03 Sept 2009
DH-edn.,
| Design your own website |
Creative writing on the net makes a virtue out of innovation, says Marianne de Nazareth |
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Today the options open for writing on the web are huge and can be well paying. However, learning to write for the web is an art in itself.
Not all writers have the ability or desire to be constrained within prescribed writing formulae, but writing for the web welcomes fresh and ‘surprising’ writing. In fact creative writing on the net makes a virtue out of innovation, and much of it is designed to shock; and to subvert our usual expectations.
Thus it means that on the web, writers play with language and also design units to be visually appealing. This article brings forward some useful writing principles which can be extrapolated effectively for the web.
There are several techniques to increase readability on the web. One must remember that reading from the screen is far less efficient than reading from paper. This could even happen if you or your publisher have planned a clear page with Acrobat or Microsoft Reader. Although a reader can zoom the text size up and down, to suit their eyesight requirements, there is awkwardness with monitors that can slow the reader down.
* If the reader zooms up text, fewer words appear on the screen, so they will begin to skim read.
* Turning over a physical page is easier than scrolling, zooming and clicking.
* The distance between reading material and the reader affects reading efficiency as does the angle of the screen.
* However slight, any flicker on the screen affects the eyes and the ability to read for a long time off the monitor.
With all these negative aspects for a web writer, work with your graphic design artist so you as a writer can write in a way that makes it easier for the reader to read. Compromise is the key, with the number of words worked out for each line to avoid these pitfalls.
Colour
Work your colour concepts with your designer who understands the concept of ‘web safe’ colours. RGB or Red, Green and Blue are Nature’s three primary colours. Monitors transmit RGB, after all colour is light so the only colours available are the ones that standard monitors can transmit. There are 216 web safe colours and other may look different. In fact there is no guarantee that your monitor will show the same hue of red as mine does. So when writing for the web:
* The contrast between the characters and the background should be as sharp as possible. Most research shows black lettering on white or cream is the easiest to read. White on black also has a high contrast.
* Keep the colour of your hyperlinks blue. Most readers connect with blue and a hyperlink.
* Avoid watermarks. They were fashionable at one time, not any more as the brain considers anything extra as an impediment.
Typesetting
Typesetting as one is familiar with on print is not the same on the web. Forget about kerning (removal of hairline spaces between alphabets in words in print), orphans and widows (words and short lines hanging on the top of the page) and the subtleties of leading. However, there are simple things to improve reading on the web:
* Hyphenation at the end of lines slows down reading and best should be avoided.
* Reading with just lower case letters is a problem on the screen, so regular capital initial letter only, sentences are better.
* Fonts with strong ascender and descending strokes show up better than skimpy fonts.
* Preferably use 10 to 12 words a sentence.
Finally, planning a website needs an actual master plan to be most effective. Draw a whole overview of what you would like in your website on paper, especially the Home page and your menu headings. That way you can plan what it will actually look like on screen and you can decide your menu with ease.
(The writer is adjunct faculty at St. Joseph’s College, Christ University and COMMITS) |
2 Sept 2009
| A hired gun for Microsoft, in pursuit of Google | | Miguel Helft, The New York Times |
Qi Lu, a self-effacing engineer, is one of the most atypical executives in the upper ranks of the Internet industry says, Miguel Helft |
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 Qi Lu knows as well as anyone just how difficult it is to take on Google. For nearly a decade, Lu played a leading role in building Yahoo’s Internet search and advertising technologies. The effort was so important that Yahoo backed it with billions of dollars to acquire companies, hire armies of engineers and develop and run its own systems. Yet Yahoo fell further and further behind and many analysts said the company was simply outgunned by Google.
Lu, who is 47, left Yahoo 14 months ago, but now finds himself once again leading the charge against Google. This time, he is backed by a patron that vows to spend even more than Yahoo did on the mission: Microsoft. “It’s an unfinished mission that I would like to work on,” he said.
The challenge for Lu and his team remains enormous, and success appears improbable. But since Steven A Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, tapped him to become president of the company’s online services division in December, Lu, a self-effacing engineer who is one of the most private and atypical executives in the upper ranks of the Internet industry, has earned the confidence of Microsoft’s troops and helped to bring a dose of optimism to a beaten-down team.
Possessing unusual stamina and a maniacal work ethic, he has pushed his team hard to give Microsoft an important victory. In nightly 9:30 meetings over several weeks, he leaned on his managers to find creative ways to structure a sweeping and complex partnership with Yahoo. The deal, signed in July, will give Microsoft something it has coveted for years: a vastly larger audience that will make Bing, its search engine, the runner-up to Google.
But Lu and his team will have a lot of running to do. Even after adding Yahoo’s search traffic, Bing’s share of the search market will be less than half as big as Google’s. Closing that immense gap will be difficult, in part because most users are happy with Google, which is constantly improving its search service.
In a lengthy interview last week at Microsoft’s headquarters, Lu said he was not underestimating the challenge. But over time, he said, Microsoft has a chance to offer a service that is different and compelling enough to compete effectively. For Microsoft, succeeding in search is vital to the company’s long-term health. For Lu, it is a mission he felt obligated to take on.
“I do think that this is answering a call to duty,” he said. Wearing a Bing T-shirt tucked into jeans held up by a black leather belt and wearing brown sandals and white socks, the wiry Lu looked more like an engineer than a senior executive.
And with an engineer’s logic, he laid out his reasons for returning to the fray. Search determines where users go online, and search advertising is the most powerful economic force on the Internet. The business is too important to be controlled by a single company, he says.
Having grown up poor in China, Lu said, he feels duty-bound not to squander the rare opportunity he was given. He was raised by his grandparents in a rural village with no electricity or running water. His intelligence got him into Fudan University in Shanghai. After finishing his master’s degree in computer science, he attended a talk given by Edmund M Clarke, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Impressed by Lu’s questions and research, Professor Clarke invited him to apply to a doctorate program.
Lu, who earned about $10 a month teaching at the university, could not afford even the application fee, so the professor arranged for the fee to be waived and Lu was admitted. Lu says the challenges he faced growing up turned out to be a blessing: “You can say it’s harsh, but it teaches you so many things.” After earning his Ph D in 1996, he went to work at one of IBM’s prestigious research labs.
Lured to Yahoo
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E-Utilities. |
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Freez Screen Video Capture
This utility is a screen-capture & screen-recording tool to create screen demos, training videos, animated tutorials, animated presentations etc. Freez Screen Video Capture can record screen activities and sounds and produce a standard AVI video file. Any part of the screen’s activities can be recorded along with a narration.Freez Screen Video Capture features include: Choice of output video’s compressor, like Microsoft Video 1, MPEG-4, DivX quality, framerate, audio format, like PCM, ADPCM, MP3, OGG, and volume. Hotkeys to pause, and stop screen recording. It can be downloaded at http://www.smallvideosoft.com/downloads/freez_screenvideocapture.exe
Photoscape
Photoscape, a photo editing tool, can help fix and enhance photos. Its features include: Viewer - View your folders photos in a slideshow; Editor: resizing, brightness and colour adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming; Batch editor: Batch editing multiple photos; Page: Merge multiple photos into one page frame; Combine: make a single photo by attaching multiple photos; Animated GIF: an animationphoto with multiple photos; Print: Print portrait shot, carte de visite, passport photo; Screen Capture: Capture and save it; Color Picker: Zoom in screen on images, search and pick the color; Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode; and Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG. The 15.45 MB Photoscape can be downloaded at http://www.brothersoft.com/download-photoscape-64064.html. Help can be found at http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/help_editor.php.
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DH reader Natesk Nayak wrote:
Could you suggest a utility to compare and sychronise folders?
DH suggested:
You could try the 1.9 MB FreeFileSync (FFS) v2.2, an Open-Source folder comparison and synchronisation tool. Do make sure that the folders you’ve listed in FFS are not the wrong way around, lest you end up deleting files. FFS can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/files/freefilesync/v2.2/FreeFileSync_v2.2_win32.exe/download
NSS |
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As Internet turns 40, barriers threaten its growth | | The Associated Press |
Goofy videos weren’t on the minds of Len Kleinrock and his team at UCLA when they began tests 40 years ago on what would become the Internet. |
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 Neither was social networking, for that matter, nor were most of the other easy-to-use applications that have drawn more than a billion people online.
Instead the researchers sought to create an open network for freely exchanging information, an openness that ultimately spurred the innovation that would later spawn the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the World Wide Web. There’s still plenty of room for innovation today, yet the openness fostering it may be eroding. While the Internet is more widely available and faster than ever, artificial barriers threaten to constrict its growth.
Call it a mid-life crisis.
A variety of factors are to blame. Spam and hacking attacks force network operators to erect security firewalls. Authoritarian regimes block access to many sites and services within their borders. And commercial considerations spur policies that can thwart rivals, particularly on mobile devices like the iPhone.
“There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop – more opportunities than ever before,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “On the worrisome side, there are some longer-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled.”
Few were paying attention back on September 2, 1969, when about 20 people gathered in Kleinrock’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch as two bulky computers passed meaningless test data through a 15-foot gray cable.
That was the beginning of the fledgling Arpanet network. Stanford Research Institute joined a month later, and UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah did by year’s end.
The 1970s brought e-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which allowed multiple networks to connect — and formed the Internet. The ‘80s gave birth to an addressing system with suffixes like “.com” and “.org” in widespread use today.
The Internet didn’t become a household word until the ‘90s, though, after a British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers like America Online connected millions of people for the first time.
That early obscurity helped the Internet blossom, free from regulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or even prohibit experimentation.
“For most of the Internet’s history, no one had heard of it,” Zittrain said. “That gave it time to prove itself functionally and to kind of take root.” Even the US government, which funded much of the Internet’s early development as a military project, largely left it alone, allowing its engineers to promote their ideal of an open network.
When Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, invented the Web in 1990, he could release it to the world without having to seek permission or contend with security firewalls that today treat unknown types of Internet traffic as suspect.
Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.
“Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom,” said Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963. “One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect.”
That idealism is eroding.
An ongoing dispute between Google Inc and Apple Inc underscores one such barrier.
Like some other mobile devices that connect to the Internet, the iPhone restricts the software that can run on it. Only applications Apple has vetted are allowed.
Apple recently blocked the Google Voice communications application, saying it overrides the iPhone’s built-in interface. Skeptics, however, suggest the move thwarts Google’s potentially competing phone services.
On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erected barriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used by their subscribers. Comcast Corp got rebuked by Federal Communications Commission last year for blocking or delaying some forms of file-sharing; Comcast ultimately agreed to stop that.
Net neutrality
The episode galvanised calls for the government to require “net neutrality,” which essentially means that a service provider could not favour certain forms of data traffic over others. But that wouldn’t be a new rule as much as a return to the principles that drove the network Kleinrock and his colleagues began building 40 years ago.
Even if service providers don’t actively interfere with traffic, they can discourage consumers’ unfettered use of the Internet with caps on monthly data usage. Some access providers are testing drastically lower limits that could mean extra charges for watching just a few DVD-quality movies online. “You are less likely to try things out,” said Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and one of the Internet’s founding fathers. “No one wants a surprise bill at the end of the month.”
Dave Farber, a former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission, said systems are far more powerful when software developers and consumers alike can simply try things out.
Farber has unlocked an older iPhone using a warrantee-voiding technique known as jail-breaking, allowing the phone to run software that Apple hasn’t approved. By doing that, he could watch video before Apple supported it in the most recent version of the iPhone, and he changed the screen display when the phone is idle to give him a summary of appointments and e-mails.
While Apple insists its reviews are necessary to protect children and consumer privacy and to avoid degrading phone performance, other phone developers are trying to preserve the type of openness found on desktop computers. Google’s Android system, for instance, allows anyone to write and distribute software without permission. Yet even on the desktop, other barriers get in the way.
Steve Crocker, an Internet pioneer who now heads the startup Shinkuro Inc, said his company has had a tough time building technology that helps people in different companies collaborate because of security firewalls that are ubiquitous on the Internet. Simply put, firewalls are designed to block incoming connections, making direct interactions between users challenging, if not impossible.
Malicious behaviour
No one’s suggesting the removal of all barriers, of course. Security firewalls and spam filters became crucial as the Internet grew and attracted malicious behaviour, much as traffic lights eventually had to be erected as cars flooded the roads. Removing those barriers could create larger problems.
And many barriers throughout history eventually fell away -- often under pressure. Early on, AOL was notorious for discouraging users from venturing from its gated community onto the broader Web. The company gradually opened the doors as its subscribers complained or fled. Today, the company is rebuilding its business around that open Internet.
What the Internet’s leading engineers are trying to avoid are barriers that are so burdensome that they squash emerging ideas before they can take hold.
Already, there is evidence of controls at workplaces and service providers slowing the uptake of file-sharing and collaboration tools. Video could be next if consumers shun higher-quality and longer clips for fear of incurring extra bandwidth fees.
Likewise, startups may never get a chance to reach users if mobile gatekeepers won’t allow them. If such barriers keep innovations from the hands of consumers, we may never know what else we may be missing along the way. |
26 Aug 2009
| Online education beats classroom | | Steve Lohr, The New York Times |
Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools have improved online experience, says Steve Lohr |
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 Arecent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
Noah Berger for ‘The New York Times’ Tyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California.
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses.
The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program.
The biggest near-term growth, Regier predicts, will be in continuing education programs. Today, Arizona State has 5,000 students in its continuing education programs, both through in-person classes and online. In three to five years, he estimates, that number could triple, with nearly all the growth coming online.
But Regier also thinks online education will continue to make further inroads in transforming college campuses as well. Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, like Blackboard or the open-source Moodle. But that is mostly for posting assignments, reading lists, and class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.
Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said. For example, it will be assumed that college students know the basics of calculus, and the classroom time will focus on applying the math to real-world problems — perhaps in exploring the physics of climate change or modeling trends in stock prices, he said.
“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.” |
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Wikipedia to censor changes | | Noam Cohen, The New York Times |
Now, as the English-language version of Wikipedia has just surpassed three million articles, that freewheeling ethos is about to be curbed. |
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 Wikipedia, one of the 10 most popular sites on the Web, was founded about eight years ago as a long-shot experiment to create a free encyclopedia from the contributions of volunteers, all with the power to edit, and presumably improve, the content.
Now, as the English-language version of Wikipedia has just surpassed three million articles, that freewheeling ethos is about to be curbed.
Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs
Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
The change is part of a growing realisation on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.
Roughly 60 million Americans visit Wikipedia every month. It is the first reference point for many Web inquiries — not least because its pages often lead the search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Since Michael Jackson died on June 25, for example, the Wikipedia article about him has been viewed more than 30 million times, with 6 million of those in the first 24 hours.
“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board.
“There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”
The new editing procedures, which have been applied to the entire German-language version of Wikipedia during the last year, are certain to be a topic of discussion this week when Wikipedia’s volunteer editors gather in Buenos Aires for their annual Wikimania conference. Much of the agenda is focused on the implications of the encyclopedia’s size and influence.
Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.
That right was never absolute, and the policy changes are an extension of earlier struggles between control and openness.
For example, certain popular or controversial pages, like the ones for the singer Britney Spears and for President Obama, are frequently “protected” or “semi-protected,” limiting who, if anyone, can edit the articles.
And for seven months beginning in November, ‘The New York Times’ worked with Wikipedia administrators to suppress information about the kidnapping of David Rohde, a correspondent in Afghanistan, from the article about him.
The Times’ argued that the censorship would improve his chances of survival. Rohde escaped from his Taliban captors in June, but the episode dismayed some Wikipedia contributors.
The new system comes as some recent studies have found Wikipedia is no longer as attractive to first-time or infrequent contributors as it once was.
Ed H Chi of the Palo Alto Research Center in California, which specialises in research for commercial endeavours, recently completed a study of the millions of changes made to Wikipedia in a month. He concluded that the site’s growth (whether in new articles, new edits or new contributors) hit a plateau in 2007-8.
For some active Wikipedia editors, this was an expected development — after so many articles, naturally there are fewer topics to uncover, and those new topics are not necessarily of general interest.
But Chi also found that the changes made by more experienced editors were more likely to stay up on the site, whereas one-time editors had a much higher chance of having their edits reversed. He concluded that there was “growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content.”
To other observers, the new flagging system reflects Wikipedia’s necessary acceptance of the responsibility that comes with its vast influence.
“Wikipedia now has the ability to alter the world that it attempts to document,” said Joseph Regale, an adjunct professor of communications at New York University whose PhI thesis was about the history of Wikipedia.
Under the current system, it is not difficult to insert false information into a Wikipedia entry, at least for a short time. In March, for example, a 22-year-old Irish student planted a false quotation attributed to the French composer Maurice Jarre shortly after Jarre’s death. It was promptly included in obituaries about Jarre in several newspapers, including ‘The Guardian’ and ‘The Independent’ in Britain. And on January 20, vandals changed the entries for two ailing senators, Edward M Kennedy and Robert C Byrd, to report falsely that they had died.
Flagged revisions, advocates say, could offer one more chance to catch such hoaxes and improve the overall accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries.
Foundation officials intend to put the system into effect first with articles about living people because those pieces are ripe for vandalism and because malicious information within them can be devastating to those individuals.
Exactly who will have flagging privileges has not yet been determined, but the editors will number in the thousands, Wikipedia officials say. With German Wikipedia, nearly 7,500 people have the right to approve a change.
The English version, which has more than three times as many articles, would presumably need even more editors to ensure that changes do not languish before approval.
“It is a test,” said Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia. “We will be interested to see all the questions raised. How long will it take for something to be approved? Will it take a couple of minutes, days, weeks?”
Wales began pushing for the policy after the Kennedy and Byrd hoaxes, but discussions about a review system date back to one of the darkest episodes in Wikipedia’s history, known as the Seigenthaler incident.
In 2005, the prominent author and journalist John Seigenthaler Sr discovered that Wikipedia’s biographical article connected him to the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Robert F Kennedy, a particularly scurrilous thing to report because he was personally close to the Kennedy family.
Since then, Wikipedians have been fanatical about providing sources for facts, with teams of editors adding the label “citation needed” to any sentence without a footnote.
“We have really become part of the infrastructure of how people get information,” Wales said. “There is a serious responsibility we have.” |
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E-Utilities |
SUMO Paint, a free online image editor, is built with Adobe Flex and can run from your browser. |
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BlueScreenView
When the Blue Screen Of Death happens on your computer it would be a good idea to identify the device driver that is causing the problem and take necessary steps to resolve it. In order to help zero-in on the ‘culprit/s’ which caused Blue Screen Of Death of your Windows, BlueScreenView, a free utility, can help. It is a tiny utility that scans the dumps of BSOD, analyses the data and provides useful information to understand the crash. For every crash this application can display Device driver or module ((filename, product name, file description, and file version) that possibly caused the crash of the system, date and time of crash, the device drivers that were loaded during the crash, and crash details on a blue screen. No installation required.
The application works with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, as long as Windows is configured to save minidump files during BSOD crashes. BlueScreenView can be downloaded at http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bluescreenview_setup.exe
SUMO Paint
SUMO Paint, a free online image editor, is built with Adobe Flex and can run from your browser. SUMO Paint has a Photoshop look alike interface - the floating toolbar, palettes and color bars are fartoo familiar. All the required tools to create a professional image are provided onlline - Ink, Pencil tools, brushes, filters, customise shapes for vector work, and multiple layers for various effects. You can either upload the image from your computer or type-in the url of an online image. You can also create a SUMO account to upload your images. Once done you can download the edited images to your computer in jpg/png format or store it online with your SUMO account. If you wish, you can set the image that you save in your SUMO account to made be available for public viewing. Sumo Paint can prove to be a useful image editing and painting software in your browser. More details of SUMO Paint v1.0 at http://www.sumo.fi/home/. At http://www.sumo.fi/video/ you can also get to know the features of SUMO and the tricks you can do with it.
XSearch
XSearch can search files on your computer quite quickly. To search you just use the word options, like, “any of the words”, “all of the words”, “exact phrase”, “without the words” and others. To search by words separate the words by using the space character, to separate names and folders use the “;” character. For example: Words: “StringA String B”, Names: “*.a;*.b;kk*.*”, Folders: “C:Test;D:MyFolder”. You can enable the context menu for XSearch, to help search for files in any folder by right-clicking at the folder in Windows Explorer and choosing the “XSearch” menu item.
XSearch also supports search words in files in unicode or UTF8 formats. You can carry out search in hexadecimal, and provides a tool to view the contents. XSearch supports search for files in specified size, date and time - search files that were created at noon on 1st Aug 2009, or by the exact size in bytes, KB, MB or GB. The search results can be saved. Search histories are recorded, however, you can also clear them too.
XSearch supports most of the file operations in Explorer such as Copy, Cut, Rename, Drag and drop etc. The freeware version of XSearch can be downloaded here.
http://www.easexp.com/xsearch/xsearch.exe. No installation required.
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DH reader Subramanian wrote:
Is there a utility to help create strong passwords?
DH suggested:
To create strong passwords you may read a Microsoft primer on Strong Passwords at http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx
19 Aug 2009
| The corporate lab as a ringmaster | | The New York Times |
It’s role is to be more of a integrator of innovation, from both outside and inside the company walls, says Steve Lohr |
|  The Internet has changed many things, of course, but one of its more far-reaching effects has been to transform the economics of innovation.
America’s big corporate research and development laboratories — at IBM, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and a handful of other companies — have their roots and rationale in the industrial era, when communication was costly, information travelled slowly and social networks were fostered at conferences and lunchrooms instead of over the Web.
Crowdsourcing and other new, more open models of innovation are really byproducts of the low-cost communication and new networks of collaboration made possible by the Internet.
So, in the Internet era, what is the continuing role and comparative advantage of the corporate R&D lab?
Its role will be smaller and its advantage diminished, suggests Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. The idea-production process, according to Schrage, will continue to shift away from the centralised model epitomised by large corporate labs, going from “proprietary innovation to populist innovation.”
Much of traditional corporate R&D spending, he said, has been subsidised by profits that are increasingly under Internet-era pressures. “The economic case for a lot of in-house R&D no longer makes sense,” Schrage said.
The best bet for corporate R&D labs, he said, is to adopt a “federated” model that leverages all the innovative work by outsiders in universities, start-ups, business partners and government labs. The corporate lab’s role, then, is to be more of a coordinator and integrator of innovation, from both outside and inside the company walls.
Though hardly alone, Hewlett-Packard has aggressively adopted that approach in the last two years, after Prith Banerjee became the senior vice president for research. Under Banerjee, former dean of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, HP Labs has not only narrowed its focus, placing larger bets on fewer projects, but has also systematically sought outside ideas.
HP now runs a yearly online contest, soliciting grant proposals from universities worldwide. The company lists eight fields in which it is seeking advanced research, and scientists suggest research projects in those fields. The HP grants are typically about $75,000 a year, and many of the collaborative projects are intended to last three years. In June, the company announced the 61 winners from 46 universities and 12 countries, including 31 projects receiving a second year of funding. “We are tapping the collective intelligence, selectively, of leading academics around the world,” Banerjee said.
Alan E Willner, an electrical engineer at the University of Southern California, is one of those academics. He is an expert in photonics, using light photons instead of electrons to transmit information. The goal of the project with HP is to cut power consumption and increase data-transmission speeds between computers in data centers, and eventually even inside of chips.
The HP project, he said, supports a research student, provides insights from HP scientists and has helped double the productivity of his research team, whose members have co-authored 21 conference and journal papers related to the project in the last year.
Another name on all those papers is Raymond G Beausoleil, an HP research fellow. The USC team, Beausoleil said, has helped fill a gap in photonics expertise in the company’s research program and accelerated its progress. He noted that HP Labs has long worked with university professors, but that the outreach tended to be informal and ad hoc. “Before,” he said, “there wasn’t necessarily a mandate to collaborate.”
Opening up is a good approach to some problems. But tight-knit teams inside corporate labs, experts say, can outshine the open model when working on multidisciplinary challenges in projects soon heading to market.
GE built up a biosciences unit, starting in 2004, to help push its diagnostic imaging technology to new commercial frontiers. Last year, GE and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center developed a prototype scanner that sharply cuts the time needed to digitise images on pathology slides.
Now, the GE researchers are working on the software and data analysis tools to look into such images for a deeper understanding of diseases. GE is collaborating with Eli Lilly and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. But the core is a 15-person team at GE Research that includes computer scientists, molecular biologists, chemists and statisticians.
“It really helps to have the close and constant communications loops within the team, because engineers have to learn a lot of biology and biologists have to learn a lot of engineering,” said Fiona Ginty, a bioinformatics scientist who leads the project.
Probably more than any other company, IBM has successfully reinvented its R&D labs over the years, analysts say. Jolted by its early-1990s tailspin, IBM opened its labs to the outside world and to customers. Since the mid-’90s, it has sharply shifted its research focus toward its growth engines of software and services.
IBM is a major underwriter of open research in universities, but also collects more patents for its own use than any other company, year after year.
The open innovation model, says John E Kelly, senior vice president and director of research, has many advantages. But he points to several innovations that became products after originating in IBM labs.
“You can’t leave discovery completely to others and to chance,” he said. |
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Bing keeps rising in the United States | | Miguel Helft, The New York Times |
It may be far too early to pop the champagne on the Microsoft campus, but a celebration with a round of beers — the good stuff — may be in order. |
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 For the second month in a row — and the second month since its release — the company’s new search engine, Bing, has increased its usage and market share in the United States.
According to comScore, Bing accounted for 8.9 percent of search queries in the United States in July, up from 8.4 percent in June and 8 percent in May. The July gains appear to have come at the expense of both Google and Yahoo, which each saw their market share decline by .3 percent, to 64.7 percent and 19.3 percent.
For Microsoft, the results are no doubt encouraging. But it is still not clear whether the initial lift for Bing, which is backed by a massive marketing campaign, will extend into the future.
“Although Bing took a bit of share from both Google and Yahoo, we are reluctant to extrapolate this into meaningful long-term share gains,” wrote Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, in a note to investors. Schachter noted that despite its slight drop in July, Google still had its second highest share of monthly queries ever.
In a note to investors, Christa Quarles, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners, repeated a cautionary statement from a month earlier: “While the data indicates a very modest near-term bounce, we will be watching closely to see if any query pickup is sustainable,” she said.
For Microsoft, which is poised to take over search at Yahoo, a loss of share at Yahoo is hardly good news. ComScore is now reporting combined results for Yahoo and Bing: they inched up very modestly to 28.2 percent, up from 28 percent in June.
The comScore results have been made available to analysts and other clients of the firm. They are expected to be distributed publicly on Tuesday. |
Google, search that satisfies | | The New York Times |
It keeps users hooked on by providing them all the info, says Miguel Helft |
| Some pundits talk about Internet users having a “Google habit” that keeps them hooked on Google and keeps Google the no. 1 Internet search engine. That habit is far from harmful, and consumers don’t feel a need to kick it for a simple reason: Google gives them what they want.
That meme appears to be confirmed by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, the University of Michigan’s well-known barometer of consumer satisfaction, which once again gave Google top marks among Internet search engines and portals.
Since it was first included in the study in 2002, Google has topped the rankings in seven of eight yearly surveys.
This year Google received 86 points, out of a possible 100, the same as a last year, and far above its nearest rival, Yahoo, with 77 points, also unchanged from last year. Microsoft and Ask.com followed close behind with 75 and 74 points respectively, and AOL was last with 70 points.
The survey was conducted before the release of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, and before Microsoft’s search alliance with Yahoo, which will make Bing the search engine on Yahoo. But those behind the survey say that consumers’ happiness with Google suggests that, despite early gains, Bing may have a tough road ahead.
“Bing gives Yahoo and Microsoft a chance to compete again,” said Larry Freed, president and chief executive of ForeSee Results, which collaborates with the university on measurements of Internet companies. But Freed said Bing would not succeed unless it did something different enough to cause users to think about changing their Google habit. “The biggest challenge for Bing will be changing people’s perceptions,” he said.
(Bing’s market share rose to 8.9 percent in July, from 8 percent in May, according to comScore. Microsoft, which changed its search engine’s name to Bing two months ago, is backing the change with a massive advertising campaign. It is not certain that it can sustain, let alone extend, its initial gains.)
Relying on studies to predict market conduct can be risky, and the University of Michigan survey, while well regarded, has not always been successful at pinpointing future user behaviour.
In 2007, for instance, Yahoo topped Google in the rankings, but that did not translate into gains in the marketplace. Similarly, that year, Ask.com did a thorough overhaul of its service that resulted in a large jump in consumer satisfaction but no discernible gains in the market.
Freed noted that the gap Google enjoyed over rivals was so significant that the company had little to fear, for now. “Google does a great job of managing consumers’ expectations,” he said. “They don’t overinflate them with a lot of marketing. They keep innovating and adding new features quietly, and the new features get out through word of mouth. It is really a brilliant strategy.”
Other surveys, however, show that by some measures, the gap between Google and Bing is not that large. So while Bing may face an uphill battle, it could still become a viable challenger to Google. |
E-Utilities | | N.S. SOUNDAR RAJAN |
Using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, Maxthon has a rich set of features to improve one’s surfing experience. |
| Printee
Printee, an Internet Explorer extension, is designed to remove extraneous elements of a webpage to create a printable page - without ads or extra information (e.g sidebars, unrelated images. Features: Reduce any web page down to just the content you want, save paper and ink; What You See Is What You Get; Support Ecofont; Improve Readability, and more. After installation add the “Printee” icon to your IE toolbar, to edit a page manually - right click and drag the mouse over the page elements to start selecting; or double click CTRL, then left click on page elements to start selecting them, or click on the Printee button in the IE toolbar, then left click elements to select. After selection, just right click to browse a useful context menu which can help refine your selection. You may also like to try CTRL+G, a single-click wizard, for an automated and quick stripping of all the text and images. The 45 KB Printee, v1.5.3 (09/08/2009), for Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, can be downloaded at http://www.irido.com/download/printee.exe. Requires Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8. Firefox users may like to try Aardvark, a firefox extension, which can be downloaded at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4111.
Maxthon Browser
Using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, Maxthon has a rich set of features to improve one’s surfing experience. Lots of features, and among them are: Tabbed Browsing, Mouse Gestures - to go back forward, refresh or close tabs, or set up your own; boost browsing speed of frequently visited websites; built-in Feed Reader to subscribe and read RSS 0.9/1.0/2.0 and Atom 0.3/1.0 Feeds; URL Aliases - name your favorite website, and visit them by simply typing it in the address bar; Ad Hunter; Web Sniffer to find the actual urls of FLV video files; Super Proxy; Screen Capture; Undo List - Back/Forward History also saved in the Undo List, split-screen browsing; Magic Fill to fill all the forms with just click; Super Drag & Drop- type the keywords in Address Bar to perform a search, Anti-Freeze, Security Updates, Trusted Website Check, Online Favorites Service, Web Bar, Filter Packs to remove ads or implement a special feature and much much more. Developed in China, Maxthon v2.5.4 can be downloaded at http://dl.maxthon.cn/mx2/mx_2.5.4.159.exe. At the time of writing this column, Maxthon, chosen as one of the top 6 international products of 2008, has been downloaded a whopping 244,133,789 times.
doPDF
doPDF can convert documents to searchable PDF files. doPDFIt installs as a printer driver and helps to generate PDF files by simply selecting the "print" command from any application like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, AutoCad drawings. The PDF files can be viewed on any computer with a PDF viewer (reader) installed. Features of DoPDF include: modify the paper size, modify the resolution (from 72 to 2400 dpi), change page orientation (portrait, landscape), change the quality settings and lots more.
The 1.72 MB doPDF, v6.3.308 (12-August-2009) for Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 7 can be downloaded at http://www.dopdf.com/download/setup/dopdf.exe.
dheutilities@gmail.com |
Cyberstop |
| DH reader Nagaraja wrote:
Can you suggest a YouTube to MP3 Converter?
DH suggested:
You could try the Free YouTube to
MP3 Converter v.3.2.1.58, for Windows XP or Vista, which can be downloaded at http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-to-MP3-Converter.htm. |
12 Aug 2009
| Breakfast can wait, the day’s first stop is online | | The New York Times |
Technology has altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day, says Brad Stone |
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 Karl and Dorsey Gude of East Lansing, Mich, can remember simpler mornings, not too long ago. They sat together and chatted as they ate breakfast. They read the newspaper and competed only with the television for the attention of their two teenage sons.
That was so last century. Today, Gude wakes at around 6 am to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.
The new routine quickly became a source of conflict in the family, with Ms Gude complaining that technology was eating into family time. But ultimately even she partially succumbed, cracking open her laptop after breakfast.
“Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” she said, “like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms.”
Technology has shaken up plenty of life’s routines, but for many people it has completely altered the once predictable rituals at the start of the day.
This is morning in America is the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.
“It used to be that you woke up, went to the bathroom, maybe brushed your teeth and picked up the newspaper,” said Naomi S Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, who has written about technology’s push into everyday life. “But what we do first now has changed dramatically. I’ll be the first to admit: the first thing I do is check my e-mail.”
The Gudes’ sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up. “We use texting as an in-house intercom,” he said. “I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts.” The Gudes recently began shutting their devices down on weekends to account for the decrease in family time.
In other households, the impulse to go online before getting out the door adds an extra layer of chaos to the already discombobulating morning scramble.
Weekday mornings have long been frenetic, disjointed affairs. Now families that used to fight over the shower or the newspaper tussle over access to the lone household computer — or about whether they should be using gadgets at all, instead of communicating with one another.
“They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”
The surge of early risers is reflected in online and wireless traffic patterns. Internet companies that used to watch traffic levels rise only when people booted up at work now see the uptick much earlier.
Arbor Networks, a Boston company that analyses Internet use, says that Web traffic in the United States gradually declines from midnight to around 6 am on the East Coast and then gets a huge morning caffeine jolt. “It’s a rocket ship that takes off at 7 am,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.
Akamai, which helps sites like Facebook and Amazon keep up with visitor demand, says traffic takes off even earlier, at around 6 am on the East oast. Verizon Wireless reported the number of text messages sent between 7 and 10 am jumped by 50 percent in July, compared with a year earlier.
Both adults and children have good reasons to wake up and log on. Mom and Dad might need to catch up on e-mail from colleagues in different time zones. Children check text messages and Facebook posts from friends with different bedtimes — and sometime forget their chores in the process.
In May, Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, NJ, bought her 14-year-old daughter, Moriah, an Apple laptop for her birthday. In the weeks after, Moriah missed the school bus three times and went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside. Moriah concedes that she neglected the bus and dog, and blames Facebook, where the possibility that crucial updates from friends might be waiting draws her online as soon as she wakes. “I have some friends that are up early and chatting,” she said. “There is definitely a pull to check it.”
Some families have tried to set limits on Internet use in the mornings. James Steyer,
founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that deals with children and entertainment, wakes every morning at 6 and spends the next hour on his BlackBerry, managing e-mail from contacts in different parts of the world.
But when he meets his wife, Liz, and their four children, ages 5 to 16, at the breakfast table, no laptops or phones are allowed.
James Steyer says he and his sons feel the temptation of technology early. Kirk, 14, often runs through much of his daily one-hour allotment of video-game time in the morning. Even Jesse, 5, has started asking each morning if he can play games on his father’s iPhone.
And James Steyer said he constantly feels the tug of waiting messages on his BlackBerry, even during morning hours that are reserved for family time.
“You have to resist the impulse. You have to switch from work mode to parenting mode,” Steyer said. “But meeting my own standard is tough.” .
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For today’s graduate, statistics is the rule | | The New York Times |
The rising stature of statisticians is a byproduct of explosion of digital data, says Steve Lohr |
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 At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.
“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.
Now Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.
Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyse and make sense of the data.”
The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analysing sensor and location data to optimise the handling of food shipments.
Even the recently ended Netflix contest, which offered $1 million to anyone who could significantly improve the company’s movie recommendation system, was a battle waged with the weapons of modern statistics.
Though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis. Computing and numerical skills, experts say, matter far more than degrees. So the new data sleuths come from backgrounds like economics, computer science and mathematics. They are certainly welcomed in the White House these days. “Robust, unbiased data are the first step toward addressing our long-term economic needs and key policy priorities,” Peter R Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared in a speech in May. Later that day, Orszag confessed in a blog entry that his talk on the importance of statistics was a subject “near to my (admittedly wonkish) heart.” IBM, seeing an opportunity in data-hunting services, created a Business Analytics and Optimisation Services group in April. The unit will tap the expertise of the more than 200 mathematicians, statisticians and other data analysts in its research labs — but that number is not enough. IBM plans to retrain or hire 4,000 more analysts across the company.
In another sign of the growing interest in the field, an estimated 6,400 people are attending the statistics profession’s annual conference in Washington this week, up from around 5,400 in recent years, according to the American Statistical Association.
The attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital.
But their rapt exchanges were filled with talk of randomisation, parameters, regressions and data clusters. The data surge is elevating a profession that traditionally tackled less visible and less lucrative work, like figuring out life expectancy rates for insurance companies.
Grimes, 32, got her doctorate in statistics from Stanford in 2003 and joined Google later that year. She is now one of many statisticians in a group of 250 data analysts. She uses statistical modeling to help improve the company’s search technology.
For example, Grimes worked on an algorithm to fine-tune Google’s crawler software, which roams the Web to constantly update its search index. The model increased the chances that the crawler would scan frequently updated Web pages and make fewer trips to more static ones.
The goal, Grimes explained, is to make tiny gains in the efficiency of computer and network use. “Even an improvement of a percent or two can be huge, when you do things over the millions and billions of times we do things at Google,” she said.
It is the size of the data sets on the Web that opens new worlds of discovery.
Traditionally, social sciences tracked people’s behaviour by interviewing or surveying them. “But the Web provides this amazing resource for observing how millions of people interact,” said Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist and social networking researcher at
Cornell.
For example, in research just published, Kleinberg and two colleagues followed the flow of ideas across cyberspace. They tracked 1.6 million news sites and blogs during the 2008 presidential campaign, using algorithms that scanned for phrases associated with news topics like “lipstick on a pig.”
The Cornell researchers found that, generally, the traditional media leads and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. But a handful of blogs were quickest to quotes that later gained wide attention.
The rich lode of Web data, experts warn, has its perils. Its sheer volume can easily overwhelm statistical models. Statisticians also caution that strong correlations of data do not necessarily prove a cause-and-effect link.
For example, in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks, according to David Alan Grier, a historian and statistician at George Washington University. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association, Grier said.
If the data explosion magnifies longstanding issues in statistics, it also opens up new frontiers.“The key is to let computers do what they are good at, which is trawling these massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd,” said Daniel Gruhl, an IBM researcher whose recent work includes mining medical data to improve treatment. “And that makes it easier for humans to do what they are good at — explain those anomalies.”
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E-Utilities |
| Quotepad
Quotpad, a handy notepad for Windows, is different. It is a good alternative if you don’t need a larger notes organizer, like Evernote. It saves the text selected on the screen without forgetting its source. Just select some text in any application, press Ctrl+Shift+Q and the selected text will be saved to QuotePad together with the URL of the webpage(?) it was copied from. Features Include: Reminders, Quick filtering, Automatic backup, Multilanguage interface, Time stamping, Checklist, and print. PrintQuotepad docks to the side of your screen as a thin vertical line. QuotePad runs under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 and has a multilingual interface. It can be downloaded at http://quotepad.info/downloads/quotepad.zip. A help file can be browsed at http://quotepad.info/help/
PicPick
PicPick could prove useful to software developers, graphic designers and home users. It is a all-in-one design tool with a plethora of features which include: Captures - Full Screen (Support for Dual Monitors). Active Window, Window Control (Scroll a page automatically), Region, Fixed Region, FreeHand, and Repeat Last Capture; Image Editor - similar to Microsoft Paint, but you can do more, provides an effect like selection opacity, blur, sharpen, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, flip, rotate and etc; Color Picker; Color Palette; Magnifier; Pixel Ruler; Protractor; Crosshair, and Whiteboard. PicPick with an intuitive interface, is a portable ware, so doesn’t need any installation. The 1.21 MB PicPick (27 Jul 2009) for Win XP/2003/Vista/Windows7 can be downloaded at http://picpick.wiziple.net/picpick_inst.exe.
Flock
Flock is a browser designed to enhance the active online social user’s experience. Managing multiple social networks, web mail, media, news feeds and blogs, is no more a hassle. With Flock you can instantly discover, enjoy and share the relationships and content. It has the capability to let you ‘broadcast’ to multiple locations at once, eliminating duplicate effort. Posting and promoting your own blogs into Facebook is effortless, just drag and drop content and ask Flock to do the rest. You can download Flock at http://www.flock.com/download
Easy Time Control
Easy Time Control offers workforce management solution to fit any size budget and organisation. It can be a good choice for small to medium sized organizations which are looking for an affordable time and attendance solution. Recent Changes incorporated include: Job Costing - Recalculate Employee Hours - Export - Logging - Users and Roles - Daily/Weekly overtimes - Overtime Approval - Auto Punches - Wizards - Offers major time tracking features. To try it out you can download the 31 MB Easy Time Control v5.2.127 (9 Jul, 09) for WinXP, Windows 2000, 2003, Vista Starter, and Vista at http://www.easytimecontrol.com/download-time-control-program.asp
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DH reader Vani wrote:
Is there a way to find out whether my computer’s hardware will work with Windows 7.
DH suggested:
To check out whether your computer will work with Windows 7 you could download Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor at http://snipurl.com/windows7upgradeadvisor.
5 Aug 2009
| Home, smart home | | V R Raman |
The humble house will be transformed into a media hub with intelligent devices, reports V R Raman |
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 Let’s leave our bricik and mortar homes and move into digital homes. Your humble home will soon be transformed into a digital and media and entertainment hub. All appliances will be intelligent, transforming your experience by having things work radically simple, together.
In the forefront of this revolution is HP which believes that every analog process will eventually become digital, virtual, mobile and personalised.
Says Balu Doraisamy, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, HP Asia Pacific & Japan: “Soon all activity will become services.” The trend, according to him, is to deliver services “wherever, however and whenever you need them”.
HP officials say that the cost of digitising a home is subject to the extent of adoption. For instance, if a consumer were to implement a digital home on a draft standard, then the cost and ease of interconnection among appliances could be high and more complex.
According to HP officials, the International Telecommunication Union, along with over 20 industry players ranging from manufacturers, chipset makers and consumer electronics companies, have created homeGrid G.hn in collaboration towards standradising home network technologies.
By developing a worldwide standard using a unified MAC/PHY for coaxial, phone line and powerline networking, ITU G.hn enables operators to deploy home networks most effectively.
Besides, it enables consumer electronics manufacturers to develop cost-effective connected home equipment for the worldwide market; consumers also get a range of interoperable products.
ITU HomeGridG.hn also has a working agreement with ratified standards such as the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA). DLNA began in 2003 when a collection of companies from around the world agreed on compatible products.
HP officials believe that efforts like this will ensure that the barrier to entry to the digital home will be somewhat lower and much simpler.
What will a digitised world look like, say, for the housewife, the executive, the student and children?
The unfolding vision is a world where services meet the physical world, where humans are mobile, devices and services are context-aware, and everything has a web presence, say HP officials. Technology will transform the user experience by making things work radically simple, in concert.
A visit to HP’s Cooltown in Singapore recently provided a fascinating peek into tomorrow’s digital world. Set up in late 2001, the innovation centre provides practical demonstrations of HP technologies for those looking for insight and inspiration.
Cooltown provides glimpses of the products that not only cover full Enterprise IT
hardware and software but also most of the consumer technologies to make up the DNA of a full digital lifestyle at home and work. Two significant areas where HP will lead the way to your digital home are: HP Procurve: Home networking infrastructure (switches, routers, wireless access points and firewalls).
Personal systems: Media storage servers, PCs, notebooks, TouchSmart PCs and imaging and printing products.
Cooltown also showcases the use of Radio-frequency identification (RFID) at home.
According to an HP official, with RFID, an internet of things will be created where products have an identity and you know where they are and it would be possible for one to know what to do with them.
Apart from creating a revolution in supply chain management, it can bring in many innovative applications in the home: an RFID-enabled washer or microwave that will make them intelligent, for instance. Asked about India’s contribution to HP’s tech strides, officials said the conglomerate has a lab in India which has come up with successful products like the Gesture-based Keyboard and Script Mail.
Several HP entities in India have collaborations with leading educational institutions including the IISc and the IITs. HP Labs India has many ongoing collaborations with Indian universities as part of the worldwide focus on open innovation.
According to HP officials, it has strong relationships with IITs, especially IIT Bombay, in areas of web-enabled technologies and quantitative search queries. There is a strong network on multimodal interactions and there are numerous universities such as all the IITs, the IIITs, IDC Mumbai, NID Bangalore and Ahmedabad which are working closely with HP Labs on this.
For image processing work there are very good linkages with the IISc. There are special arrangements with IIIT Bangalore and BITS Pilani for PhD sponsorships too.
HP Halo
HP has unveiled its state-of-the-art telepresence solution that brings those attending meetings from around the globe into an environment that gives the feeling of being in the same room.
Designed by DreamWorks Animation in alliance with HP, Halo runs on a private network designed specifically for video collaboration.
CloudPrint
The web services-based technology provides mobile users the ability to easily print documents, presentations, reports and photos to the nearest network printer — in the office or on the road. Sridhar Solur, one of the key brains behind the project, said from London via Halo that the service is “printer-agnostic and driverless, requiring only simple internet access.
The facility is available on Blackberry phones. A whole lot of regulatory and participatory issues need sorting out before CloudPrint turns into a torrent.
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E-Utilities |
CurrPorts displays a list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. |
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Clipbox
Clipboard helps to view clipboard history. It is a free, open-source clipboard utility for Windows, a simple tool with minimal resource usage. It holds text that you have copied, writes to disk immediately on copying, works well with large chunks of text, removes duplicates. The advantage of writing to disk is that you can recover copied data whenever you need it. ClipBox works alongside the regular windows clipboard and remembers every piece of data, even dozens of them. ClipBox Pro can handle many screen capture tasks, allowing you to capture the whole screen or any area of screen. The 119.9 KB Clpbox free edition (Clipbox-0.1-bin.zip), v5, can be downloaded at http://snipurl.com/clipbox. It is portable software and does not require installation.
CurrPorts
CurrPorts displays a list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. It provides details related to Process Name and ID, Protocol, Local Port Local Port Name and address, Remote Port, Remote Address, Remote Host Name, State, Process Path, Product Name, File Description and version, Company, Process Created On, User Name, Process Services, Process Attributes, Added On, Module Filename, Remote IP Country, and Window Title. CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file , XML file, or to tab-delimited text file. CurrPorts automatically marks with pink color suspicious TCP/UDP ports owned by unidentified applications (applications without version information and icons). You can download CurrPorts at http://nirsoft.net/utils/cports.zip. Please note CurrPorts and IPNetInfo, the utility which follows, work best when both programs are in the same folder.
IPNetInfo
IPNetInfo is a small utility to retrieve IP Address from the message headers. It can displays the information about these IP addresses. Information along with the owner of the IP address, the country/state name, IP addresses range, contact information (address, phone, fax, and email), and more. This utility can be very useful to find out the origin of unsolicited mail – simply copy the message headers from your email software and paste them into IPNetInfo utility. IPNetInfo v1.19 can be downloaded at http://nirsoft.net/utils/ipnetinfo.zip.
Chameleon
As many viruses, trojans, bloated softwares tend to reside in the start up items it would be prudent to watch the StartUp Menu carefully. However, choosing which one to load or not at Windows start up is not an easy task. Chameleon, a start up manager, is a good one at that. Chameleon Startup Manager controls programs that run at Windows startup. Chameleon makes it easy for users to find out more idetails about these files/applications/programmes, and what they do. There are three versions of Chameleon, the free Lite one and the non-free Standard and Pro ones, for everyday use the lite one should be just fine. It can be downloaded at http://www.chameleon-managers.com/files/cstartup_freeware.exe
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Serendipity, lost in the digital deluge | | Damon Darlin, The New York Times |
A sneak peek at the bookshelves, CDs and video collections of a person helped shed light on the owner’s tastes and discover something we never knew we wanted to find, says Damon Darlin |
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 We’ve gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free.
But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity.
When we walk into other people’s houses, we peruse their bookshelves, look at their CD cases and sneak a peek at their video collections (better that than their medicine cabinets).
It gives us a measure of the owner’s quirky tastes and, more often than not, we find a singer, a musician or a documentary we’d never known before.
But CDs have disappeared inside the iPod. And shelves of videos are rarely seen as we get discs in the mail from Netflix or downloaded from Vudu. And, one day soon, book collections may end up inside a Kindle. With an e-book reader, the person on the subway seat across from you will never know what you are reading.
Ah, the techies say, no worries. We have Facebook and Twitter, spewing a stream of suggestions about what to read, hear, see and do. We come to depend on it to lead us to the funny article on TheOnion.com or the roving food cart serving goat curry. It’s useful.
But that isn’t serendipity. It’s really group-think. Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted. We are discovering what everyone else is learning, and usually from people we have selected because they share our tastes. It won’t deliver that magic moment of discovery that we imagine occurred when Elvis Presley first heard the blues, or when Michael Jackson followed Fred Astaire’s white spats across the dance floor.
And there is just too much information. We can have thousands of people sending us suggestions each day — some useful, some not. We have to read them, sort them and act upon them. As we pay for them with our time, the human need for surprise presents an opportunity for new businesses. Can someone sort the information and provide the relevant thoughts to the specific person who doesn’t yet know he needs it? Facebook is providing some tools to subdivide friend lists, so posts from the cat-video coterie won’t interfere when you’re jousting with political-news fanatics.
An entire ecosystem has been built up around Twitter in an attempt to cash in on its popularity and its unwieldiness. Services like TweetRiver, Tweepular, TweetSum, TwitZap, TwitHive, Tweenky, Tweetree, Splitweet and CoTweet, to name just a few, have proliferated in order to manage the incoming information.
Twitter itself has bought a few of them. This week, it redesigned its site around the search engine of one such company. And the reason for the redesign was mainly to give its users tools that encourage serendipity.
Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, wrote to the Twitterati, “Repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events and sources of information.”
Still, those are solutions for information management, not for encouraging welcome randomness. It probably won’t help the quirky new television show or a new blog find an audience.
Many software developers are trying to recreate serendipity.
StumbleUpon is a Web service that steers users toward content they are likely to find interesting.
Readers tell the service about their professional interests or hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them. It’s a good try, but it is still telling readers what they want to know.
UrbanSpoon, one of the most popular applications for the iPhone, tries for randomness with a slot-machine widget. Shake the phone and three dials — for location, cuisine and price — spin to find a random restaurant.
It gets about a million shakes a day, said Ethan Lowry, one of the co-founders of the company, which is based in Seattle and now owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp.
“It was designed with a real serendipity problem in mind,” he said, recalling that his friends were once heading for the same old place for lunch when he held up his cellphone and said, “Imagine if you shook this like a Magic 8 Ball and it gave you an answer.”
For them, it was one of those magic moments because they identified a need that demanded a new business. “You get bored. It gets itchy and gets worse over time,”
Lowry said. “You want a new experience.”
But a funny thing happens with frequent users of the application. They start relying on its search engine or the “Talk of the Town” feature, an algorithm that generates suggestions that uncannily echo local sentiment. The algorithm is high-tech crowdsourcing, substituting for the serendipity that customers are seeking. We’ll have to keep hoping that someone chances upon the solution.
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DH reader Rangarajan wrote:
Can you suggest a utility to save searh processes as clickable links?
DH suggested:
You could try Search Pad (Beta), a note-taking application that automatically tracks and organises sites you find on Yahoo! Search. For more details visit http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/searchpad/
29 Jul 2009
| Virtualisation makes automation a reality |
Automation is the next step in the evolutionary chain writes Manjunath Kashi |
|  The recent global meltdown has impacted most sectors, markets and countries around the world. With uncertainty about the depth and duration of the economic slowdown, companies are crafting survival strategies for their businesses. As a result CIOs are being forced to slash their IT budgets and optimise IT infrastructure to save costs and increase efficiency. Organisations are opting to leverage their existing IT resources to maximise business efficiency. This has accelerated the demand for versatile computing that can manage multiple applications and servers running at the right time, with the right capacity to support the business.
Previously, capacity was increased by simply adding new server hardware, but this resulted in a ‘server sprawl’ - an inefficient set-up of multiple servers with low utilisation rates, requiring enormous resources and consuming vast amounts of greenhouse-gas producing power. Now Organisations are looking for ways to make their IT infrastructure do more.
Why virtualisation?
Initially, virtualisation on its own was touted as the way to combat server sprawl. The virtualisation and consolidation of servers can improve physical server utilisation rates. But CIOs still have the complex challenge of ensuring the right applications are running at the right time with the right capacity to support the business.
It is the increased automation possible in a virtualised server environment is the key to managing IT infrastructure in a way that supports the real demands of the business. virtualisation was the first step to solving capacity constraints, now automation addresses the management constraints.
Moving towards automation – from conscious to subconscious The complexity of managing modern IT infrastructure without automation is like the human body operating without the intervention of the conscious brain to pick up an object. Similarly, automating a business’s IT infrastructure to run the critical and mundane aspects of IT management will allow it to effortlessly, quickly and seamlessly respond to changes.
An automatic infrastructure can rapidly change servers, applications, connectivity to network and storage needs of the system. It can re-purpose machines according to the real-time demands of the business and enable capacity to be “dialled up” or “dialled down”.
What makes automated infrastructure reliable is its ability to bring up a failed server on new hardware, with the same network and storage access within minutes. This process is augmented without making any changes to physical machine, cable, LAN connection or SAN access.Fortunately, we are now at the stage where automation tools and expertise is available. While mainframes have been automated for some time, the Wintel environment has become increasingly standardised, making the processes more consistent and suited to automation. For instance, some of the biggest issues in the data centre are around managing patches, capacity and security. By identifying underlying consistent process and variables upfront, many of these processes can be automated to negate the need for constant human intervention. This frees up resources and funds to invest in other areas of business. This is bound to become increasingly relevant in India as small and mid-sized companies gradually expand and diversify.
In automated infrastructure, powerful workflow automation and management systems with strict policy control can:
*Allocate resources to the applications and users that need them automatically in real-time
*Continually monitor service levels to ensure business performance is on target
nProvide a dynamic, on-demand environment, with support for the industry's leading virtualisation, provisioning and re-purposing tools; and
*Support major third-party servers, software, and devices
The ultimate business dashboard
On the governance side, the CIO will have tools to monitor and report on the performance of the automated infrastructure, its applications and services, and to set policy and demand planning. These governance tools will enable them to view and manage the IT infrastructure by creating composite applications based on business priorities and activities, such as payroll, accounts, and online sales. In collaboration with other components of the automated infrastructure, they can dynamically change the infrastructure to respond to changing business conditions.
In conclusion
Automation is the next step in the evolutionary chain, enabling technology to help drive growth, innovation and profitability. This will enhance cultural change within Organisations as constraints are removed and management can drive innovation and growth knowing that IT can respond to the ever changing priorities of the business. The technology underpinning automation is actually available today, although it will become increasingly sophisticated in the coming years. As always, adoption will lag the cutting edge capability, but there are early adopters and it is predicted that the techniques will become mainstream in 2010 as the competitive gains reaped by the first movers become apparent.
(The writer is Director, Enterprise Computing Group, Unisys India) |
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| Cyberstop | | NSS |
| DH reader Raghavendra wrote
Please suggest a software to broadcast video clipping live through a webcam.
DH suggested
You could the try the service provided at www.ubroadcast.com to broadcast a LIVE or On Demand channel to a global and interactive audience, via the Internet. |
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| Texting drivers at greater risk of deadly collisions |
Many know the risks of texting while driving and do it anyway, says Matt Richtel |
|  The first study of drivers texting inside their vehicles shows that the risk sharply exceeds previous estimates based on laboratory research—and far surpasses the dangers of other driving distractions.
The new study, which entailed outfitting the cabs of long-haul trucks with video cameras over 18 months, found that when the drivers texted, their collision risk was 23 times greater than when not texting.
The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which compiled the research and plans to release its findings on Tuesday, also measured the time drivers took their eyes from the road to send or receive texts. In the moments before a crash or near crash, drivers typically spent nearly five seconds looking at their devices — enough time at typical highway speeds to cover more than the length of a football field.
Even though trucks take longer to stop and are less maneuverable than cars, the findings generally applied to all drivers, who tend to exhibit the same behaviours as the more than 100 truckers studied, the researchers said. Truckers, they said, do not appear to text more or less than typical car drivers, but they said the study did not compare use patterns that way.
Compared with other sources of driver distraction, “texting is in its own universe of risk,” said Rich Hanowski, who oversaw the study at the institute.
Mr. Hanowski said the texting analysis was financed by $300,000 from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which has the mission of improving safety in trucks and buses. More broadly, the research yielding the results represent a significant logistical undertaking.
The overall cost was $6 million to equip the trucks with video cameras and track them for three million miles as they hauled furniture, frozen foods and other goods across the country.
The final analysis of the data is undergoing peer review before formal publication.
Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech institute, one of the world’s largest vehicle safety research organisations, said the study’s message was clear.
“You should never do this,” he said of texting while driving. “It should be illegal.”
Thirty-six states do not ban texting while driving; 14 do, including Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Jersey. New York legislators have sent a bill to Gov David A Paterson. But legislators in some states have rejected such rules, and elected officials say they need more data to determine whether to ban the activity.
One difficulty in measuring crashes caused by texting drivers—and by drivers talking on phones—is that many police agencies do not collect this data or have not compiled long-term studies. Texting also is a relatively new phenomenon.
The issue has drawn attention after several recent highly publicised crashes caused by texting drivers, including an episode in May involving a trolley car driver in Boston who crashed while texting his girlfriend.
Over all, texting has soared. In December, phone users in the United States sent 110 billion messages, a tenfold increase in just three years, according to the cellular phone industry’s trade group, CTIA.
The results of the Virginia Tech study are buttressed by new laboratory research from the University of Utah. In a study over the last 18 months, college students using a sophisticated driving simulator showed an eight times greater crash risk when texting than when not texting.
That study, which is undergoing peer review and has been submitted for publication in The Journal for Human Factors, also found that drivers took their eyes off the road for around five seconds when texting.
David Strayer, a professor who co-wrote the University of Utah report, offered two explanations for the simulator’s showing lower risks than the Virginia study. Trucks are tougher to maneuver and stop, he noted, and the college students in his study might be somewhat better at multitasking. But the differences in the studies are not the point, Mr. Strayer said. “You’re off the charts in both cases,” he added.
“It’s crazy to be doing it.” At Virginia Tech, researchers said they focused on texting among truckers simply because the trucking study was relatively new and thus better reflected the explosive growth of texting. But another new study from the organisation is focusing on texting among so-called light-vehicle drivers, specifically teenagers.
Preliminary results from that study show risk levels for texters roughly comparable to those of the truck drivers. The formal results of the light-vehicle study should be available later this year. By comparison, several field and laboratory studies show that drivers talking on cellphones are four times more likely to cause a crash than other drivers. And a previous Virginia institute study videotaping car drivers found that they were three times more likely to crash or come close to a crash when dialling a phone and 1.3 times more likely when talking on it.
Researchers focused on distracted driving disagree about whether to place greater value on the results of such a so-called naturalistic study or laboratory studies, which allow the scientists to recreate conditions and measure individual drivers against themselves. But, in the case of texting, laboratory and real-world researchers say the results are significant—from both scientific methodologies, texting represents a much greater risk to drivers than other distractions.
A new poll shows that many drivers know the risks of texting while driving — and do it anyway. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety plans on Tuesday to publish polling data that show that 87 per cent of people consider drivers texting or e-mailing to pose a “very serious” safety threat (roughly equal to the 90 per cent who consider drunken drivers a threat).
Of the 2,501 drivers surveyed this spring, 95 percent said that texting was unacceptable behaviour. Yet 21 per cent of drivers said they had recently texted or e-mailed while driving.
About half of drivers 16 to 24 said they had texted while driving, compared with 22 per cent of drivers 35 to 44. “It’s convenient,” said Robert Smith, 22, a recent college graduate in Windham, Me. He says he regularly texts and drives even though he recognises that it is a serious risk. He would rather text, he said, than take time on a phone call.
“I put the phone on top of the steering wheel and text with both thumbs,” he said, adding that he often has exchanges of 10 messages or more. Sometimes, “I’ll look up and realise there’s a car sitting there and swerve around it.”Smith, who was not part of the AAA survey, said he was surprised by the findings in the new research about texting. “I’m pretty sure that someday it’s going to come back to bite me,” he said of his behaviour.
The New York Times |
E-Utilites | | N S Soundar Rajan |
Moovida is a free open source media player for Windows and Linux. |
| | TreePad
TreePad Lite, a small personal database program, lets you store notes, e-mails, texts and hyperlinks in multiple databases, instead of storing in a large number of separate documents. All data is found in ‘articles’; an article is a text shown in the right pane of the program window. Any article is found in a ‘node’, the most basic part of the tree (left pane). Find 465 KB Treepad lite or TreePad Asia, which supports non-western / Asian fonts for Windows, at http://www.treepad.com/download/#tplitewin, and for Linux at http://www.treepad.com/download/#tplitelx
Moovida
Moovida is a free open source media player for Windows and Linux. It
brings you movies, videos, TV shows, music, tunes and photos, all of them gathered at one place. Moovida supports HD and almost all file formats like divX, mkv, flv, h264, mov and ogg. The features can be viewed at http://www.moovida.com/features/. The 34573 KB Moovida v1.0.5 for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7
can be downloaded at http://www.moovida.com/download/moovida/windows/moovida-mediacenter-1.0.5.exe. Moovida for Linux can be downloaded at http://www.moovida.com/download/. FAQ at http://www.moovida.com/faq/ TubeMaster++
GgSofts’s TubeMaster++ is a useful tool to capture multimedia files being watched or listened to at YouTube, DailyMotion, MySpace, Google Videos, LastFM, Deezer, Jiwa, and Songza,. The files—FLV,MP3,MP4—can be saved directly onto a computer / converted to other popular video or audio formats like AVI, MPEG, MP3, MP4, WAV, WMA, MOV, Ipod, PSP, Blackberry, Neuros, Palm, and others. Search engines have been integrated to find videos or audio (mp3) files directly from the application. The 7111 KB TubeMaster++ , v1.1,for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 can be downloaded at http://tubemaster.free.fr/setup_tm++.exe. LibPcap (WinPcap for Windows) required to help capture with TubeMaster++.
Inkscape
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics (SVG) editor. It has capabilities similar to applications like Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or or Xara.
Inkscape also imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats. The 36.4 MB Inkscape for Windows, stable version: 0.46 , can be downloaded at http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/files/inkscape/0.46/Inkscape-0.46.win32.exe/download. Inkscape FAQ at http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ, and Inkscape tutorials at http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com
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22 July 2009
| Super Twitter: The virtual Internet revolution | | The Guardian |
Twitter reflects a modern world where things happen with amazing speed, writes Bobbie Johnson |
|  Twitter is the hottest Internet startup on the planet. Over the last few months, the messaging service it provides has morphed from a social networking tool into an instrument of revolution. So what’s life like for the 52 employees at its San Francisco headquarters?
It’s a sunny, breezy afternoon in San Francisco, and I’ve just stepped inside the offices of one of the city’s many, many web companies. Indeed, the first thing you notice is how much the large, open space looks just like any other dotcom. To one side there’s a huge flatscreen TV that staff can use to play videogames during their breaks; in one corner stands a lonely red British telephone box; a pair of life-sized, green plastic deer stand in another, for no discernible reason. It definitely has all the hallmarks of a web startup.
It’s so quiet that it feels like it could be the weekend—the only real noise is the murmur coming from a trio of workers, laptops out, sitting on a sofa in the corner. But behind the calm lies the astonishing truth: the staff here are holding up the systems behind the world’s hottest internet startup. They are responsible for a sprawling website on which 35 million people from all over the world fire out vast numbers of messages every second. This isn’t just any normal office. This is Twitter.
Right now, the company’s 52 employees are part of the biggest media story on the planet. Their online messaging service—which encourages people to share their thoughts with the world in short, bite-sized morsels—has rocketed into the public consciousness over the past year.
It began as the kind of thing a hip young iPhoner would do, then won endorsements from people such as Stephen Fry and Oprah—who knew celebrities would want to let their fans know every time they left the house?—and then, most extraordinarily, it began to play a role in times of extreme crisis, getting information out of countries such as Iran and China where the authorities were tightly controlling the news. And to top it all, this amazing journey—from plaything to instrument of social change—seems to have happened in a matter of months.
How does it feel to be at the heart of all that? “It’s a little bit like being in the eye of the storm,” says Biz Stone, one of the company’s co-founders. “It’s not hectic per se.”
I am meeting Stone—an amiable 36-year-old designer who is now the company’s creative director—to try to understand what life at Twitter has become since the team first started working on it early in 2006.
New messaging system
Back then, everything seemed like a happy accident: the team was working on a different project called Odeo—a set of tools for podcasters. It was making slow progress, but during a brainstorming session, programmer Jack Dorsey came up with an unrelated idea: a quickfire messaging system that helped people share information with groups of friends using their mobile phone.
Chief executive Evan Williams and Stone —10-year dotcom veterans—knew they were on to a winner: within a year, the podcasting company was being sold off and the team was concentrating full-time on Twitter. The idea was simple: to build a website that let someone tell their friends what they were doing.
What’s most strange about the calm in this office today is that it is such a polar opposite to the frenzied activity on the website they have created. At any given moment, millions of people are sending messages from their computers or mobile phones, or reading the messages left by others. Twitter lets you choose who you want to keep up with; they, in turn, can choose whether to listen back. The conversations are largely held in the open, allowing anyone to point to somebody’s messages or rebroadcast ones that are interesting, funny or (in the case of Iran) important.
Easy to use
Twitter is many things to many people, but most of all it is lightweight, easy to use and transparent. Its swirl of activity is like a huge party full of hundreds of conversations you can tap into—not, like Facebook, an exclusive club where you need to know the right people to join in. All of this makes it catnip to users—and to the media, which dutifully reports every twist and turn on the site. “We have to stay focused on what we’re working on and not to get too caught up in the spotlight,” says Stone. “There’s a knowledge that these things go up, and they come down again. No matter what, we’ll just keep working on trying to make Twitter better ...we like to have fun and stay humble.”
It’s an admirable sentiment, but the company can’t quite ignore its current status. It has courted the celebrity world to an extent (in one meeting room, there’s a photograph of rap mogul Sean “P Diddy” Combs, taken in the building’s lift one day after he turned up to express his gratitude and excitement). And Twittermania has led to a sequence of high-profile moments in which they have mixed with some of the world’s most famous and powerful people. Notably, there was an appearance on Oprah for Williams, who also spent the last week with Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at the Sun Valley conference—a notorious deal-making hangout for the media industry’s biggest players.
Stone, meanwhile, has seen his face splashed across numerous magazines and was recently the star guest on The Colbert Report—the spoof chat show that is adored by millions of savvy young Americans. Does the attention get too much? Or worse, does it become intoxicating?
“They are definitely memorable moments,” says Stone. “I happen to be a huge fan of Colbert, so when I was sitting there at the table watching him before he came over to interview me, I was thinking, I’m watching Colbert, he’s funny. And then suddenly I realised I’m not watching, I’m on the show.” Part of his job, he says, is to try to help everyone at the company keep these things in perspective—making sure that Twitter does not become a gang of egotists who gloat over their status as part of the Next Big Thing, but instead maintains a “general level-headed, unassuming, humble, humourous, funny atmosphere”.
He says: “We focus a lot on culture specifically at Twitter because of this spotlight. We don’t want to end up like the child actor who found success early and grew up all weird and freaky. We want to remain OK; just because we found success early and in many ways got lucky doesn’t mean we’re all a bunch of geniuses. It means what it means.”
This all means that staying simple and understated is not an accident, but a philosophy. As a result, no one in the team could be described as flashy: Stone, like most of the company’s employees dresses in the uniform of new media—T-shirt, carefully messed-up hair and black-rimmed glasses.
Of course Twitter doesn’t actually make proper money right now. It does have $55m in the bank, though, from a variety of investors, which is being spent on propping up the service and its growing staff.
Focus on audience
Twitter is concentrating on building up a large audience with the idea that the cash and profits will eventually follow. With so much money in the bank, Twitter does have breathing room, though—and major ambitions. “There are 4 billion mobile phone users in the world that are all carrying around with them Twitter-ready devices,” he says.
“It can be very transformative when you realise that people can have access to this real-time network when all they have is a cellphone,” he adds. The team tries to concentrate on keeping things running smoothly, not interfering. If enough people talk about something it bubbles to the top of Twitter’s hot topics—a list that lets users see what everyone else is talking about.
Stone points to the success of companies who use the service to communicate with customers—whether it is big names offering discounts or smaller businesses who send messages to customers telling them about the latest products. “Think about that with a street vendor in India, asking, ‘If I get a watermelon, will you buy it?’ There’s a transformative power in SMS that’s extremely inspiring for us, and we’re going to bring that online worldwide.” Suddenly it’s not just about searching for information; it’s about letting the news find you—offering people anywhere the chance to get their messages out to anyone who is interested.
Humble beginnings
That world-spanning vision is certainly a long way from where the company’s founders started out. Williams, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, dropped out of college and packed his bags for Silicon Valley. Stone, a Massachusetts native, also quit university to take up a design apprenticeship. Dorsey grew up in Missouri and moved to California, ending up working for a taxi dispatching company in Oakland.
None of them were obvious candidates for success—but Stone says part of their inspiration comes courtesy of people with similar global drive: Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is “super-smart”, he says, and he also lauds Barack Obama.
“One of the things I like so much about President Obama is his vision that it’s not a zero-sum game, where one country is going to win the game of earth. That fits with Twitter.” And Twitter doesn’t just admire Obama; it played a part in the election campaign as his team used the service to send out messages to hundreds of thousands of supporters.
Speed
“Something unbelievable happens every week,” he says. “Things do get increasingly weird as we become part of a global stage. It’s intimidating, but it’s a great opportunity.” In the grand scheme of things, he says, Twitter is just one part of a larger movement in which Google, Facebook, the mobile phone industry and the internet all play a part. How does Twitter compare to any of the previous startups that he’s worked at, I ask.
“Everything about Twitter goes faster,” Stone says. “It’s grown faster, we move faster... any decision you think we’re going to need to make two years from now, we’ll probably have to make it tomorrow.” That, he suggests, reflects modern life—a world where we expect things to happen with increasing speed. Perhaps, after all, Twitter is not just a symptom of a jump to light speed—but also a participant in taking us there. Biz Stone smiles. |
Yahoo unveils revamped home page | | The New York Times |
The page will have more status updates from various social networks, says Miguel Helft |
| After multiple rounds of testing and nearly a year of painstaking development, Yahoo is unveiling a thoroughly overhauled home page, a major step in the struggling company’s efforts to remake itself for users, advertisers and investors.
The outlines of Yahoo’s approach to redesigning the most popular home page on the Internet have long been known. The company has said time and again that it wanted to provide something of a dashboard that offered its users a view not only into their favourite Yahoo content and services, but also into third-party applications and sites that they use frequently, like Facebook, eBay or Gmail. The idea was also to make it easy for users to customise that experience. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and former chief executive, had described the goal as making Yahoo into a “starting point” for users on the Web. In the Carol Bartz regime, the preferred catchphrase appears to be putting Yahoo at the “centre point of people’s lives online.” That’s how Tapan Bhat, a senior vice president at Yahoo who oversees the home page, put it in an interview.
But the specifics of the redesigned Yahoo.com have changed several times, and the final release, which remains in “beta” testing, appears to have taken some elements in a new direction. Perhaps the most singular feature is how Yahoo integrates third-party applications and sites into its home page. Those applications, which are chosen by users, appear in a right-hand rail called My Favorites. When users hover over one of them with their mouse, a preview of that application, be it their Facebook page, the front page of The New York Times, or their Gmail in-box, pops up. That makes Yahoo.com an easy way for users to check in with their favourite services.
In early tests, some executives complained that the third-party apps took traffic—and with it, revenue opportunities—away from Yahoo. Now Yahoo is including targeted ads in the preview window.
Yahoo’s home page receives massive amounts of traffic, Bhat said. “The thing that has been missing is context and brand advertisers want to buy context,” he said. “The contextual advertising in the My Favorites area starts giving us chance to do that.” Yahoo users will be able pick My Favorites apps from a list of more than 65 apps. They will also be able to create new apps for sites that are not included in that list. Yahoo promises that it will soon make it easy for users to keep their PC and mobile selections in sync. Other features of the new home page include more personalised news and “status” updates from various social networks like Facebook and MySpace.
Bhat said the overhaul represents “the most fundamental change to the home page in Yahoo’s history.” He said the company was trying to walk a middle road between sites that broadcast a single home page to all their users — the old Yahoo.com or a newspaper home page — and services that allow users to customise their experience, like My Yahoo or iGoogle.
User tests show that a growing number of people say they like a custom experience, but the number who bother to program their home page remains relatively low, Bhat said. The new home page will not be imposed on users automatically — at least not yet. Bhat called it an “opt-in beta,” meaning that users will have to click on a link to select the new design. The new home page will be available in the US on Tuesday, and in France, Britain and India later in the week, with other countries to follow next month. |
E-Utilites |
Inquisitor can help speed up your web search. Once installed Inquisitor replaces the search bar |
|  HJSplit
HJSplit is a file-splitting and joining program. As a splitter HJSplit can split files of any type and size. To execute the programme just click on hjsplit.exe. It lets you split a large file into smaller chunks, which can be much more easily sent and stored. It can even handle files which are larger than 10Gb—can split the file into 640 Mb parts. HJSplit can join these split parts, so that the original file is restored. HJSplit can also be run directly from a floppy or CD-Rom. The 335kb HJSplit v2.4 for Windows 2000/2003/XP can be downloaded at www.freebytesoftware.com/download/hjsplit.zip.
Inquisitor
Inquisitor can help speed up your web search. Once installed Inquisitor replaces the search bar. It gives several configuration options, which include - Auto-complete settings, Instant result setting, Display count, and choice of Search Engine—The default search engine is Yahoo, but, can also be set to Google. The website result search will cease to work—only keyword suggestions can be viewed in the dropdown list. Inquisitor is compatible with Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, 8.
It works with Mac, PC and iPhone. It can be downloaded at http://www.inquisitorx.com/ie/index_en.php
System Spec
System Spec provides system information related to your PC. These include: Windows Version, Memory (Ram), CPU Information, CPU Speed, Sound card, Display Adapter, Monitors, Screen Resolution, Network Connection, Network Adapters, CD / DVD Drives, COM Ports, LPT Ports, Hard disks, USB Controllers, Manufacturer, Product Make, Serial Number, Mouse, Battery Status, BIOS Info, Motherboard, Modem, plus lots more system information in the sub sections such as Memory, Display, Startup, BIOS, Services, Processes, CPU Meter, Internet, Personal, Sound, Network Adapters, Network Users, Devices, and others. The 2.54 MB System Spec v2.68 (09-07-09) can be downloaded at http://www.alexnolan.net/software/SysSpec.exe
XMind
On XMind.net you can share your ideas and thoughts with the world. The aim is to bring Web 2.0 concepts on community sharing into a popular desktop application. Just a double-click to create and edit topics anywhere on the map; Drag-and-drop works for reorganising topics, moving markers, taking a mapshot, and adding attachments; carry out a search on a topic with Google and drag images into it.
To brainstorm ideas with selected friends, you would need to upgrade to XMind Pro. The Pro features include: inline presentation, exporting to PDF/Word/PowerPoint and Gantt charts with task topics. |
Cyberstop | | NSS |
Please advise a software to convert the videos taken by Handicam in mpeg2 format, to view it in the Mobile Phone ie Nokia Phone. |
| DH reader Nurani S. Venkatraman wrote
Please advise a software to convert the videos taken by Handicam in mpeg2 format, to view it in the Mobile Phone ie Nokia Phone.
DH suggested
You could try the 14.5 MB Format Factory, a Universal Transcoder, at http://www.formatoz.com/download.html
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15 July 2009
| Bing gives credibility to MS | | The New York Times |
The new search engine has earned praise for the quality of its results, says Miguel Helft |
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 In late May, Microsoft unveiled Bing, its new Internet search engine, in front of an audience of skeptics: technology executives and other digerati who had gathered near San Diego for an industry conference.
To that crowd, Microsoft’s efforts to take on Google and Yahoo in the search business had become something of a laughingstock, and for good reason. Microsoft’s repeated efforts to build a credible search engine had fallen flat, and the company’s market share was near its low.
Six weeks later, Bing has earned Microsoft something the company’s search efforts have lacked: respect.
As a result, analysts say, the once-dubious prospect that Microsoft could shake up the dynamics of the search business, which is worth $12 billion in the United States alone, has become just a bit more likely.
With Google and others trying to challenge Microsoft’s traditional software business, Steven A Ballmer, the chief executive, last year bid a staggering $47.5 billion in an unsuccessful effort to take over Yahoo, the No 2 player in search. That defeat forced Microsoft to redouble its homegrown efforts, leading to the release of Bing. The new service received favourable write-ups from influential reviewers and technology bloggers for the quality of its results, as well as its features and design. Studies showed many people preferred its look and feel to Google’s. Marketing experts said the Bing brand was a good choice that resonated with users.
“They have achieved a degree of respect they haven’t had,” said Danny Sullivan, a veteran search analyst and editor of the industry news site SearchEngineLand. With a tone that suggested surprise, Mr Sullivan added: “They’ve rolled out a product that is good. When people spend time on it, they do like it.”
Anna Patterson, who helped design and build some of the foundations of Google’s search engine and later co-founded Cuil, a search start-up that has yet to attract much of an audience, said: “I think they put together something that is really compelling. They made significant progress.” That is music to the ears of Microsoft’s long-maligned search team, which has watched the company’s market share in search fall by half, to about 8 per cent in May, since it introduced its first search engine in 2005.
“We have had a great start and some good buzz,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for Microsoft’s online audience business group.
“We’re settling in for a big long run.” But if succeeding in search is Microsoft’s Mount Everest, as some executives there have suggested, Bing’s success so far has merely put the company at base camp.
Reports from more than half a dozen companies that measure search and search advertising all point to upticks in Microsoft’s business since the release of Bing. Microsoft said on Monday that its internal numbers showed its search traffic growing 8 per cent in June. (ComScore, whose reports are closely watched, is expected to release figures for June on Tuesday.)
Still, Bing remains a distant third in the search race. It would have to triple its audience to catch Yahoo—and grow eightfold to tie Google, which accounts for 65 per cent of searches in the United States.
Sustaining Bing’s early momentum will be harder for Microsoft after the intense marketing campaign fades.
“It is going to be a difficult and long-term challenge,” said Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks, a subsidiary of IAC that includes the Ask.com search engine. Ask has long been praised for its innovations, and it too spent more than $100 million to market its search engine in 2006 and 2007, yet the company’s small market share has barely budged in recent years.
But analysts say Bing’s solid start gives Microsoft a chance to finally sharpen its assault on the search business. No one suggests that Google faces any immediate threat. With many people using more than one search engine, however, some believe Bing has a shot at dislodging Yahoo as the logical alternative to Google. (Google declined to comment for this article, other than to say in a statement that it takes all competitors seriously.)
“Yahoo doesn’t seem as aggressive as it has been in the past,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup. Mahaney cautioned that whatever gains Bing achieves in the coming months, he still expected Bing to trail Yahoo a year from now. Yahoo disputed Mahaney’s characterisation. Larry Cornett, the company’s vice president for consumer products for search, said in the last year alone, Yahoo had unveiled technologies that allow publishers to better showcase their sites in search results and tools that make it easier to conduct extensive research.
He said other companies were using an innovative Yahoo technology, allowing them to build their own search services, which collectively garner nearly as many queries a day as Microsoft.
“What we have accomplished in the last year shows an incredible commitment and focus,” Cornett said. Other analysts say if Bing can sustain its early gains, it could have another important effect on the industry: Yahoo and Microsoft could be pushed into a search partnership. Since Microsoft dropped its takeover attempt more than a year ago, the two companies have discussed a more limited alliance to take on Google but have been unable to reach an agreement.
The talks continue apace, according to a person briefed on them. “If Bing can have some momentum, I think it makes a deal more likely,” said Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech. Schachter said continued momentum would make Bing a bigger threat and a more attractive partner for Yahoo. For now, Microsoft continues to fight alone, but with more vigour than in years past, according to analysts. Less than a month after Bing’s release, Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo to a hot new area in search: it became the first major search engine to index new postings from popular Twitter users almost immediately. The move helped amplify the buzz around Bing.
“I feel like they are a little more daring,” Sullivan said. “They popped this thing out in a few weeks. That’s very Googley.” |
E-Utilites |
Exl-Plan Free is an Excel-based business finance planner. It can generate integrated projections - income statements, cashflows, balances sheets etc - for six months ahead. |
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Recover Files
Recover Files can undo/recover deleted files. It recovers files from the Recycle Bin, files deleted from a network share, DOS command prompt, Shift+Delete is used, when Move or Cut commands are used, from Hard drives, floppy disks, external USB disk / flash drivers, deleted by other applications or by viruses, and much more; Supports FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and NTFS 5 file systems; Performs non-destructive and read-only scan and file recovery; Restores original creation and modified file dates; Supports unicode and non-alphabet languages; Filters files by name, extension, folder and file type.
The 1.16 MB Recover Files, version 3.10 for Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 95, 98, ME and Windows NT 4 can be downloaded at http://www.UndeleteUnerase.com/download.html
Exl-Plan Free
Exl-Plan Free is an Excel-based business finance planner. It can generate integrated projections - income statements, cashflows, balances sheets etc - for six months ahead.
Exl-Plan Free comprises extensive formulae and pre-programmed menus and buttons.
Exl-Plan Free is adaptable to UK/International and US/Canadian accounting conventions.
The 5633 KB Exl-Plan Free for Windows 3.1 or 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP can be downloaded at http://www.planware.org/exlf.exe.
TeamViewer
TeamViewer can be a one-stop solution to share desktop for remote access and support over the Internet. Its features include: take control over a computer anywhere on the Internet, even through firewalls; File transfer, chat, fast and secure claim the developers, and no installation required. It can be used to present your desktop to a partner on the Internet. TeamViewer is available for multiple platforms, from Windows to Apple Mac OS X - and can even be used for cross-platform connections from Windows to Mac and back, More details on TeamViewer v4.1.6320, free for non-commercial, personal use, can be found at http://www.teamviewer.com/index.
BookTome
BookTome can catalog and manage your library or personal book collection, and sort/search it in a variety of ways. The features of bookTome include: add and edit books manually or using web services, sort and organise your books by author, series, category, reading status or tags, search your books with free-form text searching and links, keep track of books that you want to read with the wish list, print out book lists, book information and wish lists. Details about new books can be downloaded from Amazon, and tags can be assigned to describe/categorise each book. The 2.99 MB BookTome V1.61 (June 28th, 2009) for Win2K / WinXP / Vista can be downloaded at http://booktome.shanemca.com/count/click.php?id=2
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The importance of real-time search | | The Guardian |
Google’s Marissa Mayer believes real-time searching could revolutionise the way we navigate the Internet, says Charles Arthur |
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 Don’t let Marissa Mayer worry you, but she would like your camera, phone and surroundings to tell Google a bit more about you and the world around you – and do it more often. As vice-president of “search product and user experience” at the search giant, she thinks we’ve only just got started on search—and that sensors, such as those built into those objects you may own, are the way forward.
Presently, search is limited to what is strictly online, put there by people: “What we offer today is very different from, say, (what) a friend of yours who might have access to a lot of facts or information (could), so the interaction is a lot less human and prompt and responsive,” she explains. The first stage of search involved text on web pages; the second stage, which we’re in now, does involve humans, who are helping identify images and adding context to web pages, which makes the web appear knowledgeable.
Mayer, 34, gives an example of the latter: “We’re starting to see things (in search) that appear intelligent but actually aren’t semantically intelligent. So, for example, if you type GM into Google, you’ll probably get General Motors. But if you type GM foods, we actually give you pages about genetically modified foods and General Mills.”
But there’s a potential third form of search, she explains, which uses the sensors built into devices around us. “I think that some of the smartphones are doing a lot of the work for us: by having cameras they already have eyes; by having GPS they know where they are; by having things like accelerometers they know how you’re holding them.” Buildings and infrastructure typically have sensors built in too. Strain gauges on bridges tell how well they are handling the stresses of their everyday existence; there are temperature sensors on cars, while rain gauges and gas samplers at any location will give you a picture of the world.
Real-time revelations
Which leads us to real-time search—a space where Twitter, in particular, has pulled ahead of the bigger company. Although it’s emphatically unsaid, it’s clear from studying the reactions of Mayer—and other senior people at Google—that the little company has unsettled its bigger, broader rival. Of course, Google had its own attempt at real-time many-to-many messaging: Jaiku, which it bought in October 2007. But Twitter was already riding the rising wave, and Jaiku quickly fell by the wayside; its developers open-sourced the code in March and have moved on to other things. Which, until those phones, cameras and gauges start announcing their data over the web, doesn’t leave many sources of real-time information.
Mayer says: “We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good? Is it warmer in San Francisco than it is in Silicon Valley? You can actually look at tweets and see those sorts of patterns, so there’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search.”
Spot it? “Tweets”. It’s the only time in the conversation, and the half-hour talk Mayer later gives to an audience of entrepreneurs, where she mentions by name any rival product or brand. She never says Microsoft or Bing or Internet Explorer when asked about the rival’s search or about browsing. Tweets implies Twitter, the company Google is often expected to be sniffing around to replace its missed chance with Jaiku.
Making tweet music together?
So is Google talking to Twitter about integrating real-time search, which Twitter got by buying Summize last year? Mayer stonewalls. “I can say that we think that real-time search is very interesting,” Mayer says.
She would know. She is a key player at Google; one of its earliest employees. “...the company tries to keep its teams small, she says, adding: “By keeping smaller you avoid a lot of that bureaucracy that tends to snuff out an idea early.” But there is also the fact that Google is stuffed full of people who just love to experiment on its users. Google Mail uses a very slightly different blue for links than the main search page. Its engineers wondered: would that change the ratio of clickthroughs? Is there an “ideal” blue that encourages clicks? To find out, incoming users were randomly assigned between 40 different shades of links—from blue-with-green-ish to blue-with-blue-ish. It turned out blue-ness encouraged clicks more than green-ness. Who would have guessed? And who would have cared? Google, of course, which wants to get people clicking around the net.
Clicking, of course, ideally using its browser, Chrome, launched last year. Launched why? “Our engineers noticed that browsers didn’t seem to be evolving very much any more. No one was paying any attention to Javascript, even though pages were using more and more Javascript.” Chrome focuses on running Javascript (such as you find in Google products..) really quickly. So has it lived up to expectations? What were those expectations? “We have our goals in terms of users, numbers of versions.” And has it met them? “Yes”. Exceeded them? “It’s been pretty much on par. We’ve become pretty good at predicting how users will respond to something with original installs and downloads.”
Recognition factor
And finally is she surprised by how slowly image recognition has evolved, given the effort put into it, compared to voice recognition? After all, Google Image still asks for human help. Why haven’t the computers figured it out yet? “For voice, language is language.
Sometimes a new word crops up, and then you have to figure out how to recognise that.
With images, the problem is fundamentally changed.... Now, with the dawn of YouTube and digital photography and 100bn images being uploaded to the web every year, you actually need to be able to identify all 6 billion people....”
What’s also lost in a still photo is the contextual information—movement, location, voice—that reality offers. “With a still image all you have are the pixels, and those pixels might look a lot like a photo of someone else, so I do feel for the image recognition people because their problem has become significantly harder in the internet age. We’re not getting closer to a solution. The solution just moves further away.”
The areas of success are where photos get metadata—geotagging—or where humans help: “You take one picture of your family at Christmas and tag this little red spot as ‘Meredith’, and the system says: ‘Every time we see something that’s the same shade of red intensity, in all of their pictures, those are Meredith.’ A lot of people think that’s cheating, but I don’t really think it is because that’s what humans do.
“So, image recognition is really trying to harness those things; and the sensor revolution we’re seeing—GPS that’s attached to your phone, to a camera—really can help us develop image technologies that work a lot better. It means we make the problem simpler.” |
Cyberstop |
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DH reader Aaron wrote
Can u suggest a user friendly image resizer plz?
DH suggested
You could try Al Image Converter at http://www.accelerated-ideas.com/NET/Zips/AIImageConverter.zip
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8 July, 2009
| E-Utilites | | N S Soundar Rajan |
JDownloader, open source and platform independent, can help download files from file hosters like Rapidshare.com, Megaupload.com and oathers. |
| | JDownloader
JDownloader can be used by both kinds of users - those who have a premium account and those who don't subscribe. Features: Support for many file
hosting sites, decrypt plug-ins for many services. e.g. sj.org, UCMS, WordPress, skips the limits of Filehosting websites, downloads in multiple parallel streams, download with multiple connections, captcha recognition, automatical file extraction, can download Youtube, Vimeo, clipfish video, and Mp3 files; 24-hour support, integrates with Firefox, no installation needed, and more. The 15.6 MB JDownloader, v.0.6.193, cross-platform - works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, can be downloaded at http://jdownloader.en.softonic.com/download. Runs on Java 1.5 or higher. jGnash
jGnash is a free personal finance manager with many features available in commercial versions. Main Features include: Double-Entry Based Transactions, Single Entry Transactions, Split Transactions, Memorised transactions, Account Reconciliation, Report Generation in PDF Format, Quick Auto-Completion of Form Fields, Schedule Recurring Payment Reminders, Support for Multiple Currencies, Track Investment
Accounts and Transactions, OFX Import, QIF Export, Accurate calculations, no loss of precision or rounding errors, Sortable account registers, Time-stamp backup files on exit, and more. The 11.7 MB jGnash v2.3.0, cross-platform and will run on any operating system that has a working Java 1.6.0 Runtime Environment, can
be downloaded at https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=27240&package_id=297551. An FAQ can be browsed at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/jgnash/index.php?title=jgnash:FAQ Network Monitor
Spiceworks with easy-to-use interface lets you Inventory Your Network & PCs, Monitor & Manage your network, Manage the IT assets, Manage changes & configurations, Map your network, Audit the software, Troubleshoot the network, Run an IT help desk, Create & view alerts for Windows events, Monitor the health of your MS Exchange server, Monitor - network bandwidth, disk space, software installs, anti-virus
subscriptions, toner levels, offline servers & more. The 18 MB Spiceworks Network Monitor for Windows XP Pro SP2, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 Server SP1, SP2 and R2, & Windows 2008 Server, can be downloaded at
http://www.spiceworks.com/signup/thankyou.php to download. Browser Requirements: Firefox 2.0 - 3.0 and
Internet Explorer 7.0 - 8.0 Live Planet
Windows Live Planet, at windowsliveplanet.com, hosted by Microsoft India, looks like a Social Networking platform. It lets you get connected to with friends instantly with your windows live ID or Hotmail ID. To access you can also use your Gmail, Yahoo or any other ID . However, you need to sign up. Live Planet is integrated with Live messenger toolbar to facilitate chatting with your live messenger friends. 'Import' of friends from other social networks including Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Tagged to your planet in live planet. To add to your planet you can use the search facility provided. The looks of the home page suggest that this site is mainly intended for Indian users.
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| Products, Processes |
QlikTech, the Business Intelligence (BI) Company, has announced a strategic partnership with Path Infotech, provider of software solutions and services in India. |
| | QlikTech, Path Infotech to give BI solutions
The partnership is expected to combine QlikTech’s ability to enable customers to derive intelligence from business data with Path Infotech’s expertise in software services to benefit several Indian companies.
QlikTech’s business analysis solution, QlikView, is a whole new class of business intelligence software that puts business users in control, lets them explore their data with unprecedented freedom, and get the answers they need to take immediate action. CSC to resell MS Business Productivity suite
CSC has announced a global agreement to resell the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services, through its cloud. Designed to help businesses easily and securely adopt cloud computing solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud networks, this agreement will allow customers to reduce the costs of managing and maintaining business systems and give them access to Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting. Lenovo announces seven new products
Lenovo recently announced the launch of 7 new products across multiple segments. The ambitious product line-up caters to a broad segment of consumers —from Lenovo C300, the ultra-sleek, affordable, All-in-One PC, to the trendy, thin and light Lenovo IdeaPad U350, Y450 and Y550 notebooks that are loaded with cutting-edge features, to the aggressively priced Lenovo G Series notebooks, and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook. HP’s ExSO portfolio promises cost savings
HP has launched the HP Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio. The solution is designed to deliver a new magnitude of cost and resource savings for businesses involved in Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance computing. HP ExSO portfolio includes a new lightweight, super-efficient, modular systems architecture and spans data centre solutions, services and support.
At the core of the HP ExSO portfolio is the HP ProLiant SL server family, which uses a “skinless” systems architecture that replaces the traditional chassis and rack form factors with an extremely lightweight rail and tray design. Customers can dramatically reduce capital, facilities and shipping costs while using a fraction of the space normally required in a data centre. Additionally, its ultra-efficient, modular design enables customers to quickly and easily build solutions that meet extreme scale-out workload requirements. | Symantec, McAfee in ‘arms race’ | | The New York Times |
The two rivals are on a mission to ward off malicious e-mail viruses and Internet worms, says Ashlee Vance |
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The two leading makers of computer security software, Symantec and McAfee, are like preachers who conduct duelling tent revivals.
They boast and frighten and denounce each other while trying to convince the crowd that their particular brand of salvation will ward off the devil—in this case, malicious e-mail viruses and evil Internet worms. Recently, the competition between the two became fiercer, as both tried to get their software tied to more new personal computers, Web sites and Internet service providers. McAfee has been particularly aggressive, using a string of deals with large PC makers in a bid to usurp Symantec’s leadership position.
“It’s like an arms race,” said Albert A Pimentel, the chief financial officer of McAfee.
Security companies must constantly persuade customers and partners to renew subscriptions or switch from a competitor with similar products. The company, based in Santa Clara, suffered from a decade of legal and accounting problems.
Things, however, have changed in the last two years since David G DeWalt succeeded George Samenuk to run McAfee. Under DeWalt, the company has expanded well beyond antivirus software, acquired some niche security players and increased sales. Symantec, based in Cupertino, California, remains the overall security market leader, with just about double the market share of McAfee. In the consumer market, Symantec holds an even larger lead, with 52 per cent share and $1.8 billion in revenue last year, compared with 18 per cent of the market and $624 million in revenue for McAfee. A host of smaller players like Trend Micro, CA and Kaspersky Lab round out the field. “It is really Symantec and the seven dwarfs,” said Enrique T Salem, the chief executive of Symantec.
McAfee has tried to win over PC makers with something they all like: lots of cash. Last year, it spent $55 million, more than any of its rivals, to get McAfee security software preloaded onto new computers. It now counts Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Sony and Lenovo as partners. Up to 40 per cent of all computers bought by consumers this year will include McAfee’s software, the brokerage firm Jefferies & Company estimates.
Hewlett-Packard has an exclusive deal with Symantec on its consumer PCs. DeWalt said the deal should come up for bids within the next year, and Symantec will have to fight to keep it.
Salem shrugs off DeWalt’s tough talk. He said: “We need to be on as many computers as possible without being irrational.” If McAfee bids too high, Symantec will walk away from the deal. But, in another breath, Salem boasts that Symantec has won eight out of the nine PC deals up for bid so far in 2009. Symantec, for example, has chipped away at parts of Dell not covered by McAfee, like gaming PCs.The payments that both companies make to partners have their own byzantine accounting, and critics complain that the companies are not being straightforward with shareholders. Quite often, the deals with the PC sellers require the security companies to make upfront payments. Both parties then share revenue over the lifetime of the deal, as some people extend their subscriptions beyond the initial free trial period and begin paying annual fees for the software. McAfee incurs larger upfront costs than most for its deals while waiting months before it can begin booking subscriptions as revenue.
Gartner shows McAfee gaining just 0.5 percentage points of market share in the consumer security software market in the last year, with Symantec losing about 4 percentage points. DeWalt says McAfee will begin showing more significant market share gains and higher deferred revenue totals as the trial and payment process plays out. McAfee says the upfront payments are small compared with the total potential value of the PC deals and that conversion rates had been strong to date. The company says it has tried to explain the deals to Gradient and characterises the firm as shaping its research in a sensationalistic way that is meant to attract short-sellers.
McAfee’s shares fell in the last year, but at $41 last week. Executives from McAfee and Symantec say the partner deals are minor items. McAfee makes more money selling corporate security products. At $6.2 billion a year in revenue, Symantec is one of the largest software companies in the world. Both companies are in a part of the market that has done well in the global technology spending slump. According to Gartner, McAfee has proved particularly resilient to the downturn, with revenue rising 22 per cent last year to $1.6 billion.
One long-term risk for both companies is the popularity of free basic security software packages offered by some vendors, including Symantec’s PC Tools brand.
McAfee and Symantec argue that true deliverance from malicious software requires more commitment and more money. Both companies try to persuade customers to buy whole suites of security software, including firewalls and online backup services. “Last year, we saw a 500 per cent increase in malware,” said DeWalt. That’s a lot of demons to ward off.
| A router so complete, and very much vexing | | The New York Times |
D-Link DIR-685 turns your house into a Wi-Fi hot spot with its ability to blast through floors and walls, writes David Pogue |
| Even before someone coined the term “mashup,” mashups were popular in the technology world. Some are made in heaven, and are now standard pairings: clock+radio, refrigerator+freezer, cellphone+camera.
Others are still on the early-adopter fringe: TV+Internet, camera+Internet, fridge+Internet.
This month, D-Link, the networking equipment company, will offer a mashup that nobody’s ever tried before: wireless router + home backup hard drive + digital picture frame or the D-Link DIR-685 ($300 list price). The 685’s inventors have noticed that our high-tech homes are becoming cluttered with network-related gadgets and their associated cable creep. As long as people are going to buy all these different network gadgets, D-Link figures, why not combine them into one?
It’s the right idea. Unfortunately, D-Link is the wrong company to make it a reality.
First, the good news: once you get the 685 set up, it works very well. It broadcasts your Internet connection wirelessly—a fast, strong Wi-Fi signal (802.11n). This single router turned my entire house into a Wi-Fi hot spot, thanks to its ability to blast through floors and walls.
Every conceivable home router feature is on this machine’s configuration screens: port forwarding, Application Rules, individual Web site blocking, a sophisticated firewall, UPnP, Multicast Streams, Wake on LAN, users and groups, network access lists, scheduled lockouts, logs, security formats like WPA and WEP, remote management and much more. You can get a much less expensive router with these features. The 685 has some unique tricks. One of them is a tiny (3.2 inch) colour screen. It is useful for inspecting the router’s settings, but it can also display dozens of Internet information widgets: weather, New York Times headlines, stocks, sports scores, stocks, Twitter posts and photos from your Flickr or Facebook accounts.
The 685’s widget feature is so cool that you might be tempted to set the thing on your desk and glance at its parade of Internet info-bits throughout the day. Unfortunately, nobody will do that; this thing has a really, really loud fan. If you’re close enough to the router to see your photos and widgets, you’re also close enough to be driven mad by its jet-engine whirring. The 685 also has a slot on the side for a hard drive, which is not included. That way, you can buy your own hard drive online, in the capacity you desire. (Shop for a “2.5-inch SATA” hard drive.) Once you click it into place, the router’s screen offers you the chance to format the hard drive.
Why would you want a hard drive in your Wi-Fi base station? Because now it’s a NAS drive (network-attached storage), which is geek-speak for “a hard drive that every computer in the house can access at once, wirelessly.”
For example, the whole family can use it as a backup hard drive. You can use it as a central storage repository for files that everybody needs—including your whole family’s iTunes music collection. That’s right: put your iTunes folder on this drive, and now all computers can play whatever music is in it. The router’s name shows up at the left side of the iTunes window as if it’s an iPod. You can even teach the 685 to download BitTorrent files in your absence. That’s right, software pirates, you can have it download huge TV and movie files even while you and your laptop are out of the house. You have to know the Web address of the file you want, and you have to paste that into the router’s technical configuration pages in your Web browser.
The cherry on top is a feature called SharePort. It lets you connect a U S B scanner, hard drive or printer—and once you do, any Mac or PC on the wireless network can use it. All of this is great, right? So what’s the problem?
User-friendliness is the problem. The frustration begins with the bright orange sticker that’s been slapped across the network jacks on the back. The sticker says “STOP—Do not proceed until you’ve run the setup software CD.”
What’s wrong with that? First, it’s directing you to work through a multistep, complex, user-hostile procedure—wiring the D-Link router to a PC that already has a wired Internet connection, then running the pointlessly protracted installation software—that’s actually unnecessary. The router works just by plugging it into power and your modem.
Second, the setup software CD works only on Windows. Third, when you finally try to remove the orange sticker, it shreds, leaving gummy residue and paper fragments precisely where they shouldn’t be: in the Ethernet jacks. It goes on. For example, the Quick Start sheet instructs you to connect a cable to the router’s WAN port—but that port is not identified anywhere. There are five identical featureless and unlabeled Ethernet jacks on the router. Which one’s the WAN port? Let’s play Ethernet roulette!
Above all—and this is the mind-blowing part—D-Link is selling this very complex piece of consumer technology without a single word of instructions for the features that make it unique.
The user guide is a PDF document on the CD—you don’t get a printed book, of course—so what would it have cost D-Link to write up these features?
D-Link’s PR person suggested that the elusive instructions might be on the company’s Web site. (They weren’t.) In the end, it took a D-Link product manager a day to figure out how to work these features himself and supply me with the instructions. He says he will have them posted on D-Link’s Web site by the time the 685 goes on sale.
Isn’t it amazing that, after all these years, it still hasn’t dawned on companies like D-Link that simplicity sells? Spending a little money up front—on hardware design, streamlined software, better manuals—would save a fortune in tech-support calls and store returns. Not that D-Link is spending much on tech support anyway; my call was answered by clueless agents who gave me incorrect instructions. D-Link has gone to the considerable expense of inventing, designing and marketing a smart machine that could save a lot of people a lot of cost and complexity. The DIR-685, in other words, is a very cool mashup—but at the moment, it’s also a bit mashed up. |
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1 July, 2009
| E-Utilites | | N S Soundar Rajan |
Social network updating is made easy by ShoZu. The process for uploading pics, video or text is now simple. |
|  ShoZu
Social network updating is made easy by ShoZu. The process for uploading pics, video or text is now simple.
Just drag and drop the media you want to share. After the picture or video shows up, type a short caption in the small box and or any additional text into the big box, and off you go.
ShoZu CCs your email and/or other destinations you choose. This feature saves time. The program prevents duplication—you don’t end up posting the same thing on the same site, multiple times. It can also help transfer content from your phone directly to many content sharing sites. ShoZu can be used to enable your phone to receive online content too. The ShoZu desktop app runs with Adobe Air and the most recent version of Adobe Flash. To know more on ShoZu visit http://www.shozu.com
Video calling
Logitech’s Vid, an Internet video calling software, is for the “non-techie”. With a really easy-to-use interface, Vid makes it easy using a webcam and Internet connection. Vid is based on a person’s email address. It, presently, does not connect to Skype, AIM etc.
Vid is a straightforward way to make video calls. Just add a friend using his or her email address; wait for your friend’s acceptance of your invitation and make a video call simply by clicking on your friend’s picture. Vid for Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X can be downloaded at http://www.logitech.com/vid. A CPU that’s 2.5GHz or faster is recommended for enhanced performance.
Free OCR
Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. This is used to perform OCR on any image you upload. The service is free, and no registration is necessary. Upload a PDF or image file (JPG, TIFF, BMP). Free OCR processes the document/image in a few seconds transforming them into plain text format. Currently, images larger than 2MB, wider or higher than 5000 pixels are not accepted for conversion. Also, there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour. No need for any pre-processing of images except that these images are not skewed right or left. The recommended DPI for the images is 150. You can try out the Free OCR service at http://www.free-ocr.com/
Broadband Helper
Imran’s Broadband Helper Utility may be found useful by readers who use BSNL DataOne broadband connection, Plan—Home 500, Home 500 C, Home 500 Combo plus etc (or any other connection which uses ADSL Router and having the “free usage time” concept) and want to utilise the free usage time efficiently.
Features: disable connection from 09:00-02:00 so that there would be ZERO usage during this period; reboot your ADSL Modem at 02:01, so that a new connection starts in the free usage time; ShutDown the PC at 08:00 AM; determines your IP address, before and after every Reboot; can schedule any application like uTorrent to automatically start at some specified time, and more. All the features are configurable, according to your needs.
Imran’s Broadband Helper Utility can be downloaded at http://imran-utilities.synthasite.com/ |
Cyberstop |
| DH reader Mahesh wrote:
Please suggest a utility to watch TV programmes.
DH suggested:
VeohTV, a desktop application, lets you watch, upload and download video from popular video sites including ABC, CBS, FOX, and MTV.
VeohTV can be downloaded at http://www.veoh.com/ NSS
| Storehouse of answers online | | The Guardian |
Hunch will soon be a repository for the web’s collaborative wisdom, writes Jack Schofield |
| Aplayful new site can help you make decisions, as long as someone has written up the topic in its question-and-answer format. If not, you could have a go yourself, and then let other people improve it.
If you want to know whether to buy a Palm Pre or an Apple iPhone, where to go on holiday, which TV show to watch, or whether or not to get a tattoo, you could try asking Hunch. It’s a sort of “decision engine” or, as Caterina Fake told Mercury News, “like a really awesome Magic 8-Ball on steroids”.
Hunch was only launched last week, so it only answers a couple of thousand questions. However, members can add topics, or improve other people’s. In a few years, it could become a repository for the web’s collaborative wisdom. If you’ve done Internet quizzes such as “Which superhero/super villain am I?” or “Which Greek god am I?” then you already know how Hunch works–and both of those questions are already on the site.
You’re taken through a series of screens, each of which has one question and a small set of answers to choose from. At the end of the “decision tree” you are given the best answer. With Hunch you are usually given three or four answers, one of which might be a Wild Card. Sometimes the answers are rated, if Hunch thinks you are 79% certain (or whatever) to prefer its first answer. Options at the end include “Why did Hunch pick this?” (which lists your answers), and “Is Hunch wrong about this result? Fix this Hunch”.
To be allowed to mess around, you must have created at least one topic, and played at least five topics all the way through.
Hunch uses personalisation and collaborative filtering. The personalisation is based on Hunch giving you questions to answer, and keeping track of the topics you play. The more it knows about you, the better its answers should be. “Collaborative filtering” means that you will probably like the sorts of things that people like you like. It’s how Amazon’s recommendation system works. However, Hunch makes it easy for you to delete a stored answer, or all of them, from your profile.
Hunch has numerous social aspects, too. You can leave comments, and using Hunch earns you Banjos – a bit like earning stars on eBay. You can earn Impact Badges by creating topics that get positive feedback, and Personality Badges for various actions.
Hunch was developed by a group of a group of computer scientists from MIT, which has been working on collaborative filtering and artificial intelligence.
Fortunately, the Hunch team met Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr. She joined as co-founder and took charge of the product design. Her participation also ensured that Hunch got a lot of press coverage. It might not be the next Flickr, but if she’s involved, it’s certainly worth a look. |
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| Products, processes |
HP announced new releases of its application security software designed to help companies save costs and protect their IT assets from hacking. |
| | LSI announces 40 NM read channels
LSI Corporation has announced the TrueStore® RC9500, the industry's first 40-nanometer (nm) read channel. Now sampling to hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers, the RC9500 is designed to support notebook through enterprise HDD form factors and capacity points. The RC9500’s next-generation low-density parity check (LDPC) iterative decoding technology enables a greater than 10 per cent increase in the data storage capacity of HDDs, reduces read channel power consumption and delivers industry-leading performance with data rates exceeding 4.0Gb/s. | Decoding battery life for laptops | | The New York Times |
Consumers look at cell as a crucial buying factor, says David Pogue |
|  This is a story of truth, greed and the American Way. Oh, and also laptop battery-life benchmarks. Two things about battery-life measurements for laptops: First, they usually bear little relationship to reality. I don’t know about you, but my “five-hour” battery often dies halfway between JFK and LAX. Second, laptop ads always use that essential tool of wiggle-roomers everywhere, “Up to.” As in, “Up to five hours.”
Folks, “up to” is one of the greatest cop-outs in the English language. You know what? I’ve got a laptop that gets “up to” 1,000 hours on a charge! Because “up to” just means “something below this number.”
Well, so what, right? Why pick on laptop makers? Every industry does it, right?
Wrong.
In 2003, the digital camera industry had a similar problem. Every company was advertising its cameras’ battery life in overblown terms. Each had its own testing protocol, none representative of real life. Pretty soon, consumers realised that the battery statistics were basically meaningless.
Eventually, CIPA (the Camera and Imaging Products Association), a camera-industry trade group, took action. It developed a standardised battery-life test. You take one photo every 30 seconds—half with the flash on, half with the flash off. You zoom all the way in or all the way out before every shot. You leave the screen on all the time. After every 10 shots, you turn off the camera for awhile. And so on.
In other words, you test the camera pretty much the way people would use it in the real world, erring on the side of conservatism. Nowadays, all cameras are tested and advertised this way. And CIPA ratings now match up with reality.
But laptops are more complicated, right? Many more factors determine battery life: what you’re doing, how bright the screen is, what wireless features are turned on, and so on. Yet other industries have faced this problem, too. Cellphones, for example: The battery dies a lot faster when you’re making calls than when you’re just carrying the thing in your pocket. Cars: You generally get much better mileage on the highway than in the city. Even iPods: You get much better battery life when you’re playing music rather than video.
So their manufacturers do the only logical thing — they give you the worst-case/best-case numbers.
When you shop for a cellphone, you see, “4 hours talk time/300 hours standby.” When you shop for a car, you see “26 mpg city/32 highway.” When looking over an iPod, you see “24 hours of music playback/6 hours of video.” And everybody’s happy.
But with laptops, what do we get? “Up to five hours.” This is important, because battery life has become a huge selling point. People have finally managed to unlearn the Megahertz Myth (hallelujah!), so they’re looking at battery life as a crucial buying factor.
Why doesn’t the computer industry invent a standard battery test?
Actually, they have. Those “up to” numbers are the results of a test suite called MobileMark 2007. There are a few problems with the MobileMark test. One of them is the identity of its inventor. It’s Bapco (Business Application Performance Corporation), a trade group led by Intel and composed primarily of laptop and chip manufacturers.
Let’s see: a benchmark developed by precisely the companies who profit if battery life looks good. Isn’t that like putting the foxes in charge of henhouse inspections?
Another problem: Unlike CIPA’s camera tests, the MobileMark test protocol doesn’t reflect real-world use. For example, the screen. It’s the most power-hungry component of a laptop, so specifying how bright it is during your test is extremely important. Well, the MobileMark test specifies that you have the screen set to 60 nits (a brightness measurement). The screens on modern laptops put out 250 to 300 nits. The MobileMark test, in other words, specifies setting the screen at a fraction of full brightness — a setting that few people use in the real world. (Advanced Micro Devices says that 60 nits is about 20 per cent brightness on most laptops. Intel says it’s closer to 50 percent. Either way, it’s too low.)
The MobileMark test doesn’t specify whether battery-eating features like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are turned on during testing. That decision is left up to the manufacturers when they test their own laptops.
Finally, there’s the actual MobileMark test. Actually, there are three of them.
In the DVD test, you play a DVD movie over and over until the battery’s dead — a worst-case, shortest-life situation.
In the Productivity test, an automated software robot performs business tasks like crunching numbers in Excel, manipulating graphics in Photoshop and sending e-mail. This ought to be the most realistic test—except that it doesn’t include any use of Web browsers, iTunes, Windows Media Player, online TV shows or games. Oops.
In the final test, called Reading, an automated script pretends to read a PDF document, pausing two minutes on each page. This, clearly, is the best case; it’s not wildly different, in fact, from leaving the laptop unattended.
So which of those tests gets reported in the laptop ads?
Intel says it’s the Productivity test, but why aren’t we allowed to see all three results?
All of this brings us to Advanced Micro Devices, which has spent several weeks blogging about all of this silliness and bringing it to the attention of tech writers like me.
AMD thinks the industry should adopt a much more realistic benchmark for laptops—and then represent the results in a style that matches cellphones, iPods and cars. It’s proposing a new logo that clearly shows the best-case/worst-case numbers. Your laptop’s box might say, “2:30 Active Time/4:00 Resting Time.”
And, predictably, AMD reports it is meeting with “considerable resistance” from the big industry players.
Intel, AMD’s archrival, seems especially annoyed by all this muckraking. A spokesman, Bill Kircos, says MobileMark is “a well thought, well debated and very sound benchmark.” Besides, if a shopper doesn’t like it, “there are a wealth of independent tests, reviews, magazine articles and company information to see what people are getting on battery life, in addition to the three-faced MobileMark benchmark.”
Wait — consumers are supposed to make up for MobileMark’s failings by spending hours hunting online for realistic battery tests?
Wouldn’t it save effort all around to have a realistic, reliable test? That’s how the cellphone, auto and music-player industries do it; why not computer makers?
That one’s easy: because there are big dollars at stake. People pay more when they think they’re getting better battery life. By misleading the public with bogus battery statistics, stores and computer and chip makers make more money. No wonder cynics call it “benchmarketing.”
(Intel’s spokesman also told me AMD has yet to propose a better battery-testing regimen to Bapco, of which AMD is also a member. AMD retorts that’s not necessarily true: “All Bapco discussions are confidential.
If Bapco is willing to waive these confidentiality obligations or make its meeting minutes public, AMD will be happy to discuss what it has or hasn’t presented to Bapco.”)
It’s pretty obvious why Intel wants to keep the status quo. But what’s AMD’s motive in stirring up this hornet’s nest, anyway? According to tests by Laptop magazine and others, AMD laptops in general have shorter battery life than Intel laptops.
But in more realistic battery-life tests, the gap between AMD and Intel laptops closes somewhat. So yes, everybody’s got an agenda on this one. But yours should be to support AMD’s campaign It’s logical, it’s fair — and it’s long overdue. |
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HP’s new application security software
HP announced new releases of its application security software designed to help companies save costs and protect their IT assets from hacking.
The releases include HP Assessment Management Platform 8.0 -that mitigates application risk across the enterprise through a distributed, scalable web application security testing platform, Web Inspect 8.0 that helps customers analyse complex web applications, and HP Software-as-a-Service (Seas) Project Services for Application Security Centre.
Xerox unveils new colour printer
Xerox India, the world’s leading document management technology and services enterprise, announced the launch of Xerox Phaser 6280 colour printer, designed specifically to suit the requirements of small and medium businesses (SMBs). The Xerox Phaser 6280 is built on Xerox technology and offers outstanding colour capabilities at an affordable price. The colour printer is priced at Rs 48,179/- (N), 60,858/- (DN) and is available in two variants- Xerox Phaser 6280 N and Xerox Phaser 6280 DN.
Some of PHASER 6280’s features include automatic two sided printing, 600x600x4 dpi print resolution, EA-HG colour toner, colour correction technology, PANTONE® Colour approved solid-colour simulations, 10/ 100 Base T Ethernet and USB connectivity, user-friendly front panel etc.
Netgear launches new wireless router
NETGEAR, Inc, has launched RangeMax Wireless-N Router, the WNR3500. It brings faster wireless speeds and enhanced range of connectivity for the Internet. It allows users to surf, email, stream HD video, play on-line game and make Internet phone calls concurrently. The Wireless-N technology and Gigabit Ethernet port deliver exceptional range and enhanced wired network connections. The users can connect up to four other wired devices by using the built-in 4-port switch. With Push ‘N’ Connect feature, it allows wireless connection to new devices easily and provides advanced wireless security encryption for your data. Compatible with 802.11n, 802.11b and 802.11g standards, this wireless router is all you need to work for you, without the hassle of connecting to range extenders, repeaters or external antennas.
Bay Talkitec’s new voice authentication solution
Bay Talkitec has announced the integration of ‘Caller Voice authentication’ technology to its Smartcall unified contact centre platform. The new biometric voice authentication facility will enable contact centres improve caller experience by streamlining the log-in process and help banks, financial institutions and insurance companies increase security, doing away with forgettable PINs and passwords.
Nivio releases online PC
Nivio has unveiled the nivioCompanion-a tiny US$100 set-top box device. Users will have to just pay for the usage. All files are backed up instantly to prevent data loss. Users can also access their personal PC from the nearest cyber café using the user name and password. Nivio has tied up with Bharti Airtel Ltd to offer the service in India. |
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24 June , 2009
E-Utilities |
AutoSizer
