they have developed softwares for automating Data center administrative tasks. Another acquisition was of a thin client maker Neoware, this was based at $ 214 billion. Neoware also designs virtualization softwares to ease the desktop management in an organization. By reading this, you might got an idea as to how HP is growing and this simply implies us to think in other direction which is “The Hardware sales doesn’t matters for HP”. But still there are very dashing server products from HP like the Blade Server, which is basicly used to virtualize your data center with either VMware or other virtualization software products offered by HP under the above mentioned acquisition.

Remote Control Your Office PC when at Home

2007-11-18T18:18:00.000+05:30

Most of the organizations today use their own VPN solution allowing their employee to access their office pc from home. This is generally limited to very few and eligible associates, but what about them who are not eligible. For our friends who do no have idea of VPN, let me give a brief introduction about this VPN. VPN is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Network. This is the network established between two computers over internet cloud. You may get a question, what is the difference between other computers connected over internet. The difference is that VPN is highly secured network, it establishes a tunnel between two computers so that other computers will not be able to interfere between this communication. This is highly secured and encrypted as most of the company data will flow over this tunnel. Generally a client is installed on your laptop to access office PC. But the new VPN technology called SSL is totally browser based and runs with some Active X controls installed on your laptop.

The above was a brief introduction to what is VPN. But our discussion today is about other methods of accessing your PC. Infact, using this software you can access any PC over internet. These two services are GotoMypc and LogMeinrescue, GotomyPC is a client based where, you need to install a client on the PC which you want to take control, whereas LogMein is browser based and works like a SSL VPN. I came to know about this services a year back but didn’t find time to review it on Technical Herald. Now I got the time, so doing the same, Lets see how you can use these services.

GotoMyPC

This is a direct remote control, a client should be installed and configured with an Access code on your office pc. For remote controlling your office PC, you can directly login to the site and click on connect button beside the name which you have given to your office PC. Let’s see step by step procedure to use this tool.

I would recommend you to enter the credit card details, so that the account will be renewed after 30 days of trial period. But there is also another way to get the free trial without entering the credit card details.

If you close the browser without entering the credit card information, you will get a pop up advertisement as below:

Just click yes and you are in for installing the client. Installing the client will take a few minutes based on your connection speed.

While installing gotmypc client, you will be asked to enter the email address which you have used for logging onto the site. One more thing is Access Code which must be 8 characters in length.

All the above steps makes your office PC ready to be connected from home. Follow the below steps to remote control your office PC.

You will see the name of your office PC in your account. Click on connect and you are in within few mins of installing ActiveX controls on your home pc.

You can also place a shortcut icon on your desktop so that you don’t have to login to the account while connecting your pc next time. For this, click on File and select create shortcut to “officepc” where officepc is the nick name given to the pc which you want to remote control

This is how you can use Gotomypc service. Please check the Demo of this service here

Logmein

Another service is logmein, As I have mentioned above, this is just like SSL VPN solution. There is no need to install any client on the PC which you want to remotely login. This is generally used for commercial purpose by home based system administrators wherein, the technician can remotely login to customer’s desktop over internet to resolve the issue reported by customer. So you can find this useful only if you are working for such organization. However a trial version of this service can also be used for remote controlling your office PC. But only disadvantage is that, some one should be available near your office PC to accept the connection initiated by you. Lets see step by step procedure for using this serice.

First and foremost, is creating an account on the site Logmeinrescue

After creating a trial account, a technician console will be installed on the pc form which you want to initiate the connection.

This is just an Active X kind of control which will be installed on your desktop. However the connection is through the web browser over internet.

Technician console contains links for starting a new session. Click on this button will get one popup which contains the secure token to establish communication. You can communicate the token key to the person sitting on your office PC or you can also use the free email service to mail the secure link to that person

Clicking that link will bring your pc in your control, but not fully.

Now you need to click on start remote control button present on the technician console. This will generate a popup window on your office pc, to allow or cancel the connection. When allowed, you are in

Security Concerns

Let me warn you, this is not the most secure way to remote control your office pc, hence most of the organizations might have already blocked these services from entering their network. The only security concern is that, as this whole connection is over internet, there is a possibility that your pc either office or home may be hacked by a bad guy. However in large scale organizations, this is protected by firewall system, but as you know bad guys can do what we cannot imagine. Both the organizations, Logmein and Gotomypc claims that this is very secure and that they do not store any official data that goes on during the communication over internet.

Apple fixes its Firewall Vulnerabilities

2007-11-16T23:08:00.000+05:30

In my last post on Sunday I have updated about the vulnerable Firewall in Apple’s latest operating system Leopard. As always, Apple has released a fix for this vulnerability. Below are the details for some of the updates released by Apple this week.

One update was for Safari browser in tiger, Apple has released a update to get Safari to version 3.0 on earlier versions of its operating systems. Safari 3.0 is a default browser in Leopard. This is just like IE 7 update for windows xp which is a default browser in Vista. This update also fixes many vulnerabilities which could allow a bad guy over internet to execute malicious code on your machine. There are also updates released for earlier version Panther through a separate download link.

Firewall Fix
Yesterday there was also an update released for the firewall vulnerability in Apple’s latest OS Leopard. According to Apple, this update fixes the firewall vulnerability which was described in my Sunday’s post.

Apart from all the above updates, there was also an update for Safari which runs on windows platform. This is a fix for several cross-browser scripting vulnerabilities which exists in Safari, if used on Windows platform.

Read What Apple Has to Say

About the security content of the Mac OS X 10.5.1 Update (client and server)

About the security content of Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Security Update 2007-008

About the Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update

About the security content of Safari 3 Beta Update 3.0.4

Top 5 Best Practices for Exchange Server 2007

2007-11-15T20:51:00.000+05:30

If you are a system Administrator managing Exchange Server or interested to learn about this server, then this one is for you. Early this year when Microsoft released Exchange Server 2007, this was a boon for IT market. Infact this server is used even in non IT industry. Microsoft has put together many new services to make our office life easier and the project is still moving. They are also in process of integrating this service with the newly established era by Microsoft which is “Unified Communication”. For the readers who are not in this field, let me give an overview. Exchange Server is the name given to one of the server softwares by Microsoft which is used for e-mail communication by an organization. You see the mail ID’s like Virast.Khan@technicalherald.com that is because of a exchange server in which the email id (called as mailbox) is created which we can access to send and receive mails with the client software which is Microsoft Outlook and few others.

The best Practices of an Administrator managing Exchange Serve 2007 are as below:

Placing the exchange server in correct Network: As there will be many incoming and outgoing connections to this server, the network in which the server is placed really matter.

Use Security Configuration Wizard disable un-used connection ports as even a small security hole will be a major fallback.

Don’t Use Default certificates if you are using Microsoft’s firewall software ISA then you should know that there is no support for SNA (Subject Alternate name) in ISA 2004. To keep your support, you should upgrade to ISA 2006.

Disable HTTP connections if you have enabled web based access then make sure that encryption is on else snooping will be on.

Use client submission port. In Exchange 2007 you have different connectors for receiving and sending SMTP traffic.

Read indepth about each of the 5 above points at Microsoft Technet Center.

Android, the Future Phone’s OS.

2007-11-13T22:26:00.000+05:30

Google has entered the mobile market and this is not new to us. Google has been in news for all that they are trying to do to develop mobile market. Now it looks like the days are not very far away when we can see all the mobile phones running on Google’s software like presently all the desktops run on Microsoft’s windows softwares. With the announcement of GPhone (Gnome-e-Phone), Google has made us realize that they are not going to sit back in this market. Now Google has joined hands with some other firms to develop a open source software for mobiles, they want to develop a software which can run on any mobile phone. This Alliance is named as Open Handset Alliance. If this comes in, Google will definitely revolutionaries the mobile market as Microsoft did for PC market. Google has released the SDK for this OS Yesterday, which gave a push to the developers to start coding for this product which is due to start shipping in 2008

This open source software is presently termed as Android. This will be based on Linux operating system. Android was a small firm which was overtaken by Google in early 2005. Some of the major firms which have joined hands with Google in this race are HTC (High Tech Computers), Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobiles and the list is still growing. The work is on its peek and Google has declared to release this phone early next year. The Alliance is spending nearly $10 million to develop this software. There are also speculations that the present hardware used is 32 MB RAM, 32 MB Flash and 200 MHz of processor however the alliance is working to get this numbers down. Andy Rubin, the director for Mobile platform at Google said that there are about 34 companies in this Alliance and every one has contributed their own share for the development of this operating system. When asked about the IPhone, he said that it is a different business, he also appreciated Apple’s effort in building high quality consumer products. By this we can also think of Apple joining the race with Google. I don’t think so, because Apple has revolutionaries the mobile industry with its IPhone and Google with GPhone. They both can be great competitors but not partners. Read a review about this software at CNet

Get the latest from this development at Android

Leopard's Firewall is Vulnerable

2007-11-11T21:24:00.000+05:30

After releasing its latest operating system named Leopard, Apple is suffering from a very bad security vulnerability. This is about the type of firewall used in Leopard. There were reports that this firewall doesn’t blocks all the programs which are marked under block category. Infact, it doesn’t work even if it is set to block all incoming connections. If you are new to Apple’s range of operating systems, please do not get confused by these names. Tiger was the name of previous version of Mac OS X and Leopard is the one which was released last month ie. Oct 26th. Tiger was named as Mac OS X 10.4 and Leopard as Mac OS X10.5 and here we are talking about Leopard.

There are speculations that the firewall program automatically turns off while installing this operating system or while upgrading from the previous version. The major flaw is that, even if the user selects the option to block all incoming connections, an attacker can enter the computer easily just by injecting a small code via worm. This will lead to giving full control of your PC to the attacker. However if you have the extra security built into your router or you are using your Mac in an organization which has a hard core firewall solution, then you don’t have to worry at all.

Rich Mogull a security analyst’s research about the firewall revealed the following outcomes. According to him, Leopard firewall has 3 options, one to block all incoming connections, second to allow all incoming connections and final to allow users to select the application level blocking facility. Another facility allows user to enable stealth mode, in which the system will be on high security area wherein, the attacker cannot even see the machine when he/she scans the internet for a victim. But Mogull’s study revealed that none of these settings behave in their normal fashion. Even the high secure stealth mode works partially and if the user sets the application level settings, the applications starts behaving abnormally. Some of which are Skype service which gets killed automatically. Some games are not running as they do on other operating systems, Adobe creative suite users have also complained about the performance issue. The Photoshop issue which is not running properly or crashing at the time of launch. Some wireless network problems the bandwidth getting chocked while browsing.

So, don’t be in a confusion that your Leopard’s new sandboxing feature will protect your PC. I am sure Apple must be more worried than us, and very soon you will see a security patch to overcome this hurdle.

AMD’s High Performance Microprocessor

2007-11-09T19:15:00.000+05:30

This is not a new name as last year AMD has announced to introduce its new graphical card under the banner “FireStream”. But the GUI was released with some other name. And now its back again, the brand is in with all its Fireworks. After the success of its First 64 bit processor and ATI Radeon H 2600, AMD is in and this time with a FireStream.

AMD has unveiled its fastest microprocessor yesterday. This is AMD FireStream 9170, which can perform 500 billion floating-point operations per second. This kind of high performance operations were earlier used in GUI processors where it was a parallel performance of graphical chip on your computer. I believe after taking over ATI last year, AMD has reviewed its GUI processors to produce this brand new fastest processor. This is more advanced than the processor of that of ATI. FireStream 9170 comes with 2GB GDDR3 memory when compared with 512MB in ATI graphical processor and the power consumption is less than 150 Watts. It also comes with a PCI Express 2.0 interface.Apart from this, AMD has also released its Software Development Kit which will enable developers to write related drivers for this processor.

This processor is expected to be in market from early next year at an estimated cost of $1,999. However the company is looking forward for a formal demonstration next week in SC07 supercomputing show. So looking into this innovative idea of AMD, other chip makers has also started entering the era of using GUI processors in mainstream computing apart from gamming and supercomputing operations. The best thing which I liked about this processor is that, AMD has given provision to edit the code to get more out of this processor. This is definitely a big go go for developers who are familiar with High Level Language. AMD is also rolling out a programming language named Brook+ which is a set of C extensions based on Stream Computing.

So in future we could see more and more processors built on Stream computing technology.

The Upcomming releases from AMD are Sapphires board, a brand new mother board under AM2+ technology. AMD has also unveiled the AM3 technology.

Real Player Security Vulnerability

2007-10-21T16:15:00.000+05:30

In its recent study, Symantec stated that the present versions of the most popular media player “The Real Player” is vulnerable to attackers. According to them, the attackers can write a simple Active X code to modify the source of Intel’s CPU, as a result, taking total control of your machine. This code is injected into your computer when you visit a web site which contains malicious codes. This vulnerability was also noticed in the latest Beta version of Real player which is Real Player 11.

Soon after getting to know about this vulnerability, Real Networks released a latest patch to fix this. According to them, this new patch released on October 19th is set to fix this vulnerability with its Player. Real Networks also stated that, Real player 8 is not effected with this vulnerability and also there is a news that this vulnerability is only with Real Player running on Windows platform and not on Mac and linux operating systems. So go ahead and install this update from Real Networks Customer Support Site Read in detail about this news on Symantec's Security Blog.

The Microsoft Talk

2007-09-30T20:26:00.000+05:30

At last I found some time from my busy schedule this month to write a post on my blog. Now I came to know How busy is a work of System Administrator. When there is work it is loads of work and when there is no work it is Nil work. In this post, I featured some of the latest from Microsoft. As the name indicates, the Microsoft talk. So, Lets know about some of the new releases and latest happennings in Microsoft.

Office 2008 for Apple Macintosh Computers

Microsoft has announced the date of its much awaited release of Office suite for Macintosh users. Office 2008 for Mac will be launched in mid Jan for US users and will be released in other markets during the first quarter.

This will be available at an estimated cost of $500 to $150 which includes the basic edition for $400 and the students or home edition for $150. The users who are presently using office 2004 can upgrade to 2008 with some extras.

Vista SP1 released

Finally Microsoft has released the first service pack of its new operating system i.e.. Windows Vista. However this service pack is in its beta phase and released last Monday to some of the private users and testers. The service pack is set to be officially released in the first quarter of next year. There are many of bugs which have been fixed with this service pack. Read more about this news at Brandon LeBlanc’s blog

The XP Factor

Microsoft has further increased the date to end the selling of Windows XP operating system. XP has stood on its way back of becoming the most successful operating system which Microsoft has ever manufactured after 98. Earlier in August, Microsoft announced a 2C release of its operating system XP. Nothing is new in this release except the new product key so that the company can keep selling the OS to its business partners till early 2009. A final decision will be taken in 2009 on the future of XP. There are no plans by Microsoft in near future to end this 6 year old operating system.

IPhone Price cut

2007-09-08T14:59:00.000+05:30

As the holiday shopping season coming in, Apple has cut the price of its most hyped gadget of the year IPhone, which was launched 2 months back.

Is it Price Cut???

Yes, you read it right!!!!!

Now you will get an 8GB IPhone at $399 instead of $599. But this is was not all, Apple had to face the heat of this price cut from the early buyers of its most hyped IPhone. Soon after this news was announced, Apple’s shares went down by 5 percent, but slowly bounced up by the end of the day.

Jobs’ Say on Price Cut

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at his company’s website that Apple disappointed some of its customers by cutting the price of IPhone 8GB model. He apologized to all his customers and announced to offered a credit of $100 to all those loyal customers. Many customers took IPhone price cut as an opportunity and rushed to their local stores. However Ryan Roth who bought IPhone at $599 on Friday chalked up his purchase,“the worst timing ever”. He has been waiting to purchase a cell phone from last four years and after researching, he purchased IPhone, but he get some relief when Apple’s spokeswoman Natalie Kerris announced that the customers who has purchased IPhone within last 14days and have a receipt can get a full refund under Apple’s return policy. Provided they haven’t opened the product, if they have opened it, then also they would get the refund but with some price difference.

Latest from Apple

The 4GB model has been discontinued, Apple also launched a bunch of IPods last Wednesday which includes a 16GB IPod at an estimated cost of $399 using which, user will be able to connect to web wirelessly and purchase songs on the go at Starbucks from early October starting with NY city. As per this partnership, the coffee chain’s icon will light up on the touch whenever a user is near a shop that has Wi-Fi access. The new IPod also incorporates a touch screen which IPhone presently has, it also has an added advantage of downloading songs from ITunes and Wi-Fi stores. Apple also announced that they are on track of selling 1 million IPhone in United States by the end of September.
Rumors

There are speculations in consumer electronics market that this price cut is probably due to a newer versions of Apple’s IPhone to be launched later this year. The new IPhone would have all the fixes to the bugs which exist in the present model. It would come with a removable battery, as it is difficult to remove the battery in the present model. It would also have an improved screen. Seeing this, Microsoft cut the price of its Zune digital music player by $50 to $199. However this was not officially announced by Microsoft, as it was written on Zune insider blog run by one of its employee’s. The software giant met its target of selling more than 1 million units before the end of June.

With Apple II in 1970 and after reinventing the personal computer in 1980 named Macintosh. Apple is a leader in consumer electronics market. The innovative products such as IPod, now the mobile product such as IPhone, the award winning computers, OS X operating systems and other professional applications has already proved Apple’s ability in today’s competing market. Apple has managed to sell more than 110 million IPods since they debuted in 2001.

Mega Outage for Skype

2007-08-18T15:28:00.000+05:30

Skype, the most popular internet telephony and instant messaging service had to face outage in its service. This became a massive outage as Skype currently has 220 million registered users. As this is a free service, the count is massive. But for some small business organizations, Skype was the lifeline to communicate. These customers had to face a huge loss due to this outage.

The Skype network went down on Thursday 16th Aug. It was down the whole day on 16th then on Friday midnight (GMT) officials provided an update that the problem of logging into Skype is resolved. But still there were many things to do, the Chat engine was not working and also the problem was not fully resolved.

Meanwhile, there were rumours that Skype system was crashed or it has been hacked. There were also rumours that Skype outage was due to the recent update in its software. But both E-Bay and Skype declared this news as un-official and false. Skype, which was founded by Niklas and Janus was taken over by E-Bay in October 2005 for $2.1 Billion. It used peer to peer technology to communicate over Internet Protocol. The client is supported on almost every operating system available today. The best thing is that, it offers calling over VOIP for free. This is the major reason for its popularity. There was also a record that Skype had more than 9 million users at one point of time.

Check Skype HeartBeat for the full story.

Microsoft to increase the storage limit of Windows Live Hotmail

2007-08-16T21:02:00.000+05:30

Very soon, Microsoft will increase the storage limit of its recently upgraded Windows live hotmail from present 2GB to 5GB. This was declared in public earlier this week by Ellie on his website. By this storage upgrade, Microsoft will lead the race with Google which is offering 2.8GB of storage space. Early this week, Google has also announced paid storage of about $20 for an additional 6GB. However the paid storage service of Microsoft remains same at $15 for additional 10GB. It looks like Microsoft has surpassed Google in the race of online free storage space, both in terms of capacity and cost. Google is on its way of increasing its storage space every day, whereas Yahoo users are enjoying its un-limited free storage which Yahoo has upgraded in March this year. The storage will be rolled out to all the hotmail customers over the next few weeks. Apart from the storage up gradation, Microsoft is also concentrating on the speed issue. Speed matters for the entire web based e-mail access solutions, as you all know that we-mail will be slower when compared to the mails which we access in our office.

Also, the new Windows live Skydrive was made public as a beta preview earlier this month, with a free storage capacity of 500MB. Users can store documents as well as image files in this drive. This works same like the Gmail drive offered by Google, users can just drag and drop files in another drive displayed in windows explorer. Microsoft describes this drive as the personal hard drive on internet.

Read the complete review of the upcoming updates for live hotmail on Ellie’s Web site. Ellie Powers-Boyle is a Program manager at Microsoft for windows live hotmail project. See the complete report here

I think now it is Google's turn to show off their smartness. This is a never ending race between the two competitors.

Google Is Entering WiMax

2007-08-01T09:09:00.000+05:30

Very soon US users will be going WiMax with Sprint, the 3rd largest service provider there and they have chosen Google to provide the search, email and instant messenger services to its subscribers. To access these Google’s services, Sprit will be hosting the portal through which the users will be able to access their favorite Google service. Sprint will initiate testing this service in Washington DC, Chicago areas by the end of 2007. WiMax is expected to be ready by mid 2008 and users will be able to use it through the embedded devices specially designed for this purpose. Subscribers of this service will be able to access WiMax on their laptops, desktops and even their PDA’s or cell phones.

There is also news that Sprint is building this network along with another provider named Clearwire. Both these service providers will be building their respective network and will be enabling roaming between their frequencies. But like every time, Sprint will be the major player in this role. It will be making this service available to 185 million people where as Clearwire is expected to be some where nearly 115 million people.

Last month, Google has also declared that it will be bidding the Auction by FCC and if all the rules by FCC are in favor of Google, it is ready to bid a big amount up to $4.6 Billion. If it is so, that no one can stop Google from expanding it services in an un-imaginable way. FCC will auction its 700MHz spectrum to different service providers. Google is interested in open access demands, as they like to spread their services. I think, Google is the only company which is thinking to serve people free of cost. If this auction is won by service providers like AT&T or Telco, they will be selling this to us as a customers to use our cell phones. Imagine, if this auction is won by Google, we can soon imagine internet access at $2 a month with un-limited access and that too without any ads.

I am really looking ahead to see Google as the winner.

Attention IPhone Owners

2007-07-26T18:03:00.000+05:30

Your Iphone can be hacked very easily.

Surprised!!!

Not to be, as this is the first time in the history of Apple that its device can be hacked. Yes it is true. The IPhone which you have owned can be hacked when a malicious code is injected into it when you browse a web site.

Though Apple decided to provide third party applications to run as a widget, it is easy for the bad guy to take total control of your phone.

Charlie Miller, Principle security analyst at Independent Security Evaluators says that IPhone and other Apple products can be hacked very easily. The hijacked IPhone can be used to send Span messages. There is also report that the operating system of this device can also be crashed. ISE and its team recommend all the Iphone users, to visit sites which they trust.

This flaw applies to the Safari browser which comes as a default browser for IPhone as well as Macintosh based Apple computers.

But one good thing in Apple devices is that , they are designed in such a way that they can autaomatically update themselves when ever a patch is released by Apple. I think Apple would be working on this and would soon release some path to over come this vulnerability. Next month, there is a conference by ISE team on internet, I am sure, that Apple will come up with a solution to overcome this hurdle.

Using Electronic devices in rain could be very hazardous

2007-07-14T19:53:00.000+05:30

Be careful if you are using gadgets while it’s raining, these small gadgets in your pockets could be like a time bomb for you. There were many incidents of gadget users shaken up by thunder lightening. This news was also sited in most of the local news papers here, which says. “Listen to an iPod during a storm and you may get more than electrifying tunes.” Even after such advancements in technology, the masters couldn’t win over this natural hazard. Electronic devices attract lightning in the same way as the tall trees do. There were many incidents reported from past a year or so in which gadget users are getting affected by this natural effect.

A Canadian jogger suffered wishbone-shaped chest and neck burns when lightening current traveled through his music player’s wires. Sources also reported that this incident has decreased about 50% of his listening capacity. Surprised!!! No not to be, this guy was standing under a tree while it was raining and for passing on his time, he was listening to devotional music on his portable music player with an ear phone hooked in. He would not have imagined that this would cost him a lot. Even though the wires were out of his shirt, he suffered this injury. Other guy who was mowing the grass at his home had burns due to his earphone wires on the sides of his face, his hips got nasty burns as the music player was in his pocket. In an other incident, a 39 year old jogger got second degree burns while listening to music on the way back to his house from jogging. This un-fortunate incident dislocated tiny ear bones that transmit sound waves. He is still suffering as even one year down the line he is still wearing safety equipments. There was also an incident where in a man got struck by lightning when the current ran through his pager.

So, next time when you are out under open sky, be careful with your small iPod, iPhone, cell phone or other electronic gadgets. Try to avoid taking shelter under a tree when it is raining, opt for hardcore shelter instead. To be on safe side, do not talk on mobiles and listen to music while it is lightening or when there is a bad whether. If you are planning for an outing, better seek Meteorological department or explore different whether forecasts in news or on net.

Prevention is Better Than Cure

Safety measures by struckbylightning

Weather Decision Technologies

New Sony Playstation Portable

2007-07-13T17:22:00.000+05:30

Playstation Portable, the development of which was announced at E3 2003 and the release was announced at E3 2004, is a portable gaming player, a music player, an internet ready device and a UMD (Universal Media Disk) based multimedia player.

Last month, Sony was in news as it released its firmware upgrade for its Playstation Portable which can give upto 25% boost in its clock speed. There was a rumours by an unnamed source that the previous firmware version was hacked by game developers and they could allow their games to run on full CPU speed. There were speculations that the high impact games were running at 266MHz where as the full potential clock speed is 333MHz. Soon after the firmware news, it is now turn to introduce a more advanced and upgraded PSP. This includes a brighter screen, a slimmer profile and increased battery life.

The rumours of this re-designed PSP was prevailing from almost a year now. The new PSP looks almost same like the old one, but it has some enhancemnts in it. Revealed at E3 meadia & Business sumit yesterday, this new re-designed PSP would be 33% lighter which is 189g when compared to the present 280g and 19% slimmer which is 1.8cm than its predessor which is 2.2cm. This portable playstation comes with a port to connect the console to your television or to a big screen, it has 4.3 inch wide inbuilt LCD screen.. You can now charge your PSP by connecting to a PS3 or a PC via a USB cable even while the data transfer is taking place. There is also rumours of the memory capacity of this slim PSP. It is said to be 64 MB when compared to the present 32 MB.

This new device is all set to hit Europe, Japane and US gaming markets from early September this year at an estimated cost of $170 US. The new PSP comes in three colors of "Piano Black", "Ceramic white" and "Ice Silver". There is also a package in which PSP ships with Star Wars with an estimated cost of $ 199.9 US. Sony claims that it has shipped more than 25 million PSP units since its launch in 2004.

Read more about this news

Official PSP Website

Hands-on with the new PSP

Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008

2007-07-01T21:02:00.000+05:30

Last week, Microsoft released an enhancement in its Student’s suit with Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008. To help students with information, Microsoft came up with a suite called Microsoft Students. Microsoft Student is a member of Microsoft Encarta product family which includes other products like office, literature resources to help students with their home work. This is a software suite by Microsoft which includes the encyclopedia called Microsoft Encarta. Visit Microsoft Students for more details

Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008 is scheduled to be available in public this month. The estimated price of this suite will be $50 (US). Moving further, Microsoft is planning to release the enterprise version of this suite to make it available for Academies and Universities. This product features a collection of homework tools which is designed to help students complete their assignments in math, sciences, social and other subjects which are taught in schools and universities.

Features of Microsoft Student Suite

The new feature which will be available from this month is Microsoft Encarta Premium 2008 which in an updated encyclopedia version of Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007.

Microsoft Math 2.0 will be upgraded to 3.0 which includes solutions of typical math problems in different areas of interests like Geometry, algebra, trigonometry etc.. This upgrade was released in early May.

The foreign language tutor helps students to find meanings of words with its full-featured dictionary.

There are lot of upgrades with the graphical interface of this suite.

Apart from all those applications, this suite will contain office suite embedded into student oriented applications.

One thing which is common in every Microsoft upgrade is its graphical enhancements as a result, increasing the minimum hardware requirements.

Industry after IPhone

2007-06-30T18:54:00.000+05:30

Grand opening of Apple’s store at 6th Avenue at 6:00pm local time. After officially being released yesterday, IPhone has gone through lot of talks. The latest developments were the upgraded release of ITunes to tune in your IPhone. Apple also released the accessories for its IPhone. These accessories include the Bluetooth enabled head phone. Many people were waiting for the doors to open and it did at exactly 6pm local time in US. For those gadget lovers who were outside US, the internet market was flooded with inflated rates of IPhone. There are sources that the rates were touching $1000.

The enthusiasts of this gadget were eagerly waiting for the time when the doors of Apple store will be open. After purchasing the device they came out of the stores jumping and showing the device to all the reporters waiting outside the stores. The below picture which is a courtesy of Reuters shows a gadget lover moving out of the stores and all the Apple employees cheering for him.

IPhone in India

Times of India reported that we could see IPhone in India and the companies who will be sponsoring this gadget are HCL and Wipro. But there were no developments after that. There is also sources in which Times reports that 1 to 3 million handsets are to be brought home. The major advantage we would get by using IPhone in India is that we can make of the very fast 3G network technology rather than a slower EDGE network which is being offered by AT & T for US based customers. But that can be done only if we unlock the phone. This may take some time, and if companies like HCL and Wipro has taken initiatives, there is a possibility that this is true. But till now there are no developments in this side.

A Solution by Microsoft

PC World reports that a latest update released by Microsoft for its Exchange Server 2007, will make IPhone compatible with its service. Now it is possible for an IPhone user to check the company mails if the company is using Exchange Server 2007. This is the 3rd update released by Microsoft for Exchange 2007. Microsoft claims that the update will be available on its update site. This was not truly for IPhone users but as a traditional patch to resolve the bug in IMAP communication, which luckily resolved the compatibility issue with IPhone.

IPhone Logo

After the release, Apple is all busy with its logo strategy. This will help customers recognize any third party which is certified with Apple to provide services for its IPhone. Till now it is not clear as to how would it look.

Questions about IPhone

Where can I buy an IPhone?

Check retail store availability

Online support

Workshops

IPhone guide

Accessories for your IPhone

Accessories for Apple’s IPhone and IPod by Apple

There are other accessories from Amazon too.

New Real Player is available Today

2007-06-26T12:59:00.000+05:30

In my post about the New Real Player, I featured this product and just now I got the information from Real Networks that Beta is ready to be download.

Presently it is available in two modes.

1) Full Featured Player
2) Basic Player

Full Featured Player

With access to movie library you can watch more than 300 thriller movies online. The key features includes, support for all major formats including MP3, MPEG , sony memory stick and more, 1 click download and record of video from its website, complete audio and video control. It also allows you to burn your videos onto CD’s or DVD’s. Moreover, this time you do not have to go through the ads which keeps on bugging you.

This is available as a 14 days trial version. The price of it will be $4.95/months. But to download the trial version you have to fill up an online form with your credit card details.

Real Networks claims this to be a secure payment option. Presently it has only 3 credit card vendors Visa, Master and American Express. More vendors are expected to join based on the popularity of this download.

Basic Player

This player is limited, it also has the facility of 1 click download and record of videos from its website, supports all the major formats including MP3, MPEG , sony memory stick and more..

Download this player Now…

HP Photosmart R937

2007-06-24T15:19:00.000+05:30

Recently HP launched its new range of cameras by name Photosmart in which R937 is in news from quite some time now, as it has a 3.6 inch touch screen. HP claims this touch screen to be the largest screen on a digital camera. It has some of the most wanted features of 21st century photography, which includes panorama stitching, allows you to take photos in dark, anti-shake technology, negates the shaking effect form your photos, red eye removal, the red color spots in eyes of your photo can be removed and other options to crop and edit your photos. Though these features are not new to us, but this is the first of its kind that these features are inbuilt in a camera.

R937 is an 8 megapixel camera with 3X optical and 8X digital zoom. It allows you to prepare pictures for printing directly on the camera by making necessary customizations, without the need of plugging the camera to your PC. These pictures can directly be printed by HP printer or any others. The virtual keyboard on the touch screen allows you to store e-mail addresses to share the photos and tag the photos using the vista compatible tagging. These tags are also recognized by Apple IPod. This is such a slim camera (1.06 inches) that you can easily put it in your pocket. It has a li-Ion cadmium battery which is rechargeable

This camera will be available in North America from August this year at $299.99 (about ₤150).

The embedded operating systems is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista, 2000, XP Home, and XP X64 and X86 based windows operating systems. It is also compatible with MAC OS X operating system.

The 3.6 inch touch screen is an auto bright screen. It automatically adjusts the brightness with respect to the day light. You can also order prints online, using Photosmart express. It has a long lasting battery and a 32 MB of internal memory.

Check How to use this Camera

HP has also announced six other Photosmart cameras, which will range from $80 to $230, 5 to 8 megapixel and using 3X optical zoom. All these cameras are likely to be released in August this year.

The Photos here are courtesy of Infosync

IPhone, All Set to Be Crowned on 29th June

2007-06-23T20:16:00.000+05:30

June is the year of Gadgets, after Microsoft's Surface computer its Apple's IPhone. In my post about Wi-Fi on IPod, I have mentioned about IPhone. But there are lot of developments in Apple’s IPhone since its launch. When Apple launched its IPhone, there were many concerns raised by its competitors about the battery life, applications and offcourse the talktime. In considerations to all these concerns, Steve Jobs has refreshed the product with some enhancements.

These developments are about the talk time, IPhone users can have a talk time of about 8 hours and the battery life is a dashing 10 days in standby mode. The company has also upgraded its plastic body to optical-quality glass as a result making it a scratch free product. Apple also claims that IPhone has a video playback time of 7 hours, 6 hours of internet surfing. But when compared to blackberry Curve which has 16 hours of talk time IPhone has to improve a lot.

Apple is more concerned about the third party applications to run on its products. Developers can develop applications supporting Ajax and web 2.0 standards. But these applications will run as a widget on the device. Though they would have some advantages of the resources of this phone like Google maps and address books, but they would be truly running in safari.

But never to forget the multiple touch era has begin. IPhone will be supporting multiple touch screen. The IPhone is a combination of an IPod, a cell phone, a video player, a camera and it is also internet ready. It comes with the most important application, which is Google maps. You can have full access to Google maps. This phone doesn’t have any keypad unlike the traditional mobile phone. Rather it has a 3.5 inches touch keypad which makes this feature as a unique one. With multi touch screen, you can browse through the applications and albums stored on your phone with your figure rolling on the screen. The 2 mega pixel camera can take pictures, and record videos. The IPhone also give you the feature to upload the files. See the technical specifications below:

Specifications

IPhone is a 135 gms device which has a 3.5 inches multi touch screen with a resolution of 320 by 480 pixels (160 ppi). It has an inbuilt 2 megapixels camera, Wi-Fi, EDGE and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR technology. It makes use of Quad band for communication and works on MAC OS X operating system. The ARM core process which is being used in IPhone is manufactured by Samsung but not Intel. But even Intel can be benefited with this product, as the memory which is being used is a Flash based. There is a stiff shortage of NAND flash memory chips, so that’s good news for these companies as well. Samsung, in joint venture with Intel, Micron Technology, IM Flash technology, Hynix Semiconductors and Toshiba can together supply these demanding chips to Apple. This would also boost the Flash market which has gone down. According to Taiwan based Digi Times sited on SeekingAlpha, Apple is asking for 400 to 500 million 4Gbit NAND flash memory chips for this device.

You can get more specific details about the conditions under which the testing was done on Apple

Questions about IPhone

Whether the 8hours of talk time sufficient or the IPhone users would end up with the battery in the middle of the day.

Whether applications like Youtube will be fully functional.

All these questions would be answered only after we use this product. So wait for 29th June.

Price Cut

I am sure you must be eagerly waiting for IPhone to be released on 29thJune. But sources also claim that Apple is likely to bring down the prices of its IPhone. According to the isuppli’s estimates sited on Consumeraffairs, Apple will be bringing the prices of this product drastically down to buzzzzz the mobile market. It is half the price that Apple is getting as a profit on every IPhone.

Important Facts

According to informationweekthe U.S. ban on importing Qualcomm chips could benefit Apple, as the companies which are affected with this ban are market competitors of Apple’s IPhone. This ban was a competition between Broadcomm and Qualcomm. Most of the world’s largest phone suppliers have no choice rather than supporting the protest by Qualcomm to release this ban. Qualcomm has also requested Bush to impose veto to release this Ban. Read more about this story at AppleInsider

With Microsoft’s Surface Computer, the multiple touch technology is boomed. The IPhone will impact the multiple touch screen industry. The overall market for similar technology is growing at a very greater extent. Read more about this at informationweek. This is just the beginning of multiple touch technology. According to an article sited on Sun-Sentinel.com, this new user interface will be like a tsunami, hitting the entire spectrum of devices”. But we cannot pressure who will be licensing this technology, as both the major players have developed their own products supporting this technology.

My 85 year old uncle probably will never buy an IPhone, and I hope we’ll get him to own a Zune. These were the words of Microsoft CEO Ballmer, as sited on everythingIphone

All door are opened, even FCC has given green signal to this product. As per the contract with AT & T for 2 years, Apple will be selling this product from 29th June at $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8 GB. We are waiting for 29th June.

See an Ad by Apple Below

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Download Micromedia Shockwave Player

Unified Communication

2007-06-09T00:48:00.000+05:30

Unified Communication, the name as given by Microsoft. This is a new Type of communication technique in which there is no use of any Hardware device like PBX to communicate. Microsoft is slowly entering into all the markets by which ever means possible. The hardware market, with its different products including the recent launch of surface computer. After launching its Response Point (as it is code named) and Live Communication Server. Microsoft is all set to enter the voice market. Infact, it is doing so from past few years. Even the upcomming release, The Office Communication Server 2007 is also a big hit, which can be integrated with the present products of Microsoft used in every office. The most advance feature of office communication server is that it can successfully be managed on an existing Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory infrastructure environment.

Last year Microsoft, very cleverly partnered with major PBX service providers like AVAYA, Nortel, Cisco to test its PBX services embedded in communication server 2007. But today this product is competing with those vendors. The main aim of Microsoft is to deploy only soft phones for all the employees in a company. There is no use of a hard phone now and so the huge PBX box vanishes from our server rooms. With the PBX, came the programming and creation of extensions. With the launch of Communication server, this has been nullified. Now an IT administrator can create the extensions with a singly click.

The days have gone when it took hours to create extensions for all the employees in your company, with unified communication, this can be done in a single click. Just follow the screen shots and to your surprise, all the extensions will be created.

Technology

Microsoft is trying to deliver voice based solutions using its product, Office Communication Server 2007 (which is still in Beta) to be released some time this month. Office Communication Server makes use of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) which we have discussed in our post about IP Telephony. But as you say old is gold, the old technology will still be there. There is some more journey to be covered by this technology to wipe out those PBX boxes from our server rooms. Just imagine the power consumption of those huge boxes, and how dramatically it will be reduced when they are transformed into a single server.

Reducing the Overhead

IT can manage the system with all the familiar system administration tools. Certainly, automating the extension creation process will reduce the overhead from IT. Moreover, all the extensions can be centrally managed. Office communication server 2007 can work in synchronization with Exchange Server 2007 and the Active Directory where all the details of the user’s phone number is stored along side his e-mail address. It also reduced overhead from users, they just have to click on the person’s name in outlook whom they would like to call. You can also vew which of your buddy is working to call him. It offers all the features of a normal phone like call forwarding, voicemail etc.. The upcoming product, Live Meeting 2007 can also be integrated with OCS.

There will be a time when the whole world will switch from PSTN to IP based communication. Then you will not find any huge PBX box in your server room. On that day there will not be any use of hard phones at your desk. This place will be taken over by more decoratives.

Download Live Communication Server

Latest from Microsoft

SP 1 for Exchange Server 2007 to be shipped later this year. Presently in beta testing phase. This upgrade will enhance the web experience of viewing mails. There are few fixes as well..

Four Critical updates by Microsoft to be released next Tuesday to fix the flaws in IE Outlook Express, Wedmail.

Latest FromTech Ed 2007

Microsoft Orcas & Katmai names given to upcomming products Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Microsoft Surface Computer

2007-06-04T20:52:00.001+05:30

Last Wednesday, Microsoft surprised us, by officially launching its Surface Computer.

Yes its true……..

It was un-believable at first sight, when I saw the screen getting dissolved with a human touch. Being in news for more than a year now, Microsoft Surface Computer (the name as given by Microsoft) as gained lot of prominence. Just Imagine, ordering a coffee with your fingers in a restaurant.

It is just a touch screen, which is re-designed as a magical screen by Microsoft. You don’t need a keyboard to type and no mouse for pointing. The surface computer acknowledges your gestures, you can slide icons on screen. The devices which it is made up of are (Scanner, touch screen, modem and series of infra-red cameras…) touch screen senses the electronic object placed on the screen, scanner reads the bar code on the objects and modem communicates with any wifi enabled device. For example, if you place your wi fi enabled camera on it, you will get all the photos displayed on the screen without having to do any thing. More over, you can re-size your photos just by squeezing it on the screen, if you want to move this photos onto some other device, you can just place that device on the screen and slide the photos to that device. This computer works with the special version of Windows Vista.

According to Microsoft, Surface computer recognizes multiple gestures at a time. You can place your camera and your friend's camera on the screen. Surface computer recognizes these devices with its scanners and electronic modem and displays all the features beside those devices. Moreover, you can even download features from one device to other just by sliding your fingers on the screen.

Presently Surface is a 30” screen, looks like a 30” screen placed on a table. Microsoft is selling Surface computer in between $5,000 and $10,000, but prices are expected to go down with smart technologies and for home usage and very soon we will be saying buy buy to our traditional laptops.

Availability

You can find Surface computer at few of the Microsoft partners like T-mobiles USA, Harrah’s Entertainment inc, Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide inc, Sheraton Hotels, International Game Technology

Read more

Microsoft's Official Surface Computer Site

Watch the amazing video below

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Download Micromedia Shockwave Player

Google Has Acquired FeedBurner

2007-06-02T15:03:00.000+05:30

Not sure whether you have noticed a small change on Feedburner.com about this merge. Yes this is true; I have mentioned in my post earlier that, Google FeedBurner merge is in rumors. This rumor has turn out to be true. You can read all the advantages that Google will be getting with this merge in my post here

I am very happy with this deal, infact evrybody is happy with this deal. Very soon, Google will be integrating FeedBurner with Google Analytics or with Google Adsense. Now we can get all my subscribers at one place. Overall we get following services in one place.

Mails, Spreadsheets, photos, groups etc...

Adsense account and its reports

Analytics reports

The above features already exist. One new and most welcomed feature will be My subscribers count and hits being added to my Google bucket.

Isn’t it a very cool feature? Now you can stick to one resource for Blogging, for Mailing, and for promoting your Blog or site and that resource is Google.

But see the clever fox behind the door, FeedBurner was started in 2003, within last 4 years it has grown only $10M. A 10 Million Dollar company being sold at 10 times its price is like a dream come true for FeedBurner.

Wow.....

This is because FeedBurner has all the inventory of the websites and its subscribers in its database. Looking onto this it will be easier for Google to integrate this service with its existing tools like Analytics or Adsense with some minor modifications. This was the best option instead of starting the all new service name Adsense RSS Burner. No doubt, this deal is not a loss for Google.

This deal brings happiness not only for us (Bloggers) but also for advertisers. If you have read my post about this deal, there I have mentioned about the disadvantage which these advertisers were facing with FeedBurner as FeedBurner will not display any advertisement in whichever reader the visitor is reading your post. Now Google will remove this feature as it will bring lots of bucks in its pocket.

There are lots of developments to come in Google…….

There we go, Aaron Brazell has posted a letter of this Deal, check it out below

Open Letter to Google, FeedBurner

RealPlayer 11 In News

2007-06-01T11:19:00.000+05:30

The newly launched RealPlayer Blog reports that RealNetworks have launched their new RealPlayer which can download videos in a single click from Youtube, Google, Yahoo, AOL et… The Beta version of this player will be available in public from this month (dates not specified).

According to RealNetworks, this player has the facility to integrate with video hosting websites like Youtube etc.. Users can download the videos in different formats including Flash, Windows Media, Quick time and offcourse Real. You can also burn CD’s, however, to burn the DVD’s you have to get the full version ($30) for offline viewing.

Legality

The company says, they respect the copyright policies. This Player will download the contents if it not protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management). Else it will not download the video. Isn’t it a very legal feature. But I think, unless some legal copyright policies are enforced on websites which offer free contents to its viewer like Youtube, this Player is not used to its extent. Till that time viewers will continue to download free contents on Youtube, which includes movies, music videos and TV shows which is not legal.

RealPlayer is the most downloaded player available on internet, used to view videos or listen to audio for innumerable sites. Real Networks says, about 1.5 Million copies of RealPlayer are downloaded daily. The good feature about this new Player is that, you don’t have to open the player to download the videos and even the website from which you want to download contents do not have to do any thing. All the homework is done by this player which will add a pop up button to the window on the browser (generally on the contents being viewed in Flash or any other player) asking you to download. Also, if the file is protected by DRM, then it will display “This video cannot be downloaded”. You will get the reason if you click on that button.

Future Developments

Real Networks is also planning to develop the upgraded version of this player which can upload the contents on web and can even transfer online contents to their Ipods or any personal media device.

Apple Ipod May Go Wi-Fi This Year

2007-05-30T07:38:00.000+05:30

A product which has been rumored for almost a year now.

Earlier this year, Apple, one of the leading manufacturers of ipods and other hardware products announced its new range of ipods, i.e… a Wi-Fi enabled ipod. And here we go, after selling its 100 millionth ipod last month there is a good news from Apple. Apple’s rumorist Digi Times (as pointed out by engadget ) announces the new range of ipods from Apple. But mind you, Digi Times is a site which spreads the news of latest products form Apple which fail to develop. Now it reports that Apple ipods may go Wifi this year. This was in news from quite some time now. Digi Times is the primary manufacturer of most of the Apple’s products. They report that Foxconn will manufacture this finished ipod from Apple which will have Wi-Fi enabled.

But till now, there is no news about the specification of our favourite device with such a nice facility. We would not be able to guess whether the Wi-Fi ipod will be a touch screen or a PDA like device. But imagine, if your ipod is Wi Fi enabled, then you can download music on the go. But I think that if at tall a product like this is developed, it should have a stable battery, not the traditional batteries used in present ipods. There is also a concern about the keypad. Generally Wi Fi networks are authorized zones, to enter into which, you have to enter the key codes and typing it using a small keypad of present ipod is very difficult. Looking into all these concerns, Apple must be bringing some changes in its present models of ipod.

No body knows, What’s going on inside Apple. Also if we look at other launches from Apple this year, the major launch is its iphone to be released in june this year, which has Wi-Fi support.

Microsoft was the first player in the market to enable Wi Fi on a portable device like ipod, that was not an ipod but a music player rather. Seeing this there are couple of other players like Sandisk already showcasing it’s Wi Fi enabled devices while Samsung and Sony are preparing to enter the booming market.

Apple was in news this year with most of the new happening with its launches and products. Also the first virus to infect an ipod was developed by some bad guys. Seeing this Apple has released security updates (offcourse it is not a new service)

Related Posts

Play Whatever you like to

Security updates for your Apple product

Apple ipod MP3 Player

The Apple Store (U.S)

Good Practices to Shoo... Spammers

2007-05-27T20:50:00.001+05:30

Now a days, every communication is on internet which is very vulnerable but a fastest means of communication. There is a possibility that some un-unknown sender will send a junk mail to you. A junk mail is called spam, it can be an un-wanted SMS in your mobile or a comment on your blog, mail in your inbox. Did you got a mail from a person, whom you do not know and did not met with. This is spamming, read the History of spam.

Any thing which is un-knowing or which you do not want is a spam. This could be a mail, a comment on your website etc. Spam can be from a individual sender or an organization.

Organizations ???

Yes there are some organizations which send spams to the e-mails addresses harvested by spammers. Offcourse that is not spamming for organizations rather seen as a means of advertising, but that is a spam for us.

Why do people do Spamming

There is nothing specific about this, but sources say that spamming is a hobby for some spammers and it is also a source for promotion of a product or a company. Like creating a virus and infecting a pc is a Fun for some of its creators, in the same way, spamming is fun for some.

Volume of Spam on Internet

According to Microsoft present CEO, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them being spam. At the same time, Jef Poskenzer, owner of the website acme.com was receiving over one million spam emails per day. According to Sophos developer of e-mail, and network security products such as anti-spam, anti-spyware, anti-virus, last year US topped the rank of most spam receiving state. When we compare the statistics based on the continents, it was Asia with 40 percent.

Spamming is illegal in some countries and legal (with some guidelines) in some. Infact, in Australia, there is a penalty of 2000 USD for individual spammer or 900,000 USD for corporate spammers.

SPAMHAUS hosts the updated list of all the top spammers across the world.

How Do Spammers Get your E-mail Address ?

As we have read above, there are different types of spammers, some do this for fun, some to take revenge etc... Some spammers will be professionals like virus developers. These spammers will create a script or program to find your e-mail address. These programs are called spambots or spam spiders which will crawl through your site to find any @ symbol or any .com like word. If they find such things on your site, will store it to harvest the e-mail address to be spammed. There are other ways in which your e-mail address can be spoofed like hackers spoof your IP address.

How Do I Stop Spamm

We cannot stop spam but we can protect our e-mail address from being spammed. But remember, once you are on the database of spammers then it is very difficult to get out. There are steps in which you can work even if your e-mail address is spammed. Thanks to some of the free services on web which I will be mentioning below

There are many anti-spam softwares, most of them free downloads are available for download on net. Detecting spam based on the content of the e-mail, either by detecting keywords such as “Viagra”, “Cialis” or by statistical means is very popular. If your anti-spam engine is tuned with these type of keywords then you have stopped 10 percent of spamming. But if the word is say (specialist) then this can be mistaken with "Cialis" by some anti-spam engines. That means, if your friend send a joke mail to you mentioning a word “Viagra” in it, them that mail will be treated as a spam by these anti-spam softwares.

Tools to Protect from Being Spammed

As I have mentioned above, Spam spiders look for symbols like @ or .com, to harvest your e-mail address in their pool. So, when ever you mention your e-mail address on a website or blog, write it as

Virasat Dot Khan AT Google Dot Communication.

More such techniques are mentioned by Amit in his blog Digital Inspiration
Postini is a paid service for mail forwarding. This is generally used by corporate organizations today.

Hide your e-mail address published on websites from Spambot. Spambots are the spam spiders which will crawl your site to spoof your e-mail address to hack it or to spam it.

Spambox and mailexpire are also a useful tools. Not to protect from being spammed rather to get important mails from un-known senders. Spambox and mailexpire creates a temporary mailbox in their domain which will direct all the mails sent to that temporary address to your official e-mail address. So, you can give this mail address to the un-known vendor. The best part of this mail address is that, it will expire within the period which you have mentioned. This is a free service, check it out. Thanks to Amit who covered these tool on his blog.

One of the tools CAPTCHAs covered by Amit in his blog is also a good tool to protect your inbox from spammers.

Read more about Spamming

Make your e-mail address less vulnerable to spammers

Hide your e-mail address on websites from spammers

Spam Hunters become a Digg Spammers Best Friend

Spam (Electronics) by Wikipedia

Another Beta Product from Microsoft

2007-05-26T15:23:00.000+05:30

When Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates arrived At WinHEC 2007, he had a role in his mind. This was to announce the New server operating system from Microsoft i.e... Windows Server 2008. WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) is a trade show organized by Microsoft were the top level speakers from Microsoft speaks about the future of their company and announces any new product if launched.

After windows Server 2003, its chance for Windows Server 2008. Infect the R2 version of this server is in market. This new server OS has more than 4,000 policies which can applied by an administrator. Last week, Longhorn was officially named as Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has also announced that this would be the last 32 bit operating system. As we are moving into the new era of 64 bit computing, the next operating systems will be 64 bit.

Microsoft has announced its new server operating system “Windows Server 2008”, the code name of this was Windows longhorn. Till now, it has gone through 3 Beta stages. Beta 1 was released in 2005, Beta 2 was released last year and Beta 3 was released last month this year. I will mention the unique feature of

A New Role to Active Directory

The most important is the Windows Server Virtualization, which is used to Virtualize the server covered in my previous post about Global Warming. This Server has got a new role assigned it its Active Directory. This is Active Directory Domain Service, the features of its is the same, allowing network to manage the resources centrally, to set group policies for the users and centrally deploy applications to multiple computers. Apart from this overlapping features, it also has a special AD service called Federation Service using which the credentials of one enterprise can be shared with other trusted partners. As a result, a consultant can use his company’s user name and password to log on to client’s network.

No Need for a VPN

The Terminal service supports RDP 6.0. Now it is possible to share a single application instead of the whole desktop. Microsoft has given a straight competition to the VPN vendors like Avaya, CICSO and Check point by introducing feature of remote controlling a desktop over internet using its Terminal Services like Gateway, Web Access. They allow a desktop to be controlled over RDP or HTTPS over internet connection without any VPN deployed.

Some New Features

The new Virtual Domain controller, A read only Domain Controller resides in a low physical security area which will re-direct all the write attempts to a Full Domain controller.

The local administrators can login to a Server for maintenance task, no need for special domain admin privileges.

Policies using which administrator can restrict the network and other resource access on the individual level.

A powerful command line, called windows power shell.

Apply patches without re-booting the server, this service was also introduced in Windows Vista

This server is facilitated with improved IIS 7, and High-availability clusters.

Change the partition size without re-booting the server. Infact you can also change the size for primary partition.

Self healing NTFS, a new system service that runs in background and monitors the NTFS partition, detects any failures and automatically recovers the data, without the need to restart the server.

So What's Next from Microsoft....There is also the R2 Version of Windows Server 2008 in Market...Microsoft Will never Stop.

Gmail has Increased its Attachment Limit to 20 MB!

2007-05-25T13:52:00.000+05:30

Google is flying with all its colors. Earlier this week, Gmail, one of the most popular free email client has announced that it has increased its attachment limit to 20 MB from 10 MB. This means, now you can send share your favorite pictures and songs with your friends. Gmail is emerging as a leader in free email and pop3 email service providers. Earlier it was released as a private beta by invitation only, but in February this year, it has gone purely public. According to Google, they are increasing the storage capacity of Gmail with a rate of 145 MB a year and the team hopes that the storage capacity will reach a mark of 3 GB by the end of 2008, imagine then we can use gmail as our hard disk.

Gmail Drive In your Windows Explorer

Download this gmail driver to get the Gmail hard disk. . It comes as one of the drives in your windows explorer, in which you can drag and drop your files. This feature is really cool, you just need to open the gmail drive in your explorer and login to your account then start drag and drop.

The main aim of Google is to provide a rich user experience, with programming like Ajax and java scripts, Google is delivering this very efficiently. Gmail also offers spam filtering system, through which a message marked as spam will automatically get deleted after 30 days. They have recently launched a downloadable version of Gmail for mobiles.

Funny Story

Gmail was a project begun by Google developer Paul Buchheit a year before it was announced to the public. For several years, the software was available only for internal Google employees. Gmail was finally announced in 2004, this news came as a rumours. They day being an April Fool’s Day, nobody believed this news. As Google was knows for making April Fool’s jokes (such as Pigeon Rank . Then finally Rosenberg, Google’s vice-president of products was interviewed by BBC News as saying, “We are serious about Gmail”.

The major competitors of Gmail were Hotmail, Yaboo, AOL. There were many ups and downs with the storage capacity offered by all these email clients. But finally Gmail managed to get on top with the attachment doubled this year to 20 MB. But as far as storage limit is concerned, earlier this month, Yahoo has announced their un-limited storage capacity.

Global Warming A Growing Concern

2007-05-23T23:01:00.001+05:30

I hope, every one know about Global Warming and the its increasing effects.

No, No, do not get surprised, I am not growing to write about the climatic changes of our Earth in my post, but rather I will stick to my title which is “Technology”. In this post, I will be writing about how Technology can help in reducing Global Warming and its ill causes. The WHO is organizing many campaigns to create awareness among us regarding the hazards of Global Warming.

Hardware

Dell’s Contribution

Do you remember, Last year, in the month of December, Dell has introduced its new range of servers called Energy Smart Servers to reduce power consumption. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 1950 and 2950 can deliver up to 25 percent greater performance per watt while reducing power consumption by 20 percent. According to Dell, these improvements can save hundreds of dollars per server every year, which can translate to millions of dollars per year in large data center deployments. They also disclosed that the New PowerEdge Energy Smart servers combined with Dell OptiPlex desktops and Dell's industry leading-services, partnerships and sustainability programs deliver on our commitment to drive energy-efficient solutions that increase performance and reduce power consumption from the desktop to the data center. If your company uses Dell hardware, you might be aware of the recently announced OptiPlex 740 and 320 desktops joining Dell's Energy Smart technology. Especially, OptiPlex 740, which can use 70 percent less power than its predecessors. The new hardware from Dell include low-flow fans with a power speed control mechanism, higher-efficiency power supplies, low-voltage processors, and factory-integrated BIOS designed for increased efficiency and air flow

If the hardware from Dell would have come a year earlier, enough electricity could have been saved to avoid about 12.5 million tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of removing about 2.5 million cars from the road. The potential savings for customers about $1.6 billion in operating costs. If we consider this percentage all over the world, the cause for Global Warming will be drastically reduced. The Dell Power and Thermal Lab in Austin, Texas is a research facility dedicated to the creation and validation of industry standard solutions to today's energy efficiency challenges. By partnering with market-leading companies like Microsoft, APC, Liebert, Rittal and Sanmina SCI, Dell is working to address Data Center inefficiency end-to-end. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 1950 and 2950 servers are available today worldwide. Prices start at $2,449 and $2,619, respectively.

Recent Announcements from Dell

Earlier last month, dell has introduced two AMD Opteron based servers, designed to reduce the power consumption. The actual power consumption depends on the usage, but Dell claims that this server will deliver up to 105 percent greater performance per watt over the previous generation servers and hence, Dell calls it as 9th Generation.

Hewlett-Packard

Its Not only Dell that is coming forward to reduce Global Warming, but there are other major hardware vendors as well you might be still using HP’s Blade Servers. Hewlett-Packard came up with a new technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling for datacenters in which, Heat sensors on server racks send signals to a control panel that adjusts the air-conditioning output. According to Hp, this technology will save power of up to 45 percent.

Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart servers also offer an ideal platform for consolidation and virtualization, enabling customers to balance capacity demand within the same or reduced physical space and price range.

Software

Virtualization, a Step ahead to Decrease Global Warming.

Virtualization has been in mainframe for years, there are lot of softwares like VMwar, IBM Advanced POWER Virtualization, Microsoft: Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005, XenSource – XenOptimizer. Server virtualization means multiple server operating system running on a single hardware.

VMware has gained more importance in its life span of nearly a Decade. It offers, Data Centre products to reduce costs through more efficient use of resources. There are many such products from VMware which offers virtualization. Infact, VMware offers some Free products like VMware player using which you can start your own virtualization now.

Recent Announcements from VMware

VMware announces VMware ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, using which you can deploy or create a Virtual image for a pc or a server, infact you can edit it with your IT policies to protect the contents, package it into a virtual machine and deploy it on any managed or unmanaged licensed client. This is the only Edition of VMware using which an IT administrator can manage thousands of VMware ACE desktops and apply policies to all of them using a single console. VMware costs in between $1000 to $15,000

Believe me, Technology can do lot of things to reduce Global Warming. Both Software and Hardware vendors should look into designing such environment friendly products.

For Information Visit the Following links

Moving Beyond Server Virtualization

Microsoft’s Strategy on Virtualization

Server Virtualization

Virtualization Simplified

Rumours: Google To Buy FeedBurner For $100 M

2007-05-22T23:35:00.000+05:30

Last Week, rumours prevailed over the Web that Google is looking ahead to buy Feedburner for $100 million, No, it's not at all a bit amount for Google. Though there is no official complements made by Google on this. I think that it should happen and if so, google will integrate this tool with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service offered by Google to generate the detailed reports of the visitors who visited your blog or website. It makes use of the heart of google, the webmaster using which you can keep track of your visitors and their geographical location.

Frankly speaking, as a blogger, to promote my blog, I would love to burn a feed using the service provided by same vendor on which I am blogging(Google). But it is very tiresome doing the process of signing in to FeedBurner and then burning our feed and so on. RSS market is a very rapidly evolving as far as advertising is concerned. All the funda of RSS is, Today we are reading blogs via RSS by subscribing to them in a separate windows. Like google reader or yahoo sources. But did you observed that when you are viewing those blogs view RSS, RSS is actually eliminating the use of potential Ads like Google Adsense and Ads from other sources, just try out in Google Reader if you have any doubts. This is generating a huge loss to publishers as they rely on the income generated by the people who view or click these Ads. So if Google goes ahead with buying FeedBurner, then it will be advantageous to both the companies and off course users will feel the touch of all the services under same Google platform. The Blogger, The Adsense, The FeedBurning etc…

Google has proven by buying Doubleclick that it is not going to stop. This deal will come as a new opportunity for Starters who have AdSense accounts but were excluded from the Feedburner feedavertising program because of low subscriber base. Whatever it is but this deal will definitely make $$$$ for Google and Google will Rule this Web without any competitors. I think Google should go for it...

Wikiwix Launched

2007-05-20T13:33:00.000+05:30

Wikipedia a famous encyclopedia on internet launched its independent search engine wikiwix.com to index all is contents. Though it is not officially launched by Wikipedia, but it came as a surprise to all the Wikipedia visitors.

Wikipedia is a web based free content encyclopedia project. The main difference in this encyclopedia with Britannica or others is Wikipedia is like a Democratic encyclopedia. Most of the articles can be edited by anyone with access to internet. The English edition launched in early 2001, as a complement to Nupedia which was a same encyclopedia as Wikipedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free contents. It was founded by Jimmy Wales, but Nupedia lasted from mid 2000 to ending 2003.

During the free software movement in early 2001, Nupedia started Wikipedia as their side project before entering the peer review process. Over the period, Wikipedia has grown vastly and formed its own identity. Now Wikipedia is one of the 15 most visited sites on internet.

Other Major Projects from Wikipedia includes

Wiktionary, a dictionary project launched in December 2002

Wikiquote, a collection of quotations launched a week after Wikipedia was launched.

Wikibooks, a collection of collaboratively written books

From the above information, you might have got a basic idea about how vast is Wikipedia and at what rate it is expanding. Wikipedia has nearly 7.2 million articles in 251 languages, 1.7 million of which are in English. Wikipedia receives between 10,000 and 30,000 page requests per second depending on the time of the day. More than 100 Servers have been set up to handle the traffic.

Samsung- An emerging Technology

2007-05-19T19:32:00.000+05:30

Samsung is re-inforcing its technology from day to day and every upgrading model will be thinner and lighter when compared with its predecessor. Samsung became the first company to produce a 10 mega pixel camera cell phone. This was launched last year in Korea. Earlier in 2000 Samsung became the first company to embed a cell phone in a camera, also in 2004 it again formed a record by introducing its 5 mega pixel camera phone and off-course, who can forget its 7 mega pixel camera in 2005. I will be featuring the 10 mega pixel camera phone model SCH-B600 in this post, this phone was launched in Korean market last year. It also offers the same level of picture-taking sophistication that a top-notch megapixel digital camera offers.

This camera phone is called as B600, it is 6mm thinner and 10grms lighter than its predecessor i.e.. 7 mega pixel camera phone. The B600 offers the same picture quality which a 10 mega pixel camera offers. The functions in B600 includes an MP3 player, business card reader, and 128 polyphonic sounds. It has 3X optiplex zoom and 5X digital zoom. It comes with LED auto focus feature which allows you to capture clear picture even in dark. The moving picture can be recorded in QVGA resolution at 15 to 30 frames per seconds, you can also watch TV in crisp picture through Satellite DMB function.

The price of B600 is around 900,000 won (about $ 900) in Korea.

SCH-B600 Specifications

Standard CDMA 2000 1X EVDO (800 MHz)
Camera - 10 Megapixel Camera
Display - 2.2" 240x320 16M Color TFT LCD
Features - Mobile TV (Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting ); Video Recording & Messaging (MPEG4 / H.264); MP3/ AAC / AAC+; Dual Speaker / Anycall Band; Bluetooth Technology / PictBridge / Voice Recognition/ Document Viewer / TV-output / BT Printing
Memory - External memory (MMCmicro)

* Specifications are subject to change without notice

Silverlight- A New Role to Web Browser

2007-05-18T22:13:00.001+05:30

This time it is a new family rather then the upgrade of the existing product. Recently, in NAB conference Microsoft has launched its new web product called Silverlight. According to Microsoft, this product will be competing with Adobe Flash even though they are different in their offering services. The languages supported are PHP, XHTML, Apache C#, JavaScript (ECMA 3.0), VB, .NET, Python and Ruby with Python and Ruby supporting in their respective licensing policies. This product will benefit developers a lot. They can build a normal JavaScript and copy it in Silverlight where it can perform a multiple times faster than what it does in normal web browser. Everybody knows that Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E was in news from quite some time now. Microsoft introduced Silverlight as one of the products of this technology pool. The latest release was 1.0 beta with alpha release of version 1.1 made available as well.

Silverlight is a cross browser, cross platform plug-in to improve your web experience. Designers can design W3C standards web pages. It runs in all popular browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. CNET gathered the information about How big guys on internet Like Netfllix, Major league Base Ball team and Web developer plans to make use of this technology. Silverlight Beta 1.0 is just a 1MB download and it takes less than 1min to get installed on your pc. The universal package contains both Intel and power pc versions. Silverlight will be available in public this summer.

Supporting Platform

Silverlight is supported by all the popular web browsers like Ie6.0, 7, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari. The present version is not supported on Opera and on windows 2000 machines, Microsoft is planning to make it available in future versions.

The Future

It looks like Microsoft has joined the race with yahoo! and Google to make heavy bucks. Its for sure that this product is going to fill Bill’s pocket. But speaking frankly, the main aim of Microsoft till now is to provide effective and user friendly services to its customers. This looks to be a new area where Microsoft has entered to render its services, in near future, there are lot of such surprises which we will be getting from this software giant. Tim a microsoft blogger says that there is a big surprise up their collective corporate sleeve which will soon be announced at mix . In his post on techcrunch, Nik Cubrilovic writes that this service may be pushed by Microsoft overnight with their windows updates or with hotmail services, but till now there are not such declarations made by Microsoft.

Useful Links

For more details visit the Silver Community and Silver Site

Developers and Designers If you are a developer, you will find this one interesting.

Silverlight on Wikipedia

Videos

Extend your Browser Programming model with Silver light [By Stefan Schackow: Microsoft]

Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect [Developer Of Lotus Notes: IBM Corporation]

Get Auto Saved With Blogger

2007-05-18T20:49:00.001+05:30

Today, Blogger has added a most welcomed feature in its service. This is the Auto Save option. Now you don't need to worry about the un-predictable hardware or software failures on your system. Blogger will take all the pains to auto save your post in the form of a Draft.

This is done every minutes, unless you are a professional typist. If you are typing very fast to compete with Blogger Servers, then as soon as you stop typing, Blogger will save your contents just to keep you on safe side.

Even now, when I am writing this post, every word of mine is getting auto saved in their servers. Just to make you updated with what is happenning to your contents, you will see the save now button in two colors (grey and blue). When ever your contents gets saved, it turns to grey color, mentioning the time at whih your content was autosaved.

The Disadvantage

There is a problem here, your post gets saved with the date on which you satarted writing. Lets say if you have started writing on your post on 18th May at 8:00pm, and completed at 19th May 6:00am. When you publish your post, it will be published with the date as Posted on 18th May at 8:00pm rather than 19th May 6:00am.

Apart from auto save, Blogger has also introduced the keyboard shortcuts to save, publish and preview your blog. Now Ctrl-P publishes your Post, Ctrl-S saves your post a draft, and Ctrl-D switches from published to draft. The Preview option has been moved over to Ctrl-Shift-P.

So enjoy the new features.

Microsoft Pushes Windows Live Hotmail For Public

2007-05-13T21:46:00.000+05:30

After Google, its Microsoft’s chance to provide more space to its e-mail customers. Microsoft Pushes Windows Live Hotmail from its Beta status for public use. Though it was in news since the ending of year 2005 with the name “Windows Live mail”, but after going through its beta status, Microsoft has changed the name to “Windows Live Hotmail”. According to Microsoft, this product is a significant upgrade to MSN hotmail. It gives flexible access via the web on a mobile phone or with an e-mail client. Microsoft’s main aim was to bring all its services like Live.com, Live Search, Windows Live messenger, Windows Live space and Windows Live hotmail to a single mega service.

Presently Windows Live Hotmail is in two versions, the classical version to run smoothly on a slow speed internet pc and the Full version for high speed internet users. Full version offers the feature of viewing messages in the preview pan like we do in Outlook 2003 & 2007.

Features

A fresh new look, more space (2GB), some added features and accessing all the microsoft services in a single click. You can search the web as well as your mail from your hotmail account. Using Contact Importer you can directly import your contacts from outlook mail client to your hotmail client. This tool is a free download from the hotmail web site. You don’t need to add all the contacts manually. Simply run this exe to upload all your contacts from outlook to your hotmail account.

Security

Microsoft does the home work to finding out whether the mail in your mailbox is from a secure source or is a phishing attempt by some bad guy. You can mark your mail safe if it is form a known sender. The red and yahoo bar present at the top of your mail warns you about these attempts by making the un-secured mail to appear in red color and the safe one in yellow. Microsoft in collaboration with Micro Trends, makes your mails virus free.

But still it lags with Google in terms of the space availability. Windows Live Hotmail offers 2 GB of space when compared to Gmail at 2.8 GB. Yahoo is a way long way back with 1GB of space. If you need more space in your Hotmail account, you can pay extra 20 bucks to get it. Yes, you can get extra 2GB of storage by paying $20 per year. Microsoft also announced its new product, “Microsoft Office Outlook Connector Beta” using which, all its live hotmail customers over the web can access their mails free using Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007. In future, Microsoft is also looking forward to introduce its Windows Live Mobile mail product.

So, What are you waiting for? Get your Windows Live hotmail Now .

To Read more about this just click the links below:

Windows Live Hotmail to debut Monday

It Lives! Microsoft launches Windows Live Hotmail

Microsoft to introduce Windows Live writer

Windows Live Hotmail Briefing

Microsoft & Yahoo!

2007-05-12T21:20:00.000+05:30

A Surprising Rumors Or A Big Deal On Internet

Though this information was declared as a rumors by Yahoo, but talks of Acquisition by Microsoft, boosted up Yahoo's stock price for a day. This Rumors helped Yahoo to improve its stakes last Friday when Yahoo's shares surged $2.80 or 9.9 percent to $30.98, while shares Microsoft fell 41 percent to $30.56 (Courtesy: Physorg.com )

It was recently sited in Wall Street journals and in many local news papers in India as well that Microsoft and yahoo would go for a tie to overcome the dominance of the largest search engines of this planet “Google”. But sources clearly displays that a combined Yahoo-Microsoft, sill cannot defeat Google. According to Physorg.com in march, Google had 48 percent shares of the whole US search market, where as Yahoo and Microsoft together cannot be more than 38.5 percent. Google have also proven to be the best search engine on internet. According to one of the US sources COM Score Media Metrix , Google has 43.7 percent of visitors when compared to Yahoo and MSN at 28.8 and 12.8 percent respectively.

But still Microsoft due to its windows updates, manages to get more visitors to its website than Google. Late in 2005 when both Microsoft and Yahoo were trying to by the stakes of AOL, Google paid $1 Billion to purchase 5 percent stakes of AOL to make its position more secure. Recently, a week back, Yahoo declared that it would buy 80 percent of advertising Exchange Right Media for $680 Million as a result gaining full control in that company.

Google is growing un-stoppable in the areas of providing internet services and advertising markets. With its successful products like Adsense and Adwords, Google is generating a lot of profit. Even the products like photo management, Blogging service, video and instant messaging are also doing good. The major difference in Microsoft’s and Google’s strategy is whenever Microsoft releases a product in beta testing, this product will be available only to selected users. This runs counter to the strategy of Google, which pushes out services to users in rapid fire fashion even if they remain in beta for years. The best example of this is the Microsoft's Hotmail upgrade (Launched globally on Monday) was in beta. Part of what Microsoft has to do is launch the things which were there in background.

To Read more just click on one of the links below

See What Microsoft CEO Ballmer Coy had to say Yahoo Acquisition

Microsoft yahoo Deal : Not if, but when, analysts say

With Yahoo deal off, what next for Microsoft ?

Talk of Acquisition by Microsoft boosts Yahoo’s stock price

No Signs of Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

Microsoft-Yahoo Deal may hurt Google ad sales

Yahoo! Mail Beta

2007-05-09T20:18:00.000+05:30

This was introduced in mid 2005, but it’s still getting popular day by day. It’s a whole new way of mailing experience over internet. Let’s see few of the new features in Yahoo Mail beta due to which it has become more popular. There is lot of similarities in this new version of Yahoo Mail with Microsoft outlook.

New features in Yahoo Mail beta:

First thing is its new look. Now it is possible to work as you use to on Microsoft Outlook. Message can be viewed in the reading pane, just by clicking on it. In the earlier version, you had to click on the message to open it, which in turn opens a new window. But that is not the case here.

Drag and drop option is introduced, messages can be directly moved into the folders which ever you would like. This can be done just by dragging and dropping the message, same like in Microsoft Outlook.

Now, it is possible to Cc and Bcc a message to different recipients. Earlier only To field use to be there, in this version, Yahoo has introduced Cc and Bcc fields also.

This client is more secure than the earlier one. Every attachment is scanned for Virus before downloading it to the local pc by Norton Antivirus. Once the Virus scan is completed, a pop up window appears, allowing you to download the attachment. One more security feature is the Spam filter, by switching the spam filter to on, Yahoo automatically re-directs the Spam messages to Spam folder instead of inbox Folder.

Adding contacts is just a few clicks away. Now it is easier to create a new contact in your account. Yahoo Mail Beta version organizes contacts in a well structured manner, as a result users will find it easier to create and view the contacts in their accounts.

The Calendar and Event manager together creates a whole new experience of remembering things for the user. You can set the events so that you don’t forget important meetings with your clients.

All together, yahoo mail Beta creates a whole new experience of viewing mails on a third party mail client. That’s the reason why Yahoo is mostly admired all over the globe. For the latest development in Yahoo, visit my upcoming post.

Code Of Conduct For Bloggers

2007-04-15T06:05:00.000+05:30

Its been in news from quite some time now after BBC interview Jimmy. This was really needed, thanks to Jimmy Wales and Tim O Reilly who proposed the code of conduct for Bloggers. Today the Blogosphere is expanding with a more faster rate than ever. According to the sources gathered by Headlines Today, the number of blogs have increased from 8 Million in 2005 to 70 Million in 2007.

Blogoshpere being the vast area, infact very vast area, there should be some kind of laws governing the Bloggers. By seeing this initiative by Tim and Jimmy, many top players are comming forward to take part in creating this central governing body for Blogosphere.

Jimmy Wales is the founder of the free encyclopedia available on net "Wikipedia "
Read about Wikipedia . In his interview to BBC radio, Jim raised a question for all the Bloggers around the globe, which is "Do we allow people to use our blogs as places to embark on threatening behavior and really abusive personal insults?"

Tim O Reilly is a Internet Publisher and a founder of OReilly Media Inc. According to Tim, this Draft for Bloggers code of conduct has already been prepared which will soon be hosted on its official site.bloggingcode.org
Read more about what Tim has to say about this on his official web site
here.

The guidelines of this Code will be

1) Delete Thretening material from the posts.
2) Delete the Blog if it is abusive
3) Action against bloggers if they attack others.
4) Blogger is responsible for the comments made on his blog.
5) Anonymous comments should not be encouraged

But I don't think that the last point made above is relavent. Bloggers should encourage anonymous contents. Because the person who makes a negative comment on your blog will not like his identity to be disclosed in front of you.

Even after encouraging anonymous comments, we can be on save side by keeping moderate comments. Which can be hosted on your blog only when the respective author approves it.

If the Code of conduct is formed, we can soon se a governing body named, "Blogger Engineering Task Force"

Microsoft's Office 2007

2007-04-10T09:31:00.000+05:30

Microsoft has Launched “ Office 2007 ” formerly known as office 12. The development of which is in news from mid 2005. This post features this new version of office from Microsoft. Office 2007 is a whole new software which was released in the beginning of this year.

The Ribbon of standard menus is designed to quickly access all the menu options for formatting a document. The text alignment is 2 ways, top bottom and left right. Lets see the features of each program in depth. Every application has a zooming scale in the right side corner of the application window. See the Ribbon below:

The menu is more advanced. Now, you can save the documents in the format which is compatible with earlier versions of office. Se the menu of word 2007 below:

Word

Word has become more advanced. In earlier versions, you would select the property to check whether it suits your document. But in word 2007 you can just bring the mouse pointer to that property and automatically the text will change to that property. Same is the case with the picture format. Some new format’s which has more graphical view has been introduced in this new version of office. By marking a document as final, you can make it as read only in a single click.

Power Point

Power point has become more user friendly. The major tool introduced is presenter view. This tool is used to work on power point using two monitors. In which you can do rough work (generally navigation work) in your screen while the second screen displays the presentation to the audience. You can also record your narration with just a single click

Excel

Excel has become lighter; Microsoft has put more significance to graphical user interface. Now the formulae are just a single click away. Your sheet can be more secure with the range protection password, in which you can select particular range of cells and apply permissions to different user on it. Security is at granular level.

Outlook

Outlook 2007 is intelligent enough to configure your internet mail address. Just enter your name, email address and the password. Outlook will search for the respective POP3 and SMTP server over web.

Outlook 2007 supports the mailbox hosted on Microsoft Exchange 2003. One very useful and important feature in outlook 2007 which was also available with office 2003 is the availability of RSS feeds. You can configure the RSS for your favorite bog and news websites so that you can be updated whenever that site is updated. The instance search feature provides the capability of desktop search, you just have to download this exe from Microsoft web.

You can select, the particular time at which your message should be delivered. There is a facility to insert business card in your mail. New thing is “To do bar”, in which you can track your daily tasks. Also it communicates with the share point server over web 3.0 and lists all the tasks in your account. You can also track the mail which is marked as follow-up. Overall, outlook is just same as outlook 2003 with slight modifications.

Now you can view the attachment of the mail in the same windows which you are using to view the mail. No need to open the attachmeent with a different program.

Office Publisher

With office publisher you can create, Advertisements, Award Certificates, Banners, Brochures, Business Cards, Envelops, Greeting Cards, Gift Certificates etc. You can design a whole website using office publisher.

Saving files

All the applications give you the flexibility to save the document in such a way that it has backward compatibility with previous versions of office but with some exceptions. In the save as option, you can save your document such that it can be opened with earlier versions of office.

Office 2007 has a new file format, which is based on XML. The result is the more secure and efficient office. The specialty of XML format is as follows:

1) The documents which are saved are 75% smaller than their actual size.
2) File recovery is at more granular level. Now you can recover the table from a file.
3) Document can be shared more securely with Document inspector
4) Different file extensions for easier identification (Default is .docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc…and the files which extension ends with m, contain macros.)

The Translation Issue

Translations are still a major concern for every software industry. I translated my name from English to Arabic and I got the following result.

If you know Arabic language, you would jump laughing in front of your system. This is translated from left to right but Arabic language is written from right to left.

To put it simple in front of you, it is like “nahK ilA tasariV riM”

My View about Office 2007

Overall I could say only one word, “WoW”. Enjoy the below slide which I have created in power point 2007.

Top Ten Benefits of Microsoft (Courtesy: Microsoft Corporation)

Desktop

Access 2007

Accounting Express 2007

Excel 2007

Groove 2007

Info Path 2007

OneNote 2007

Outlook 2007

Power Point 2007

Project 2007

Publisher 2007

Share Point Designer 2007

Visio 2007

Word 2007

Servers

Forms Server 2007

Groove Server 2007

Live Communication Server

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Performance Point Server 2007

Project Server 2007

SharePoint Server 2007

SharePoint Server for Search 2007

Services

Live Meeting

Important Links

MSDN Blog

A Glimpse at New Office 2007 Features Via Word

Accessibility in Office 2007.

Windows Media Player 11

2007-04-04T07:08:00.000+05:30

It’s been a very long journey of Windows Media Player from ver 2.0 to the current ver 11. This post features the latest Media player from Microsoft i.e.., Windows Media Player 11.

If you have Windows Vista installed on your system, you also have this latest version of MP. Windows Media Player 11 is included as the default MP for Vista and it works with all the versions of Vista till date.

It is not mandatory that you should have Vista to get MP 11 on your machine. Long before the release of Vista this year, Microsoft have released MP 11 exclusive for Windows XP.

Features of Media Player 11

All of us like this player due to its new design and digital look. This was the indication of a new operating system from Microsoft. As you can see that windows media player’s look is similar to that of Vista’s

It has Back and forward buttons which we didn’t had in earlier versions. This helps you in working with multiple web pages.

Playback control features improved repeat, shuffle and full-screen options. Now there is no need to parse through the long menus to repeat a song. It is just a single click away in the playback control.

So, what are you waiting for, Download this incredible player here and enjoy the experience for real music stores in this digital world.

Important Links

See which version of MP, Microsoft recommends for your type of operating system.

There are some differences between the media player available with Vista and the one which you have downloaded for Window XP. Click here for the differences.

Google's Blog

2007-03-23T16:14:00.000+05:30

I hope, you might have downloaded the google web gadget for cricket scores, which was described in my Previous Post. I guess, you have removed it soon after India lost the match against Bangladesh. Never mind, India is an un-predictable team.

I found a very interesting thing over web which I want to share with you. May be this is well know to all of you, but I found it recently. This is Google’s Blog on blogger.com. Google calls this blog as “ Official Google Blog”. This blog has gone live from past few months. Atlast, Google has got the time to write posts on their very own service, Blogger

You can get information about most of the new services of google, recent lauches etc.. Probably a good way to get updated about what Master Google is doing on the web.

The recent hit post on this blog was about the “Open Source Carnival”, in which google was accepting applications for programmers to write open source softwares. Visit this blog for all the latest that is happening with google. I read about “Google’s Privacy Policy” which is changed, this year. Now googler's can choose their privacy policy.

Related link to Google Base Blog

Cricket World Cup 2007

2007-03-15T06:40:00.000+05:30

As you all know, that Cricket world has began. This time it is West Indies, which is hosting this grand Cricket Championship.

All together there are 16 teams participating in World Cup. I am sure that all of you might have started searching for different ways to get the scores on the web.

Even I am doing the same. But recently when I casually tried to add a gadget to my google desktop. I got a very useful thing. A score gadget, in which you can see live cricket scores.

This is how it looks, it is powerd by cricinfo.com, the site which I was visiting to get the lastest scores till now.

If you want to be updated with all that is happening in this world cup, Download this gadget here the prerequisits for installing this gadget is google desktop.

If you do not have Google Desktop installed in your machines, download it here

Get all the latest gadgets and widgets from google by searching with the keyword Cricket Scores in google images.

Power of Internet Protocol

2007-03-05T16:41:00.000+05:30

The most important information which I have changed about this post is its Heading. From now on, you will be seeing it as Power of Internet. I have chosen this heading, as in future, I will be posting about all the major applications used in internet world.

I hope every body found my previous post useful, if you are visiting this blog for the first time, I recommend you to visit my previous post to get the details of this topic, you can also find the answer to why did I chose this topic, in my previous post. As I have mentioned to write about technical details of IP telephony in next post, so doing the same in this post.

Let me brief out, what I am going to write in this blog. I will be starting with the most used protocol in IP telephony that is SIP, then we will see a software review, in which I will be reviewing few softwares used in IP communication. We will also see Microsoft's strategy for Ip telephony.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

SIP is a protocol used to Initiate or terminate sessions with one or multiple participants.Companies like Vonage and Packet8 have adopted SIP as the foundation for the services they offer to consumers.PortSIP softPhone is a powerful and unique Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) software phone capable of voice over IP communications. The PortSIP softphone delivers SIP-based communications and services in a software-based phone for PC-to-Phone, Phone-to-PC and PC-to-PC services. As a SIP phone, PortSIP can be used on Voice over IP networks to interact with traditional Public Switching Telecommunication Networks (PSTNs) and future IP-based telecommunication devices. But SIP is not majorly used now, this is because of its only disadvantage which is the change over of device if we change the service provider.

Other Protocols used

The codes and commands used to establish and terminate a phone call over an IP network. The protocol supports such features as conference calling, call waiting and call transfer. The primary IP telephony signaling protocols are H.323, SIP and MGCP/MEGACO. There are also proprietary protocols; for example, Cisco's Skinny is widely used.H.323* is a multimedia conferencing protocol, which includes voice, video, and data conferencing, for use over packet-switched networks

Some Models of IP Phone

This is Avaya's 2420 Model IP phone.

These are not most popular, you can see them in few Contact Centres.

The above two IP phones are most widely used, you can see them in almost every Contact Centre and It firm. These phones works same way as our normal PC, to get the IP address. They get the IP address from the DHCP server as the PC does. Through DHCP server, they can be centrally managed. Even the IP Firmware can be upgraded from the server itself rather then installing on each and every instrument.

Market Leader CISCO's Strategy

Cisco has released a voice gateway appliance designed to aid in the phased migration from time-division multiplexing (TDM) private branch exchange (PBX) networks to fully converged Cisco IP telephony and IP communications solutions. The Cisco EGW 2200 gateway supports the interworking of voice signaling protocols, Digital Private Network Signaling System (DPNSS) and Q.SIG, with Cisco CallManager call-processing software and Cisco Unity voice mail and unified messaging solutions. The Cisco EGW 2200 gateway supports the interworking of voice signaling protocols, Digital Private Network Signaling System (DPNSS) and Q.SIG, with Cisco CallManager call-processing software and Cisco Unity voice mail and unified messaging solutions.
The gateway supports commonly used DPNSS features, such as call-back, extension status, route optimization, and centralized attendant console, as well as other centralized operator functions. In addition, the Cisco EGW 2200 helps enable the interoperation of IP telephony voice mail features with legacy voice mail systems

Microsoft's PBX Strategy

Even Microsoft have entered into designing different softwares to communicate over internet. One of then which was in new last year is “Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007”. This software will integrated with other microsoft's communication products like outlook etc. Microsoft's ambition is to integrate this server software with every thing else in office suite. This product allows its user to initiate the call or conference with any person on a IP network. As far as the security is concerned, Microsoft Office Communication Server provides, single application infrastructure, a single administrator and a configuration and a single directory for IT professionals.

Find the review of it here

Software Review

The only software which I could review was SKYPE, probably the most used IP based software in the internet world. If you want to make a call on internet using free softwares, skype is the best option to go for. But the only disadvantage lies in the connection speed. Skype requires a broadband connection for reliable communication.
I tried with 128kbps, this effected the clarity of the voice and the call was getting disconnected after some time.Download Skype

Even yahoo, Google and MSN provides such kind of services through its softwares.

Integration of IP and PSTN Phone

Sphere’s VG3 media gateways deliver PSTN connectivity as well as support for legacy analog and digital phones ensuring you have a migration path and enabling you to protect your existing investments.

The figure shows the integration of IP and PSTN lines, the VOIP gateway is used to create addition lines for the PBX system. As VOIP can produce the standard telephone or T1/E1 lines, they can be terminated to a PBX line card.

Future of Internet Telephony

The Ip based communication is growing a very fastly. As it grows, so the competition in this industry. Free PC based VOIP is dominated by skype software. If you are opting for this service, keep in mind that even the smaller ISP's will offer VOIP service. But it depends on you to chose the best third party tool which would work the best. Study reviels free services like Yahoo!, Skype, and MSN are broadly used.

So if these third party tools offer free service then what would ISP do. They would opt for a firmware which would offer PC based programs. Here lies the brutality, now the customer should opt only for the paid service of the ISP rather than the third party free tools. Visit Brutal Future of VOIP for more details.

But how long will this persist, broadband will not be able to keep their charges high. There will be time when they will be forced to reduce the prices.

IP Telephone Is A Reality Now ! ! ! ! !

2007-02-13T22:57:00.000+05:30

As I have promised to write about IP Telephony in my Previous Post so writing the same.

You see life and Technology keeps on changing, we have travelled from our traditional phones to a more advanced IP phone. Did you remember, earlier we use to have huge phones, in which the dialing system was numbers printed on a ring. Now you can carry phones in your pocket.

Most of you must be fed up with the usage rates of lour local telephone service provider. Did you ever made a free call with your own phone and? VOIP is the technology with which you can do so.

VOIP AN Emerging Technology

VOIP is the new emerging technology which is used in making phone calls over standard internet protocols. Sources have presumed that this technology will emerge a standard technology for making calls, leaving the traditional analogue phone system down. Why is this technology preferred by most of the major companies today? The only answer is the cost. It works like this, lets say you have a p2p connections to your friends system. There will not be any charges to transfer a file from your computer to his computer, as this is totally private interface without the interference of any third party vendor. VOIP works in the same way, but here the technology used is INTERNET. Sources write that VOIP technology will take the place of today’s traditional phones. A customer can place a call using the three technologies of VOIP. These are:

ATA (Analogue Telephone Adaptor)

This is used to connect your traditional phone to your computer using ATA, which does the required signal conversion for you.

IP phone

New device, which looks just like a traditional phone. It has its own software and it ca be connected directly to a router. It uses standard RJ-45 cable to connect.

Computer to Computer

This uses the software whose functionality is same like a phone. These freewares are downloadable from internet. You are just paying for the internet service which you are using. The call which you make goes through internet like a packet. What ever is the distance the quality depends on the connection speed and the software.

When Did It Started ?

It all started when products like Gizmo products and Skype developed their own services to make a long distance call over internet using software. This worked out to be much cheaper that the traditional phones which we have today. Let’s say a person in India places a call to his colleague in India. This call is treated as a local call irrespective of his colleague is in which part of the world.
The major development started in 2004 when this technology was in its initial phase, it is from then after, major IT firms and call centers opted for this technology.

IP Phone in IT Firms

IP phones are getting common these days. You can see IP phones in every IT industry today. Think about it, what could be the reason? The only reason you can get it, the cost of deployment. Yes, the cost of deploying IP phones is lesser than that of normal phones. As you know that the rates over internet are calculated mostly based on capacity (MB or GB), if you make a call the rates will be calculated based on the data that is getting transferred from one destination to another. This is same as your internet usage, while using internet at your home, the ISP rates it based on the capacity that was downloaded. It is because of this, most of the companies are opting for an IP phone to support their customers.

Advantages Of Changing the Voice Based Communication to IP Telephony

Using IP telephony in Call Centers reduces costs and complexity, and boosts productivity and customer service capabilities. Like we do from PC’s in network, same way a Virtual network of IP phones can be found. Giving the experience of a single office to the customers. So everyone everywhere is using the same functions and has the same operations support.

An IP contact center deploys sophisticated applications and engages all of your enterprise’s resources, both technical and human. Branch or remote sites can provide seamless global coverage and respond to spikes in call volume, all through a connection to the central hub. Using this technology, users can work from anywhere, including their homes. As a result providing a cost control strategy for many contact centers.

Now, the natures big barrier, which is the geographical barrier is now nowhere a limit for Contact Centers. Regardless of physical location, contact centers can be logically grouped. As a result, it is easier to manage the resources and also traffic load across the IP WAN can be balanced. Enterprises that have branch locations can tap into the branch workforce for temporary contact center work and the branch offices can tap into the main call centers for assistance during peak periods. With the right IP telephony applications, less-busy operations can back up other operations with temporary help during the busiest periods.

Disadvantages and Threats of Using IP Telephony

Bandwidth

The main drawback is that, the IP telephone technology truly depends on one of the most un-reliable and most vulnerable services on this planet which is INTERNET. Yes, the quality of the IP communication depends on the internet connection speed.
You get a mail delay, which you can manage for hours, but imagine a delay over IP phones, wouldn’t it be funny to say “Hello” and wait for 1hr to get the reply “Hi”. You utilize the best out of this technology if you have a Broadband connection, which will soon be a reality in India.

Power Failure Threat

Power failure leads IP phone to go down. The conventional phones which we use in our houses are connected using copper wires till the service provider’s end, where they have the power supplies to supply the power required for the functioning of these devices. These phones use phantom power which is supplied over the line by the central office. Even if there is a power failure, the service providers will have backup generators which will prevent the phones to go down. But this is not the case in IP phones; a home user of the IP phone will use his modem which is powered by a conventional 3V battery. If the power goes down there is no secondary power source for this IP phone, hence the phone goes down, leaving no option for the calls. This is the case only in the home use, as the home users cannot afford a backup generator. But this is not the case in industries which opt for this technology.

Security Threat

This technology is still lagging behind in proper encryption policy. Though it is possible to use IP SEC to secure the point to point connection, but still you cannot rely over internet as it is the place where all the hackers and bad guys do their jobs

Apart from the above disadvantages, there is one more which says, This technology is still lagging behind in proper encryption policy. Though it is possible to use IP SEC to secure the point to point connection, but still you cannot rely over internet as it is the place where all the hackers and bad guys do their jobs

Useful link

VOIP Predication for 2007: Best bets from VOIP experts.

Visit my next blog for the advanced and Technical features of using an IP phone. Also I will be writing about the future in VOIP based communication.

My Friend's Mail

2007-02-12T23:19:00.000+05:30

I am writing this blog, not to Criticize my visitors but to appreciate and to point them that we appreciate every body to comment our posts.

I got a mail from one of my friends, which I want to share with you. First let me give a brief description about my friend.

His name is Sawanth Kumar, he is doing his engineering 2nd year from IIT-D.

Let me also explain you how did we met each other.

One day as usual, I was waiting at a bus-stop to catch a bus to my house. It was late in the evening and there was no sign of a bus. I was loosing my patience, so I decided to raise my thumb for a lift. Few vehicles passed and at last I got a lift. A college boy who was going on his motor cycle stopped to give me a lift. At first I was very calm, then we started on-drive chat with each other.

Boy: "Where are you going".

Me : "Dar-ul-Shifa" (this is a place where I use to live earlier, its in old city (Hyderabad)).

Boy: "OK, I am going till Charminar so I can drop you till your home. What’s your name?"

Me : "Virasat"

Boy: "My name is Sawanth,..Sawanth Kumar."

Me : "Oh I see, What do you do?"

Boy: "I am studying in Intermediate 1st Year."

Me : "Ok, please stop near this shop" ( I said pointing to a shop in front of us)."Thank you, bye."

Boy: "Ok bye, see you…"

By saying bye to each other, we ended our communication, I started towards my house.

After two days, we met again. He remembered me, but I didn’t because it was a daily job for me to take lift. Very soon we became good friends, he was studying in a college which was near my school. I was studying my 10th class at that time, from Brilliant Grammar High School (Dilsukhnagar). From this day onwards, we started coming together as both of us were staying in Old city (hyd). In one year, we became good friends. We have good contacts, even now.

So this was my friends introduction, now let me describe what did he write in his mail which he sent me yesterday.

Hi Virasat,

How is it going…….. and all the formalities.

I read your blog……. Things about the blog.

Every time you write about Microsoft Vista, don't you find any other topic to blog. There are many topics on which you can write your blog. I am getting bored by seeing at your blog. Change the topic and write something new.

Thanks …… and all the ending formalities.

The best part which he wrote is about the repetitivenes of the topic in my blog. So I decided to change the topics, as it is natural that even you can get bored by visiting my blog.

So wait for my next blog in which I will be writing about IP phones.

The WOW Of Windows Vista

2007-02-08T05:45:00.000+05:30

I hope everybody liked my previous post featuring Windows Vista. If anybody didn't like it, we always encourage comments so please send in your views through comments. If you are visiting this blog for the first time, my sincere advice to you will be to visit my Previous Post as you can find most of the features there.

Let me first summarize what I am going to write in this post. As Vista is a new operating system, there is a possibility that many of you do not have hands on experience on it. In this post, I will be describing some of the personalized, application specific features of Windows Vista which I didn’t write in my previous post. You will definitely find this very useful while working on Vista. The topics which I will be covering in this post are the Glass effect, Building RSS applications, User Account Controll, Programming controls, Restart & Recovery, Gadgets and Error reporting. I will also provide links to short duration videos about 10 min or less, in which you can see how these effects look in real time. Mind you, these videos are generated by Microsoft © 2006 , I am just providing the links to view them. So let’s not waste time and start . . . . .

Live Features Of Windows Vista

The best feature which I observed in vista is the drag and drop feature, to view a source code of an html or an XML file, you do not need to click on view source code option which you were doing in XP. Here you can just drag the icon and drop it on a code editor (mostly used is Microsoft Visual Studio) to view the source code.

Glass Effect

We all have noticed that there will be something new in every release of Microsoft’s Windows Operating Systems family. Same way Vista is know for its fast performance and graphical design. But apart from the internal features, Microsoft has worked hard to get that stunning look in this OS which makes it a Brand new piece in the software universe. The crystal effect or glass effect what ever you call it as is one of them, this feature allows you to see the background window with its contents while working on the top window. See how to Create Glass with C# in windows Vista. If you want to download this clip to view it offline Click Here

Building RSS Applications

Windows Vista comes with IE 7 as the default browser and the facility to create RSS feed reader API as mentioned in my previous post. Many companies found IE 7 to be in-compatible with their enterprise level applications like Citrix and few others but the main advantage of using IE 7 is, the RSS compatibility in it. All the internet surfers and casual users can take advantage of this feature, in which you can subscribe to multiple sites or blogs to get updated with their recent posts. See how you can Create RSS Feed API, but be careful when you are working with COM based API from .NET, release the objects if they are not in use. If you want to download this clip Click Here

Programming Controls

Program the Command Controls of Vista, you can create your own task dialogue boxes, save them so that they can be used further. Every thing is by programming the APIs. See how you can Create Dialogue Box. To download this clip, Click Here

User Account Controll

In vista, there is a secure feature called User Account control, this features allows the programs which need admin privileges to run in standard user account. As a result, making your system more secure and preventing the malicious codes to run on your computer if your account has admin privileges. See how this is coded using Microsoft Visual Studio. If you want to view this clip offline, you can Downloadthis clip.

Restart & Recovery

Now your applications are not vulnerable to system crash. When ever an application crashes, the session on which you are working is stored in a temporary file and then the internal system of the OS tries to restart your application. When your application is recovered and restarted, it will begin from where it has left before restarting. Isn’t this a great feature, look how this is programmed using Visual Studio here View this clip offline, Download it here

Gadgets Beauty

Vista is like a gadget guru for users who make use of gadgets a lot, it is in build with so many gadgets and gives the space to download others to add them on your desktop. If you have ever worked with Google Gadgets, you will understand the power of gadgets. In vista, you do not need any third party gadget application to decorate your desktop, Vista itself is a big gadget. See how you can Add Gadgets and modify them according to your use, to view this clip offline, Click Here

Error Reporting

Users who use Microsoft products hates to the wait and same does the developers of Vista. What do you do if you get a display on the task header of an application window as “applicaton (not responding)”? Hanged applications can be closed from the task dialogue box itself within no time, you don’t need to open task manager and kill that application to close it as you were doing in XP. As we all know the Microsoft keeps developing its own OS from time to time by releasing patches and updates to remove its vulnerabilities. This is done by taking suggestions from its users. By sending reports of your errors to Microsoft, you can help Microsoft in filling up the gaps in its softwares. In Vista there is a more advanced error reporting technology. Daniel Moth shows about Error Reporting and winqual technical support for Vista. To view it offline, you can Download it here.

Microsoft’s Web Castes

These free 90-minute webcasts provide an opportunity to interact with Microsoft subject matter experts, to view them you have to get registered with microsoft. Its free, so go ahead and make use of this useful resources.

1) Tips and tricks for targeting native APIs

2) Get your applications ready for Windows Vista

3) Build a sidebar gadget

A Brand New Operating System

2007-02-04T22:31:00.002+05:30

Get Your Copy Of Office For Free !!!!!

At a launch event for Windows Vista, 2007 Microsoft Office System, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 you’ll be able to see how to build security-enhanced applications and help ensure reliability. You will learn, how to create engaging, visually stunning, and highly differentiated user interfaces, and how to build applications that connect users to each other and to their data, allowing them to visualize, share, and act on information. You will even receive a free copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2007 and Microsoft Office Groove 2007 at the event. So,go ahead Register today for MSDN event nearby you and get it for free.

Get Vista Tips From Professionals

As Vista is a new Operating system, it is common that we would face some difficulties in understanding it, even if we understand it, effecient utilization of this OS will be a challenge in the beginning. Are you facing any difficulty in using Vista ??? Get the Tips here. Read these tips to train yourself and your organization with tips on Vista from Microsoft.

As you all know that, in my Previous Blog I have promised to write the features of Vista , so get ready to experience the Brand.

Features Of Windows Vista

New Visuals And Display Technologies

Create experience with Windows Vista's new visuals and display technologies, such as Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML, make it simpler to create breakthrough user interfaces with less effort than ever before. Now, themes can be applied within the applications. The 3D design of the icons, a very different look, will make developers feel Vista a very different peace of software compare to others softwares; this can be done by user experience as XAML has replaced the procedural coding language. Existing message box is replaced with task dialogues. View the User Experience Guide here.

Connectivity Is Faster And Safer

Get connected to the network, whether it is a communication around the world or across the table, Windows Vista gives developers the ability to make applications connect faster and safer than it was before. Hosting web services is more flexible now. The token supported are "Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)", "Kerberos", "X.509", and "Username". Now you can register Multiple Names for a single computer using "Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP)." Support for next generation Internet protocols IPV6, the API’s in Vista make the developers build securing web services. Standard name resolution APIs, like "getaddrinfo", can be used to resolve their PNRP names. "Quality Windows Audio/Video Experience (qWAVE)" simplifies the user experience in today’s challenging network and multimedia applications; it is compliant with the "Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)" which can be extended to support future technologies from Microsoft like Microsoft’s proposed "Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)" and "QoS 2.0 messaging".

Auxiliary Display

Quick access to your important information using auxiliary display, the redesigned enhanced kernel power policy manager allows the system to make use of the power in an efficient manner. NLA2 (Network API2) provides a single place where an application can get all the network parameters for a computer and can inform the application of changes to the parameters and network context information.

Now your presentation can be written on a tablet pc, ink strokes can be converted to text.

Data Integration

In particular, the new XPS packages, XPS Document format, and RSS capabilities make it easier for developers to integrate their data and build more data-aware applications. The containers for application data are described by XML Paper Specification (XPS) this is used in vista in creating secure and digitally signed documents.The RSS Support in Windows Vista provides three basic platform services.

Using ClickOnce Utility

Using , ClickOnce you can deploy and update applications to your clients through the Web, or a file share. You can deploy new versions of the applications by copying them to the install points. Clients will receive this version when they next start the application. One of the most important features is about MSI and User Account Protection (UAP). More importantly, Windows Vista makes it easier to create applications that deploy more securely, without requiring users tohave Administrator privileges.

No Need To Re-Boot After Deploying Patches

Now there is no need to re-boot your system after applying patches or updates. Windows Vista provides developers with a set of tools for creating applications that will help optimize system stability and performance.The Windows Feedback Platform (WFP) supports error handling for application crashes and hangs they provide reporting and customer response management for these errors. Developers can view crash and hang Trends by volume and growth over time, download end-user report files such as Mini Dumps, subscribe to events such as Security related issues with their applications, and register responses to connect to their solutions for their customers. With Windows Vista, it is easier for developers to improve their Product Quality , inter anonymous application state information, and connect with their customers, whether they are IT pros or end users, through the Developer Portal for Windows Feedback Platform services.

User Account Control

User Account Control is a collection of technologies in Windows Vista that enables users to run as standard users, with low privilege, while still being able to perform common tasks and enjoy high application compatibility. Download the Standard User Analyzer tool which is used by developers to analyze their code for UAC compliance by using Visual Studio tools . Keep in mind that UAC compliance is all about least privilege. Learn more on how to build User Account Control compliant applications. To ensure the health and security of a network, particularly one supporting roaming computing and the attachment of portable devices, Windows Vista provides the Network Access Protection (NAP) framework. Developers who have prepared their applications for the release of Windows Vista can take advantage of these features to help keep their customers secure and to keep their applications running smoothly.

Vista is all set to be crowned.

2007-01-27T19:22:00.000+05:30

Bill Gates Celebrates Worldwide General Availability of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System

January 29, 2007

1:45 p.m. PST / 4:45 p.m. EST

From Times Square in New York City, join Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for a live webcast celebrating the worldwide launch of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. The celebration pays tribute to the millions of Microsoft customers, partners and product testers around the world who provided input and feedback on these products -- helping Microsoft transform the way people communicate, create and share content, and access information and entertainment in the new digital age.

To view on demand webcaste, click here

Visit my next blog for features of vista.

Networking World

2006-11-08T08:07:00.000+05:30

Networking is the most important part of IT business, infact most of the business relay to their network connectivity for production. And you see, networking is the most complex but an easy to do job of system Administrator

Easy Job ! ! ! !

Networking is the most complex part

Networking is the most complex part as, it requires lot of calculations (not Maths, but logical calculations). A network administrator must be very careful while patching network cables in hub room ( In MNC's, there will be a seperate room called hub room where all the network cables are terminated which inturn goes to server room lets not get into these details. ). As it is a live business, the network folks must be very careful, somebody might be accessing a very important application when his respective network cable is accidently un-plugged from the switch.

Networking is an easy to do job of system administrator

Yes, networking is an easy job, provided if you maintain all the records in text sheets. All the switch configurations must be saved in a text file and backed up at some safe location. All the ip address ranges assigned to a perticular switch must be pasted in the hub rooms, so that it will be easy for the folks who does patching.

Guide to Network Performance Management

Keeping a close eye on your network performance and throughput is critical. But, as your network grows, managing it becomes more complex. This guide introduces you to the best performance management practices to follow, the pitfalls to avoid and provides troubleshooting help & advice for monitoring and maintaining your network. Also, you'll find articles, tutorials, tips, tools, white papers, expert advice and more to pump up your network monitoring and diagnostic know-how quickly. Get Your Network Running Better Than Ever!