estuff-zone

We Need Wireless Power

2008-12-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

New Hampshire was hit by a major ice storm last Thursday night. The power at my house went out initially around 7:30PM but my UPS system kept the Internet modem and Wi-Fi access point up for a while. The power came back briefly around 10PM but went out for good at midnight. This time the storm took out the cable so there was no Internet. After almost 36 total hours without power or heat (it dropped to 20F or –6C outside) the power finally came back Saturday morning. Now on Monday there is still no cable or high speed Internet at home. I was able to get to the Internet on my cell phone using EDVO and also make phone calls. The wireless networks were a lot more resistant to the effect of the storm than the other utilities. If only Tesla had been more successful with his research on the wireless transmission of power.

Schools are pretty much closed state-wide in New Hampshire as much of the state is still without power. The north side of my town is still without as are several near by towns. You really don’t realize how dependent we are on electric power until you have to go without it. The same is true for the Internet. I found myself stopping several times a day thinking “Oh I’ll look that up on the Internet.” only to catch myself with the memory that the Internet was not available. No looking up bank balances. No looking up that company someone told me about. No ordering that Christmas gift. It felt weird.

How did we get along before? Well my neighbor who has a very old house had a gas stove that didn’t need electric power and a fireplace. We were able to cook and stay warm there. But somehow I don’t see us going back to encyclopedia in place of the Internet. Not for full time at least. And have you seen a typewriter lately? I saw some in a store recently and they were clearly labeled for collectors rather than for people who wanted to use them. Long term there is no going back.

Well that is my observation for today. More useful posts once I have had time to tap the network for a while.

Microsoft, Michigan Department of Education and Michigan Virtual University offer CareerForward to help students prepare for a 21st-century workplace.

2008-12-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

SEATTLE — Dec. 2, 2008 — With financial support and assistance from Microsoft Corp.’s U.S. Partners in Learning, students across the nation now have access to CareerForward, a powerful, free online course covering globalization, career planning, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. CareerForward empowers students at any grade level in middle and high school to take charge of their own education, career path and future prosperity. Global education leaders from more than 30 nations are learning how to implement this program in their home countries this week at the School of the Future World Summit in Seattle hosted by Microsoft Corp.

Increasingly, multinational corporations are seeking young people who possess a global perspective and an appreciation that their academic preparation is vital to their future. Students who take the new online CareerForward course will better understand the crucial importance of their education and have the ability to improve their motivation and choices in high school and college. Students, parents and teachers can access the course at http://review.careerforward.org/careerforward.

“This course will help students understand how to thrive in a global economy,” said Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. “It also will teach them to learn online — something they’ll need to do throughout their work lives.”

Michigan ranks No. 2 in the nation for its online learning policy and practice according to The Center for Digital Education. CareerForward first launched in Michigan two years ago when the state became the first in the nation to require online learning as a requirement for high school education. This year alone, 18,000 Michigan students have pledged to complete the course.

“Students and the career choices they make are critical to the talent pipeline and future business prosperity in the U.S.,” said Anthony Salcito, general manager of U.S. Public Sector Education at Microsoft. “CareerForward encourages the development of a skilled work force, as it helps young citizens explore global opportunities and recognize the importance of technology in jobs of the future.”

CareerForward is a media-rich online learning program, developed through a unique public-private partnership between the Michigan Department of Education, Michigan Virtual University and Microsoft. The program helps students wrestle with some of the burning questions about their futures: What am I going to do with my life? What is the world of work like? What will I need to succeed? What’s next for me? Using a variety of multimedia, course topics explore these questions and more. Throughout the course, students are asked frequently to reflect on what they’re learning, to write their thoughts down as a continual refinement of their thinking, and to discuss their thoughts with other students, either in-person or online.

Students can work with local educators to access the online course, which takes about four to six weeks or approximately 20 hours to complete. The course is designed to be facilitated by a local teacher and can be used independently or as part of an existing face-to-face course in career planning, business or global studies.

“This course helps students realize the crucial importance of education to their future,” said Mike Flanagan, Michigan’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. “By integrating technology into every student’s education, this allows them to experience their education outside of the classroom — in the world of technology. It helps bring relevance to their learning.”

“We are excited about the national launch of CareerForward,” said Jamey Fitzpatrick, president of Michigan Virtual University. “This innovative online course is something that every parent in the country will want their son or daughter to experience.”

Further information on CareerForward is available at http://review.careerforward.org/careerforward. More information about Michigan Virtual University is available at http://www.mivu.org. More information about Microsoft U.S. Partners in Learning is available at http://www.microsoft.com/education/pilus.mspx.

Free Online Career Development Course Now Available to 16 Million Students Nationwide

2008-12-21T20:09:00.002-08:00

Do you know students who are wondering “What do I want to be when I grow up?” It’s a hard question and students look in all directions for answers. Recently Microsoft and the Michigan Virtual University released an online “course” for students to use to do some self evaluation to try to help answer that question. The course covers a number of topics that includes things like globalization, career planning, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. I don’t usually copy complete announcements but I did today. Check out CareerForward today.

Teacher Tech Tuesdays January 2009

2008-12-21T20:09:00.001-08:00

The Teacher Tech Tuesday program (last blogged about here) is dedicated to helping teachers and academic administrators get more out of Microsoft products. The goal is to help bring technology in to classrooms as a tool to teach other subject and not just to teach technology for the sake of technology. I just received the schedule for Teach Tech Tuesdays for January 2009 and they look interesting. Podcasting in history class, getting more dynamic content using MS Office, increasing collaboration using OneNote and using Microsoft Math in math classes. And if you need more incentive there are special offers for each program. Yeah, free, is a good price. :-)

Free EBooks From Microsoft Learning

2008-12-21T20:02:00.000-08:00

I was checking the Microsoft Learning blog the other day and saw this announcement of some free eBooks as Microsoft Press continues its 25th Anniversary eBook giveaway. The books below are only available until December 24th so grab them now if they look interesting. I’ve grabbed a copy of Writing Secure Code for Vista myself. Writing secure code is something I think is very important and something that I think students should at least discuss from their earliest programming experiences.

Understanding IPv6, by Joseph Davies
Writing Secure Code for Vista, by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc

Also you can sign up for a newsletter that will let you know as soon as additional free eBooks become available. Visit one of those book links for more information.

3Leaf Systems to Demo Silicon Enabled Server Virtualization Technology at Supercomputing 08

2008-11-16T23:53:00.000-08:00

3Leaf Systems (www.3leafsystems.com), a provider of next-generation virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced that the company will showcase new silicon enabled virtualization technology enabling dynamic resource utilization using commodity servers from Super Micro Computer Inc. 3Leaf will demo the solution at Supermicro’s Booth# 1033 at SC08 being held in the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas from November 15-21.
Virtualization within high performance computing (HPC) environments presents particular challenges to today’s enterprises. HPC environments require ultra high speed message passing between applications in order to operate in high computing environments, and many of today’s virtualization solutions fall short in providing this capability. In addition, CPU and memory demands from HPC applications continue to drive over-provisioning of servers within the data center.

Now, rather than having to overbuild their infrastructures to allow for high compute or memory intensive jobs, and/or sacrificing performance to achieve virtualization, enterprises have another choice. 3Leaf’s silicon enabled technology demonstrates how enterprises can pool CPU and memory resources across multiple x86 servers to create a cloud environment, enable up to one terabyte of DRAM for memory intensive applications, and achieve low-latency messaging between applications.

“Virtualization, along with compute and memory constraints within today’s scale-out servers, provides many challenges for HPC environments,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, CEO and president, 3Leaf Systems. “With this technology, working together with companies like Supermicro, 3Leaf helps enable virtualization for HPC environments while lowering the capital and operational costs of their HPC infrastructures. Supermicro shares our vision and we are pleased the company is an early adopter of this revolutionary technology.”

“We recognize the strong, unique value that the 3Leaf technology achieves, and are excited to partner with 3Leaf to help enterprises overcome pain points in their HPC environments by optimizing resources and dramatically reducing data center costs,” said Charles Liang, CEO and president, Supermicro. “With the 3Leaf enabled Supermicro servers, enterprises can achieve a terabyte of DRAM at a dramatically low cost and enable low-latency messaging for fast performance.”

About SC08

SC08, sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in research, education and commerce. This premiere international conference includes technical and education programs, workshops, tutorials, an exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning. For more information, please visit http://sc08.supercomputing.org/.

rPath's Billy Marshall Interviewed on how Enterprises can Virtualize Applications as a Precursor to Cloud Computing

2008-11-16T23:51:00.001-08:00

Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of rPath, recently spoke with Dana Gardner to find out more about how enterprises should begin moving to application-level virtualization that serves as an onramp to cloud benefits.

Many enterprises are factoring how to bring more applications into a virtual development and deployment environment to save on operating costs and to take advantage of service oriented architectures (SOA) and cloud computing models.

Finding proven deployment methods and governance for managing virtualized applications across a lifecycle is an essential ingredient in making SOA and cloud-computing approaches as productive as possible while avoiding risk and complexity. The goal is to avoid having to rewrite code in order for applications to work across multiple clouds -- public, private or hybrids.

The cloud forces the older notion of "write-once, run anywhere" into a new level of "deploy correctly so you can exploit the benefits of cloud choices and save a lot of money."

Here are some excerpts from that interview:

We're once again facing a similar situation now where enterprises are taking a very tough look at their data center expenditures and expansions that they're planning for the data center. ... The [economic downturn] is going to have folks looking very hard at large-scale outlays of capital for data centers.

I believe that will be a catalyst for folks to consider a variable-cost approach to using infrastructures or service, perhaps platform as a service (PaaS). All these things roll up under the notion of cloud.

Virtualization provides isolation for applications running their own logical server, their own virtual server. ... Virtualization gives you -- from a business perspective -- an opportunity to decouple the definition of the application from the system that it runs on. ... Then, at run-time, you can decide where you have capacity that best meets needs of the profile of an application.

I can begin sourcing infrastructure a little more dynamically, based upon the load that I see. Maybe I can spend less on the capital associated with my own data center, because with my application defined as this independent unit, separate from the physical infrastructure I'll be able to buy infrastructure on demand from Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, these folks who are now offering up these virtualized clouds of servers.

That's the architecture we're evolving toward. ... For legacy applications, there's not going to be much opportunity. [But] they may actually consider this for new applications that would get some level of benefit by being close to other services.

[If] I can define my application as a working unit, I may be able to choose between Amazon or my internal architecture that perhaps has a VMware basis, or a Rackspace, GoGrid, or BlueLock offering.

Intel Core i7 chip launches in Tokyo

2008-11-16T23:45:00.000-08:00

Irasshaimase! Stores in Tokyo districts such as Akihabara have launched sales of Intel's Core i7 processor, due to be officially rolled out at U.S. resellers on Monday.

Computerworld reported that "several hundred people crowded stores" that opened around 10 p.m. Saturday. The top-of-the-line 965 chip sold out, according to one retailer.

Sofmap store in Akihabara is selling boxed Core i7 processors

(Credit: Sofmap)The Core i7 represents the vanguard of Intel's new Nehalem microarchitecture. The i7 is a desktop processor targeted initially at gaming boxes.

(See CNET review of Falcon Northwest Mach V tower system based on Core i7-965 processor.)

Sofmap, a large Japanese computer reseller, is showing Core i7 processors, motherboards, and systems on its Web site.

Sofmap lists the boxed Core i7-920 (2.66GHz) at 32,800 yen or close to $340. The i7-940 (2.93GHz) is listed at 63,800 yen or about $660. The high-end i7-965 (3.20GHZ) goes for 112,800 yen or $1,160.

A series of i7-920 processors bundled with Windows Vista Home Premium "DSP version" are shown ranging in price from 45,800 yen ($470) to 54,800 yen ($565).

Specification details (listed by Sofmap) include: LGA1366 socket, Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) rated at 4.8GT/sec (gigatransfers per second), 8MB L3 cache, and a 130 watt TDP (Thermal Design Power).

The DSP, or Delivery Service Provider, version of Windows Vista is being promoted heavily in Japan and is typically bundled with other components.

Sofmap advertisement for Core i7

(Credit: Sofmap)Motherboards and systems are also on sale. Motherboards are based on the Intel X58 chipset. DDR3 memory is being promoted along with the i7 too.

Tower systems using the Core i7 chip range in price from 179,800 yen ($1,852) to 219,800 yen ($2,264).

Where is Google voice-powered search?

2008-11-16T23:42:00.000-08:00

Reporters were put into a frenzy this week when Google announced it was set to launch version two of its mobile search application for the iPhone that included the addition of voice-powered search, allowing you skip the keyboard altogether. But now the question is, where is it?

My colleague Josh Lowensohn reported on the application on Thursday, and duly noted on Friday afternoon that it still wasn't available in Apple's App Store. But as of Saturday afternoon, the application was still MIA. A search on the App Store returned only the older version of the Google Mobile App.

According to The New York Times, Google planned to release the free application through the iTunes Store "as soon as Friday." The application, an update to Google Mobile App, is meant to allow you to talk into your phone, ask any question, and the results of your query will then be offered up on your iPhone.

One reason for the delay could be that it has been bogged down by Apple's App Store approval process, which can take days or even months. Indeed, the Google Earth app for the iPhone took several days to appear in the App Store after its release. And Buzzd CEO Nihal Mehta noted that it took three months for his company's application to arrive in the App Store after it had been submitted. In other words, it's difficult for third-party developers to determine exactly when the application is going to be made available.

Perhaps from now on, when developers release an iPhone app, they'll learn to add a caveat that while the application has technically been released, it may take several days or even longer for it to actually show up in the App Store.

Adobe wants to bridge gap between PCs and cloud

2008-11-16T23:39:00.000-08:00

Adobe Systems wants to have it both ways.

Microsoft's power with programmers is tethered to desktops and laptops, the vast majority of which run Windows. Google is trying to dominate what it believes is the new frontier, cloud computing, where applications run on the Web. Adobe, though, is trying to run down the middle with a strategy that touches on both domains.

"It's a balance of the client and cloud together that makes for the most effective applications and the best development," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch, who's planning to speak on the subject in a keynote speech Monday at the company's Max conference in San Francisco.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)
Since Adobe's $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition in 2005, programming technology has been rising in importance within a company that got its start with publishing software such as Photoshop. The technology that brought the two companies together, Flash, will hog the spotlight at the conference.

Flash got its start as a way to give Web pages animations and basic applications such as games, but it's grown up since then. The Flex technology has given developers a more mature programming model, and the addition of video-streaming abilities to the Flash Player that's plugged into the vast majority of Web browsers has given Adobe's technology incumbent status. Who can live online without YouTube?

Adobe is still working on Flash, releasing Flash Player 10, aka Astro, in October. At Max, though, a Flash cousin called AIR--the Adobe Integrated Runtime--will share the stage with the release of version 1.5.

Flash and AIR are key to bridging the cloud-PC gap. For example, Adobe has launched an online Photoshop.com service, where members can upload, edit, and share photos. The site uses Flash to run the processing-intensive editing software on people's own computers, not Adobe's servers, Lynch said.

"Our operational costs for hosting that application are much lower than if we had server-side processing," and users get better performance, Lynch said.

But Flash still lives largely within the browser. Adobe hopes to uproot it with AIR, a "runtime" foundation for housing applications. AIR runs Flash programs but also has a built-in engine for showing Web pages and for running programs written in JavaScript, which is widely used for Web-based applications. And AIR is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and programmers who write AIR applications don't have to worry about what operating system is on a person's computer.

But there's a risk to choosing a hybrid strategy: gains in flexibility often come at the expense of specialization, and specialized applications often work better. Sun Microsystems tried for years to get Java to catch on as a cross-platform runtime, but 13 years after its launch, it has yet to catch on with mainstream computing applications.

Google's cloud computing is limited by the comparatively feeble abilities of JavaScript running in Web browsers, but extensions such as Gears are bringing some advanced features. But Google gets the advantage of software that's available from all sorts of computing devices--your own, a friend's, a kiosk in an airport, your iPhone--as long as you have a network connection. And there's a natural collaboration component that comes with online applications that matches well with business needs.

Microsoft is moving slowly cloudward, but its cash cows remain Windows and Office. Its software is more powerful and responsive than any Web-based application--as long as you have your PC with you.

AIR applications can take advantage of local computing power, though--and the big new feature of AIR 1.5 is that it uses Flash Player 10, which brings 3D graphics, better text handling, the ability to mix different audio signals, and other abilities that make it a more reasonable competitor to Windows.

Revived Fervor for Smart Monitors Linked to a Server

2008-10-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO — Instead of having a big, loud and complex computer on your desk, what if you could have a quiet, thin machine that rarely needed an upgrade or a fix?

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Hewlett-Packard’s version of a so-called thin client and monitor, top, and the Hot-E device from ThinLinX, above.

Enlarge This Image

JetBlue Airways
Employees of JetBlue at Kennedy Airport using thin clients connected to remote servers that handle the processing of data.
That has been the goal of many technology companies over the last 15 or so years. They have tried to disrupt Microsoft’s dominance of the PC desktop by creating what amount to intelligent monitors.

Rather than relying on their innards for handling work, these so-called thin clients send it out over the network to much larger servers that hold all of the necessary software and handle data-processing jobs.

For a variety of reasons, including slow data connections and clunky software, this model failed to live up to its promise and turned into an industrywide joke. But now the technology is making a comeback, and large companies like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Samsung are increasing their investments in thin client systems. Plenty of start-ups are looking at the market as well.

Thin-client backers have by now mostly given up on challenging Microsoft — in fact, in most cases they make it easy to use Windows over the network. But they continue to bill thin clients as a way to save companies money and make their systems more secure.

“The hype cycle that has followed thin clients started at this enormous level, disappeared into negativity and now is bubbling back up,” said Bob O’Donnell, an analyst at the consulting firm IDC.

The benefits of the technology seem obvious. Software glitches, updates and security are much less of a problem. The thin-client model places the burden of managing computers on professionals monitoring servers in a large warehouse.

Perhaps best of all, the users’ data is stored on the network. If the machine on your desk breaks, you just get another one and connect to the data warehouse, and off you go.

The biggest changes driving the interest in thin clients stem from networking and software improvements. The spread of high-speed Internet connections means that people working in a cubicle and at home can rely on an effective link back to the data warehouses.

H.P., Citrix Systems, Microsoft and others are also fine-tuning the software that controls communication between thin clients and the servers. This has led to smoother-running machines that can handle even video and audio applications.

Most significantly, the pool of programs thin clients can use has grown thanks to so-called virtualization software, which lets companies package up an entire operating system and all of its applications. Instead of picking and choosing certain software to send over the wire, companies can ship entire “virtual desktops.”

The reinvigorated buzz around thin-client technology has caused a scramble to address the market in innovative ways.

For example, Teradici, a start-up near Vancouver, produces a microprocessor that can speed the flow of software from data warehouses to thin clients. Dell and I.B.M. offer systems based on this chip and say that they can deal with even the most demanding software, like design programs.

Next month, Samsung will ship the 19-inch SyncMaster 930ND monitor, which relies on Teradici’s chip. Business customers can plug an Ethernet cable into the monitor and turn it into a full-fledged computer by connecting back to their data centers.

Customers of the Silicon Valley start-up Pano Logic plug their monitors, keyboards and mice into a small device that manages connections with servers holding full virtual desktops. The Hot-E from the Australian company ThinLinX is similar. One longtime player in the thin-client business, Wyse, manufactures an array of slim hardware, including laptops, that handle much the same work.

Noting rising interest in thin clients and virtual desktops, H.P. created a new group six months ago to address the technology, after buying the thin-client company Neoware for $214 million in late 2007.

“What you are seeing is that a lot of the right technology elements are starting to be there,” said Roberto Moctezuma, the vice president in charge of H.P.’s “desktop solutions” organization. “I think five years from now you will see a lot of thin computing in businesses.”

JetBlue has bought into thin clients for 20 percent of its computers using a combination of H.P.’s hardware and Citrix’s software. The technology will take center stage at the airline’s new terminal at Kennedy Airport.

“Thin clients represent a strategic direction for us,” said Pat Thompson, director of technology operations at JetBlue. “They are pretty much behind every customer-facing piece of technology that you see out there.”

By next January, the Regional Transportation District of Denver, which handles public transit in the Denver area, plans to replace about one-quarter of its systems with thin clients from Wyse running virtualization software from VMware.

“We’re looking at saving about $30,000 per year just in energy costs,” said Trent Ratcliff, the technology infrastructure manager. “And we’ll probably replace these every seven to nine years instead of every three years with PCs.”

Despite the budding interest, thin clients remain a tough sell for cultural reasons. People are used to keeping confidential and personal information on their own machines, and many companies see moving away from traditional desktops as a risk. In 2008, only 3.7 million thin clients were shipped, compared with 300 million PCs, according to IDC.

That should start to change in 2009 as companies begin a number of test projects and in 2010 when large-scale commitments to the technology begin, Mr. O’Donnell said.

Wall Street firms looking to make things easier for employees and save money, especially in these tight times, are driving some of the early tests.

“Financial services companies in the U.S. are very interested in using thin clients,” said Scott Woodgate, director for the Windows business group at Microsoft.

Microsoft has developed its virtualization software and acquired a pair of software makers — Calista Technologies and Kidaro — whose products could complement thin client technology.

Looking ahead, the thin client model could creep into the home, with PC-like functions arriving via TV set-top boxes or through devices that plug into the back of televisions. Internet service providers have started to explore the idea of selling these products to consumers and then offering monthly subscriptions to computing services.

Consumers would benefit by buying a device that’s cheaper than a PC but can still tap into a full virtual computer back in a managed data warehouse.

“There are companies that are talking about peeling off an infinite number of virtual systems and renting them to consumers,” said Roger L. Kay, president of the analysis firm Endpoint Technologies. “This is an idea whose time has come, and the argument is growing every day in favor of thin computing of some sort.”

Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User

2008-10-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

“One of these days, I’m going to write a book called, ‘The Basics.’ It’s going to be a compendium of the essential tech bits that you just assume everyone knows–but you’re wrong.
“(I’ll never forget watching a book editor at a publishing house painstakingly drag across a word in a word processor to select it. After 10 minutes of this, I couldn’t stand it. ‘Why don’t you just double-click the word?’ She had no clue you could do that!)”
Many readers chimed in with other “basics” that they assumed every computer user knew–but soon discovered that what’s common knowledge isn’t the same as universal knowledge.
I’m sure the basics could fill a book, but here are a few to get you started. All of these are things that certain friends, family or coworkers, over the years, did *not* know. Clip, save and pass along to…well, you know who they are.
* You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.
* When you get an e-mail message from eBay or your bank, claiming that you have an account problem or a question from a buyer, it’s probably a “phishing scam” intended to trick you into typing your password. Don’t click the link in the message. If in doubt, go into your browser and type “www.ebay.com” (or whatever) manually.
* Nobody, but nobody, is going to give you half of $80 million to help them liberate the funds of a deceased millionaire…from Nigeria or anywhere else.
* You can hide all windows, revealing only what’s on the computer desktop, with one keystroke: hit the Windows key and “D” simultaneously in Windows, or press F11 on Macs (on recent Mac laptops, Command+F3; Command is the key with the cloverleaf logo). That’s great when you want examine or delete something you’ve just downloaded to the desktop, for example. Press the keystroke again to return to what you were doing.
* You can enlarge the text on any Web page. In Windows, press Ctrl and the plus or minus keys (for bigger or smaller fonts); on the Mac, it’s the Command key and plus or minus.
* You can also enlarge the entire Web page or document by pressing the Control key as you turn the wheel on top of your mouse. On the Mac, this enlarges the entire screen image.
* The number of megapixels does not determine a camera’s picture quality; that’s a marketing myth. The sensor size is far more important. (Use Google to find it. For example, search for “sensor size Nikon D90.”)
* On most cellphones, press the Send key to open up a list of recent calls. Instead of manually dialing, you can return a call by highlighting one of these calls and pressing Send again.
* When someone sends you some shocking e-mail and suggests that you pass it on, don’t. At least not until you’ve first confirmed its truth at snopes.com, the Internet’s authority on e-mailed myths. This includes get-rich schemes, Microsoft/AOL cash giveaways, and–especially lately–nutty scare-tactic messages about our Presidential candidates.
* You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.
* When you’re filling in the boxes on a Web page (like City, State, Zip), you can press the Tab key to jump from box to box, rather than clicking. Add the Shift key to jump through the boxes backwards.
* You can adjust the size and position of any window on your computer. Drag the top strip to move it; drag the lower-right corner (Mac) or any edge (Windows) to resize it.
* Forcing the camera’s flash to go off prevents silhouetted, too-dark faces when you’re outdoors.
* When you’re searching for something on the Web using, say, Google, put quotes around phrases that must be searched together. For example, if you put quotes around “electric curtains,” Google won’t waste your time finding one set of Web pages containing the word “electric” and another set containing the word “curtains.”
* You can use Google to do math for you. Just type the equation, like 23*7+15/3=, and hit Enter.
* Oh, yeah: on the computer, * means “times” and / means “divided by.”
* If you can’t find some obvious command, like Delete in a photo program, try clicking using the right-side mouse button. (On the Mac, you can Control-click instead.)
* Google is also a units-of-measurement and currency converter. Type “teaspoons in 1.3 gallons,” for example, or “euros in 17 dollars.” Click Search to see the answer.
* You can open the Start menu by tapping the key with the Windows logo on it.
* You can switch from one open program to the next by pressing Alt+Tab (Windows) or Command-Tab (Mac).
* You generally can’t send someone more than a couple of full-size digital photos as an e-mail attachment; those files are too big, and they’ll bounce back to you. (Instead, use iPhoto or Picasa–photo-organizing programs that can automatically scale down photos in the process of e-mailing them.)
* Whatever technology you buy today will be obsolete soon, but you can avoid heartache by learning the cycles. New iPods come out every September. New digital cameras come out in February and October.
* Just putting something into the Trash or the Recycle Bin doesn’t actually delete it. You then have to *empty* the Trash or Recycle Bin. (Once a year, I hear about somebody whose hard drive is full, despite having practically no files. It’s because over the years, they’ve put 79 gigabytes’ worth of stuff in the Recycle Bin and never emptied it.)
* You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type the remainder: “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. (In the Safari browser, you can even leave off the “.com” part.)
* On the iPhone, hit the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space, and a capitalized letter at the beginning of the next word.
* Come up with an automated backup system for your computer. There’s no misery quite like the sick feeling of having lost chunks of your life because you didn’t have a safety copy.

Top 5 High Tech Infantry Guns

2008-09-21T00:11:00.000-07:00

Five of the best and most innovative weapons which could be made available to our foot soldiers.

When the Pentagon announced that it adjusted its future Combat Systems Initiative, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates voiced his concerns regarding the slow pace of fielding weapons to infantrymen who needed them now.

When the Pentagon recently tweaked its Future Combat Systems initiative, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made noise about fielding weapons to infantrymen who need them now, rather than planning for hypothetical dogfights and sea battles.

So, what are currently the most innovative systems available to our soldiers? Here are five of the best weapons either in use on the battlefield or in development stages to be issued in the near future.

SCAR-Light

* Developer - FNH USA (USA)
* Caliber – 5.56mm
* Features – More accuracy and less prone to jamming than an M-16 or M4 rifle. SCAR barrels can be change with ease on the battle filed using a minimal number of tools.
* Progress – The original release of the SCAR was planned for 2006, but after a limited production run last year, there’s hope for the SCAR.

High Tech Infantry Guns - SCAR Light

Replacing the M-16 as well as the compact variant, the M-4 has been a largely tragic tale. One attempt was the Objective Individual Combat Weapon (OICW), which came with an integrated grenade launcher and laser-rangefinder.

Unfortunately the OIWC was scrapped due to excessive weight adding to the list of non contenders against the M-16 and M4.

In an effort to over come the seemingly impossible task of replacing these two assault rifles, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) held a competition to aid the development of a new rifle to be deployed with Special Forces personnel.

The competition led to the development of the SCAR, and after having passed rigorous test to ensure the weapon was more accurate and reliable than the M-16 and M4, FHN USA landed the contract to mass-produce the FN SCAR.

The SCAR comes in two calibers—5.56 for the SCAR-Light, and 7.62 for the SCAR-Heavy. The weapon also meets SOCOM’s requirements for quick changes in the field. Using a minimal amount of tools the SCAR’s 18 inch barrel can be replaced with a standard 14 inch or shorter 10 inch barrel within minutes.

Although the SCAR-Light is likely to be more common than the more powerful SCAR-Heavy, both two weapons share 99 percent of the same parts, making field repairs easier and streamlining the overall logistics.

XM-25

* Developer - Alliance Techsystems (USA)
* Caliber – 25mm
* Features – Computer-aided targeting system which allows the user to aim quickly to adjust the range of the air-bursting round.
* Progress - The XM-25 is still in development, but in this industry—and particularly for a system that survived the OICW debacle—that amounts to very good news.

High Tech Infantry Guns - XM 25

The grenade launcher is often envisioned as an under-the-barrel weapon attached to an assault rifle; however the self-contained XM-25 is an entirely new concept.

Using the onboard ballistic computer and laser rangefinder, the user can set the exact range at which the 25mm round will explode. This feature allows the Xm-25 to negotiate almost any kind of cover a target could find, especially in an urban environment.

For example, rounds could be set to go off, in midair, just past the corner of building, just inside a sniper’s window, or directly above a group of hostiles hunched behind a concrete barrier.

The company behind the development of the XM-25, Alliance Techsystems credits the overhead airbursts with the potential for five time greater lethality, compared to other grenade launchers such as the M203. This is because the shrapnel will be more likely to drop on the targets head.

While this may seem like a gruesome point of pride, more direct strike means less civilian casualties.

SAR 21

* Developer - Singapore Technologies Kinetics (Singapore)
* Caliber – 5.56mm
* Features - Integrated visible/ infrared laser sight and 1.5x optical scope, translucent ammo magazines.
* Progress - The SAR 21 became standard issue for Singapore’s armed forces in 1999, but there are no plans for adoption elsewhere.

High Tech Infantry Guns - SAR 21

While the United States has had trouble replacing the M-16, Singapore have been using a newer and perhaps better performing assault rifle since 1999.

The SAR 21 replaced Singapore’s licensed version of the M-16, and has since gained a reputation among gun experts as one of the best “bullpup” (where the action and magazine are behind the trigger) assault rifles on the market.

While the SAR 21 has a smaller profile than the M-16, it doesn’t sacrifice barrel length (shorter barrels have less accuracy over longer distances). It also has a more manageable recoil due to the weapons center of gravity, the recoil tends to kick directly back toward to firer, instead of pushing upwards.

The SAR 21 has a Kevlar cheek plate to deal with chamber explosions occurring next to the user’s face (a regular safety issue for bullpup weapons). It’s also one of the few assault rifles in the world equipped with an integrated laser aiming device.
Corner Shot Launcher

* Developer - Corner Shot (Israel), Dynamit Nobel Defence (Germany)
* Caliber – 60mm
* Features - A collapsible firing-post, which is fitted with a camera and video screen, attaches to a disposable, one-shot 60 mm grenade launcher. Rounds can be fired at a 90 degree angle—other Corner Shot devices fire at up to 60 degrees.
* Progress – Unveiled in 2004, the Corner Shot is still awaiting deployment.

High Tech Infantry Guns - Corner Shot Assault Rifle

To read our original post on the Corner Shot Assault Rifle, Click Here>>>

Thanks to a hinged frame, an under-the-barrel camera and a video screen, the Corner Shot can basically shoot around corners. There are currently three different versions available; a pistol, a compact assault rifle or a 40mm and 60mm grenade launcher.

Designed for urban combat, where the ability to see around corners and open fire while behind cover is a huge advantage.

FMG9 Folding Machine Gun

* Developer - Magpul Industries (USA)
* Caliber – 9mm
* Features - Spring-loaded design transitions from a box to a gun, with a 31-round Glock 18 magazine loaded and ready to fire, at the press of a button.
* Progress - Nonfiring semiautomatic prototype shown in March 2008. Unfortunately no word yet on when a firing model—much less a fully automatic one—might be available.

High Tech Infantry Guns - FMG9

The concept of folding guns is not entirely new, legendary gun designer Eugene Stoner developed one in the 1980s, but Magpul Industries still made news earlier this year when it unveiled a prototype model of its FMG9 (short for Folding Machine Gun).

The folded gun resembles a small tool box with a flash light mounted on the top but with one push of a button the box suddenly transforms into a fully loaded, ready to fire 9mm submachine gun.

The gun also has an integrated laser sight, and can be carried without the handle and flashlight, for a sleeker, more pocketable profile.

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101 Google Tips, Tricks

2008-09-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

1. The best way to begin searching harder with Google is by clicking the Advanced Search link.

2. This lets you search for exact phrases, "all these words", or one of the specified keywords by entering search terms into the appropriate box.

3. You can also define how many results you want on the page, what language and what file type you're looking for, all with menus.

4. Advanced Search lets you type in a Top Level Domain (like .co.uk) in the "Search within site of domain" box to restrict results.

5. And you can click the "Date, usage rights, numeric range and more" link to access more advanced features.

6. Save time – most of these advanced features are also available in Google's front page search box, as command line parameters.

7. Google's main search invisibly combines search terms with the Boolean construct "AND". When you enter smoke fire – it looks for smoke AND fire.

8. To make Google search for smoke or fire, just type smoke OR fire

9. Instead of OR you can type the | symbol, like this: smoke | fire

10. Boolean connectors like AND and OR are case sensitive. They must be upper case.

11. Search for a specific term, then one keyword OR another by grouping them with parentheses, like this: water (smoke OR fire)

12. To look for phrases, put them in quotes: "there's no smoke without fire"

13. Synonym search looks for words that mean similar things. Use the tilde symbol before your keyword, like this: ~eggplant

14. Exclude specific key words with the minus operator. new pram -ebay excludes all results from eBay.

15. Common words, like I, and, then and if are ignored by Google. These are called "stop words".

16. The plus operator makes sure stop words are included. Like: fish +and chips

17. If a stop word is included in a phrase between quote marks as a phrase, the word is searched for.

18. You can also ask Google to fill in a blank. Try: Christopher Columbus discovered *

19. Search for a numerical range using the numrange operator. For example, search for Sony TV between £300 and £500 with the string Sony TV £300..£500

20. Google recognises 13 main file types through advanced search, including all Microsoft Office Document types, Lotus, PostScript, Shockwave Flash and plain text files.

21. Search for any filetype directly using the modifier filetype:[filetype extension]. For example: soccer filetype:pdf

22. Exclude entire file types, using the same Boolean syntax we used to exclude key words earlier: rugby -filetype:doc

23, In fact, you can combine any Boolean search operators, as long as your syntax is correct. An example: "sausage and mash" -onions filetype:doc

24. Google has some very powerful, hidden search parameters, too. For example "intitle" only searches page titles. Try intitle:herbs

25. If you're looking for files rather than pages – give index of as the intitle: parameter. It helps you find web and FTP directories.

26. The modifier inurl only searches the web address of a page: give inurl:spices a go.

27. Find live webcams by searching for: inurl:view/view.shtml

28. The modifier inanchor is very specific, only finding results in text used in page links.

29. Want to know how many links there are to a site? Try link:sitename – for example link:www.mozilla.org

30. Similarly, you can find pages that Google thinks are related in content, using the related: modifier. Use it like this: related:www.microsoft.com

31. The modifier info:site_name returns information about the specified page.

32. Alternatively, do a normal search then click the "Similar Pages" link next to a result.

33. Specify a site to search with the site: modifier – like this: search tips site:www.techradar.com

34. The above tip works with directory sites like www.dmoz.org and dynamically generated sites.

35. Access Google Directory – a database of handpicked and rated sites – at directory.google.com

36. The Boolean operators intitle and inurl work in Google directory, as does OR.

37. Use the site: modifier when searching Google Images, at images.google.com. For example: dvd recorder site:www.amazon.co.uk

38. Similar, using "site:.com" will only return results from .com domains.

39. Google News (news.google.com) has its own Boolean parameters. For example "intext" pulls terms from the body of a story.

40. If you use the operator "source:" in Google News, you can pick specific archives. For example: heather mills source:daily_mail

41. Using the "location:" filter enables you to return news from a chosen country. location:uk for example.

42. Similarly, Google Blogsearch (blogsearch.google.com) has its own syntax. You can search for a blog title, for example, using inblogtitle:

43. The general search engine can get very specific indeed. Try movie: to look for movie reviews.

44. The modifier film: works just as well!

45. Enter showtimes and Google will prompt you for your postcode. Enter it and it'll tell you when and where local films are showing.

46. For a dedicated film search page, go to www.google.co.uk/movies

47. If you ticked "Remember this Location" when you searched for show times, the next time you can enter the name of a current film instead.

48. Google really likes movies. Try typing director: The Dark Knight into the main search box.

49. For cast lists, try cast: name_of_film

50. The modifier music: followed by a band, song or album returns music reviews.

51. Try searching for weather London – you'll get a full 4-day forecast.

52. There's also a built-in dictionary. Try define: in the search box.

53. Google stores the content of old sites. You can search this cache direct with the syntax keyword cache:site_url

54. Alternatively, enter cache:site_url into Google's search box to be taken direct to the stored site.

55. No calculator handy? Use Google's built in features. Try typing 12*15 and hitting "Google Search".

56. Google's calculator converts measurements and understands natural language. Type in 14 stones in kilos, for example.

57. It does currency conversion too. Try 200 pounds in euros

58. If you know the currency code you can type 200 GBP in EUR instead for more reliable results.

59. And temperature! Just type: 98 f to c to convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade.

60. Want to know how clever Google really is? Type 2476 in roman numerals, then hit "Google Search"...

61. You can personalise your Google experience by creating a Google account. Go to www.google.com/account/ then click "Create Account".

62. With a Google account there are lots more extras available. You'll get a free Gmail email account for one...

63. With your Google account, you can also personalise your front page. Click "iGoogle" to add blog and site feeds.

64. Click "Add a Tab" in iGoogle to add custom tabs. Google automatically populates them with suitable site suggestions.

65. iGoogle allows you to theme your page too. Click "Select Theme" to change the default look.

66. Some iGoogle themes change with time..."Sweet Dreams" is a theme that turns from day to night as you browse.

67. Click "More" under "Try something new" to access a full list of Google sites and new features.

68. "Custom Search" enables you to create a branded Google search for your own site.

69. An active, useful service missing from the list is "Personalised Search" – but you can access it via www.google.com/psearch when you're logged in.

70. This page lists searches you have recently made – and is divided into categories. Clicking "pause" stops Google from recording your history.

71. Click "Trends" to see the sites you visit most, the terms you enter most often and links you've clicked on!

72. Personalised Search also includes a bookmark facility – which enables you to save bookmarks online and access them from anywhere.

73. You can add bookmarks or access your bookmarks using the iGoogle Bookmarks gadget.

74. Did you know you can search within your returned results? Scroll down to the bottom of the search results page to find the link.

75. Search locally by appending your postcode to the end of query. For example Indian food BA1 2BW finds restaurants in Bath, with addresses and phone numbers!

76. Looking for a map? Just add map to the end of your query, like this: Leeds map

77. Google finds images just as easily and lists them at the top, when you add image to the end of your search.

78. Google Image Search recognises faces... add &imgtype=face to the end of the returned URL in the location bar, then hit enter to filter out pictures that aren't people.

79. Keeping an eye on stocks? Type stocks: followed by market ticker for the company and Google returns the data from Google Finance.

80. Enter the carrier and flight number in Google's main search box to return flight tracking information.

81. What time is it? Find out anywhere by typing time then the name of a place.

82. You may have noticed Google suggests alternate spellings for search terms – that's the built in spell checker!

83. You can invoke the spell checker directly by using spell: followed by your keyword.

84. Click "I'm Feeling Lucky" to be taken straight to the first page Google finds for your keyword.

85. Enter a statistics-based query like population of Britain into Google, and it will show you the answer at the top of its results.

86. If your search has none-English results, click "Translate this Page" to see it in English.

87. You can search foreign sites specifically by clicking "Language Tools", then choosing which countries sites to translate your query to.

88. Other features on the language tools page include a translator for blocks of text you can type or cut and paste.

89. There's also a box that you can enter a direct URL into, translating to the chosen language.

90. Near the language tools link, you'll see the "Search Preferences". This handy page is full of secret functionality.

91. You can specify which languages Google returns results in, ticking as many (or few) boxes as you like.

92. Google's Safe Search protects you from explicit sexual content. You can choose to filter results more stringently or switch it off completely.

93. Google's default of 10 results a page can be increased to up to 100 in Search Preferences, too.

94. You can also set Google to open your search results in a new window.

95. Want to see what others are searching for or improve your page rank? Go to www.google.com/zeitgeist

96. Another useful, experimental search can be found at www.google.com/trends – where you can find the hottest search terms.

97. To compare the performance of two or more terms, enter them into the trends search box separated by commas.

98. Fancy searching Google in Klingon? Go to www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon

99. Perhaps the Swedish chef from the muppets is your role model instead? Check www.google.com/intl/xx-bork

100. Type answer to life, the universe and everything into Google. You may be surprised by the result...

101. It will also tell you the number of horns on a unicorn.

Hack Available to Download Windows XP SP3 RC from Microsoft

2008-09-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

That's right! Now you can get your hands on the first Release Candidate for Windows XP Service Pack 3! And all it will take is the implementation of a simple registry hack designed to allow Windows XP users to access, download and install Service Pack 3 Release Candidate straight from Microsoft.

You are not one of the 15,000 testers that have been so far permitted access to the RC build? No problem. And on top of that, there is no need to wait for a public version of one of the upcoming development milestones of XP SP3. If you really can't wait to get your hands on XP SP3 RC, then all you have to do is play around with the registry a tad.

The fact of the matter is that a registry hack to access a testing build of Windows Vista SP1 debuted in mid October. Modifying the registry allowed Windows Vista users to grab the Beta of Service Pack 1 straight from the Microsoft Windows Updates servers. The same is now the case for Windows XP. In order to understand what the hack is, you have to know that as of now, Windows XP SP3 RC is available exclusively to over 15,000 testers via Microsoft Connect. The Redmond company is delivering all members of the beta testing program of XP SP3 with a script set up to introduce a registry key, that subsequently permits access to the Release Candidate of XP SP3, according to Daniel Melanchthon, Technology Advisor for Microsoft Germany.

Well, the hack is nothing more, and nothing less than this script coming from Microsoft. Of course all participants in the beta testing process of Windows XP SP3 are under a strict non-disclosure agreement with Microsoft. But there are leaks, of course. You will be able to find the hack in question on WinFuture. Don't worry if you cannot speak German, it's not relevant in the least. Just copy the code that starts with "@echo off" into a text editor, Notepad will do fine. It doesn't matter the name under which you save it, but what does matter is the extension. Save As "WinXPSP3RC.cmd" for example, but pay attention to the .CMD, and in notepad select the All Files option and not .TXT. Apply the hack; it may require a restart, and then just check for Updates. You will be able to find Windows XP Build 2600.xpsp.071030-1537: Service Pack 3, v.3244 weighing in at some 337 MB – namely the Release Candidate for XP SP3.

How To Get Your Blog Ranked High on Google

2008-09-17T00:47:00.000-07:00

1. Select Your Keywords and Keyword PhrasesChoose the keywords and keyword phrases you want your blog post to rank high for on the Google search engine results page. For example, I want my blog post to rank high for the term, "blog ranked high on Google." Currently there are approximately 286,000 pages using this term so I'll have to do everything in my power to compete with these web pages to get my blog post on the first page of the Google results page for that term.My keyword phrase also includes other keyword phrases like, "ranked high on Google" with about 310,000 competing pages and "high on Google" with over 71 million competing pages. Getting to the first page for these terms would be a bonus.

2. Use Your Keywords in Your Blog TitleGoogle pays very close attention to the words and phrases you use in your blog title. Notice how I used the term, "blog ranked high on Google" in the title of this article. It's important to use your keyword phrase in your blog title if you want to rank high for that phrase on the Google results page.Another reason you want to use your keyword phrase in your blog title is to give your reader an immediate understanding as to what your blog post is about. If your blog is listed at the top of the search engine results page for your keyword phrase but no one reads it, it's of no value. Use a title that will cause people to click through to your blog post.The New York Times creates two different titles for their articles. They use a catchy, creative or humorous title for their newspaper, and a keyword specific title for the articles and blogs they post to the Internet. They do this because people looking for jokes about the eating habits of nuns generally go to a search engine and type, "jokes about the eating habits of nuns," not "Nuns, Buns and Puns."

3. Use Your Keywords in Your Blog TextNotice how the keyword phrase, "blog ranked high on Google," is used throughout this blog post. Google pays attention to the text on a blog in order to understand what the blog post is about. Once Google comprehends the content of the blog post, it will categorize the blog based on that information. By using your keyword phrase in your text, both Google and your readers can quickly understand what your blog post is about, allowing Google to accurately categorize your blog making it easy for your clients to find. In the past, search engine consultants encouraged writers to use their keyword phrase in the first 25 words of their text and again in the last sentence. Today, the search engines don't seem to pay as much attention to word placement, but reader's do.If your article is about your keyword phrase, it's a good idea to use it in the first and last sentence because it helps your reader quickly know what your blog post is about. It's also a good idea to use your keyword phrase in the first sentence because that is the text that is most likely to show in the description text on the search results page.

4. Link To Your Blog With Keyword Rich Anchor TextGet as many one-way links leading back to your blog post as possible from as many quality blogs and websites as you can. Do your best to insure that the text people click on to get back to your site includes your keywords and keyword phrases. This is known in Internet marketing circles as anchor text.In this example I want the anchor text leading back to my blog post to have the keyword phrase, "blog ranked high on Google," as the clickable text. The clickable text is the means by which all of those other web sites and blogs tell Google what your blog post is about.Google provides far more weight to the theme of your blog post based on the quality and size of the sites linking back to your blog than the text on your blog. For example, if you do a Google search for the term, "click here," you will be taken to the Adobe Reader download web page. It's interesting to note the term "click here" doesn't appear anywhere on that page. The reason the Adobe Reader download page comes up first for this term is because there are millions of other sites that use the anchor text, "click here," to direct people to the Adobe Reader download page.There are two wonderful ways to get keyword rich anchor text directing people back to your blog post. The first is to write and submit an article about your blog post to other web site and blog owners who will upload your article to their site. In return those web site and blog owners will provide you with a keyword rich anchor text link from your article back to your blog. They get great content for their web site and you get a valuable one-way link back to your blog post.The second way is to encourage other blog owners to write about your blog post. In doing so, they are very likely to use your blog title as the anchor text leading readers back to your post. This is another reason why it's so important to use your keyword phrase in your blog title.

5. Ask Your Readers To Digg Your Blog Post. Ask your readers to tell the rest of the world about your blog post by submitting it to one of the social bookmarking sites. They include DIGG, Stumble, Blink and many others. If the title of your blog post includes your keyword phrase, it is likely that this is how your readers will describe your blog post to the social bookmarking sites. This helps Google decide where to rank your site on the search results page.

6. Blog On A Community Site Recognized Expert, Active Rain, and Christian Blog are all examples of niche community blog sites. Recognized Expert is a site for marketing experts, Active Rain is for real estate professionals and the Christian blog is for, you guessed it, Christians. These niche sites have tons of traffic along with the undivided attention of Google and the other search engines.

Concurrent Computer posts $301K profit

2008-09-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

Concurrent Computer Corp. was in the black in the third quarter of fiscal 2008, and it reported plans for a reverse stock split.

The Duluth, Ga.-based provider of real-time Linux software and technology for commercial and government markets (NASDAQ: CCUR) had net income of $301,000 on $19.4 million in revenue. This compares with a net loss of $3.1 million on $16.1 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2007.

Concurrent has break-even earnings in the third quarter, compared with a loss per share of 4 cents in the same period last year.

The Company also said its that its board of directors has stamped its approval on asking Concurrent's stockholders for a reverse split of common stock at a ratio of one-for-10, meaning every 10 shares of common stock of Concurrent will be combined into one share of common stock. Concurrent plans to schedule a stockholders' meeting in the next two months.

Google Chrome...is Windows inside, which may be a strategic error

2008-09-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

In a fascinating post, Scott Hanselman pulls apart the Google Chrome browser to discover Windows inside or, rather, Windows Template Library (WTL). WTL was open sourced by Microsoft back in 2004 and went somewhat silent until now, when it popped up in Google's open-source browser.

Hanselman calls out the reason for WTL's inclusion:

Chrome uses abstraction libraries to draw the GUI on other non-Windows platforms, but for now, what sits underneath part of ChromeViews is good ol' WTL. Makes sense, too. Why not use a native library to get native speeds? They are using WTL 8.0 build 7161 from what I can see.

Speed matters, and getting top speeds on Windows may require using native Windows libraries, graciously offered by Microsoft back in 2004 as open source.

However, not everything came free of charge (and effort) from Microsoft, as Hanselman points out, and it appears from a recent PCWorld article by Neil McAllister that the effort to bring Chrome to the Mac and Linux will be even harder. Hanselman writes:

Looks like The Chromium authors may have disassembled part of the Windows Kernel in order to achieve this security feature [Data Execution Protection] under Windows XP SP2. Probably not cool to do that, but they're clearly doing it for good and not evil, as their intent (from reading their code) is to make their browser safer under XP SP2 and prevent unwanted code execution.

So the Chrome authors have had to cut some corners to make the browser secure on Windows. Microsoft may not like the approach, but as Hanselman notes, at least Google is doing it for benevolent purposes.

Fine. But what I really want to see is Chrome for the Mac (and Linux). For this, however, PCWorld's McAllister suggests that we "shouldn't hold our breath," as the "Mac build is a work in progress that is much closer to the start than the finish." In part, this is because Google needs to code around Windows platform-specific elements like WTL.

All of which means that while Microsoft's open-source efforts may ensure it will take first place in the Chrome bake-off, Google is forcing the early adopters to stick with Firefox, rather than experiment with Chrome. The trendsetting crowd is with the Mac and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Linux, not Windows. (Of course, some data doesn't support this contention.)

It might make sense to aim for the mainstream (i.e., corporate IT, which would get the most benefit from an JavaScript-optimized Web browser), but the mainstream isn't in the habit of trying out the latest and greatest.

Personally, I think Google needs the entrepreneurial CIO and CTO if it hopes to make Chrome stick. That crowd, however, is likely not a Windows crowd. Time will tell if this was a strategic error on Google's part.

Top 5 List On How To Pick The Right Motherboard

2008-09-17T00:24:00.000-07:00

I decided to make a top five list on motherboards because, in building a computer, it’s the hardest component to pick. It’s pretty much the nervous system of the PC, so proper selection is crucial to ensure your new computer performs as well or better than expected. Anyway, on with the top five!

1. Make Sure you pick the right size motherboard for the case you have chosen to use. If you have a micro at ATX case then your motherboard cannot be an ATX. Larger cases sometimes allow you to have smaller motherboards. Check the specs on the case before you continue looking for a motherboard.
2. Count how many SATA or IDE connections are available. I learned the hard way — I bought a CD drive and a hard drive — both IDE — and I only had one IDE connection and six SATA connections on the board I bought. I had To send the hard drive back and get a SATA.
3. Price isn’t everything! a motherboard that costs $80 can just as easily run as well if not better than a motherboard that costs $1000. Check the specs for features you want and also that you don’t need. If you’re not a gamer, chances are you don’t need something like SLI.
4. Do your research! Check and see what other people are saying about the motherboard. Again, just because the motherboard is expensive doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a beacon of quality!
5. Never buy from a third party like a flea market, a friend, or a guy in a van.

Strong Passwords, Passphrases, and Keys

2008-09-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

Internet Fixes has an article this week about using passphrases instead of passwords. That would involve using Windows’ ability to utilize 127 character passwords, and using a random phrase instead of using a random password.

Example: My Aunt Nellie eats cat food!

Here we have 29 characters, including spaces, three capitalized letters and a punctuation mark. This is a pretty strong passphrase. In theory, it would require a supercomputer working for millions of years to solve a random key involving 29 units. Of course, that isn’t really a random key. It’s a random phrase that, again in theory, could be cracked by a brute force attack on a fast computer, or a distributed computing network using botted machines with a sophisticated cracking program using a good dictionary.

Also, some programs and web pages will not accept passwords that long, and some will not accept spaces. For those problems, the article suggests eliminating the spaces. That pulls the length down to 24 characters, still plenty strong enough (and perhaps even harder to crack).

Another method, and the one I prefer myself, is to use the first letter of each word, along with the punctuation and capitalization. I like to use favorite quotations, and throw in a curve like a misspelled word or two commas instead of one. That way you can actually write the thing down and (a) it won’t look like a password or passphrase at all, and (b) it becomes so random that it’s hard to imagine a program that could crack it between now and the end of the universe.

Example: The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep becomes Twal,dad,bIhptk,amtgbIs — also 23 characters but even closer to truly random. Change those commas to something else, toss in an extra character or add an exclamation point, and you’ve got a very secure key.

Why is this important? Well, you have to be able to remember at least a master password to get into RoboForm or other password managers. [What? You don’t?] Second, someone else has to be able to do so too, in the event of an emergency. They aren’t likely to have memorized “Twal,dad…” but they can write that quote down and, knowing the trick of converting it, drag that sucker out years down the road. Just remember to tell them if you change it, and to use something else for your “private” files — you know, the ones you get from that Russian site.

We’ll discuss strong encryption of files and drives another time.

Top Five Tips On How To Use An Old Computer

2008-09-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

1. Fix it up. If the computer’s not too old, you should be able to buy some new RAM and some more hard drive space to extend its life. Before you buy a hard drive, just make sure you know the right connections. If you have enough money, buy a new processor (at least a Pentium 3 or higher).
2. Turn it into a sub-woofer! I know you’re like Coolio. Well I did it by using this PC World article. I found it quite interesting.
3. Donate it or recycle it. Yeah not the coolest thing, but it’s pretty obvious.
4. Turn it into a home server. As long as you have Windows 95 or higher, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. You might need to get a router and a few other things at your local computer store.
5. Take it apart. If you don’t know much about computers, you can get a “how to build a computer” article and practice building a computer before you spend your hard earned cash.

The Weekly Source Code 33 - Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome

2008-09-16T01:51:00.000-07:00

First, let me remind you that in my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer, Dear Reader, I present to you thirty-third in a infinite number of posts of "The Weekly Source Code."
That said, what does Microsoft Code have to do with Google Chrome, the new browser from Google? Take a look at the Terms and Conditions for the "Chromium" project up on Google Code. There are 24 different bits of third party software involved in making Chrome work, and one of them is WTL, the Windows Template Library, which was released as Open Source in 2004.
Chrome's use of the Open Source Windows Template Library
WTL is distributed under the MS-PL or Microsoft Public License. This is a VERY relaxed license that basically says "have fun, and don't call if there's trouble." In the Open Source world, licenses like that make people smile.
WTL is a C++ library for Win32 development and is kind of like MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), but a lot more lightweight. It was originally worked on by Nenad Stefanovic as an internal thing at Microsoft that was then released as an unsupported sample. Nenad is still listed on the old SourceForge project.
WTL embraces ATL (Active Template Library) which is a series of C++ template classes made to make COM development easier. It was more or less patterned after the STL (Standard Template Library). You may remember that folks like Chris Sells were hard-core ATL wonks. Chris and Chris Tavares (of P&P fame) worked on the ATL Internals book.
WTL was well loved going back to 2002. There's a great post from back then by Simon Steele about The Joys of WTL. Simon says:
The Windows Template Library (WTL) is MFC on template-based steroids - after a successful stretch on the slimfast plan. WTL provides the user-interface frameworks that we need to write proper GUI applications without resorting to the bloated MFC or complicated pure Win32 API programming. A number of the "must-have" classes from MFC are also available as WTL utility classes too, welcome back your old friends CPoint, CSize, CRect and most importantly CString! WTL produces small executables that do not require the MFC run time libraries - in fact if you stay clear of the Visual C++ runtime functions (strcpy and friends) you can dispense with msvcrt.dll as well - leading to really small programs, which run fast too
Windows Template Library was released as Open Source over 4 years ago which is like 28 Internet years. May of 2004 was a long time. I didn't think Microsoft was doing much Open Source that far back, but it appears they were. In fact, back as far as April of 2003 there was talk on the WTL Yahoo Group by Pranish Kumar, then of the Visual C++ team, of trying to figure out how to get the product out into the community in a way that would let it live on.
History: How WTL Became Open Source
I had an IM chat today with Pranish Kumar about how WTL made it out of a 2004 Microsoft as an Open Source project. I'd also encourage you to check out both the Shared Source page at MSFT, the Open Source page, and most importantly, Port 25.
Here's part of my IM with Pranish about how WTL was released:
[WTL] was one of the first if not the first OSS things from Microsoft and it was a tough sell. There was a meeting with some bosses where we were presenting 3 potential OSS items. I guess it was the first "real OSS" with joint MS/Community involvement as opposed to just us posting something externally. WTL was the only one that got approved.
Me: Did it start the Shared Source Initiative?
Yes in the broader sense, I think we took the basis for the license/process from Win CE and a few other components which Microsoft made available (in some form) as shared source. They also looked at BSD and some other licenses.
It was a fascinating experience for many reasons. One of them was seeing the reaction of various Microsoft execs to the whole open source/shared source idea. There was a lot of concern about OSS = Linux, and questions on whether there was business value in us engaging
It's pretty amazing how our stance/attitude has changed, one of the reasons WTL got through is because we convinced management, it had a passionate community base and would really help us foster that base.
I check in on the community now and then (not as regularly as I'd like) and I'm always impressed how it's remained strong.
One of the reasons I wanted to work for ScottGu was because of Microsoft's always improving attitude about releasing source. It's a big company and sometimes moves slow, but more people "get it" now than before.
Digging In
Chrome uses abstraction libraries to draw the GUI on other non-Windows platforms, but for now, what sits underneath part of ChromeViews is good ol' WTL. Makes sense, too. Why not use a native library to get native speeds? They are using WTL 8.0 build 7161 from what I can see.
Chromium is a lot of code. The source tarball is over 400 megs, if you want to try to compile it yourself with VS2005. Let's try to look at a few tiny interesting bits, though. You can check out their "Build Bot" if you like, and watch the development on the Linux and Mac Versions as they progress each day.
In some places, Chrome uses WTL for little stuff, like macros. For example, in the Chrome AeroTooltipManager, GET_X_LPARAM is a macro:
1. ...snip...
2. if (u_msg == WM_MOUSEMOVE || u_msg == WM_NCMOUSEMOVE) {
3. int x = GET_X_LPARAM(l_param);
4. int y = GET_Y_LPARAM(l_param);
5. if (last_mouse_x_ != x || last_mouse_y_ != y) {
6. last_mouse_x_ = x;
7. last_mouse_y_ = y;
8. HideKeyboardTooltip();
9. UpdateTooltip(x, y);
10. }
11. ...snip...
In other places, they rely on it more, like in text_field.cc that includes atlcrack.h. These are not drugs, mind you, but rather "message crackers" to help get at, and react to, the information inside Window Messages. These are used to create a "message map" of all the events you're interested in. These are macros that expand into an obscene amount of code. They are exceedingly handy.
1. // CWindowImpl
2. BEGIN_MSG_MAP(Edit)
3. MSG_WM_CHAR(OnChar)
4. MSG_WM_CONTEXTMENU(OnContextMenu)
5. MSG_WM_COPY(OnCopy)
6. MSG_WM_CUT(OnCut)
7. MESSAGE_HANDLER_EX(WM_IME_COMPOSITION, OnImeComposition)
8. MSG_WM_KEYDOWN(OnKeyDown)
9. MSG_WM_LBUTTONDBLCLK(OnLButtonDblClk)
10. MSG_WM_LBUTTONDOWN(OnLButtonDown)
11. MSG_WM_LBUTTONUP(OnLButtonUp)
12. MSG_WM_MBUTTONDOWN(OnNonLButtonDown)
13. MSG_WM_MOUSEMOVE(OnMouseMove)
14. MSG_WM_MOUSELEAVE(OnMouseLeave)
15. MSG_WM_NCCALCSIZE(OnNCCalcSize)
16. MSG_WM_NCPAINT(OnNCPaint)
17. MSG_WM_RBUTTONDOWN(OnNonLButtonDown)
18. MSG_WM_PASTE(OnPaste)
19. MSG_WM_SYSCHAR(OnSysChar) // WM_SYSxxx == WM_xxx with ALT down
20. MSG_WM_SYSKEYDOWN(OnKeyDown)
21. END_MSG_MAP()
They also use some handy helpers that are C++ classes around Windows structures. For example, the Windows POINT structure is a class in WTL called CPoint. The class actual derives from the struct. Lots of interesting stuff in there, and WTL is at a pretty low level helping out and keeping things tidy.
Now, moving on to something I found fascinating because it's not documented and may or may not have required some disassembling to accomplish.
Chrome's Odd Use of Data Execution Prevention
This part isn't explicitly about use of open source, but it's darned interesting. This is part of Chrome's WinMain(). It's long, but check out a few interesting bits. First, the big if/else at the beginning. They look at the command line and determine if they (the EXE) are one of three flavors...either a Renderer, a Plugin [host] process, or the Browser process. Notice that they have DEP (Data Execution Prevention) turned on for the Renderer and main Browser, but have to enable ATL7 thinking because there are plugins that weird build in older ways still out there. They are ultimately calling SetProcessDEPPolicy and passing in a flag to enable DEP, as well enabling ATL7 compiled processes. From MSDN help:
"Disables DEP-ATL thunk emulation for the current process, which prevents the system from intercepting NX faults that originate from the Active Template Library (ATL) thunk layer."
These new APIs were added in Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3 and WIndows 2008. Why is ATL special cased? From Michael Howard:
"Older versions of ATL, and by older I mean pre-Visual C++ 2005, used dynamically generated code in small isolated cases. Obviously, without the appropriate APIs this is going to cause problems on a DEP-enabled computer, because you can't execute data. This code is referred to as a "thunk" and versions of ATL in VC++ 2005 and later work correctly with DEP."
Some plugins that might run in a Chrome sandboxed process might be compiled in this way, so that process has a different security DEP setting than the others.
1. int APIENTRY wWinMain(HINSTANCE instance, HINSTANCE prev_instance,
2. wchar_t* command_line, int show_command) {
3. // The exit manager is in charge of calling the dtors of singletons.
4. base::AtExitManager exit_manager;
5.
6. // Note that std::wstring and CommandLine got linked anyway because of
7. // breakpad.
8. CommandLine parsed_command_line;
9. std::wstring process_type =
10. parsed_command_line.GetSwitchValue(switches::kProcessType);
11.
12. const wchar_t* dll_name = L"chrome.dll";
13. if (process_type == switches::kPluginProcess) {
14. // Plugin process.
15. // For plugins, we enable ATL7 thunking support because we saw old activex
16. // built with VC2002 in the wild still being used.
17. sandbox::SetCurrentProcessDEP(sandbox::DEP_ENABLED_ATL7_COMPAT);
18. } else if (process_type == switches::kRendererProcess) {
19. // Renderer process.
20. // For the processes we control, we enforce strong DEP support.
21. sandbox::SetCurrentProcessDEP(sandbox::DEP_ENABLED);
22. } else {
23. // Browser process.
24. // For the processes we control, we enforce strong DEP support.
25. sandbox::SetCurrentProcessDEP(sandbox::DEP_ENABLED);
26. }
27. ...snip...
28. }
When you dig into their use of DEP, notice this interesting comment, as they try to get DEP working under Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1. They are using the totally unsupported technique outlined in this article from 2005 to try to turn on DEP. If you try to call this on Vista you'll get back STATUS_NOT_SUPPORTED, of course. ;) There's an official Vista API, and that's SetProcessDEPPolicy.
As an side, and interestingly enough, this undocumented API has been added as a patch just last week to WINE (Windows Emulation) for those who try to emulate Windows under Linux, but outside a VM.
Note the most interesting comment in the method:
"// Completely undocumented from Microsoft. You can find this information by
// disassembling Vista's SP1 kernel32.dll with your favorite disassembler.
enum PROCESS_INFORMATION_CLASS {
ProcessExecuteFlags = 0x22,
}"
Looks like The Chromium authors may have disassembled part of the Windows Kernel in order to achieve this security feature under Windows XP SP2. Probably not cool to do that, but they're clearly doing it for good and not evil, as their intent (from reading their code) is to make their browser safer under XP SP2 and prevent unwanted code execution.
This internal and totally unsupported API is in the Microsoft Windows Internals 4th Edition, Chapter 6, on download.microsoft.com (PDF). It's also mentioned in a Microsoft Research PowerPoint (PPTX). An architect on the Windows Kernel team point out in a forum posting that this was internal:
"I want to stress as a disclaimer that NtSetInformationProcess, class ProcessAccessToken, is an undocumented and unsupported infterface. It is reserved for system component use and is subject to change between operating system releases"
You can see the dance Chrome does below or on their source site. They poke around looking for a method that does what they want, using GetProcAddress:
1. namespace sandbox {
2.
3. namespace {
4.
5. // These values are in the Windows 2008 SDK but not in the previous ones. Define
6. // the values here until we're sure everyone updated their SDK.
7. #ifndef PROCESS_DEP_ENABLE
8. #define PROCESS_DEP_ENABLE 0x00000001
9. #endif
10. #ifndef PROCESS_DEP_DISABLE_ATL_THUNK_EMULATION
11. #define PROCESS_DEP_DISABLE_ATL_THUNK_EMULATION 0x00000002
12. #endif
13.
14. // SetProcessDEPPolicy is declared in the Windows 2008 SDK.
15. typedef BOOL (WINAPI *FnSetProcessDEPPolicy)(DWORD dwFlags);
16.
17. // Completely undocumented from Microsoft. You can find this information by
18. // disassembling Vista's SP1 kernel32.dll with your favorite disassembler.
19. enum PROCESS_INFORMATION_CLASS {
20. ProcessExecuteFlags = 0x22,
21. };
22.
23. // Flags named as per their usage.
24. const int MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_ENABLE = 1;
25. const int MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_DISABLE = 2;
26. const int MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_ATL7_THUNK_EMULATION = 4;
27. const int MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_PERMANENT = 8;
28.
29. // Not exactly the right signature but that will suffice.
30. typedef HRESULT (WINAPI *FnNtSetInformationProcess)(
31. HANDLE ProcessHandle,
32. PROCESS_INFORMATION_CLASS ProcessInformationClass,
33. PVOID ProcessInformation,
34. ULONG ProcessInformationLength);
35.
36. } // namespace
37.
38. bool SetCurrentProcessDEP(DepEnforcement enforcement) {
39. #ifdef _WIN64
40. // DEP is always on in x64.
41. return enforcement != DEP_DISABLED;
42. #endif
43.
44. // Try documented ways first.
45. // Only available on Vista SP1 and Windows 2008.
46. // http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736299.aspx
47. FnSetProcessDEPPolicy SetProcDEP =
48. reinterpret_cast(
49. GetProcAddress(GetModuleHandle(L"kernel32.dll"),
50. "SetProcessDEPPolicy"));
51.
52. if (SetProcDEP) {
53. ULONG dep_flags;
54. switch (enforcement) {
55. case DEP_DISABLED:
56. dep_flags = 0;
57. break;
58. case DEP_ENABLED:
59. dep_flags = PROCESS_DEP_ENABLE |
60. PROCESS_DEP_DISABLE_ATL_THUNK_EMULATION;
61. break;
62. case DEP_ENABLED_ATL7_COMPAT:
63. dep_flags = PROCESS_DEP_ENABLE;
64. break;
65. default:
66. NOTREACHED();
67. return false;
68. }
69. return 0 != SetProcDEP(dep_flags);
70. }
71.
72. // Go in darker areas.
73. // Only available on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1.
74. // http://www.uninformed.org/?v=2&a=4
75. FnNtSetInformationProcess NtSetInformationProc =
76. reinterpret_cast(
77. GetProcAddress(GetModuleHandle(L"ntdll.dll"),
78. "NtSetInformationProcess"));
79.
80. if (!NtSetInformationProc)
81. return false;
82.
83. // Flags being used as per SetProcessDEPPolicy on Vista SP1.
84. ULONG dep_flags;
85. switch (enforcement) {
86. case DEP_DISABLED:
87. // 2
88. dep_flags = MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_DISABLE;
89. break;
90. case DEP_ENABLED:
91. // 9
92. dep_flags = MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_PERMANENT | MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_ENABLE;
93. break;
94. case DEP_ENABLED_ATL7_COMPAT:
95. // 0xD
96. dep_flags = MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_PERMANENT | MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_ENABLE |
97. MEM_EXECUTE_OPTION_ATL7_THUNK_EMULATION;
98. break;
99. default:
100. NOTREACHED();
101. return false;
102. }
103.
104. HRESULT status = NtSetInformationProc(GetCurrentProcess(),
105. ProcessExecuteFlags,
106. &dep_flags,
107. sizeof(dep_flags));
108. return SUCCEEDED(status);
109. }
110.
111. } // namespace sandbox
It's a really interesting read and there's a lot of stuff going on in the comments, like TODOs, HACKs, and the like. All the stuff you'd expect to see any application of significant size. Funny, it's been at least 5 years since I've thought about C++ deeply. And to think I used to do all this -> stuff full time for money!
There's lots more to see. Check out the About Box version checks where they were blocking on Vista SP1 with UAC disabled. Also, the Threading stuff is interesting as they have a Thread Class that was ported to Mac and Linux. Finally check out Pickle.cc, as they serialize objects by "pickling them." Pickle is serialization for Python, and this looks like they're serializing between C++ and Python, and this is a C++ implementation of Pickle.
Back on WTL, you can download the final MS release of WTL 7.1 at Microsoft Downloads if you're interested. However, the more interesting release is the 8.0 release from June of 2007. This was the most recent release from the community! WTL 8 includes full support for Vista!
I think it's great that Microsoft is releasing more and more code in either Shared Source, Reference Source, or my favorite, Open Source as MS-PL. The fact that Google was able to use it, even this small part, really speaks to the spirit of Open Source.
Related Links
WTL on Code Project by Michael Dunn
Part I - ATL GUI Classes
Part II - WTL GUI Base Classes
Part III - Toolbars and Status Bars
Part IV - Dialogs and Controls
Part V - Advanced Dialog UI Classes
WTL Yahoo Gruop - Still Active with 4500+ members
WTL SourceForge Project

11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation

2008-09-16T01:48:00.000-07:00

Over five years ago I posted Tips for a Successful MSFT Presentation. Yesterday I watched the video of my Mix Presentation all the way through. It's always very painful to hear one's own voice but it's even worse to watch yourself. I never listen to my podcast and I avoid watching myself. It's like watching a person in parallel universe and it inspires self-loathing. However, if you are someone who values continuous improvement - and I am - you need to do the uncomfortable.

Here's my five-years-later Updated Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation.

1. Have a Reset Strategy (One-Click)
If you're going to give a talk, you'll probably have to give it more than once. If you have demonstrations of any kind, have a "one-click" way to reset them. This might be a batch file or Powershell script that drops a modified database and reattaches a fresh one, or copies template files over ones you modify during your demo.

Personally, I'm sold on Virtual Machines. I have seven VMs on a small, fast portable USB drive that will let me do roughly 12 different presentations at the drop of a hat. You never know when you'll be called upon to give a demo. With a Virtual Machine I can turn on "Undo Disks" after I've prepared the talk, and my reset strategy is to just turn off the VM and select "Delete Changes." A little up-front preparation means one less thing for you to panic about the day of the talk.

2. Know Your Affectations (Ssssssseriously)
I have a bit of a lisp, it seems. I also hold my shoulders a little higher than is natural which causes my neck to tighten up. I also pick a different word, without realizing it, and overuse it in every talk. This is similar to how Microsoft Employees overuse the word "so" (which is actually Northwestern Americans, not MSFTies) too much.

It's important to know YOUR affectations so you can change them. They may be weakening your talk. Don't try to remember them all, though. Just pick two or three and focus on replacing them with something less detracting. Don't overanalyze or beat yourself up, though. I've spoken hundreds of times over the last 15 years and I'm always taking two-steps forward and one step back. The point is to try, not to succeed absolutely.

3. Know When To Move and When To Not Move (Red light!)
One of the most powerful tips I ever received was this: "When you move, they look at you. When you stop, they look at the screen." Use this to your advantage. Don't pace randomly, idley or unconsciously. Don't rock back and forth on your heels. Also, empty your pockets if you tend to fiddle with lose change or your keys.

4. For the Love of All That Is Holy, FONT SIZE, People (See that?)
It just tears me up. It physically makes me ill. To give a presentation and utter the words "um, you probably won't be able to see this" does everyone in the room a disservice. Do NOT use the moment of the presentation as your time to do the font resizing.

Lucida Console, 14 to 18pt, Bold. Consider this my gift to you. This is the most readable, mono-spaced font out there. Courier of any flavor or Arial (or any other proportionally spaced font) is NOT appropriate for code demonstrations, period, full stop. Prepare your machine AHEAD OF TIME. Nothing disrespects an audience like making them wait while you ask "Can you see this 8 point font? No? Oh, let me change it while you wait." Setup every program you could possibly use, including all Command Prompt shortcuts, before you begin your presentation. That includes VS.NET, Notepad, XMLSpy, and any others, including any small utilities.

I've found that the most readable setup for Command Prompts is a Black Background and with the Foreground Text set to Kermit Green (ala "Green Screen." Yes, I was suspicious and disbelieving also, but believe it or not, it really works.) I set Command Prompts to Lucida Console, 14 to 18pt, Bold as well, with much success.

Also, set the font size to LARGEST in Internet Explorer and remember that there are accessibility features in IE that allow you to include your own Large Font CSS file for those web pages that force a small font via CSS.

Learn how to use ZoomIt and practice before-hand. It can be an incredibly powerful tool for calling out sections of the screen and making it so even the folks way in the back can see what's going on.

For simplicities' sake, I like to keep a separate user around call "BigFonty" (choose your own name). He's an Administrator on the local machine and he exists ONLY for the purposes of demonstrations. All the fonts are large for all programs, large icons, great colors, etc. It's the easiest way to set all these settings once and always have them easily available.

5. Speak their Language (Know the Audience)
When I was in Malaysia for TechEd, I spent 3 full days exclusively with locals before the talk, I learned snippets of each of the languages, tried to understand their jokes and get an idea about what was important to people in Malaysia. American analogies, much humor, and certain "U.S. specific" English colloquialisms just didn't make any sense to them. When it came time to give the presentations, I better understood the Malaysian sense of timing, of tone and timbre, and I began each of my presentations by speaking in Bahasa Malaysia. I changed aspects of my slides to remove inappropriate content and add specific details that would be important to them.

I've used this same technique in a half-dozen countries with success. While this is an extreme example, the parallels with any audience are clear. If you're speaking to a room full of IT guys who work in the Automotive field, or the Banking industry, the fact that we are all programmers only gives you a small degree of shared experience. Remember no matter the technical topic, try to get into the mind of the audience and ask yourself, why are they here and what can I tell them that will not be a waste of their time. What would YOU want to hear (and HOW would you like to hear it) if you were sitting there?

6. Be Utterly Prepared (No excuses)
Short of an unexpected BSOD (and even then, be ready) you should be prepared for ANYTHING. You should know EVERY inch of your demos and EXACTLY what can go wrong. Nothing kills your credibility more than an error that you DON'T understand. Errors and screw-ups happen ALL the time in Presentations. They can even INCREASE your credibility if you recover gracefully and EXPLAIN what happened. "Ah, this is a common mistake that I've made, and here's what you should watch for." Be prepared with phrases that will turn the unfortunate incident around and provide them useful information.

7. CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT (Have some)
Every move, phrase, mistake, anecdote and slide should actually contain content. It should be meaningful. Your mistakes should teach them, your demos should teach them; even your shortcut keys, utilities and menu layout should teach them. A presentation isn't an opportunity to read your slides. I'll say that again. Don't READ your slides. I can read faster than you can talk.

Remember that most people can read silently to themselves 5 to 10 times faster that you can read to them out loud. Your job as a presenter is to read in between the lines, and provide them structure. Your slides should be treated as your outline – they are structure, scaffolding, nothing more. If you jam your slides full of details and dozens of bullets, you might as well take your content and write an article. It's difficult to listen to someone talk and read their slides at the same time – remember that when you design your content. YOU are the content, and your slides are your Table of Contents.

8. System Setup (Be unique, but don't be nuts)
When you a presenting, remember that you are looked upon as an authority. Basically, you are innocent until proven guilty. It's great to have a personality and to be unique, but don't let your personal choice of editors or crazy color scheme obscure the good information you're presenting. I appreciate that you may like to use VI or emacs to view text files, but let's just say that sometimes Notepad has a calming effect on the audience.

I give Microsoft talks, usually, so I tend towards Visual Studio, but 99% of my talks use a limited number of tools. Basically Visual Studio, Notepad, the Command Prompt and a Browser.

Remember that while you may prefer things a certain way while your face is a foot away from the screen, it's very likely the wrong setup when 500 people are more than 100 feet away.

I really like to get Toolbars and things out of the way. I use F11 (Fullscreen) in the Browser a lot, as well as Visual Studio's Shift-Alt-Enter shortcut to FullScreen. Turn off unneeded flair and toolbars. Also, turn on line-numbering so you can refer to lines if you're presenting code.

9. Speaking (Um…)
"Volume and Diction," my High School Drama teacher said to me. Speak clearly, authoritatively, project your voice to the back of the room. The best speakers don't even need microphones. If you have a speaking affectation (I had a lisp growing up) or you tend to say, um, etc, or find yourself overusing a specific phrase ("a priori", "fantastic", "powerful", etc) take it upon yourself to NOTICE this mannerism and avoid it.

Practice multi-tasking. It seems silly to say, but although we can all multitask to a certain degree, when we hit a real snag in a presentation, many of us tend to freeze. Silence is deadly. Remember, since all eyes are on you, complete silence and apparent introspection says "I don't know know what I'm doing." When you need to get to a particular file, don't make the audience wait for you while you putter through explorer. Have shortcuts ready (and explain when you use them). Move fast and efficiently, but annotate your actions. You should continue to "color-commentate" your actions like a sports announcer. Don't allow "dead-air," unless it's silence for effect.

10. Advancing Slides (No lasers!)
I always used to hate slide-advancers, you know, those little remotes with forward and backward buttons. Then I tried one and I'm hooked. I use the Microsoft Presenter Mouse 8000 and totally recommend it. It isn't just a great Bluetooth mouse, but flip it over and it's a great Powerpoint slide advancer.

Take a look at Al Gore's excellent presentation in "An Inconvenient Truth." It's seamless and flows. Now imagine him running over to his laptop to hit the spacebar each time he wanted to advance a slide. My presentations have gotten better as I've started incorporating this technique.

11. Care (deeply)
I really avoid presenting on topics that I don't care about. I avoid it like the Plague and I encourage you to do so as well. There's nothing more important that truly caring about your topic. If you care, it'll show. If you eschew all the other tips, at the very least care.

Is HP building a custom Linux distro for home computers?

2008-09-16T01:46:00.000-07:00

Business Week reports that sources inside HP claim the company is readying a custom operating system based on Linux for home computer users. There are practically no details about the rumored OS at this point, aside from the fact that it's supposed to be "easier" to use than most Linux distributions.

Why would HP, a company that has made billions of dollars by selling machines designed to run Windows want to build its own operating system? Two words. Vista and Apple.

First of all, Microsoft is in the process of killing off its most popular operating system ever, Windows XP. But many home and business computer users are reluctant to install Windows Vista. So if HP wants to continue selling computers over the next few years while waiting for Windows 7 to arrive, it might not be a bad idea to offer customers an alternative to Windows Vista.

The Business Week article also quotes someone who claims that Apple could be preparing to enter the sub-$1000 laptop game soon. That's an area where companies like HP, Dell, and Acer haven't really had to worry about Apple so far. But one of the reasons Apple laptops have been gaining steam in the last few years is because the same company is behind the software and the hardware. That means you don't run into the kind of hardware compatibility issues you find with Windows Vista. A custom HP operating system could ensure that as long as you buy HP peripherals, everything you plug into your computer will work.

HP has already begun dabbling in Linux. Earlier this year the company released the HP 2133 Mini-Note, a low end ultraportable laptop designed to compete with the popular Asus Eee PC. The cheapest versions of the Mini-Note run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

The 5 most annoying programs on your PC

2008-09-16T01:43:00.000-07:00

Elephantware. That is what we are talking about. Bloated programs that make brand new PCs boot like Pentium 2s with 64 MBs of RAM.

This is software that causes your screen to freeze while it works, consumes enough system resources to display a reminder box letting you know there is a new, even bigger, version available for download. Software we've been forced to install so we can read some special document format, enjoy some DRM infected piece of media, or communicate with others who also live with the same brand of behemoth riding on their backs.

We all have it. We are all stuck with it. And, aside from a glimmer or two of hope, we can't expect to escape their boot screens, quick launch icons, or update reminders anytime soon.

This is the worst of the worst.

1. Acrobat Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is like a stocky frat guy you never want to invite to your Halloween parties, because he'll show up wearing a giant gift-wrapped box with a "To: Women, From: God" label on top. He thinks he is all that, but he really just wore a costume so big he can't get through the front door and has to stay outside by the fire all night (true story!).

Back on topic though, Acrobat reader does one thing poorly -- read PDFs. To do this it needs to download updates at least twice a month. Acrobat's other big feature is the ability to bring your system to a roaring halt while it boots up its massive amount of plugins and libraries. All this to display (wait for it) -- a page.

FoxIt Reader is a much better solution. Download it, and you'll no longer cringe each time your accidentally click on a PDF link while browsing the internet.

2. iTunes

I CAN HAZ MANY HOURS OF IPOD SYNCING? KTHXBYE!

For the love of Apple, why is iTunes such a cow of an application? It is a media player! It should be light and the media should be heavy. Instead we have a bloated and increasingly complex application that takes so long to load, is so ugly, and takes up so much memory the only option is to not use it and pull up Pandora. And let's not even talk about the painful process of syncing a new iPod using this pile of cowplop.

3. Real Player

Real Player could have been YouTube. Instead it is, well, Real Player. Like a pushy kid on your front lawn trying to sell you a magazine subscription, Real Player just doesn't leave you alone. It is constantly trying to take over all the media on your hard drive, your web browser, and your MP3 Players. To make matters worse it continuously tries to upsell you on Rhapsody and SuperPass. Yeah, let's just SuperPass on those options. Thanks.

You might try Real Alternative instead.

4. Internet Explorer

Yes, the great drunk-and-raving-at-family-Christmas-gatherings granddad of bad software. Will Microsoft ever fix this? Sure IE 7.0 is better than IE 6.0, but that is only in a "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" sort of way. It is still evil. Can't believe it? Ask any web developer to explain how many hours they've spent in the last month getting their site to work in IE and you'll get the picture.

If you aren't using FireFox, do.

5. Microsoft Outlook

Hello Microsoft! Please! It is nearly 2008! How is it possible GMail and Yahoo Mail are so much faster and so much more feature-rich than your flagship mail client? How is it, in the world of 500 spam messages a day, that Outlook becomes pitch-drip slow as soon as you have a couple thousand messages? How is it your business contact manager is always trying to do mysterious things, always failing to do them, and always complaining about it in the middle of startup? And how, oh please tell us how, can you justify a message search that scans a folder at the same speed we do?

Let's face it, no matter how fast your processor, how big your hard drive, or how many Gigs of RAM you have -- your PC will still never run like a gazelle. With junk like the aforementioned software cluttering up your C Drive from day one, you'll always be stuck waddling along at Winnie-the-Pooh speeds. And if that is too fast for you, perhaps a downgrade to Vista is in order.

Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games

2008-09-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

Interview: Trent Reznor on Year Zero, Planting Clues, and What's Ludicrous About Being a Musician Today
...- .. -.. . ---: .-..-. .-. . -.. / .... --- .-. ... . / ...- . -.-. - --- .-. .-..-.
...- .. -.. . ---: .-..-. - .... . / -... . --. .. -. -. .. -. --. / --- ..-. / - .... . / . -. -.. .-..-.
NinWiki: Guide to Year Zero
The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it.
On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails' European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled "i am trying to believe." Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing "iamtryingtobelieve.com" into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site's contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: "I'm drinking the water. So should you." Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?
A few days later, on February 14, a woman named Sue was about to wash a different T-shirt, which she had bought at one of the Lisbon shows, when she noticed that the tour dates included several boldface digits. Fans quickly interpreted this as a Los Angeles telephone number. People who called it heard a recording of a newscaster announcing, "Presidential address: America is born again," followed by a distorted snippet of what could only be a new Nine Inch Nails song. Then, a woman named Ana reported finding a USB flash drive in a bathroom stall at the hall where the band had been playing. On the drive was a previously unreleased song, which she promptly uploaded. The metadata tag on the song contained a clue that led to a site displaying a glowing wheat field, with the legend "America Is Born Again." Clicking and dragging the mouse across the screen, however, revealed a much grimmer-looking site labeled "Another Version of the Truth." Clicking on that led to a forum about acts of underground resistance.
All this activity had been set in motion months before. Trent Reznor, the singer — songwriter behind Nine Inch Nails, had been recording Year Zero, a grimly futuristic suite evoking an America beset by terrorism, ravaged by climate change, and ruled by a Christian military dictatorship. "But I had a problem," he recalls, lounging on a second-floor deck of the house he's remodeling in Beverly Hills: how to provide context for the songs. In the '60s, concept albums came with extensive liner notes and lots of artwork. MP3s don't have that. "So I started thinking about how to make the world's most elaborate album cover," he says, "using the media of today."
Years earlier, Reznor had heard about a complex game played out over many months, both online and in the real world, in which millions of people across the planet had collectively solved a cascading series of puzzles, riddles, and treasure hunts that ultimately tied into the Steven Spielberg movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. Developed by Jordan Weisman, then a Microsoft exec, it was the first of what came to be called alternate reality games — ARGs for short. After leaving Redmond, Weisman founded a company called 42 Entertainment, which made ARGs for products ranging from Windows Vista to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Reznor wanted to give his fans a taste of life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state, and he decided that a game involving millions of players worldwide would help him do that in a big way.
Reznor was stepping into a new kind of interactive fiction. These narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the story online. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the audience in ways that other forms of storytelling cannot match. No longer passive consumers, the players live out the story. Eight years ago, this kind of entertainment didn't exist; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent.
How could this work for Year Zero? Reznor had spent a long time thinking and writing about the future dystopia he imagined. Now he wanted to share this story with his fans. He filled in the contact form on 42 Entertainment's Web site and clicked Send.

Alex Lieu, Susan Bonds, and Jordan Weisman of 42 Entertainment, which pioneered alternate reality games.
Photo: Robert Maxwell
When Weisman opened Reznor's email at his lakefront house near Seattle, he had barely heard of Nine Inch Nails. Slender and soft-spoken, with curly dark hair and a salt-and-pepper beard that gives him a vaguely Talmudic appearance, he's not big on hardcore industrial rock. His experience is more in game design and social inter-action, two fields he views as intimately conjoined. "Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet," he says, sipping coffee in his guesthouse, "which is other people."
In 2001, Weisman was creative director of Microsoft's entertainment division, which was developing the Xbox and a number of videogames — including one based on AI — to support its launch. The AI game never materialized, but the ARG Weisman created was phenomenally successful. He left Microsoft and in 2003 decided to do ARGs full-time, launching 42 Entertainment as a boutique marketing firm. He took the name from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which maintains that "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" is in fact 42. The company's first game, ilovebees, had people answering pay phones around the world in the weeks leading up to the release of Halo 2. One player even braved a Florida hurricane to take a call in a Burger King parking lot.
Similar games have been used to launch scores of products in the years since. GMD Studios, a Florida outfit, staged a fake auto theft to begin a game for Audi that drew more than 500,000 players. A London studio called Hi-Res used television ads and specially made chocolate bars, among other things, in a still-talked-about game touting JJ Abrams' Lost. More recently, someone — not 42 — has been planting enigmatic clues on Web sites and fake MySpace profiles to promote a film Abrams is producing that so far is best known by the codename Cloverfield. What's all this about a Japanese drink called Slusho? And what does it have to do with the sudden appearance of a Godzilla-like monster in New York Harbor? Abrams fans have been falling all over themselves to figure it out.
"When done well, ARGs can be extraordinarily effective," says Ty Montague, creative director of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. That's because the games offer marketers a solution to a growing problem: how to reach people who are so media-saturated they block all attempts to get through. "Your brain filters it out, because otherwise you'd go crazy," Weisman says. That's why he opted for a "subdural" approach: Instead of shouting the message, hide it. "I figured that if the audience discovered something, they would share it," he explains, "because we all need something to talk about."
The ARG for AI began with an obscure credit for a "sentient machine therapist" in both the trailer and a prerelease promotional poster. Soon someone — all signs point to a member of Weisman's group — wrote Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News, suggesting he Google the therapist's name. That led to a maze of bizarre Web sites about robot rights and a phone number that, when called, played a message from a woman whose husband had just died in a suspicious boating accident. Within 24 hours, thousands of people were trying to figure out what had happened.

Weisman had long been working toward that moment. Severely dyslexic as a kid, his world changed when he was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. "Here was entertainment that involved problem solving and was story-based and social," he says. "It totally put my brain on fire. What we're doing now is a giant extrapolation of sitting in the kitchen playing D&D with friends. It's just that now our kitchen table holds 3 million people" — the number that ultimately engaged with the AI game.
During the development of that first ARG, Weisman argued that no puzzle would be too hard, no clue too obscure, because with so many people collaborating online, the players would have access to every conceivable skill set. Where he erred was in not following that idea to its logical conclusion. "Not only do they have every skill on the planet," he says, "they have unlimited resources, unlimited time, and unlimited money. Not only can they solve anything, they can solve anything instantly." Weisman dubbed his game the Beast, because originally it had 666 pieces of content. But as the players burned through those and clamored for more, the name took on a different meaning. He had created a monster.
Weisman and Spielberg viewed the Beast as an extension of AI. But the bill to fund it came out of the film's marketing budget, and the ARG certainly created buzz for the movie. Meanwhile, the Internet was transforming marketing. Western commerce had been built on a clear proposition: I give you money, you give me something else of value. But like a rug merchant who offers prospective buyers tea before discussing his wares, the Internet was beginning to engage and entertain customers — whether with free singles on iTunes or an ARG that could run for months — before asking them to part with their money. "All marketing," Weisman says, "is headed in that direction."
For Nine Inch Nails fans, the unfolding of the Year Zero game was as puzzling as it was exciting. "We didn't know where it would go," says Cameron Ladd, a 19-year-old community college student in rural Ohio who helps moderate the Nine Inch Nails fan forum Echoing the Sound. "We had no idea of the scope. That was the most fun — not knowing what would come next." Debates raged as to whether it had anything to do with Philip K. Dick or the Bible, how it compared with Children of Men or V for Vendetta, and why the Year Zero Web sites kept referring to something called the Presence, which appeared to be a giant hand reaching down from the sky. The band's European tour dates became the object of obsessive attention. "It was like, bang-bang-bang — there were so many things happening at once," Ladd says. "It was one gigantic burst of excitement."
Fans in Europe were so eager to find new flash drives that they ran for the toilets the moment the concert venue doors opened. On February 18, at the Sala Razzmatazz in Barcelona, someone scored. The drive contained an MP3 file of a new Nine Inch Nails song that trailed off into the sound of crickets.
But when the cricket sounds were run through a spectrograph, they yielded a series of blips that gradually resolved into a phone number in Cleveland, Ohio. People who dialed this number (and some 1.7 million did) heard a horrific recording from a mysterious organization called US Wiretap: a young woman on her cell phone at an underground nightclub, with shrieking and gunshots in the background, screaming hysterically that someone had come into the club and killed her friend and that the cops had locked everybody inside and she was going to die.

A visit to uswiretap.com ("A Partnership Corporation of the Bureau of Morality") revealed that federal agents had bolted the doors to the club, a known "resistance" hangout, while the 112 people inside spent two days tearing one another to shreds in a mad frenzy.
The clues on the flash drives were typical of what makes a good ARG work. They were hard to spot and even harder to decipher, but because the narrative was being pieced together online, you didn't have to be a propellerhead to follow it. "Our assumption," says Sean Stewart, the game's head writer, "was never that there's a continent of people who love nothing better than to do spectrogram analysis. But there are always a few, and if you make a world that's compelling enough, there'll be a lot to do even if you're not interested in the really arcane stuff."
Most fans didn't realize their progress was being monitored nonstop. Unlike less interactive forms of entertainment, ARGs require a close collaboration between the puppet masters — the unseen figures who create the story — and the audience. "The makers and the consumers are in a tango," Stewart says. "It's a dance, it's passionate, and sometimes there are sinister overtones. It creates a unique dynamic."
After every gig, Reznor rushed back to his hotel so he could watch the action on fan forums and in chat rooms unfold on his laptop. "I couldn't wait," Reznor says. "'Did they find it? Did they find it?' I know it sounds nerdy, but it was exciting." The 42 Entertainment team, working out of a cramped loft in downtown Pasadena, California, kept an even closer watch. They had to make sure the players didn't get frustrated or go too far down a wrong path.
It didn't take long to spot the first problem. On several sites, brief snippets of text from mildly subversive books — One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heather Has Two Mommies — had been scanned into the background to provide visual interest. Players, however, were interpreting them as clues and trying to figure out what they meant.
At 42 Entertainment, panic set in. "It's a silent contract," explains Steve Peters, the game designer charged with tracking player progress. "We respect you — which means we're not going to lead you along by the nose and then not give you anything." They decided to add a clue suggesting that the texts were from banned books.
There were more complications to come. Reznor presumed that weeks before the CD reached Wal-Mart and Best Buy, someone would upload it to the BitTorrent sites, which his most avid fans would be carefully monitoring. So he planted hints in the music — a few seconds recorded out of phase on "The Great Destroyer," for instance. Played on a monaural device, the music briefly canceled itself out, leaving nothing except a barely audible voice saying something like "red horse vector." At redhorsevector.net, players would find a top-secret report suggesting the source of the nightclub massacre — a weaponized virus called Red Horse that caused acute homicidal psychosis.
Surprisingly, though, no one was uploading the album. Reznor had assumed it would hit the peer-to-peer sites by mid-March, but at the end of that month there was still no sign of it. Without the music, only a handful of new clues were coming out. "The fans were getting antsy," says Alex Lieu, 42 Entertainment's creative director. "So were we. Trent was stunned. And the whole time we were thinking, 'When is someone going to steal this album?'"
Reznor would like to make one thing about the Year Zero game perfectly clear: "It's not fucking marketing. I'm not trying to sell anything." That's why he paid for the game himself, out of his recording budget. For a while, he didn't even tell his label what he was doing. But the game was extremely effective at generating excitement. Every time a song was leaked, the message boards were swamped. By the time the album hit store shelves in April, 2.5 million people had visited at least one of the game's 30 Web sites. The buzz was so great that Interscope chair Jimmy Iovine — Reznor's label boss at Universal Music at the time — called Weisman to talk about buying 42 Entertainment.
From 42's perspective, it hardly matters whether you call the game "marketing" or not. What matters is that someone — Reznor, Microsoft, Disney — writes a check. And, for now, the checks generally come from companies trying to sell something. As a result, many ARG developers want to break out of marketing entirely and find another way to make money. Novelists, film directors, and television producers get to tell their own stories; why not ARG-makers? GMD Studios, the company behind the ARG for Audi, has been running a game that it hopes will spawn graphic novels and maybe a TV show. In September, Stewart and two other longtime associates of Weisman's left 42 Entertainment to start a new company, Fourth Wall Studios, with similar ambitions.
So far, however, no one has managed to create an ARG that can sustain itself through advertising, subscription fees, or any other model. The most ambitious attempt was Perplex City, a vast treasure hunt staged by a London company called Mind Candy, which has received $10 million in venture capital — a first in ARG-land. Perplex City was said to be a locale in an alternate universe whose most powerful artifact, a polished metal cube, had been stolen and buried somewhere on Earth; whoever found it stood to receive a $200,000 reward. Clues were hidden on a series of cards sold in toy shops, bookstores, and online for about $1 apiece.
VCs had visions of Pokémon dancing in their heads. But though 50,000 people in 92 countries registered for the game, the cards turned out to be difficult and expensive to produce. Last June, not long after the cube was unearthed in a forest in England, a planned second season was abruptly canceled. "I'm still convinced there are exciting commercial models that no one has found just yet," says Michael Smith, Mind Candy's CEO. "It's a wonderful world we created, and I very, very much want to relaunch it." Unfortunately, he doesn't know when that will happen.
As the album's release date approached, the game hit the peer-to-peer sites and regained its momentum. Reznor and the team from 42 Entertainment had a critical planning session in London to figure out a way to wrap it up. Elan Lee, the game's chief designer, suggested an explosive finale: Stage a surprise concert and blow up a building on the way out. A building? Reznor was awestruck: "These are my kind of people!"
"I'm still trying to work an actual cadaver into a campaign," Lieu says. "You'd think Year Zero would be the one, but it wasn't."
Blowing up a building wasn't practical, so they came up with something else. On April 13, all the players who had signed up at a subversive site called Open Source Resistance were invited to gather beneath a mural in Hollywood. Some of those who showed up were given cell phones and told to keep them on at all times. Five days later, the phones rang. The players were told to report to a parking lot, where they were loaded onto a ram-shackle bus with blacked-out windows.
The bus delivered them at twilight to what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse near some railroad tracks. Armed men patrolled the roof. The 50-odd players were led up a ramp and into a large, dark room where the leader of Open Source Resistance (actually an actor) gave a speech about the importance of making themselves heard. Then they were led through a maze of rooms and deposited in front of — a row of amps?
With the sudden crack of a drumbeat, Nine Inch Nails materialized onstage and broke into "The Beginning of the End," a song they had never before played in the US. "This is the beginning," Reznor intoned, as guitar chords strafed the room. He got out one, two, three, four more songs before the SWAT team arrived. Then, as flashing lights and flash bombs filled the room, men in riot gear stormed the stage. "Run for the bus!" someone yelled, and the players started sprinting. The bus sped them back to the parking lot and the cars that would take them safely home. But before they drove away, they were told they'd be contacted again.
Now that the album is out, the game has gone cold. "I don't know if the audience was ready for it to end," says Susan Bonds, the president of 42 Entertainment. "But we always expected to pick it up again." Reznor, after all, had conceived Year Zero as a two-part album. "Those phones are still out there," she adds. "The minutes have expired. But we could buy new minutes at any point."

Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer

2008-09-16T00:30:00.000-07:00

RyAnne Fultz, 33, says she suffered her worst epileptic attack in a year after she clicked on the wrong post at a forum run by the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation.
Photo courtesy RyAnne Fultz Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don't fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn't move and couldn't speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz's 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

"Everyone who logged on, it affected to some extent, whether by causing headaches or seizures," says Browen Mead, a 24-year-old epilepsy patient in Maine who says she suffered a daylong migraine after examining several of the offending posts. She'd lingered too long on the pages trying to determine who was responsible.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

Fultz says the attack spawned an uncommonly bad seizure. "It was a spike of pain in my head," she says. "And the lockup, that only happens with really bad ones. I don't think I've had a seizure like that in about a year."

But she's satisfied with the Epilepsy Foundation's relatively fast response to the attack, about 12 hours after it began on Easter weekend. "We all really appreciate them for giving us this forum and giving us this place to find each other," she says.

Epilepsy affects an estimated 50 million people worldwide, about 3 percent of whom are photosensitive, meaning flashing lights and colors can trigger seizures.

Servers & Datacentre

2008-09-15T03:37:00.001-07:00

ComputerworldUK Server and Datacentre is your essential resource for all the latest news, analysis, case studies and reviews of servers, datacentres, mainframes, desktop servers, server blades, virtualisation, business continuity and disaster recovery, network operating systems and servers, grid computing, infrastructure management and supercomputers.

Windows Server 2008: the host with the most

2008-09-15T03:34:00.000-07:00

The typical x86 rack server's characteristics reflect the requirements of Windows Server. Microsoft's big OS has always been designed under the presumption that it will have a full physical server to itself.

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In Windows Server 2008, Microsoft delivers a 64-bit server OS with a smaller minimum resource footprint than Windows Vista. It varies by edition; Windows Server 2008 Datacenter doesn't focus so much on shedding the pounds, but it, too, picks up the speed benefits from the slimmer Server Core, which was created to be a practically weightless virtualised guest OS. IT shops are likely to use Windows Server 2008 the same way they use Windows Server 2003 now, only now they can run lots of independent virtual Windows Servers that scale in features and footprint across a broad range of options.

Windows Server 2008 remains a component of the Windows Server System, so Microsoft has not instituted a free lunch programme. Functions like email and collaboration, database, and robust edge services are add-ons that most deployments will require. But these can be placed at the host level, with virtualised guests distributing applications and services that use Windows Server components. In other words, one license of Exchange Server or SQL Server will stretch further than ever before.

How low it can go I spent most of my time testing Windows Server 2008 Enterprise on an eight-core, two-socket AMD Barcelona reference server. When you align the features of the Barcelona architecture with Windows Server 2008's capabilities, you come away with the impression that AMD designed its CPU with Windows Server 2008 in mind. Having talked with Barcelona's architects, I'll bend nondisclosure just enough to say that to call Barcelona a Windows Server 2008 hardware architecture is not far-fetched.

Windows Server 2008 is built for virtualisation. All SKUs up to Datacenter are tooled for what you might call "buffet" scalability. You can choose, with finer granularity than is possible under Windows Server 2003, the server features you want to run, where you want to run them, and what portion of total resources are dedicated to them. For example, Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 has split Web application services functionality into some 40 independently loadable plug-ins. It is similar in concept to Apache's modular approach, but IIS's approach is safer, more transparent, and much easier to manage. This is a nice fit for server roles, a feature introduced in Windows Server 2003 that provides simple on/off switches and wizards that bring up and shut down groups of services according to need.

Windows Server 2008 continues Windows Server's tradition of server roles, but adds finer-grained, modular control over individual features. You can still do a blunderbuss deployment in which a Windows Server host or guest role is "all," but it is well worth IT managers' and administrators' time to learn to match server roles, and modular services within those roles, to user and application requirements. Do that, and you'll have servers that will make physical-to-virtual transitions and virtual machine relocation uncommonly easy.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

2008-09-15T02:59:00.000-07:00

1. Cobol

Y2k was like a second gold rush for Cobol programmers who were seeing dwindling need for their skills. But six-and-a-half years later, there's no savior in sight for this fading language. At the same time, while there's little curriculum coverage anymore at universities teaching computer science, "when you talk to practitioners, they'll say there are applications in thousands of organizations that have to be maintained," says Heikki Topi, chair of computer information services at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., and a member of the education board for the Association for Computing Machinery.
And for those who want to help do that, you can actually learn Cobol at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, which according to Mary Sumner, a professor there, still offers a Cobol course. "Two of the major employers in the area still use Cobol, and for many of their entry-level jobs, they want to see that on the transcript," she says. "Until that changes, we'd be doing the students a disservice by not offering it." (see also: "Cobol Coders: Going, Going, Gone? ")

2. Nonrelational DBMS

In the 1980s, there were two major database management systems approaches: hierarchical systems, such as IBM's IMS and SAS Institute Inc.'s System 2000, and network DBMS, such as CA's IDMS and Oracle Corp.'s DBMS, formerly the VAX DBMS. Today, however, both have been replaced by the relational DBMS approach, embodied by SQL databases such as DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, says Topi. "The others are rarely covered anymore in database curricula," he says.

3. Non-IP networks

TCP/IP has largely taken over the networking world, and as a result, there's less demand than ever for IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA) skills. "It's worth virtually nothing on the market," says David Foote, president of Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan, Conn. Foote tracks market pay for individual IT skills, which companies usually pay as a lump sum or a percentage of workers' base pay, either as a bonus or an adjustment to their base salary. SNA, Foote says, commands less than 1% premium pay. "It's like a penny from 1922 -- there has to be someone who wants to buy it."
Despite the fact that many banks, insurance firms and other companies still have large investments in SNA networks, the educational offerings in this area are also rare, according to Topi. "The dominant model of protocols is TCP/IP and the Internet technologies," he says.

4. cc:Mail

This store-and-forward LAN-based e-mail system from the 1980s was once used by about 20 million people. However, as e-mail was integrated into more-complex systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, its popularity waned, and in 2000, it was withdrawn from the market. According to Foote, "cc:Mail is a bygone era. Now e-mail is tied into everything else, and cc:Mail didn't make that leap." Just the same, the product continues to be commercially supported by Global System Services Corp. in Mountain View, Calif.

5. ColdFusion

This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages. Debates continue over whether ColdFusion is as robust and scalable as its competitors, but nevertheless, premiums paid for ColdFusion programmers have dropped way off, according to Foote. "It was really popular at one time, but the market is now crowded with other products," he says.

6. C programming

As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant, according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he says. (see also: "Hot Skills, Cold Skills ")

7. PowerBuilder

Recruiters that have been around since the 1990s, such as David Hayes, president of HireMinds LLC in Cambridge, Mass., remember when PowerBuilder programmers were "hot, hot, hot," as he says. Developed by Powersoft Inc., this client/server development tool in 1994 was bought by Sybase Inc., which was once a strong Oracle competitor.
Today, PowerBuilder developers are at the very bottom of the list of in-demand application development and platform skills, with pay about equal to Cobol programmers, according to Foote. Nevertheless, the product keeps on trucking, with PowerBuilder 11 expected this year, which has the ability to generate .Net code. (see also: "35 Technologies that shaped the industry ")

8. Certified NetWare Engineers

In the early 1990s, it was all the rage to become a Certified NetWare Engineer, especially with Novell Inc. enjoying 90% market share for PC-based servers. Today, however, you don't have to look far to find CNEs retraining themselves with other skills to stay marketable. "It seems like it happened overnight," Hayes says. "Everyone had Novell, and within a two-year period, they'd all switched to NT." Novell says it will continue supporting NetWare 6.5 through at least 2015; however, it has also retired several of its NetWare certifications, including Master CNE and NetWare 5 CNE, and it plans to retire NetWare 6 CNE. "Companies are still paying skill premiums for CNEs, but they're losing value," Foote says.
9. PC network administrators
With the accelerating move to consolidate Windows servers, some see substantially less demand for PC network administrators. "You see the evidence for that in the demise of those programs at the technical and two-year schools and the loss of instructors," says Nate Viall, president of Nate Viall & Associates, an AS/400 (iSeries) recruiting company.

10. OS/2

A rough translation of OS/2 could be "wrong horse." Initially created by Microsoft and IBM and released with great fanfare in 1987, the collaboration soon unraveled, and after repeated rumors of its demise, IBM finally discontinued sales in 2005. OS/2 still has a dedicated community, however, and a company called Serenity Systems International still sells the operating system under the name eComStation. (see also: "IBM, Bankers at Odds Over OS/2 Migration Path ")

Windows 7 Beta to come in December?

2008-09-15T02:57:00.001-07:00

The successor to Windows Vista may hit Beta status before the turn of the year, according to this report from ZDNet.

Whilst privileged few have worked with Microsoft on two milestone builds, namely M1 and M2, M3 will precede an actual Beta version of the OS which Microsoft hopes will repair Vista's poor image.

It isn't to say that there won't be some form of pre-beta build, such as a Community Technology Preview and, indeed, attendees of WinHEC in November will undoubtedly be hoping that Microsoft delivers some goods.

Yet, having said this, December does appear to be the month for the Beta process to commence according to unnamed sources.

Such a turn of events could theoretically put general availability of Windows 7, as it is currently known, in the late 2009 or early 2010 time frame.

Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport

2008-09-15T02:47:00.000-07:00

From Press Release:

With its luxurious length of 4.47 m, the Veyron is a perfectly balanced combination of high-powered performance and sleek, racy design.
Even at complete standstill, the car’s enormous power is made visible by its impressive mid-engine, elevated majestically beneath the chassis. Simultaneously, the Veyron’s bold proportions, well-balanced surfaces, and clear line structures give an impression of pure, sleek elegance.

The design of the Veyron honors a great heritage without drifting off into retro style. Every detail of the classic two-tone color scheme, a quote from the 1920s and 1930s, has been carefully thought out, resulting in the typical Bugatti profile with the classic, contrasting ellipsis – the stylistic element used by Ettore Bugatti himself. The “crest line”, which runs uninterrupted from the hood to the only 1.21-m-high roof, is a proud homage to the Veyron’s forebears. Thus, the Veyron’s classic paintwork and harmonious design connect this state-of-the-art super sports car to the glorious heritage of Bugatti automobiles.

Tabbert Paganini Caravan

2008-09-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

Tabbert Paganini is a luxurious well-designed mansion on wheels allows you to move about like a king. Sporting an imposing exterior form, the pleasure doubles up with exquisitely detailed interiors. Unobtrusive stainless steel veins in the top cabinets, and the table with real wood edge are visible and tangible proof of highest quality.

Zero-Gee Ergonomic Computer/Gaming Workstation

2008-09-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

The Zero-Gee ergonomic Computer/gaming workstation is meant to take the international markets by surprise and offer a unique workstation that combines an ergonomically designed chair with the workstation. You can literally lie down and work on the PC. So, if you are looking for comfortable and revolutionary workstations, you must consider accepting the company’s proposal and bring the Zero-Gee to either your office or home.

SQL DBMS

2008-09-15T02:24:00.000-07:00

IBM started working on a prototype system loosely based on Codd's concepts as System R in the early 1970s — unfortunately, System R was conceived as a way of proving Codd's ideas unimplementable[citation needed], and thus the project was delivered to a group of programmers who were not under Codd's supervision, never understood his ideas fully and ended up violating several fundamentals of the relational model. The first "quickie" version was ready in 1974/5, and work then started on multi-table systems in which the data could be broken down so that all of the data for a record (much of which is often optional) did not have to be stored in a single large "chunk". Subsequent multi-user versions were tested by customers in 1978 and 1979, by which time a standardized query language, SQL, had been added. Codd's ideas were establishing themselves as both workable and superior to Codasyl, pushing IBM to develop a true production version of System R, known as SQL/DS, and, later, Database 2 (DB2).

Many of the people involved with INGRES became convinced of the future commercial success of such systems, and formed their own companies to commercialize the work but with an SQL interface. Sybase, Informix, NonStop SQL and eventually Ingres itself were all being sold as offshoots to the original INGRES product in the 1980s. Even Microsoft SQL Server is actually a re-built version of Sybase, and thus, INGRES. Only Larry Ellison's Oracle started from a different chain, based on IBM's papers on System R, and beat IBM to market when the first version was released in 1978.

Stonebraker went on to apply the lessons from INGRES to develop a new database, Postgres, which is now known as PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is primarily used for global mission critical applications (the .org and .info domain name registries use it as their primary data store, as do many large companies and financial institutions).
In Sweden, Codd's paper was also read and Mimer SQL was developed from the mid-70s at Uppsala University. In 1984, this project was consolidated into an independent enterprise. In the early 1980s, Mimer introduced transaction handling for high robustness in applications, an idea that was subsequently implemented on most other DBMS.

Relational DBMS

2008-09-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

Edgar Codd worked at IBM in San Jose, California, in one of their offshoot offices that was primarily involved in the development of hard disk systems. He was unhappy with the navigational model of the Codasyl approach, notably the lack of a "search" facility which was becoming increasingly useful. In 1970, he wrote a number of papers that outlined a new approach to database construction that eventually culminated in the groundbreaking A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.[1]

In this paper, he described a new system for storing and working with large databases. Instead of records being stored in some sort of linked list of free-form records as in Codasyl, Codd's idea was to use a "table" of fixed-length records. A linked-list system would be very inefficient when storing "sparse" databases where some of the data for any one record could be left empty. The relational model solved this by splitting the data into a series of normalized tables, with optional elements being moved out of the main table to where they would take up room only if needed.

In the relational model, related records are linked together with a "key".
For instance, a common use of a database system is to track information about users, their name, login information, various addresses and phone numbers. In the navigational approach all of these data would be placed in a single record, and unused items would simply not be placed in the database. In the relational approach, the data would be normalized into a user table, an address table and a phone number table (for instance). Records would be created in these optional tables only if the address or phone numbers were actually provided.
Linking the information back together is the key to this system. In the relational model, some bit of information was used as a "key", uniquely defining a particular record. When information was being collected about a user, information stored in the optional (or related) tables would be found by searching for this key. For instance, if the login name of a user is unique, addresses and phone numbers for that user would be recorded with the login name as its key. This "re-linking" of related data back into a single collection is something that traditional computer languages are not designed for.

Just as the navigational approach would require programs to loop in order to collect records, the relational approach would require loops to collect information about any one record. Codd's solution to the necessary looping was a set-oriented language, a suggestion that would later spawn the ubiquitous SQL. Using a branch of mathematics known as tuple calculus, he demonstrated that such a system could support all the operations of normal databases (inserting, updating etc.) as well as providing a simple system for finding and returning sets of data in a single operation.

Codd's paper was picked up by two people at Berkeley, Eugene Wong and Michael Stonebraker. They started a project known as INGRES using funding that had already been allocated for a geographical database project, using student programmers to produce code. Beginning in 1973, INGRES delivered its first test products which were generally ready for widespread use in 1979. During this time, a number of people had moved "through" the group — perhaps as many as 30 people worked on the project, about five at a time. INGRES was similar to System R in a number of ways, including the use of a "language" for data access, known as QUEL — QUEL was in fact relational, having been based on Codd's own Alpha language, but has since been corrupted to follow SQL, thus violating much the same concepts of the relational model as SQL itself.

IBM itself did only one test implementation of the relational model, PRTV, and a production one, Business System 12, both now discontinued. Honeywell did MRDS for Multics, and now there are two new implementations: Alphora Dataphor and Rel. All other DBMS implementations usually called relational are actually SQL DBMSs.
In 1968, the [2] University of Michigan began development of the Micro DBMS relational database management system. It was used to manage very large data sets by the US Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency and researchers from University of Alberta, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. It ran on mainframe computers using Michigan Terminal System. The system remained in production until 1996

Navigational DBMS

2008-09-15T02:22:00.000-07:00

As computers grew in capability, this trade-off became increasingly unnecessary and a number of general-purpose database systems emerged; by the mid-1960s there were a number of such systems in commercial use. Interest in a standard began to grow, and Charles Bachman, author of one such product, IDS, founded the Database Task Group within CODASYL, the group responsible for the creation and standardization of COBOL. In 1971 they delivered their standard, which generally became known as the Codasyl approach, and soon there were a number of commercial products based on it available.
The Codasyl approach was based on the "manual" navigation of a linked data set which was formed into a large network. When the database was first opened, the program was handed back a link to the first record in the database, which also contained pointers to other pieces of data. To find any particular record the programmer had to step through these pointers one at a time until the required record was returned. Simple queries like "find all the people in Sweden" required the program to walk the entire data set and collect the matching results. There was, essentially, no concept of "find" or "search". This might sound like a serious limitation today, but in an era when the data was most often stored on magnetic tape such operations were too expensive to contemplate anyway.

IBM also had their own DBMS system in 1968, known as IMS. IMS was a development of software written for the Apollo program on the System/360. IMS was generally similar in concept to Codasyl, but used a strict hierarchy for its model of data navigation instead of Codasyl's network model.

Both concepts later became known as navigational databases due to the way data was accessed, and Bachman's 1973 Turing Award award presentation was The Programmer as Navigator.

IMS is classified as a hierarchical database. IDS and IDMS (both CODASYL databases) as well as CINCOMs TOTAL database are classified as network databases

Meta-data repository

2008-09-15T02:21:00.000-07:00

Main article: Metadata

Metadata (also spelled meta-data) is data describing data. For example, a listing that describes what attributes are allowed to be in data sets is called "meta-information". The meta-data is also known as data about data.

History of DBMS Databases have been in use since the earliest days of electronic computing. Unlike modern systems which can be applied to widely different databases and needs, the vast majority of older systems were tightly linked to the custom databases in order to gain speed at the expense of flexibility. Originally DBMSs were found only in large organizations with the computer hardware needed to support large data sets.

Automated optimization

2008-09-15T02:20:00.002-07:00

If there are frequently occurring usage patterns or requests, some DBMS can adjust themselves to improve the speed of those interactions. In some cases the DBMS will merely provide tools to monitor performance, allowing a human expert to make the necessary adjustments after reviewing the statistics collected.

Change and access logging

2008-09-15T02:20:00.001-07:00

Often one wants to know who accessed what attributes, what was changed, and when it was changed. Logging services allow this by keeping a record of access occurrences and changes.

Computation

2008-09-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

There are common computations requested on attributes such as counting, summing, averaging, sorting, grouping, cross-referencing, etc. Rather than have each computer application implement these from scratch, they can rely on the DBMS to supply such calculations. it's nice

Security

2008-09-15T02:18:00.001-07:00

Often it is desirable to limit who can see or change which attributes or groups of attributes. This may be managed directly by individual, or by the assignment of individuals and privileges to groups, or (in the most elaborate models) through the assignment of individuals and groups to roles which are then granted entitlements.

Rule enforcement

2008-09-15T02:17:00.001-07:00

Often one wants to apply rules to attributes so that the attributes are clean and reliable. For example, we may have a rule that says each car can have only one engine associated with it (identified by Engine Number). If somebody tries to associate a second engine with a given car, we want the DBMS to deny such a request and display an error message. However, with changes in the model specification such as, in this example, hybrid gas-electric cars, rules may need to change. Ideally such rules should be able to be added and removed as needed without significant data layout redesign.

Backup and replication

2008-09-15T02:15:00.000-07:00

Copies of attributes need to be made regularly in case primary disks or other equipment fails. A periodic copy of attributes may also be created for a distant organization that cannot readily access the original. DBMS usually provide utilities to facilitate the process of extracting and disseminating attribute sets.

When data is replicated between database servers, so that the information remains consistent throughout the database system and users cannot tell or even know which server in the DBMS they are using, the system is said to exhibit replication transparency.

Query ability

2008-09-15T02:14:00.001-07:00

Querying is the process of requesting attribute information from various perspectives and combinations of factors. Example: "How many 2-door cars in Texas are green?"

A database query language and report writer allow users to interactively interrogate the database, analyze its data and update it according to the users privileges on data. It also controls the security of the database.

Data security prevents unauthorized users from viewing or updating the database. Using passwords, users are allowed access to the entire database or subsets of it called subschemas. For example, an employee database can contain all the data about an individual employee, but one group of users may be authorized to view only payroll data, while others are allowed access to only work history and medical data.
If the DBMS provides a way to interactively enter and update the database, as well as interrogate it, this capability allows for managing personal databases. However it may not leave an audit trail of actions or provide the kinds of controls necessary in a multi-user organization. These controls are only available when a set of application programs are customized for each data entry and updating function.

Query ability

2008-09-15T02:14:00.000-07:00

Features and capabilities of DBMS

2008-09-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

A DBMS can be characterized as an "attribute management system" where attributes are small chunks of information that describe something. For example, "color" is an attribute of a car. The value of the attribute may be a color such as "red", "blue" or "silver".

Alternatively, and especially in connection with the relational model of database management, the relation between attributes drawn from a specified set of domains can be seen as being primary. For instance, the database might indicate that a car that was originally "red" might fade to "pink" in time, provided it was of some particular "make" with an inferior paint job. Such higher arity relationships provide information on all of the underlying domains at the same time, with none of them being privileged above the others.

Throughout recent history specialized databases have existed for scientific, geospatial, imaging, document storage and like uses. Functionality drawn from such applications has lately begun appearing in mainstream DBMSs as well. However, the main focus there, at least when aimed at the commercial data processing market, is still on descriptive attributes on repetitive record structures.
Thus, the DBMSs of today roll together frequently-needed services or features of attribute management. By externalizing such functionality to the DBMS, applications effectively share code with each other and are relieved of much internal complexity. Features commonly offered by database management systems include:

DBMS benefits

2008-09-15T02:12:00.001-07:00

• Improved strategic use of corporate data
• Reduced complexity of the organization’s information systems environment
• Reduced data redundancy and inconsistency
• Enhanced data integrity
• Application-data independence
• Reduced application development and maintenance costs
• Improved flexibility of information systems
• Increased access and availability of data and information
• Logical & Physical data independence
• Concurrent access anomalies.
• Facilitates atomicity problem.
• Provides central control on the system through DBA.

Logical view and physical view

2008-09-15T02:10:00.000-07:00

A database management system provides the ability for many different users to share data and process resources. But as there can be many different users, there are many different database needs. The question now is: How can a single, unified database meet the differing requirement of so many users?

A DBMS minimizes these problems by providing two views of the database data: a physical view and a logical view. The physical view deals with the actual, physical arrangement and location of data in the direct access storage devices(DASDs). Database specialists use the physical view to make efficient use of storage and processing resources. Users, however, may wish to see data differently from how they are stored, and they do not want to know all the technical details of physical storage. After all, a business user is primarily interested in using the information, not in how it is stored. The logical view/user’s view, of a database program represents data in a format that is meaningful to a user and to the software programs that process those data. That is, the logical view tells the user, in user terms, what is in the database. One strength of a DBMS is that while there is only one physical view of the data, there can be an endless number of different logical views. This feature allows users to see database information in a more business-related way rather than from a technical, processing viewpoint. Thus the logical view refers to the way user views data, and the physical view to the way the data are physically stored and processed...

Description

2008-09-15T01:58:00.000-07:00

A DBMS is a complex set of software programs that controls the organization, storage, management, and retrieval of data in a database. DBMS are categorized according to their data structures or types. It is a set of prewritten programs that are used to store, update and retrieve a Database. A DBMS includes:
1. A modeling language to define the schema of each database hosted in the DBMS, according to the DBMS data model.

o The four most common types of organizations are the hierarchical, network, relational and object models. Inverted lists and other methods are also used. A given database management system may provide one or more of the four models. The optimal structure depends on the natural organization of the application's data, and on the application's requirements (which include transaction rate (speed), reliability, maintainability, scalability, and cost).

o The dominant model in use today is the ad hoc one embedded in SQL, despite the objections of purists who believe this model is a corruption of the relational model, since it violates several of its fundamental principles for the sake of practicality and performance. Many DBMSs also support the Open Database Connectivity API that supports a standard way for programmers to access the DBMS.

2. Data structures (fields, records, files and objects) optimized to deal with very large amounts of data stored on a permanent data storage device (which implies relatively slow access compared to volatile main memory).

3. A database query language and report writer to allow users to interactively interrogate the database, analyze its data and update it according to the users privileges on data.

o It also controls the security of the database.

o Data security prevents unauthorized users from viewing or updating the
database. Using passwords, users are allowed access to the entire database or
subsets of it called subschemas. For example, an employee database can contain all the data about an individual employee, but one group of users may be authorized to view only payroll data, while others are allowed access to only work history and medical data.

o If the DBMS provides a way to interactively enter and update the database, as well as interrogate it, this capability allows for managing personal databases. However, it may not leave an audit trail of actions or provide the kinds of controls necessary in a multi-user organization. These controls are only available when a set of application programs are customized for each data entry and updating function.

4. A transaction mechanism, that ideally would guarantee the ACID properties, in order to ensure data integrity, despite concurrent user accesses (concurrency control), and faults (fault tolerance).
o It also maintains the integrity of the data in the database.

o The DBMS can maintain the integrity of the database by not allowing more than one user to update the same record at the same time. The DBMS can help prevent duplicate records via unique index constraints; for example, no two customers with the same customer numbers (key fields) can be entered into the database. See ACID properties for more information (Redundancy avoidance).

The DBMS accepts requests for data from the application program and instructs the operating system to transfer the appropriate data.

When a DBMS is used, information systems can be changed much more easily as the organization's information requirements change. New categories of data can be added to the database without disruption to the existing system.
Organizations may use one kind of DBMS for daily transaction processing and then move the detail onto another computer that uses another DBMS better suited for random inquiries and analysis. Overall systems design decisions are performed by data administrators and systems analysts. Detailed database design is performed by database administrators.

Database servers are specially designed computers that hold the actual databases and run only the DBMS and related software. Database servers are usually multiprocessor computers, with RAID disk arrays used for stable storage. Connected to one or more servers via a high-speed channel, hardware database accelerators are also used in large volume transaction processing environments.
DBMSs are found at the heart of most database applications. Sometimes DBMSs are built around a private multitasking kernel with built-in networking support although nowadays these functions are left to the operating system.

Virginia Court Strikes Down Anti-Spam Law

2008-09-14T01:02:00.000-07:00

In a surprise move, Supreme Court in the state of Virgina has struck down that states anti-spam law. To add insult to injury, the court ruling also freed a man considered by some to be the worse spammer around. It seems that the court felt that Virgina’s anti-spam law violated the persons first amendment right […]

Ubuntu Linux To Improve User Experience

2008-09-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, promises that their Ubuntu Linux is set for a large improvement. His thinking is that Ubuntu needs to develope a better user experience and with this in mind, has hired a group of developers to work on the project. On his blog he states that that the companies goal is to deliver a user experience similar to what Apple offers and that these changes will occur in the next two years.

This seems like a huge undertaking for the company, but if anyone can do it, Mr. Shuttleworth stands the best chance. He further states that:

There’s also recognition for the scale of the challenge that faces us. When I laid out the goal of “delivering a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years” at OSCON, I had many questions afterwards about how on earth we could achieve that. “Everyone scratches their own itch, how can you possibly make the UI consistent?” was a common theme. And it’s true - the free software desktop is often patchy and inconsistent. But I see the lack of consistency as both a weakness (GNOME, OpenOffice and Firefox all have different UI toolkits, and it’s very difficult to make them seamless) and as a strength - people are free to innovate, and the results are world-leading. Our challenge is to get the best of both of those worlds.

If Canonical is able to pull this off, it will be a shot in the arm for Linux and may just convince some Window users to make the switch. But we will have to wait and see just how well Ubuntu will compare to Apple’s flagship operating system. I must admit that this does look promsing.

2008 - The Computer World Will Change - Hang On!

2008-09-14T00:58:00.001-07:00

This is not going to be earth shattering news for most of you who have been exposed to the layers of blogging about Google and Apple. But there continues to be more to the Google-Apple alliance appearing each day that would seem to indicate that more pieces of the puzzle keep coming together to start bringing the bigger picture into focus.

If you have read any of my previous articles, you are aware of the continued debate and/or rumors about Google and their alleged Google phone. You are also aware of Google Doc’s plus other online play toys as well as Google’s acquisition of Postini the security company. The Apple iPhone and iPod Touch speak for themselves. Next take the deal that Google is working on with HTC. Add to the mix that a Google founder sits on the Apple Board of Directors.

Wrap all of this up, take some Google and Apple elves, throw them together inside a hidden fortress down under Silicon Valley, mix well and poof! You will have the perfect mixture to introduce a new and exciting device that will throw the computing world on its ear. A device that will be designed by Apple so you will know it will be superb in design and function, most likely using a trimmed down Apple OS and hooked up to Google’s vast array of super data centers.

The hardware will be relatively inexpensive and connection to Google’s system will be ad supported and FREE! This may just be the worlds first ‘hybrid’ computer. :-)
What do you think? Are you feeling the vibes yet or is this just to good to be true?

Comments welcome.

The top 10 computer security threats for 2008

2008-09-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

The 2008 Olympics is likely to spur a flurry of hacker activity, says Websense Inc, which specializes in web filtering and security software, releasing the top ten computer security threats for 2008.

"Looking at the current attack trends, cyber criminal techniques are evolving quickly and efficiently to not only evade detection, but to steal data and manipulate trusted content such as Web sites and applications," said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research, Websense, in a media release. "It's critical that organizations and individuals recognize that attackers are changing techniques and launching targeted attacks."

The top 10 security threats are:

1. Olympics: New cyber attacks, phishing and fraud

Event-based attacks and scams are popular, and with the whole world watching, the 2008 Olympics may fuel a surge in cyberattacks, says Websense. As the Olympic torch burns, Websense researchers predict the possibility of large scale denial-of-service attacks on Beijing Olympic-related sites as political statements and fraud attempts through email and the Web surrounding the Olympics. Additionally, Websense predicts compromises of popular Olympic news or other sports sites -- attacks designed to install malicious code on end-users' machines and steal personal or confidential business information.

2. Malicious spam invades blogs, search engines, forums and Web sites

Websense predicts that hackers will increasingly use Web spam to post URLs to malicious sites within forums, blogs, in the commentary or 'talk-back' sections of news sites and on compromised Web sites. This activity not only drives traffic to the infected Web sites but also assists in the purveyor's site sitting higher on search engine rankings, increasing the risk that users will visit the site.

3. Attackers use Web's 'weakest links' to launch attacks

The Web is an entanglement of links and content. The advent of Web 2.0 additions such as Google Adsense, mash-ups, widgets, and social networks along with the massive amounts of Web advertisements linked to Web pages have increased the likelihood of 'weak links' -- or Web sites and content that are vulnerable to compromises.

Websense predicts that attackers will increasingly exploit the weakest links within the Web infrastructure in order to target the greatest number of Internet users. Most vulnerable to these attacks are search engines and large user networks such as MySpace, Facebook or other social networking sites.

4. Number of compromised Web sites will surpass number of created malicious sites

The Web as an attack vector has been steadily increasing for the last five years and now attackers are using compromised sites as their launching platforms -- even more than their own created sites. Compromising sites -- particularly, sites well-visited by end-users, such as the Dolphin Stadium attack that occurred a few days prior to the 2007 Super Bowl XLI in Miami, provides attackers with built-in Web traffic and minimizes the need for lures through email, instant messaging or Web posts.

5. Cross-platform Web attacks: Mac, iPhone popularity spurs increase

With the brand popularity and growing use of iPhones and Macintosh computers, Websense researchers predict attackers will increasingly launch cross-platform Web attacks that detect the operating system in use and serve up code specifically targeting that operating system instead of attacks based on just the Web browser. Operating systems that are targeted now include Mac OSX, iPhone, and Windows.

6. Rise in targeted Web 2.0 special interest attacks: Hackers targeting specific groups of people based on interests and profile

Web 2.0 has spawned a proliferation of Web users that visit chat rooms, social networking sites, and special interest Web sites such as travel sites, automotive, and more. These sites provide attackers with potential victims that fall within a certain age group, wealth bracket, or people with particular purchasing habits. In 2008, Websense researchers predict targeted attacks will rise toward specific social networking or special interest sites that have a higher probability of delivering a payoff.

7. Morphing JavaScript to evade anti-virus scanners

Hackers are upping the ante with evasion techniques that use poly-morphic JavaScript (Polyscript) -- which means that a uniquely-coded Web page is served up for each visit by a user to a malicious Web site. By changing the code every visit, signature-based security scanning technologies have difficulty detecting Web pages as malicious and hackers can extend the length of time their malicious site evades detection.

8. Data concealment methods increase in sophistication

Websense predicts an increased use of crypto-virology and sophistication in data concealment including the use of stenography, embedding data within standard protocols, and potentially within media files. Toolkits widely available on the Web will be used to embed proprietary information and steal data.

9. Global law enforcement will crack down on key hacker groups and individuals

In 2007, large-scale Internet-based attacks garnered the attention of law enforcement officials around the world. Websense anticipates that through the global cooperation of enforcement agencies, in 2008 the biggest crackdown and arrests of key members of a hacker group will occur.

10. Vishing and voice spam will combine and increase

The vast cell phone user population has grown into a lucrative market to exploit with spamming and "vishing" for financial gain. To date, researchers have seen an increased number of vishing attacks but not a lot of spam -- or pro-active automated calling. In 2008 Websense predicts that 'vishing,' or the practice of using social engineering and Voice over IP (VoIP) to gain personal and financial information, and voice spam will combine and increase -- users will receive automated voice calls on LAN lines with voice spam to lure them to input their credentials through the telephone.

6 Things Apple's Not Doing Right

2008-09-14T00:43:00.002-07:00

Back in October of 2001, Apple (AAPL) introduced the first iPod. Apple’s press release read - an “Ultra-Portable MP3 Music Player Puts 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket.” Priced at $399 a pop and aided by really slick advertising, it was an instant hit, that put Apple on the fast track - from a company whose stock was in the cellar for almost two decades - to a growth stock with excellent long-term potential.

AAPL - who famously rejected Intel’s (INTC) chips and went with Motorola (MOT) back during the birth of the PC in the early 1980’s, finally picked Intel as their choice of CPU in mid-2005. But Apple had already re-written their operating system, and its guts were UNIX [BSD 5.x] - making the switch from PowerPC to Intel rather painless [for Apple]. At this point, Apple had a mere 5% share of the PC market - with a focus on education, artists, and graphic/industrial design.

By mid 2006, all of Apple’s computer offerings had Intel CPUs and Intel chip-sets. Files were interchangeable easily between Apple’s and other systems, and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Office ran [runs] on the Mac. With the narrowing gap between the PC and the Mac, and with the cachet of “coolness” that the Mac had, Apple’s market share rose to the high single digits by 2007. Former PC owners [like me] switched to the Mac - because the OS was more generic [UNIX], and file transfer issues of the past do not apply to the current generation of Mac hardware and software.

What Apple did correctly [till now]:

1. Slick new devices like iPod.

2. iTunes

3. Mac O/S went from proprietary to UNIX based [easy file sharing with other OSs].

4. Slick new Macintosh designs - based on Intel CPUs and Intel chipsets.

5. iPhone/iPod Touch.

But, Apple is getting complacent. The latest revision of iPod Nano was evolutionary, heck, it was cosmetic. The feature most requested by Nano users was built-in FM with recording, but Apple chose to not include FM with the Nano; instead, one has to buy this option separately, and there is no way one can record a tune playing on the radio - as there is no “record" button on any iPod.

While the next generation of Macs will have an Intel CPU, they will have an Apple-proprietary chip-set , making things more problematic for boot-camp hackers - the only bunch of happy Vista users. Apple shifted resources from OSX-Snow Leopard to iPhoneG3. This has already ticked off a bunch of Apple faithfuls, who look forward to every revision of the OS and the Mac - like Porschephiles do, the 911. Apple’s survival through the 1980’s and 1990’s was under-written by these faithfuls, who bought Macs despite the fact that they had to jump through hoops to transfer a file to someone who owned a PC.

Apple chose to not market the iPod Touch as aggressively as they do their other products, so as to not cannibalize iPhone sales. The Touch is probably the best compact mobile internet device [MID], yet it isn’t marketed as such. Yet, in the last two quarters, iPod Touch growth has outpaced the growth of other iPods, keeping AAPL’s gross margins for iPods in-line with what it was in 2007! Impressive.

Recently, a small company called Psystar made a [and still makes a] generic Mac, and Apple immediately filed a copyright infringement suit [Psystar has countersued Apple and has charged Apple with restraint of trade, unfair competition and other violations of antitrust law]. C'mon Apple, a certain amount of "generic" competition is OK, plus these guys package their computers in a generic box - no slick "I have an Apple" packaging.

Finally, Apple is the Cult of Jobs wrapped into a publicly traded company. The day that Jobs was rumored to have been sick, the stock dropped 5%.

Things Apple is not doing right:

1. Not being brave when updating the Nano.

2. Slighting their faithful.

3. Not marketing iPod Touch as a MID.

4. Gravitating towards proprietary hardware.

5. Once again, thwarting generics [which did them no good the first time around].

6. The Cult of Jobs - dependence on one single person.

Apple’s current line of products is still awesome, and I expect the company to not falter for the next twelve to eighteen months. But the end isn’t far from now.

Windows Vista SP1 kills “2099 Grace Timer Crack and OEM BIOS Hack”

2008-09-14T00:43:00.001-07:00

The Windows Vista free ride is officially over. The first service pack for the latest Window client brings only bad news for Vista pirates. Essentially, Windows Vista SP1 is the killer of the 2099 Grace Timer Crack and the OEM BIOS hack. With the first service pack for the operating system, Microsoft is claiming back Vista copies that have been activated using two of the most popular illegal workarounds available to date.

Both the 2099 Grace Timer crack and the OEM BIOS hack have been around for over a year. Microsoft did by no means rush to kill either one, although the company has provided official confirmation of the existence of the two Vista activation bypassing methods since early January 2007. This scenario only comes to confirm the depth at which the 2099 Grace Timer and OEM BIOS Vista activation workarounds were integrated into the very fabric of the operating system.

“Known as the ‘timer crack’ or ‘2099 crack’ this hack basically resets the pre-activation grace period to be in effect through 2099,” explained Alex Kochis, Senior Product Manager for Windows Genuine Advantage. “Our team is actively reviewing the reports of this workaround now, and I expect we’ll take corrective action soon,” Kochis added on January 2, 2007. (emphasis added)

“I know many of you are aware of reports of hacks that attempt to exploit our OEM BIOS based activation. We’re aware of this type of hack,” Kochis said on April 10, 2007. “There appear to be two primary variants of OA 2.0 hacks circulating. One is similar to the XP approach I described above where actual editing of the BIOS on the motherboard is done to make the motherboard appear to be from an OEM. (…) The second variant does not change anything in the BIOS itself, but uses a software-based approach to fool the OS into thinking it’s running on OA 2.0-enabled hardware.”

For over a year, Microsoft has been building Windows Vista SP1. The service pack was finally released to manufacturing on February 4, 2007, and will ship to end users starting mid-March. However, Vista pirates that will choose to implement the service pack, via manual installation or through Automatic Updates, will see their operating systems labeled as non-genuine.

The experience is a replica of what pirated versions of Windows XP offer today. Microsoft has in fact cut the umbilical cord that connected Vista with the Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy mechanism and has scrapped the Reduced Functionality Mode kill switch from the platform. Users of pirated versions of Vista will no longer lose functionality or access to their copy of the operating system, as following Vista SP1 there will be no more Reduced Functionality Mode.

Source:? softpedia

Microsoft, Windows Vista, Service Pack, SP1, Vista SP1, Grace Timer Crack, 2099 Grace Timer Crack, OEM, BIOS, Hack, Activation, Piracy

Windows Server 2008 as a SUPER workstation OS

2008-09-14T00:41:00.000-07:00

Windows Server 2008 is the best OS to be released till date from Microsoft’s stable. And the moment I got hold of the RTM build I could not resist installing it on my workstation. Due to the nature of my work I always prefer running a Server OS on my main workstation… I have been running Windows 2003 disguised as XP (with all the themes and stuff) all these days.

So here is my tale of how I went about setting up Windows Server 2008 to look and fell like its desktop counterpart Windows Vista.

1. Enable Hardware Virtualization: My workstation is a x64 machine with hardware virtualization capabilities. This means I can run Hyper-V on my machine. Even if your machine’s hardware supports virtualization it is most likely not going to be enabled by default. You have to enable it via your BIOS setup.

2. Install the latest Graphics and Audio drivers: Being a server OS Windows 2008 carries with it basic graphics and audio drivers. To utilize the full strength of your hardware ensure you install the latest drivers for both graphics and audio hardware. Only with the proper graphics drivers will you be able to enable the “Aero” experience on Windows 2008.

3. Desktop Experience Feature: The Desktop Experience Feature enables a bunch of stuff that is by default present on a desktop OS. Most importantly it includes Themes, Windows Media player and the Aero related features. You will have to enable it form the Server Manager. The “Turn Windows features on or off” / “Add remove windows components” has all been rolled into the Server Manager now.

Server Manager > Features > Desktop Experience

Installing the Desktop Experience feature does not enable them. You have to manually set them up.

4. Themes: To enable Themes you will basically have to enable the Themes Service. Again being a server OS it is not enabled by default.

Microsoft Solution Accelerators

2008-09-14T00:38:00.000-07:00

Are you getting ready to deploy Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista SP1 and Microsoft Virtualization technologies? Check out the brand new Solution Accelerators Microsoft is releasing this week!

Microsoft is launching three Solution Accelerators that will help IT professionals and Microsoft Partners more quickly assess, plan, secure, deploy and manage (operate) Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista SP1 and Microsoft Virtualization.

In the form of automation tools and technical guidance, these accelerators are developed with industry best practice in mind and can speed up every stage of your IT project lifecycle from server and desktop deployments projects to virtualization.

There are 3 solution accelerators released this week and another 1 in mid-March.

* Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator (MAP)
o MAP is a network-wide inventory and assessment tool platform that is based on an agentless, zero foot-print architecture.
o It allows customers and consultants to discover servers, desktops, applications and devices as well as assessing for migration readiness.
o Key features including hardware and device compatibility assessments of existing machines for the latest Windows OS migration (e.g. Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1), Microsoft Office 2007 hardware assessment and virtualization candidacy assessments for Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid) and, very soon, Hyper-V.

How To: Change Office 2007 Product Key

2008-09-14T00:29:00.000-07:00

You may need to alter or change Microsoft Office 2007 (aka 2007 Microsoft Office System programs and suites) product license key or volume license key (VLK) which also known as serial number or CD key.

You can modify or change product key for 2007 Microsoft Office programs or suites by first uninstall or remove Microsoft Office and then reinstalling the business productivity suite. However, you can follow the following steps in order to reset and change the Microsoft Office 2007 product serial key without the need to uninstall or reinstall 2007 Office system suites.

Note: The following steps involve modification of registry key values, which may corrupt your Windows if done incorrectly. Backup registry first before performing the workaround.

1. Close all Microsoft Office programs.

2. Click on Start button, then click on Run.

3. Type “regedit” (without quotes) in the Run text box, and click OK or press Enter.

4. Locate and then click the following subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration

Inside, you will find another subkey that resembles the following subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{30120000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}

5. Optional: Backup this registry branch by exporting the Registration subkey to a file, just in case the new product key does not work and you have to restore back the old product key. To export the registry, right click on the Registration subkey and click on Export, and follow the on-screen prompt to enter a file name for the registry file and choose a location to store it.

6. Under the Registration subkey, there may be several Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID) subkey that contain a combination of alphanumeric characters. Each GUID is specific to a program that is installed on your computer.
If you find additional subkeys that reference Microsoft 12.0 registration, then click and open each GUID subkey to view and identify the Office product version by the ProductName registry entry in the right pane. For example:

ProductName=Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007

7. After you find the GUID subkey that contains your Office product or program which you want to remove the existing product license key or registration details, delete the following registry entries by right clicking on the registry entry in the GUID subkey, click Delete, and then click Yes:

• DigitalProductID
• ProductID

8. Exit Registry Editor.

9. Run or open an Office application program, such as Microsoft Word or Excel or Outlook. Office 2007 will prompt you to enter a new 25-character product key.

10. Type in the valid and genuine product key, and then click OK.

11. Then when prompted to choose your preferred type of Microsoft Office 2007 installation, press on “Install Now”.

12. Microsoft Office 2007 will be updated with new product CD key or volume license key, and ready for activation (if it’s a non-VLK serial) or use.

Note: If you’re having problem with your new Office 2007 product key, simply double click on the backup registry .reg file created at the optional step above to restore the registry settings of the Registration subkey so that the original value can be imported back to the registry.

You may need to reset to change Office 2007 product key with the above steps if you don’t want to uninstall or reinstall Microsoft Office 2007 again in many scenarios, such as you have just bought a retail version of Office 2007, or receive Office 2007 as a gift, or win MS Office 2007 as a prize, or just get your MSN product key for Office 2007, or having problem with activation process online or via phone, or unable to step-up or convert evaluation copy of Office 2007 to full-use version, or having problem with Office Genuine Advantage (OG) validation.

On the other hand, if you manage to find a valid and genuine volume license key or VLK, you can change the product key of Microsoft Office 2007 with the VLK serial in order to bypass the Office 2007 activation process (as Office 2007 still using WPA 1.0 where corporate users need not to activate), without the need of crack or hack for Office 2007, for full use for unlimited period as long as you’re not caught by OGA.

aleks krotoski

2008-09-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

Over the past week and a half, our gamesblog inbox has overflowed with entries for the Viva Piñata competition, and I'm pleased to say that the winner has been chosen after much deliberation between myself, Greg and Keef.

We chose this particular winner because we felt he (yes, it was a he) got the balance of sincerity and surrealism just right. From the submission:

Radi-ant: With a healthy green glow and a rear mounted geiger counter (complete with sound effects), hazmat helmet and safety boots

Topical, no?

Other excellent runners up include:

jagdev kenth for his suggestions for Cinnamonkey, Gooba, Jameleon and Jagular (and their awesome descriptions)
Lemuel for Mooringue (a Moozipan, but wearing a suit of sort of plate armour to make it hugely tough; sort of, in that for the meringue style it would have to be white and the edges of the plates look like the cracks you get
in the top of a pavlova), the Secret Squazzil (With a long overcoat and hat, dark glasses; the ever necessary corsage/newspaper so he can be easily spotted by other spies and the ubiquitous spies briefcase) and the Disco Doenut (Sporting a multi-coloured afro, enormous star shaped glasses, uber high platforms and of course some gittery flares, this disco diva has more funky moves than a taffly on fire!)
Benjamin Wood for Treagle Tart (based on Eaglair: Feather Boa and nothing else.)
Marion Hayter for Jamonimo (Unsuccessful parachutist - Flight goggles on a lemming, based on Lemmoning)

And so congratulations are in order to Chris Jones, who's leaving the party with a copy of the game, an Xbox Live Vision Camera and an exclusive Viva Piñata Card, designed by the artists at Rare. Three cheers!

Stay tuned for more competitions forthcoming. We're on a roll.

Gartner’s top 10 technologies for 2008: SOA precursors; fabric computing; Real world Web; WOA

2008-08-29T03:05:00.000-07:00

Gartner outlined its top 10 strategic technology areas for 2008 and many roads lead to service oriented architecture.
The top 10 is off to the right and there aren’t any huge surprises. Who didn’t see green IT and virtualization being listed? But what’s notable are all of the SOA precursors to be found. Business process modeling (No. 3), metadata management (No. 4), mashups and composite apps (No. 6) and Web platforms (No. 7) all add up to SOA down the road. All of those aforementioned items need to be done as large companies adopt SOA. What’s notable here is that Gartner’s list is focused on 2008. If you assume everyone in this packed room at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando runs back to the office to implement these technologies (fat chance) mass SOA adoption should come sometime in 2009 or 2010.

“SOA isn’t on the list because we are looking at some of the implementation technologies for service oriented architecture,” says Gartner analyst David Cearley. For instance, business process modeling (BPM) isn’t even a technology, but it’s a necessary precursor to introducing new technology. “SOA without BPM will not deliver on its process to the business,” says Cearley.

Cearley argues that metadata management falls into a similar category. Without the upfront work on developing an information infrastructure SOA will stumble.

A look at some of the other key technologies described.

Green IT: The technologies for green IT practices–multicore chips, power supplies, fans and power management software–are all mature, says Carl Claunch, an analyst at Gartner. So what’s new about green IT for 2008?

Claunch argues that there may be limits put on data center choices, regulations may become more prominent and then there’s the cost savings to your electric bill. “Green really matters and there’s a lot of work coming from the technology vendor sphere,” says Claunch.

Cearley notes that he has talked with many technology managers that haven’t been prodded for green IT practices. His advice: Plan ahead because “at some point someone will knock on your door about it and it’ll be easier if you plan ahead.”

Computing fabrics: Claunch says blade servers are just an intermediate stage. A fabric will allow several blades to be merged. “Blades are not the final step,” says Clough. His description:

The fabric based server of the future will treat memory, processors and I/O cards are components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suit the owner’s needs. That is, a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server. Any combination of the components can be configured, as they will not longer be defined as blades.

Unified communications. Plain old telephone lines are merging to VOIP. Convergence of communications is underway. The big question: When do the real value added applications come along? Claunch says converging things like Web services, contact centers, email and phone services will lead to combinations with storage networks, video from security cameras and sensors. “All sorts of potential applications emerge,” says Claunch. Timeline: 2010.

Virtualization is more than just consolidation of hardware. Claunch argues that virtualization is all about flexibility and the ability to adapt. These advantages go beyond mere hardware savings.

Here’s a chart outlining what Gartner calls Virtualization 2.0:

Web platforms (also known as SaaS today). Cearley says that 25 percent of Gartner customers have some form of SaaS already. Cearley advises that IT managers build in SaaS providers into their sourcing strategies.

Longer term, however, Web platforms will be the model for the future. Ultimately everything–infrastructure, information, widgets and business processes–will be delivered as a service. All of these intertwined APIs will give us a acronym: WOA (Web oriented architecture.) “Put this on your radar screen and start with some ‘what if’ models,” says Cearley. These Web platforms will also make mashups more common in the enterprise. In fact, Cearley argues that enterprises will need an architecture just to manage mashups.

Real World Web: Claunch defines the Real World Web as one where all devices–wireless devices, cameras, PCs etc.–combine to analyze location, intent and even emotions over a network. This will augment reality, says Claunch. Many verticals–military, healthcare, travel and retail–are expected to adopt applications for the Real World Web.

Post-VS 2008-Technology: LINQ to XSD and LINQ to Stored XML

2008-08-29T02:40:00.000-07:00

Today, Shyam Pather, Principal Development Lead on the Data Programmability Team at Microsoft, is giving a presentation on LINQ to XML: Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight, and Beyond at the XML 2007 Conference in Boston. He talks about the current and future technologies surrounding LINQ to XML.

The first two parts of the presentation cover LINQ to XML basics and the current advanced XML features:

LINQ to XML classes (XDocument, XElement, XAttribute, XNamespace, XName)
VB XML Literals
Intellisense Support
Helpful Operator Overloads
Cast Operator on XElement and XAttribute to bypass .Value property when accessing content
Nullable types and null coalescing operator
Bridge Classes, which offer System.Xml APIs over LINQ to XML trees
The slides can be downloaded from the conference's web site.

In the third part of the presentation Shyam presents future extensions of LINQ to XML: LINQ to XSD and LINQ to Stored XML.

LINQ to XSD has first been announced by Microsoft's XML team in November 2006 (including a preview alpha 0.1 for the LINQ May 2006 CTP):

LINQ to XSD provides .NET developers with support for typed XML programming on top of LINQ to XML. While the LINQ to XML programmer operates on generic XML trees, the LINQ to XSD programmer operates on typed XML trees -- instances of .NET types that model the XML types of a specific XML schema (XSD). To get an idea, consider the following C#3.0 fragment for a LINQ to XML query that computes the total over the items in a XML tree for a purchase order:

(from item in purchaseOrder.Elements("Item")
select (double)item.Element("Price") * (int)item.Element("Quantity")
).Sum();

Using LINQ to XSD, the query is written in a much clearer and type-safe way:

(from item in purchaseOrder.Item
select item.Price * item.Quantity
).Sum();

In June 2007 another preview alpha 0.2 for Visual Studio 2008 beta 1 was published. No LINQ to XSD preview appeared for VS 2008 beta 2, probably because Dr. Ralf Lämmel, who spearheaded the technology, left Microsoft. Roger Jennings, principal consultant of OakLeaf Systems, has the details of LINQ to XSD's history. He pursued the matter and requested an update of the technology from Microsoft:

Ralf Lämmel updated his LINQ to XSD implementation that enables strongly-typed LINQ to XML queries from the November 2006 Preview Alpha 0.1 for the May 2006 LINQ CTP to Preview Alpha 0.2 for Orcas Beta 1 on June 5, 2007. Dr. Lämmel then returned to Germany to assume a full professorship in the Department of Computer Sciences of the University of Koblenz (Germany). There’s been no word from the XML Team that’s responsible for LINQ to XML about an update to LINQ to XSD for the final VS 2008 bits. Hopefully, this very useful LINQ implementation won’t disappear as a result of attention attrition.
LINQ to Stored XML (XML in the database) offers ways of issuing queries against XML datatype columns within an SQL Server 2005. The goal is to "provide a strongly-typed LINQ experience over data in XML datatype columns" by providing "mapping from XML schema to classes" and "query translation from LINQ expressions to server XQuery expressions" (sample taken from the AdventureWorks database with 'Resume' being an XML datatype column):

Query:

var q = from o in _data.JobCandidates

where o.Resume.Skills.Contains("production")

select o.Resume.Name.Name_Last;

Output:

SELECT [Extent1].[Resume].query(
N'declare namespace r="http://.../adventure-works/Resume";
/*[1]/r:Name/r:Name.Last'
).value(N'.', N'nvarchar(max)') AS [C1]

FROM [HumanResources].[JobCandidate] AS [Extent1]

WHERE cast(1 as bit) = ([Extent1].[Resume].query(
N'declare namespace r="http://.../adventure-works/Resume";
contains(/*[1]/r:Skills, "production")'
).value(N'.', N'bit'))

The presentation is the first sign that activity is continued on LINQ to XSD and that LINQ to Stored XML is underway. But unfortunately no release dates - not even for preview bits - are mentioned.

A unique collection of amazing stuff from around the world

2008-08-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

In the revolution of miniature of computers, the scientists are ahead with blue-tooth technology... See the forthcoming computers within ur pockets ..
...

This pen sort of instrument produces both the monitor as well as the keyboard on flat surfaces from where you can just carry out the normal operations you do on your desktop.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 released

2008-08-18T00:49:00.000-07:00

Some stuff it includes:

Some new WPF designer stuff (not sure what though - not really my area)
ADO.NET Entity Designer
Office MFC stuff (not sure if it also includes TR1, these two were bundled together earlier on in the year)
Some improvements for the JavaScript support
Background compilation for C#
Also you will need SP1 to use VS2008 with SQL Server 2008 which was released a few days ago.

Originally posted at http://msmvps.com/blogs/gbarnett. Please post all comments there. Thanks, Granville.

A bit late...Pex 0.6 (with x64 support) released

2008-08-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

I've not looked at Pex (Program EXploration) yet but it seems pretty interesting. The previous version 0.5 only supported x86.

I watched the Channel9 video on Pex a while back now, and have been following it via word of mouth for a long time so when 0.5 dropped it was pretty exciting...until I found out it didn't support x64.

Nikolai Tillman has some more information on the 0.6 release, of particular note "64-bit support: Pex 0.6 installs on 64-bit Windows (but cannot analyse 64-bit-only code)"

Originally posted at http://msmvps.com/blogs/gbarnett. Please post all comments there. Thanks, Granville.

Apple blows world away with amazing new ‘iPhone’

2008-08-18T00:39:00.002-07:00

Steve Jobs had done it – he’s wowed the world with the next generation iPod called ‘iPhone’ due in the US June 2007 – a widescreen iPod, phone and Internet device that’s not only all-in-one, but is the world’s thinnest phone at 11.6mm, runs desktop class apps and much, much more. It’s the gadget of the decade! Totally, utterly, jaw-droppingly amazing.

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Steve Jobs has amazed the entire world with the brand new iPhone, a next-generation iPod that seamlessly merges a widescreen, wireless iPod, an amazing GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile phone (although not 3G), built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and full web browsing, email and other software programs (widgets) to deliver the next-generation mobile Internet, music, video, photo and computing experience.

Apple’s PDA phone makes the original Newton look very basic indeed, as it uses no stylus but is fully touch controlled. It also runs Mac OS X, although there’s no word on whether or not you could run Photoshop or other OS X apps on the phone, and at this stage it doesn’t look like that’s what the iPhone can do.

Music can be viewed with the CoverFlow graphical movement of album covers across the screen as seen in iTunes 7. Integration with Google Maps is built-in, as is free Yahoo push email (like Blackberries can do) using IMAP to ensure you’re notified of new emails virtually immediately.

The touch screen keyboard looks like a winner, too – with only one physical button on the iPhone, everything else is touch screen, on an LCD screen of 3.5-inches that has incredibly sharp resolution.

Apple have also changed their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to just Apple, Inc in celebration of the fact that they are well and truly no longer a computer company.

Cingular are indeed the network partner for Apple, and the head of Cingular, who pointed out that Cingular is now a part of AT&T, was at pains to explain that this was not a MVNO relationship, but one that let Apple be Apple, and Cingular be Cingular.

Apple are using some advanced features of Cingular’s network to allow users to listen to voicemail messages in whatever order they choose, not the order they were recorded in.

Other features include one of the smallest Bluetooth headsets you ever seen, plus a standard pair of headphones that now comes with a small microphone section if you prefer to use a wired headset, as the Bluetooth headset is likely to be an extra-cost option.

Give me more juicy details, like the price and when it's available to buy! Go to the next page below for instant gratification and the conclusion to this article on the mindblowingly amazing iPhone...

Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

2008-08-18T00:39:00.001-07:00

PDC05 - Amazing C++ futures talk

Just went to Herb Sutter's talk on C++ futures. Really rocking stuff! Check out the slides for TLN309. (Sorry, no link yet. I hope to update it when I get it.)

The first few minutes were on general improvements to the language including future ISO standard additions.

The coolest thing here at first glance is the "auto" keyword, which is a shortcut that lets you avoid typing in the whole bloody type declaration for a variable declaration when its type can be inferred from the assignment. For instance:

before:

foo::iterator i = myList.begin();

after:

auto i = myList.begin(); // Type of 'i is inferred from the assignment

There was also a bit about lamda functions. (Yes, some of this stuff is quite parallel with upcoming C# enhancements.)

The remainder of the talk was about moving C++ toward real concurrency at a high level. The goal is to help programmers avoid all the mess of dealing with individual threads and locking. With just a few new keywords ("active" and "future") you inform the compiler what parts of your program can be done asynchronously. Think of it as making your code "message based", without completly changing the syntax.

I'm sure many of you may be doubtful from my description, and perhaps wondering what I'm smoking, but all I can say is "check it out for yourself". It only hurts your brain a little bit to grok the syntax, and it's pretty easy to see how powerful the ideas are.

Of course, all this magic will need some pretty intense upgrades to the C++ runtime. As a tools developer who plays around in the blood and guts of running code, it makes my neck hairs stand on end to think about evolving tools to this new world. I'm not doubting it can be done. Rather, I'm stepping back and reappraising the mountain to be climbed.

Intel C++ Compiler v10.1.015 MACOSX

2008-08-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

ntel® C++ Compiler Professional Edition offers the best support for creating multi-threaded applications.

Only the Professional Edition offers the breadth of advanced optimization, multi-threading, and processor support that includes automatic processor dispatch, vectorization, auto-parallelization, OpenMP*, data prefetching, and loop unrolling, along with highly optimized C++ templates for parallelism, math processing, and multimedia libraries.

The Professional Edition combines a high performance compiler with Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB), Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) and Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL). The Professional Edition creates a strong foundation for building robust, high performance parallel code at significant price savings.

The Standard Edition compiler has the same performance and features as the Professional Edition compiler, but does not provide the multi-threaded libraries.

Amazing Concept Computer Puts The Real World Inside The Internet

2008-08-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

Holy smoke! This concept design from Mac Funamizu should be made today. The unnamed project uses a camera, scanner, GPS and see-through display to assimilate just about anything.

Point it at a street or landscape and it will use position and visual information to work out what you are looking at, and then pull down any relevant information from the internet. Then you can click on your image to zoom and explore in further detail. The floor-plan of a building or the menu of a restaurant, for instance.

The other picture shows the device, which Yanko Design has dubbed The Looking Glass, sitting on top of a newspaper and allowing copying and highlighting of the text. The more I think about this, the more amazing the possibilities. I belive there are already some services out there which use a phone's camera to locate the user, so perhaps this isn't so far fetched after all.

Amazing Computer Techical Support help Calling

2008-08-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

These "silly tech support calls " have been around in e-mails and online since the dawn of tech support.
They are always fun to read. I'm in the mood for a good laugh. How 'bout you?
**********
Customer: Hi, this is Celine. I can't get my diskette out. Tech support: Have you tried pushing the Button?
Customer: Yes, sure, it's really stuck. Tech support: That doesn't sound good; I'll make a note.
Customer: No, wait a minute... I hadn't inserted it yet... it's still on my desk... Sorry....
**********
Tech support: What kind of computer do you have? Female customer: A white one...
Tech support: Click on the 'my computer' icon on to the left of the screen. Customer: Your left or my left?
**********
Tech support: Good day. How may I help you? Male customer: Hello... I can't print.
Tech support: Would you click on "start" for me and... Customer: Listen pal; don't start getting technical on me! I'm not Bill Gates.
**********
Customer: Hi, good afternoon, this is Martha, I can't print. Every time I try, it says 'Can't find printer'. I've even lifted the printer and placed it in front of the monitor, but the computer still says he can't find it...
**********
Customer: I have problems printing in red... Tech support: Do you have a color printer?
Customer: Aaaah....................thank you.
**********
Tech support: What's on your monitor now, ma'am? Customer: A teddy bear my boyfriend bought for me at the 7-11.
**********
Customer: My keyboard is not working anymore. Tech support: Are you sure it's plugged into the computer?
Customer: No. I can't get behind the computer. Tech support: Pick up your keyboard and walk 10 paces back
Customer: OK
Tech support: Did the keyboard come with you? Customer: Yes
Tech support: That means the keyboard is not plugged in. Is there another keyboard? Customer: Yes, there's another one here. Ah...that one does work...
**********
Tech support: Your password is the small letter "a" as in apple, a capital letter V as in Victor, the number 7. Customer: Is that 7 in capital letters?
**********
Customer: I can't get on the Internet. Tech support: Are you sure you used the right password?
Customer: Yes, I'm sure. I saw my colleague do it. Tech support: Can you tell me what the password was?
Customer: Five stars.
********** Tech support: What anti-virus program do you use? Customer: Netscape.
Tech support: That's not an anti-virus program. Customer : Oh, sorry...Internet Explorer.
**********
Customer: I have a huge problem. A friend has placed a screen saver on my computer, but every time I move the mouse, it disappears.
**********
Tech support: How may I help you? Customer: I'm writing my first e-mail.
Tech support: OK, and what seems to be the problem? Customer: Well, I have the letter 'a' in the address, but how do I get the circle around it?
**********
A woman customer called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer. Tech support: Are you running it under windows?
Customer: "No, my desk is next to the door, but that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his printer is working fine."
**********
And last but not least...

Tech support: "Okay Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now type the letter "P" to bring up the Program Manager"
Customer: I don't have a P.
Tech support: On your keyboard, Bob.
Customer: What do you mean?
Tech support: "P".....on your keyboard, Bob.

What’s Your Favorite iMac Tip?

2008-08-12T01:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah… I have a new iMac. Isn’t she gorgeous? I’ve been looking at getting one for awhile, to use for a machine to live stream. The live stream has been being powered using a Mac Mini that’s kind of old. It’s just underpowered, and not easy to keep everything going. So anyway, the iMac is going to run the chat and stream, and hopefully everything will run much more smoothly. I’m not sure how it will all be set up at this point, but I’m happy to have new options. I have to thank Ponzi, who gave this to me for my birthday. As a Geek, you can never have too many computers, especially if you work from home.

The best part of doing unboxing videos is being able to tease people all day. No matter what it is, I’ll leave the box sitting on my desk all day. People will join and watch, waiting to see what I’ve gotten, and what I’m going to do with it. At the time I recorded this particular video, we had nearly 900 people watching the live stream. I love when so many of you want to join us and see what we’re up to!

iMac sets the standard for elegance and power. It packs a complete, high-performance computer into its all-in-one design. With an anodized aluminum frame and glass cover, it’s striking to behold. The 20- and 24-inch glossy widescreen displays make photos and movies come alive with rich color. The use of recyclable glass and aluminum makes iMac friendlier to the environment, too.

The ultrathin Apple Keyboard perfectly complements iMac. Its anodized aluminum enclosure features low-profile keys with a crisp, responsive feel. The keyboard includes special function keys for one-touch control of Mac features, and two USB 2.0 ports provide high-speed connectivity to your iPod, Mighty Mouse, digital camera, and other devices.

With iMac, details make all the difference. For example, because it’s made from a single sheet of aluminum, you won’t see any seams or screws except for a single compartment on the bottom that provides easy access to the memory slots. The built-in iSight camera and microphone are integrated so neatly you barely notice they’re there — until you need them for a video chat.

So once I get it all out of the box, I was happy to see a wireless keyboard, and the Mighty Mouse that I love using so much. It’s always fun to unbox Apple products! I know… everyone wants me to plug this thing in. It’s a 24″ model, and was not easy to get out of the box, believe it or not. I love the design of the iMac. It’s very clean and uncluttered.

Thank you, Ponzi, for the iMac!! I know this will get a lot of use, and the stream will run much better now.

* The 12 Month Internet Millionaire.
* Happy Apple IPhone, Brand New For March 2008.
* Apple IPhone Rabid Niche Cash System.

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

Top 10 Tips to Keep Your Windows Vista Computer Running Smoothly

2008-08-12T01:36:00.000-07:00

Are you using Vista on your computer? If so… have you had any issues with the performance, and how your computer actually runs? These tips were sent in by a community member by the name of Elis.

When I used to be on Windows XP, I always had the problem of keeping my computer running smoothly. Now that I,’m on Windows Vista the job has become much easier. Although Vista uses more resources, somehow I think it has been brilliantly built if running under optimum specs. So here is my top 10 tips on how to keep windows vista running smoothly.

His suggestions are general guidelines…

* Leave your computer on for as long as you can. I leave my computer on for months on end. Every time I restart my computer, the cache to certain folders, files etc is deleted. This means that files will open slower than normal. No harm comes from leaving your computer running, and it has been proven that there is no long term damage… apart from receiving a higher than normal electricity bill

My note: I don’t know how that was proven, but I keep my primary computer on all the time as well.
* Firewall. The Windows Firewall now has the option to configure incoming and outgoing traffic, which I think is great. It comes in very handy when you need it most.

My note: I don’t fully agree with the above tip, about using Windows Firewall. Many free firewalls are much better at protecting you than the one from Windows… such as Comodo.
* Antivirus. Get yourself a decent anti virus. Personally, I prefer ESETs NOD32 Anti virus which does a magnificent job. It is also light on resources unlike its competitors Norton and McAfee. Every month or so I do a virus scan, but nothing is usually found.
* Defragment. Defragmentation of your hard disk is very useful, as files are spread all over the place. There is nothing wrong with the built-in Windows Defragmenter, but there is a better one which is faster and has better options. O&O Defrag 10 repacks fragmented files together and optimizes your hard drives. You should check it out. You can also save 5% off Purchase using coupon code ALEX-KCBH
* Disk Cleanup. The Disk Cleanup can come in very handy usually. It’s mostly needed when things get overcrowded. I recommend you DO NOT delete the temporary internet files and thumbnails. There is also an excellent free program called ATF Cleaner. It safely cleans things like temp files, cache, java cache, and more… at the click of a button. YOU decide what you do and don’t want ATF Cleaner to clean for you.
* Keep files organized. I keep all my pictures, videos, documents… everything is organized. I truly think it is very helpful to know where all your files and folders are. This way, they are also not thrown all over the place so you forget what you’re looking for.
* Have only one instance of each type of software running at one time., such as Browsers or Antivirus. I know most people stick to Firefox, but personally I like IE7. No, I haven’t mistyped. Thats correct: Internet Explorer 7 is my choice. Web sites pop up in under a second. I have tried Firefox. Although it is brilliant with all the nice features and plug ins, I find them irrelevant. IE7 does a marvelous job for me.
* Delete software that you do not need from “Remove Programs.” I used to have a ton of software on my computer. These were usually things I did not need or didn’t use. I know some software may be considered ‘cool’ to have so you can brag to your friends about them. But when they have no use… they are just wasting computer resources.
* Startup programs. MSCONFIG does a magnificent job on helping you choose what programs should start and what shouldn’t, although it is up to you. If you haven’t heard of msconfig before then here’s how to open it! Click “Start”, then “search”. Type msconfig, and click “enter”. After it has appeared, go to the “startup” tab, and choose what irrelevant programs you want to cancel from starting. Keep in mind that you cannot disable things like display drivers, and any other necessary system files/programs.
* Running Programs. Always check what programs/processes you have running on your computer through the task manager. It usually helps because some programs will stop responding in the background if you have one that is taking up a huge amount of resources. You might experience some lag.

New Tech for Computers in 2008-2010

2008-08-12T01:27:00.000-07:00

New Tech for Computers in 2008-2010

* DisplayPort - more anti copying protection and new plug , supports high def
* USB3 - more anti copying protection and new plug , supports faster speed
* CPU's that have more cores
* Intel CPU's that have memory controllers on board
* WiMax Wireless (different from 54g)
* SD cards with bigger sizes used as os drives more.
* Multi-touch touch screens
* 10g Ethernet

Anyone else heard of new things for Computers that Ive missed ?

Top 100 Universities for Computer Science

2008-08-12T01:25:00.000-07:00

1. Stanford University ---- ckgaa@forsythe.stanford.edu
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ---- mitgrad@mit.edu
3. University of California - Berkeley ---- gradadm@eecs.berkeley.edu
4. Carnegie Mellon University ---- apps@ece.cmu.edu
5. Cornell University ---- engr_admissions-mailbox@cornell.edu
6. Princeton University ---- gradinfo@cs.princeton.edu
7. University of Texas - Austin ---- adgrd@utxdp.dp.utexas.edu
8. University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign ---- application@ece.uiuc.edu
9. University of Washington ---- uwgrad@u.washington.edu
10. University of Wisconsin - Madison ---- egradvisor@engr.wisc.edu
11. Harvard University ---- adm@hugsas.harvard.edu
12. California Institute of Technology ---- gradofc@cco.caltech.edu
13. Brown University ---- admission_graduate@brown.edu
14. University of California - Los Angeles ---- diane@ea.ucla.edu
15. Yale University ---- graduate.admissions@yale.edu
16. University of Maryland - College Park ---- cmscgrad@deans.umd.edu
17. University of Massachusetts - Amherst ---- gradapp@umassp.edu
18. Rice University ---- deng@rice.edu
19. University of Southern California ---- gradapp@enroll1.usc.edu
20. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor ---- dawnf@umich.edu
21. Columbia University (Fu Foundation) ---- seasgradmit@columbia.edu
22. University of California - San Diego ---- gradinfo@cs.ucsd.edu
23. University of Pennsylvania ---- engadmis@seas.upenn.edu
24. Purdue University - West Lafayette ---- gradinfo@purdue.edu
25. Rutgers State University - New Brunswick ---- graduateadmissions@rutgers.edu
26. Duke University ---- grad-admissions@duke.edu
27. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill ---- seaelle@unc.edu
28. University of Rochester ---- graddean@seas.rochester.edu
29. SUNY - Stony Brook ---- graduate.school@sunysb.edu
30. Georgia Institute of Technology
31. University of Arizona ---- gradadm@lorax.admin.arizona.edu
32. University of California - Irvine ---- jdsommer@uci.edu
33. University of Virginia ---- inquiry@cs.virginia.edu
34. Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis ----grad_me@engr.iupui.edu
35. Johns Hopkins University ---- grad_adm@jhu.edu
36. Northwestern University ---- gradapp@nwu.edu
37. Ohio State University ---- admissions@osu.edu
38. University of Colorado - Boulder ---- pamw@schof.colorado.edu
39. University of Utah ---- grad-coordinator@cs.utah.edu
40. Oregon Graduate Inst. of Science and Technology ---- admissions@admin.ogi.edu
41. University of Pittsburgh ---- admin@engrng.pitt.edu
42. Syracuse University ---- gradinfo@syr.edu
43. University of Pennsylvania ---- engadmis@seas.upenn.edu
44. University of Florida ---- admissions@eng.ufl.edu
45. University of Minnesota ---- gsadmit@maroon.tc.umn.edu
46. University of California - Santa Barbara ---- engrdean@engineering.ucsb.edu
47. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ---- grad-services@rpi.edu
48. Univ of California-Santa Cruz ---- mullane@cse.ucsc.edu
49. University of Illinois - Chicago ---- laura@eecs.uic.edu
50. Washington University in St. Louis ---- gradengineering@seas.wustl.edu
51. Michigan State University ---- kreh@egr.msu.edu
52. Pennsylvania State University - University Park ---- gadm@psu.edu
53. CUNY - City College ---- admissions@crow.admit.ccny.cuny.edu
54. Dartmouth College ---- thayer.admissions@dartmouth.edu
55. Boston University University of California - Davis ---- gradinfo@ece.ucdavis.edu
56. SUNY - Buffalo ---- slking@eng.buffalo.edu
57. North Carolina State University ---- graduate_admissions@ncsu.edu
58. Arizona State University ---- asuengr@asu.edu
59. University of Iowa ---- admissions@uiowa.edu
60. Texas A&M University - College Station ---- eapo@tamu.edu
61. University of Oregon ---- osuadmit@ccmail.orst.edu
62. University of Kentucky ---- jreese@pop.uky.edu
63. Virginia Tech ---- mcpherso@vt.edu
64. Case Western Reserve University ---- grad@b63810.student.cwru.edu
65. George Washington University ---- adms@seas.gwu.edu
66. University of South Florida ---- kjohnson@eng.usf.edu
67. Temple University ---- sbiswas@vm.temple.edu
68. Oregon State University ---- osuadmit@ccmail.orst.edu
69. University of Southwestern Louisiana ---- admissions@usl.edu
70. Vanderbilt University ---- barbara.amann@vanderbilt.edu
71. University of Nebraska-Lincoln ---- grad_admissions@unl.edu
72. University of Houston ---- gradinfo@cs.uh.edu
73. University of Texas at Dallas ---- grad-admissions@utdallas.edu
74. Louisiana State U & A&M College
75. Iowa State University ---- grad_admissions@iastate.edu
76. New Mexico State University
77. Wayne State University ---- m.t.wood@wayne.edu
78. Washington State University
79. Kansas State University ---- gradschool@ksu.edu
80. University of Central Florida
81. United States Naval Postgraduate School ---- tcalhoon@nps.navy.mill
82. University of Texas - Arlington ---- graduate.school@uta.edu
83. University of Kansas ---- dwales@ukans.edu
84. University of Alabama - Huntsville ---- admitme@email.uah.edu
85. Old Dominion University ---- admit@odu.edu
86. University of Maryland Baltimore County ---- umbcgrad@umbc.edu
87. Southern Methodist University ---- valerin@seas.smu.edu
88. Illinois Institute of Technology ---- grad@minna.acc.iit.edu
89. University of Connecticut ---- mbalinsk@gris.grad.uconn.edu
90. University of South Carolina ---- info@engr.sc.edu
91. Florida State University ---- gaitrosd@cs.fsu.edu
92. Lehigh University ---- ineas@lehigh.edu
93. University of Massachusetts - Lowell ---- graduate_school@uml.edu
94. University of Alabama - Birmingham
95. Mississippi State University ---- student@grad.msstat
96. Kent State University ---- dbarber@emerald.educ.kent.edu
97. University of Oklahoma ---- admrec@ouwww.ucs.ou
98. Tulane University ---- emichael@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu
99. Stevens Institute of Technology ---- jcuddy@stevens-tec
100. Worcester Polytechnic Institute ---- gao@wpi.edu

Apple Computer's iMac With a Transparent Screen

2008-08-12T01:22:00.000-07:00

Qwest CEO among Candidates for Motorola's Top Post.

2008-08-12T01:17:00.001-07:00

By Barbara Rose, Chicago Tribune Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Oct. 8--Richard Notebaert, Chairman and CEO of Qwest Communications International Inc., is among several candidates contacted in the search to replace Motorola Inc. CEO Christopher Galvin, according to sources familiar with the search.

The job would be a homecoming for the 55-year-old telecom veteran, who led the former Ameritech Corp. until its sale to SBC Communications Inc. in 1999 before jumping to equipment maker Tellabs Inc. as CEO.

A Post-Katrina Computer Makeover

2008-08-12T01:15:00.000-07:00

See Comments (1)

Hurricane Katrina may have been a 2005 news event, but it's still affecting millions of people well into 2006, including this week's Hook Me Up subject Jerry.

The hurricane's destruction had a major affect on tourism, causing Jerry to lose his job as a web designer for the New Orleans tourism site. But as a true survivor, Jerry made do with his available resources, specifically a $40 computer he purchased on Craigslist.

Jerry is now working as a freelance web designer and trying to get his true passion up and running: an Internet radio station, Astreauxworld.com. Ideally Jerry would like to focus on the radio station fulltime, but he doesn't have the right hardware or software to take the station to the next level.

I dispatched Jacky Myint to hook Jerry up. She's a freelance web designer, too, and works as a developer at the Associated Press. Jacky surveyed Jerry's set-up and was amazed: two old, and I mean old PCs making crunchy noises as they tried to process all the data needed for Jerry's websites.

Jacky decided to hook Jerry up with a Toshiba Qosmio Laptop. The Qosmio is known as a top-notch multimedia laptop, handling audio and video files with ease. The system has a huge array of built in AV ports, which is something that's not usually found on traditional laptops. Plus, the laptop's screen is big and bright, something that got Jerry really excited.

On top of all those features, the Qosmio also has a DVD±RW that pops out of the front panel, so you can put peripherals along the side of the system without blocking the drive bay. And for the audiophile in Jerry, the Qosmio also has Harmon Kardon speakers that sound terrific, considering they are built in to the laptop. But for his home setup, we also got him a set of the Klipsch Pro-Media speakers for full stereo sound.

To properly promote and package Jerry's Internet radio station, Jacky picked out a copy of Sony's Acid Pro 6, a music creation program that helps Jerry make jingles and promotional spots to play between tracks.

The actual computers were only half the problem, so Jacky decided some basic organizational tools would make a huge difference. Jacky, went with a Palm TX PDA to stay organized, a Microsoft wireless notebook mouse, and a Logitech Web-Cam to add pictures and video to the radio station's web site.

In total, Jacky spent just under $3,000 to transform Jerry's ‘jerryrigged' setup into a broadcaster's dream.

Howto: Delete undeletable files in Windows XP

2008-08-12T01:14:00.001-07:00

That’s right: This is for Windows. Don’t get all huffy. I learned something new today while I was at work, and I’m going to share it. Not everything has to do with Ubuntu. Okay, most everything does, but it’s only obliquely this time.

I work on a PC that has several user accounts, and some of them are quite old — outdated is a good word for them. Some of them are two or three years old, and haven’t been used in a long time. I can tell, of course, by perusing the Documents and Settings folder. (Some people really should empty their IE cache before they log out. :shock: But that’s beside the point.)

For outdated accounts for people who have since departed, I like to delete their account folder and save space on the drive (more space for music downloaded from Jamendo! :mrgreen: ). The problem is that I occasionally get mystery files that can’t be deleted. Like this …

images[1].

See that trailing dot? I don’t know if that dot is the reason, but Windows can’t delete that file. XP complains about not being able to find the file. Explorer barfs up an error message, and even DEL from a command box (dare I call it a terminal?) can’t do it. This one has the same effect.

imagrs[1].

I don’t know where they come from or why they appear, but XP has a %@#! fit every time I try to delete them. And without that file disappearing, there’s a whole trail of encapsulating folders that don’t want to delete either. Because there’s still something in there, you see. So it can’t be deleted. :roll:

So me, being Ubuntu-minded, figured it would work just as well to boot into a Linux live CD and delete it manually. Well, except that the drive is an NTFS volume, of course. And Damn Small Linux wouldn’t do NTFS for me. And Slax suddenly refused to install to a USB key for me. And now I’m spending an hour trying to work a Windows-based Slax installer program that has been discontinued and I only found by way of the Internet Archive and it doesn’t seem to like my USB drive and my download speed for the Ubuntu live CD is 10kbps on a corporate line and even then I don’t know if I could get NTFS access off a live CD and I don’t want to install the Reconstructor on a virtual PC just to get NTFS support in a live environment. …

See where I’m at? This is way too much circumnavigation just to delete a 0Kb file.

Google a little, and I came up with this.

1. Open a cmd box. (Start > Run > cmd)
2. Open the Task Manager. (Right-click on the taskbar.)
3. Kill explorer.exe. Don’t close the Task Manager.
4. Navigate in the cmd box to the undeletable file.
5. Delete it with DEL (I used DEL *.* for an immensely gratifying delete experience).
6. Using the File menu in Task Manager, restart explorer.exe.

And it worked. Like a charm. So let that be a lesson to you: The best solution is not always the quickest and easiest solution. Sometimes you just have to kill Explorer.

Things to do with an old computer

2008-08-12T01:12:00.002-07:00

In all the time I’ve been pitching old computers as viable machines, I’ve never taken up the issue of what you can actually do with an old computer.

There are two reasons for that. First, it’s been beaten to death. Every blog in every corner of every Web page has a list of wacky ideas for old computers. Hamster cages. Barbecue grills. Bird nesting boxes. Kitchen clocks. You name it. Search for “old computer” on Ixquick and you get a frothy mess of blogs and know-it-all Web sites giving you ideas.

Second, it’s not my goal to give you ideas for an ancillary machine. It’s my goal to keep you from buying a new computer in the first place, because your old one can do the job just as well, you just have to be open minded about it. ;) So really, I don’t want you to look for ideas for an old computer. I want you to use it like it’s a new one.

All the same, I get e-mails asking for ideas. So I thought I’d pool together some of my own, along with some I culled from elsewhere. Some of these things I’ve done, and some just sound like good ideas. Maybe one will sound good to you too. Enjoy.

First, if you must get rid of it completely. …

Convert to cash. This is kind of a weird suggestion, but before you do anything with your computer, you should see what you have. You might have a piece of junk in your hands, and if it’s some kind of wacky home-grown computer, it probably is junk. But if you have an old IBM Model M keyboard connected to it. … Congratulations: You just made $100 on ebay. Find out what it is, what it’s worth and if you should hold on to it.

Give it to a geek. Provided you’re not a geek already, find one and see if you can foist it on to them. Most geeks can be found … well, actually, most geeks can’t be found outside their dens, except if there’s a fire drill. Ask around and if you can triangulate the location of a geek in his or her natural habitat, see if they want your machine. Most geeks consider gifts to be romantic overtures, but make it clear that it’s just a castaway. You won’t hurt their feelings.

Recycle it. Most big-name sellers have recycle programs now, although some, like Dell, are generally only interested in their own branded machines. I suppose that’s okay, since they’d be picking up some weird stuff if they didn’t draw the line somewhere. Also check around for your local Free Geek group, and remember that sometimes charities will take computers as donations, like cars. Whatever you do, make sure your computer doesn’t end up in a landfill in a third world country. IT crud is somehow making its way into small African nations, dumped into pits and left to decompose. Maybe that doesn’t bother you, but considering that the average CRT has up to 8 lbs. of lead in it, it’s not environmentally — or ethically — conscientious. Let’s not turn the developing world into a garbage pit, friends.

But if you’re willing to keep it around. …

Torrent slave. You probably already know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, read this post, then come back here. It’s a sign of the times that torrent traffic has become so popular. I don’t care if you’ve got a 75Mhz Pentium in the closet: If you can get some version of Linux on there, you’ve got a primo torrent slave.

Jukebox. Here’s one idea that gets thrown around a lot, and that’s because it makes a lot of sense. If it has a sound card, it’s a great jukebox. And if you can get some sort of Linux working on it, you can at least get cplay going, if not some other audio application. Hook it up to your home network and listen to music from one room to another. Is it a laptop? Great, it has a built-in visualiser panel. I used to take a Presario 1020 to work just to play tunes, and it drove the tech staff crazy. Everyone else was jealous.

File server, printer server or NAS. Another old chestnut, but again, there’s a reason for that. Most machines that you find “too slow” for desktop use are acceptably fast as servers or network storage. Take out the GUI and suddenly it’s a speed demon again. Link up a series of machines with NFS and get everybody using the same stuff, and quite easily. Want an idea how to do that in Ubuntu? Look at this.

Web design and development. So long as you’re hooking it up as a file server, you might as well make it into a full-fledged in-house Web server, particularly if you’re into Web design. Test at the local level, before moving your site out into the real world. Build a wiki. And remember that some very, very slow machines work well as Web servers. Like the old 286 Web server.

FTP for fun and profit. Again, so long as you’re setting up a server, put together an FTP site. I used to run a live vsftpd server off a 300Mhz machine with no hard drive, just to transfer large files between me and my brother. He could sign in, drop off his file and I’d copy it elsewhere. Turn it off, and it’s gone. Easy as pie.

Put on a white hat. And so long as you’re creating an off-the-grid server, you might as well learn how to break into it. Cut your teeth in the security field by keeping yourself out of your own machine. And really, does it matter a lot if your old computer is compromised by you?

Guinea pig. If the security business doesn’t enthuse you, consider other ways to use your computer as a test subject. Take it apart. Put it back together. Find a tutorial on computers and experiment with it. What’s this button do? Consider the last great act of your old computer to be teaching you about computers. It’s also good to keep a spare desktop around for testing used parts. If you have one that’s fairly flexible, you can use it to troubleshoot hardware problems.

Cannibalize it. Better than throwing it away is to put some of the parts into another machine. Why have only one hard drive, when two are twice as nice? Got an extra CDROM? Put it into another machine and copy-on-the-fly. Double up on memory, if it’s compatible. It might make things faster, too. (Of course, it might not.)

Upgrade it. Take this one with a grain of salt. If you’re computer is junk, then parts are probably going to be cheap. If it’s still a little valuable, then parts might be a little more money. If it’s really old, upgrading is going to be ridiculously expensive. There’s a funny price curve attached to computer parts. It starts high, falls after a few years, bottoms out after about six, then suddenly spikes again around 10. So depending on how old it is, you might be putting more money into it than it’s worth.

Firewall. Ah, yes, the old firewall suggestion. Yes, it’s possible, and there are Linux distros that are made specifically for this purpose. To be honest, I don’t know of anyone — I mean personally — who dedicates an entire outdated PC to firewall duty. It’s too easy to get a $50 router with a 24V AC adapter, cross your fingers and hope it keeps the bad guys out. However, it’s a great learning experience and a good use for an outdated machine. Consider it.

Cluster it. Get two or three or ten of the things, rig them all up together and start crunching numbers, folding proteins or searching for aliens. OpenMosix is designed just for that purpose. Now before you start buying pallets of Pentium II machines off PublicSurplus.com, remember that clusters don’t always behave like a single computer. In other words, ten 166Mhz machines are not necessarily as fast as one 1.6Ghz machine, except under certain circumstances. And really, if you daisy-chain ten Pentium Pro machines together in hopes of playing Frozen Bubble on the collection, your electricity bill is going to be horrific. :shock:

Give it to the kids. Oh yeah. That one. Yes, I’m sure your kids really want to play Snowfight on your old 233Mhz laptop. Let’s face it: All the “kids” I know are too busy with Star Wars Galaxies, and your old Pentium II ain’t going to cut it. And don’t give it to your teenager to “do their homework on.” Your teenager knows junk when he sees it, and a “gift” like that is just going to trigger another episode of angst. Unless, of course, your teenager is a geek, in which case he or she has probably already commandeered your old computer. So yes, you could try to give it to your kids, but don’t be surprised if they use it for a bookend.

Use it for a bookend. No, let’s skip that one.

Gaming hub/LAN party server. I can’t speak to the effectiveness of this one, but I’ll mention it because I’ve seen it listed elsewhere as an option. I think it might depend on the game, the number of players, the hardware, the speed of the network, and so forth. It sounds like a possibility to me, though. I leave it to you to find out how well it works.

Your own personal Internet radio station. I had a friend who ran a streaming audio server off his home network, then could access the stream and listen to his own music collection while at work. It was an exceedingly cool setup, and if it wasn’t for his rather bizarre taste in music, I might still be tuning into it. It’s supposedly easy to set up (warning: that’s an old thread), but I’ve not done this either.

Capture cartoons. I’ve heard about setting up a personal video recorder, but it only vaguely interests me since I’m not much of a TV-watcher. There are a variety of TV-in cards you can get, some quite cheap. And just about every model has a howto in the forums, so search around in there until you find some instructions for your card and your release. Let me know if it’s worth trying. ;)

Emulation station. The beauty of an old machine is that it’s still logarithmically faster than a C-64. Get VICE going, or pick another emulator that reminds you of your younger days. There are Apple ][ emulators, Atari 800 emulators, 68k Mac emulators, Nintendo DS, Sega Genesis, DOS emulators — you name it. But don’t ask me about those other machines. I’m a Chickenhead. You won’t catch me playing anything but Bruce Lee. :twisted:

Legacy gaming. Along the same lines, you can usually run old Windows titles from within wine, and not have nearly as many complications as trying to install Windows 95 (now with USB support! :roll: ). Go into the basement and get out all your old Win98 games, and spin them up again. And if you were ever a Tribes player … you still are. (And by the way, if you can get the new, free releases of Command & Conquer running in Linux, let me know how you did it. It’s not happening for me. :( )

Movie machine. I’ve watched DivX movies on 300Mhz machines inside X with mplayer, and you can even throw a movie up against the framebuffer of a still-slower computer, and watch movies or DVDs that way. Old laptops are excellent for this; it’s one of the reasons I keep a spare to the side of my bigger machine — so I can watch movies while I moderate. :mrgreen:

Internet phone. Another one I’ve heard about, but haven’t done. If your machine can handle Skype or Ekiga or even Google voice chat, you might as well set it up to run solo, and let your big rig relax. Personally I don’t like telephones much more than televisions, so for this one, you’re on your own.

Compiler. I’ve heard of people compiling software packages on spare machines, just so they don’t have to bog down their main rig with the chore. It’s an advanced task, since you have to be sure the results will be compatible between the two machines, but it’s not unheard of. In some cases, that’s how you install precompiled versions of Linux on outdated hardware.

Renderer. If you do 3D work or animation, which requires heavy processing over long periods of time, you might want to relegate the task to the old machine. Granted, a slower CPU might take longer to finish the job, but if that’s all it’s doing, and you don’t mind waiting, then why not? Dump the work on the old machine and you can go back to playing Bruce Lee. ;)

Distro-hop. This is my favorite thing to do with an outdated machine. Get yourself a rewriteable CD, download a few ISOs and try them out on an older box. See how well — or how badly — they perform. Keep a blog of your adventures and let your experience guide and instruct others. And when you feel really daring, start working on Gentoo or Linux From Scratch. That will be not only useful, but educational too.

Finish the band’s first album. Since there are plenty of applications that work as synthesizers, drum machines or for looping effects, you can pursue that musical career you always knew you were destined for, with your old K6-2 as the backup singer. Rehearse, record, release. Just don’t quit your day job yet. :|

Get all artistic and stuff. After you’ve recorded your opus, strip the machine down and learn how to mod it. Try out paints and LED effects. Throw a water cooling system into your old Packard Bell 486. Make a Lego case for it. Because you know what? Even an ugly 333Mhz Aptiva modded to look like the MCP tower from Tron is WICKED COOL. :shock:

Finally, keep using it. I said at the start that I don’t really like the idea of pushing an old computer out the door, just to make space for a new one that happens to work a little faster. I would prefer you took the time and learned how to keep your machine useful, and maybe hold on to it for a few more years. Fact of the matter is, I don’t have a computer that’s younger than seven years old, and I haven’t run into anything that I needed a newer one for. Try out alternative desktops. Lighten the load a little. Set up a strictly GTK1.2 environment. Experiment with so-called “lightweight” distros. Be open-minded and try new applications with lower system demands. Better yet, code some new ones that fit your needs and don’t bog down your machine.

What you do with your computer is up to you. But remember that there are a lot of options available to you, if you’re willing to keep it around. I’d highly recommend that.

Howto: 16-second boot on 550Mhz Celeron with Crux

2008-08-12T01:12:00.001-07:00

I’ve mentioned a few times that my Thinkpad boots in under 16 seconds to an Openbox desktop, but I haven’t ever really shown how. It takes a little while to arrange a system that runs that fast, but if you’re interested and you have a few days to spare, these are the best suggestions I can make.

Before you try something like this, you should be able to handle everything described in the Crux Handbook, including setting up a network, building a custom kernel, configuring your hardware and partitioning a system drive. And of course, all from the command line. Extra points are awarded for style, such as setting up your wireless connection while you’re still in the live environment. ;)

Please be aware that this is definitely not a beginner’s task. Remember when you first installed Ubuntu and everything just magically worked? I can guarantee you, with 99 44/100 percent certainty, that at the first boot everything will not work — if it boots at all. This is the kind of project where one small button buried deep in a nested menu somewhere will cost you hours of compiling, hours of troubleshooting and days of kicking yourself in the behind.

For partitions, I use a simple four-part scheme — something like this.

/boot 32MB ext2
swap 128MB
/ 4096MB ext2
/home (remainder) ext2

Make sure you set the noatime flag when you build your /etc/fstab file too. It helps.

Most of the magic happens in the kernel configuration, which should make sense — a custom kernel is still the best and most effective way of speeding up any system, and any distro. Personally I disable almost everything I can think of, although that’s going to vary from machine to machine. For the record, this is the hardware I’m using.

* 550Mhz Celeron (Coppermine)
* 192Mb PC100
* 4Mb Silicon Motion, Inc. SM712 LynxEM+
* 20Gb 5400rpm Hitachi hard drive HTS548040M9AT00
* LG CRN8241B 24x CDROM
* 2x USB 1.1 ports, one side and one rear
* 800×600 SVGA LCD
* Intel 8440MX AC’97 Audio

Network is from an unencrypted access point to a Linksys WPC11 v3 PCMCIA card. This is an 11b card that uses the Prism 2 chipset — in other words, I don’t need firmware or special binary packages to get the network up. If yours is different, you’re on your own.

My kernel configuration takes everything — absolutely everything — out that isn’t essential. I find it makes the system faster, and takes less time to compile. That will be important if you’re using a similarly (or even more so) slow machine. So here’s what I suggest for 2.6.25.5, downloaded in the live environment, and you can decide if it’s to your liking:

Under general setup I disable …

* incomplete code or drivers (it makes setup go by a little quicker)
* optimization for for size
* control group support
* group CPU scheduler
* create deprecated sysfs files
* kernel-user space relay support
* heap randomization
* profiling support
* OProfile system profiling and
* Kprobes

In enable the block layer disable …

* support for large block devices (when they make a terabyte drive for my 550Mhz machine, I’ll re-enable it)
* anticipatory and deadline I/O schedulers (which makes CFQ the default)

For processor type and features I …

* disable high resolution timer support
* disable SMP support
* disable single-depth WCHAN output
* set the subarchitecture type to PC-compatible
* set the processor family to Coppermine
* disable HPET timer support
* disable machine check exception
* turn off high memory support
* disable Compat VDSO support

In power management options I …

* disable legacy power management
* enable supend-to-RAM and standby
* disable hibernation (when you boot in 16 seconds, do you really need hibernation?)
* For ACPI …
o disable all deprecated options, as well as the future power /sys interface
o disable battery, since the machine doesn’t have one
o disable debug statements
* enable APM and the real mode APM BIOS call (this works for shutdown for me)
* disable CPU frequency scaling, since it will be on AC at all times
* disable CPU idle PM support

The bus options I use are …

* disable deprecated pci_find_*
* enable PCMCIA/Cardbus support and
o disable ioctl
o modularize yenta-compatible support

Under networking …

* disable IPv6
* and wireless options …
o modularize the deprecated 802.11 stack

For block devices under device drivers …

* disable normal floppy disk support

Disable all misc devices.

For ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support …

* disable legacy /proc/ide/ support
* disable probe IDE PCI devices in PCI order
* enable Intel PIIXn chipsets support, and nothing else

For SCSI device support …

* disable SCSI CDROM support
* disable all SCSI transports
* disable all SCSI low-level drivers

Disable all SATA and PATA drivers, all RAID and LVM, Fusion MPT, Firewire and Macintosh support.

For network devices …

* disable all ethernet devices
* under Wireless LAN…
o enable IEEE802.11
o modularize the Hermes chipset and Hermes PCMCIA card support
o modularize IEEE802.11 for Host AP and the Prism2 PC card options

For character devices, disable HPET event timer and hardware random number generator core support.

Under multimedia devices, disable DVB for Linux.

For graphics support and /dev/agpgart, enable only the 440BX option.

For sound, I use ALSA and enable the AC’97 option under PCI devices. I also diable the OSS options.

Most of the USB options I keep because they allow you to use USB flash drives. I do however, disable USB 2.0 support (this machine is 1.1 only), and USB printer and monitor support under USB support.

Under file systems I only leave second extended filesystem enabled. Everything else — including NFS — gets turned off. I also …

* disable dnotify
* disable inotify
* disable kernel automounter version 4

Under cryptographic API, I make sure everything is compiled into the kernel, and not modularized. Then I disable all hardware crypto devices.

Finally, disable all virtualization. I don’t see a 550Mhz Celeron as much of a platform for virtualizing. ;)

And that’s about it. I’m sure there’s more that could be turned off or disabled, but it’s tough to test everything in there. :D

Next step, I set up /etc/rc.modules to probe orinoco-cs and yenta-socket:

/sbin/modprobe yenta-socket
/sbin/modprobe orinoco-cs

Rather than use the /etc/rc.d/net daemon, I write the network connection sequence into /etc/rc.local, like this:

iwconfig eth0 mode managed essid any
ifconfig eth0 up
dhcpcd eth0

For some reason, the net daemon doesn’t behave for me like it’s supposed to under wireless connections, when I compare it to the wired connections I’ve tried. That’s probably my fault, but this way works perfectly for me.

I use Grub over LILO on my Crux systems. Grub is in the opt repository, which means you have to add it manually to the system, instead of just selecting the core packages. I also add nano from there, because vi just … well, never mind. :P

When you edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf file, remember that the partitions are separated in this system — not as subdirectories. In other words, you can probably delete the “/boot” part from the kernel lines, and change the /dev/hda1 to /dev/hda3 instead. Setting up Grub for me is less complex than what the handbook suggests; I just

grub

Then

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
quit

That does it for me. If you have a stranger arrangement, you’ll have to adjust that for your flavor.

At this point, your system should boot. Cross your fingers and give it a try.

If it’s up and working, you can continue by setting the compilation flags in /etc/pkgmk.conf.

export CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
export CARCH="i686"
export CFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math"
export CXXFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math"

If “unsafe” CFLAGS are something you worry about, you can use the safe ones from the Gentoo wiki. These haven’t given me any problems thus far. (Note: Except for Firefox, which had to be recompiled with the safe flags. Remember that some programs will work this way, and others won’t, and I don’t have any advice for you on how to predict the results.)

I disable the footprint check since it tends to halt software installations at inconvenient times.

For /etc/prt-get.conf, I set the logging feature and “prefer-higher” as default options. Since there’s not a lot of screen space available, the list of installed or failed packages can get kicked up off the screen. The logs tell me if something went wrong, at least.

I usually start the software update process at this point. Since my router’s settings block rsync, I use httpup to sync with the ports, and then start a system-wide update. That can take about four hours, depending.

From there, start building X, the drivers and the software you want. Configure X with (of all things) X -configure, and make the directory at /etc/X11 before moving the generated xorg.conf.new file to it’s new location under its new name (xorg.conf, that is).

I use the Arch Linux-style autologin. I also change the runlevels for C1 and C2 to 2345 — like this:

c1:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
c2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux

I disable all the other terminals; I just don’t use them. And I set the multiuser script to start at those same runlevels, like this:

rm:2345:once:/etc/rc.multi

Otherwise, your autologin doesn’t spawn terminals, or doesn’t kick into graphical mode. And of course, while I’m in there, I change all the “wait” terms to “once” — giving it one last kick in the pants. :D

Once everything is how you like it, you can boot into a live CD once more and reoptimize the directory structures with this command, from a terminal.

e2fsck -fD /dev/hdXY

The drive assignments will change according to the live environment, and make sure you don’t run that on your swap partition. :)

I think that’s about it. A machine built like this goes from Grub to X in under 16 seconds for me, and that’s by far the best performance I’ve gotten out of any distro I have ever found, with any and all of the tweaks I can find. Just out of curiosity, let me know if it works for you too. :D

Howto: Set up Hardy for speed, v1.0

2008-08-12T01:10:00.000-07:00

This is version 1.0 of “Howto: Set up Hardy for speed.”

This guide is a collection of tips and tweaks for Ubuntu Linux 8.04. The content comes from tutorials and speed suggestions found on the Ubuntu Forums and elsewhere. The material has been collated and narrated, and arranged with links to external resources or supplemental information.

The guide describes how to set up a faster Ubuntu 8.04 system, with an eye on machines that predate Pentium 4 models or require non-default settings to achieve better performance. Please read the Welcome pages for more information.

This howto is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, v1.2. Please read the included license page for details.

The guide is available in two forms: A Zim notebook and as a relative-linked HTML document.

The size of the guide and the material included does not lend itself to a blog post, although it could easily be incorporated into another Web site or wiki, probably with minimal effort. On a blog however, it would be too easy to make a mistake or miscode something.

Zim also makes it easy to convert the guide to HTML, which makes it a little more accessible to machines that don’t have an Internet connection, or lack graphical environments. It also makes the guide platform-independent, which means you don’t need to use Linux to read it.

The files are compressed as .tar.bz2 files, and are hosted outside of WordPress.com, which doesn’t allow that file extension to be uploaded. These guides are considerably larger than past guides, because of the inclusion of bootcharts and other visual elements.

The current versions can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.

Howto: Set up Hardy for speed, v1.0, Zim
Howto: Set up Hardy for speed, v1.0, HTML

For a command-line accessible link, please follow a link above to a download page.

To install the guide for use with Zim, decompress it into a folder, and add the folder as a notebook in Zim. The guide is introduced on the Welcome page.

To install the guide for use as an HTML document, decompress it, then open the index.html page in your browser.

For questions, corrections, ideas or suggestions for the howto, please feel free to leave a comment here. Translations and additional hosts are always welcome; I’d be more than happy to link to wikis, translations or revisions of the howto.

Install Ubuntu from USB

2008-08-12T01:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve been banging my head against the wall for the past year, looking for a solution on how to get Ubuntu to install from a USB flash drive.

The underlying idea is to avoid CDs, thereby giving an option to machines lacking CDROM drives, or with defective drives. I’ve run into more than one laptop that needed an optical drive replacement that might have benefitted from the install CD on a USB stick.

It would also benefit multiple installations, and maybe open an option for customized installation setups.

That’s what it looks like on paper anyway. In reality, I’m in pretty deep. I managed to get the drive to boot, and managed to get the installer to run, but the installation sequence (and by that, I mean the alternate CD text-based installer) tries to detect the installation CD in a CD drive, and I don’t see a way around that.

If anyone can humor me with an idea here, I’m willing to listen. I’ve been using the syslinux method to boot the flash drive a la PenDriveLinux.com’s Knoppix tutorial, but that’s not necessarily the right way.

Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship

2008-08-12T01:04:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post by Scott Shane as a follow up to his entrepreneurship test. He is the A. Malachi Mixon Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of seven books, the latest of which is The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By. Many entrepreneurs believe a bunch of myths about entrepreneurship, so here are ten of the most common and the realities that bust them:

1.

It takes a lot of money to finance a new business. Not true. The typical start-up only requires about $25,000 to get going. The successful entrepreneurs who don’t believe the myth design their businesses to work with little cash. They borrow instead of paying for things. They rent instead of buy. And they turn fixed costs into variable costs by, say, paying people commissions instead of salaries.
2.

Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money. Not unless you start a computer or biotech company. Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and seventy-two percent of the companies that got VC money over the past fifteen or so years. VCs only fund about 3,000 companies per year and only about one quarter of those companies are in the seed or start-up stage. In fact, the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower.
3.

Most business angels are rich. If rich means being an accredited investor –a person with a net worth of more than $1 million or an annual income of $200,000 per year if single and $300,000 if married – then the answer is “no.” Almost three quarters of the people who provide capital to fund the start-ups of other people who are not friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family don’t meet SEC accreditation requirements. In fact, thirty-two percent have a household income of $40,000 per year or less and seventeen percent have a negative net worth.
4.

Start-ups can’t be financed with debt. Actually, debt is more common than equity. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Small Business Finances, fifty-three percent of the financing of companies that are two years old or younger comes from debt and only forty-seven percent comes from equity. So a lot of entrepreneurs out there are using debt rather than equity to fund their companies.
5.

Banks don’t lend money to start-ups. This is another myth. Again, the Federal Reserve data shows that banks account for sixteen percent of all the financing provided to companies that are two years old or younger. While sixteen percent might not seem that high, it is three percent higher than the amount of money provided by the next highest source – trade creditors – and is higher than a bunch of other sources that everyone talks about going to: friends and family, business angels, venture capitalists, strategic investors, and government agencies.
6.

Most entrepreneurs start businesses in attractive industries. Sadly, the opposite is true. Most entrepreneurs head right for the worst industries for start-ups. The correlation between the number of entrepreneurs starting businesses in an industry and the number of companies failing in the industry is 0.77. That means that most entrepreneurs are picking industries in which they are mostlikely to fail.
7.

The growth of a start-up depends more on an entrepreneur’s talent than on the business he chooses. Sorry to deflate some egos here, but the industry you choose to start your company has a huge effect on the odds that it will grow. Over the past twenty years or so, about 4.2 percent of all start-ups in the computer and office equipment industry made the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in the U.S. 0.005 percent of start-ups in the hotel and motel industry and 0.007 percent of start-up eating and drinking establishments made the Inc. 500. That means the odds that you will make the Inc 500 are 840 times higher if you start a computer company than if you start a hotel or motel. There is nothing anyone has discovered about the effects of entrepreneurial talent that has a similar magnitude effect on the growth of new businesses.
8.

Most entrepreneurs are successful financially. Sorry, this is another myth. Entrepreneurship creates a lot of wealth, but it is very unevenly distributed. The typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year. Only the top ten percent of entrepreneurs earn more money than employees. And the typical entrepreneur earns less money than he otherwise would have earned working for someone else.
9.

Many start-ups achieve the sales growth projections that equity investors are looking for. Not even close. Of the 590,000 or so new businesses with at least one employee founded in this country every year, data from the U.S. Census shows that less than 200 reach the $100 million in sales in six years that venture capitalists talk about looking for. About 500 firms reach the $50 million in sales that the sophisticated angels, like the ones at Tech Coast Angels and the Band of Angels talk about. In fact, only about 9,500 companies reach $5 million in sales in that amount of time.
10.

Starting a business is easy. Actually it isn’t, and most people who begin the process of starting a company fail to get one up and running. Seven years after beginning the process of starting a business, only one-third of people have a new company with positive cash flow greater than the salary and expenses of the owner for more than three consecutive months.

The 25 Most Modern Libraries in the World

2008-07-31T21:11:00.000-07:00

Libraries aren’t just musty places to store books with librarians shushing anyone who makes a peep. They’ve become much more than that and the modern library is often home to sleek architecture and the latest technology. These 25 libraries, in no particular order, demonstrate how libraries have become part of the cutting edge of information management, design and Web technology, and all of them can help you get some ideas on how to bring your library into the future.

Architecture

While traditional libraries still abound, these libraries have opted to create spaces that are modern and user friendly.

Library of Picture Books in Iwaki City of Fukushima Prefecture: This library challenges the old ideas of what a library space should be. Integrated into the landscape with beautiful views from almost everywhere, this library is bright, airy and free from the stodginess that infects many older institutions. Books are arranged in cubicles, with their colorful covers exposed encouraging children to pick them up and read them. Changing the face of educational institutions from quiet, controlled places to playful and free places help bring libraries into the modern era and instill a love of reading in children.
Det Kongelige Bibliotek: The Danish Royal Library, or the Black Diamond as it’s often called due to the shape of the building, is a modern facility inside and out. Featuring cutting edge design by Danish architects schmidt hammer lassen, it employs marble and glass to create a distinctive form on the outside. The design continues to the inside, with open spaces and playful walkways. Of course, the collections are extensive as well, with loads of online resources, old manuscripts, a large number of photographs, and access to a number of IT resources.
Bibliotheque Nationale de France: Some have suggested that the French National Library is a bit too modern, creating a sterile space too cold for people and unfriendly to books. While not all would agree, the library does attempt to create a wholly modern approach to library space, focusing on computers more than books, including services from four super computers. Of course, it does have quite a few flaws as well, as the ultra modern building designed by Francois Mitterrand isn’t easy to navigate and none of the services offered by the library are available without a cost. If anything, this building is a lesson in creating modern spaces that aren’t just focused on design but on function as well.
Seattle Public Library: This award winning building designed by Rem Koolhaas is the central home of Seattle’s library system. Modern on both the inside and the out, the library creates an easy-to-navigate and unique space for readers, browsers and studiers alike. The library doesn’t just look modern, however; it’s filled with loads of technological features as well. The library employs an RFID system that allows patrons to check out their own materials and leaves library staff free to deal with other matters as well as working with online resources and creating their own podcast.
Malmo City Library: This bright, glass enclosed Swedish library was designed by Henning Larsen. It employs design that is both functional and attractive while embracing many modern features that help the library run more smoothly and efficiently as well. The new FKI Logistex self-service check-in kiosks allow books to be checked in without the assistance of library staff, visitors use internet and other computer services, and plans have been made to link library data nationwide to make finding and using materials easier and more efficient. Perhaps most notably, the library offers the ability to check out a person for a 45-minute chat in an attempt to promote understanding and break down stereotypes.
Geisel Library: This library isn’t particularly modern in function, but is notable for its design which resembles a large metal and glass treehouse. The library boasts several stories and is home to five of UCSD’s on campus libraries. It shows that libraries can be innovative and sometimes even notable parts of the architecture of cities, countries and universities.
Halmstad Library: For a library that blurs the line between the indoors and outdoors, check out this Swedish design. Built to extend over the nearby Nissan River, the building is bright and airy, allowing in plenty of light. An atrium at the center of the building surrounds an existing chestnut tree, bringing a bit of the outdoors into the library’s interior spaces and creating an innovative and soothing library experience.
National Library of the Czech Republic: While this library is still in the conceptual stages only, it represents one of the most distinctive and unique architectural plans for a library in the world. The current design for the library is an organic green form resembling a hill, a blob, or some say, an octopus. Created to blend in with the surrounding landscape while providing bright and thoroughly modern interior spaces, the library reflects an increasing attitude of playfulness and daring when it comes to design, hopefully reflecting the attitudes within the library as well.
Technology and Innovation

These libraries have found new and creative ways to use technology and design.

DOK (Delft Public Library): Billed as a "library concept center" rather than a traditional library, this Dutch library takes modern libraries to a new level. Filled with bright colors and sleek modern design, this library makes use of professionally designed graphics, comfy furniture and shelving made from recyclable materials. Patrons have access not only to traditional books but to video games, listening stations, toys for kids to play with, comic books, a piano and even an art collection. On the technology side, the library is wired to deliver a text message to your phone when you enter, welcoming you. Additionally, books and cards use RFID, LCD screens around the building filled with information, stations for podcasting and videocasting and what is planned to be a "genius bar" to give technology help to the public.
Turku City Library: This modern library building in Finland is full of all the normal resources found in libraries like books, DVDs, CDs, and magazines but with one big difference. While most libraries are organized by the type of material, putting books in one place and DVDs in another, the Turku library is arranged entirely by subject, putting all related materials together in one place. Staff placed in the sections are specialists in each subject, and patrons are able to check out their own books with automated machines.
Bow Idea Store: This library is yet another that is taking a different approach to what a library is, preferring to call itself an Idea Store rather than a library. The idea is to combine traditional service provided by libraries with access to technology and lifelong learning opportunities. The library wants to not only provide resources, but to educate and improve the lives of those in the community. Patrons are encouraged to hang out in the library, meet friends, have coffee at the cafe and pursue hobbies using the library’s resources.
Cerritos Library: Called the "Experience Library," Cerritos was designed to be an open and modern space that takes a different approach to library services. The library is home to more than books and also includes a saltwater aquarium, sculptures by Dale Chihuly and a replica of a T-Rex fossil encouraging exploration and the pursuit of knowledge. Rooms in the library are designed by themes ranging from Old World reading to World traditions. Info Stations are located around the library to help assist patrons in finding what they need, and the local intranet allows users to customize their viewing experience. Additional technology in the library is found in the huge multimedia lab, thousands of laptop stations, wireless headsets and computers for librarians and an RFID tracking system for books.
Cuyahoga County Public Library: Ranked as the top library by Hennen’s American Public Library Ratings in 2006, this Cleveland, Ohio, library works to keep up to date with the latest technologies. Their website was ranked as the best by Ektron in 2006 and gives patrons the ability to access their accounts, purchase tickets to library events and much more. The library also offers text message delivery of library notices, the first in the nation to offer this service. The library offers access to 85 colleges and universities through its online OhioLink program as well as a host of other Ohio libraries, greatly increasing the number of resources patrons can draw upon. If that weren’t enough, the library also participates in a podcasting program and places videos of speakers and visitors to the library online for all patrons to enjoy.
Pace University Library: This university library in New York has made it easier than ever to get access to library materials. The library was granted the Library of the Future award for an innovative media network it has implemented. An internal streaming system called MediaPatch allows the library to share various types of media across campuses quickly and easily, allowing patrons at one branch to access the resources from another at the touch of a button. This solves several copyright concerns as the information never leaves the school’s secure servers but still allows distance learners and those in the classroom to quickly and easily access information. The library also participates in a podcasting program designed to cover a variety of subjects.
Richmond Public Library: Billed as the "library of the future" when it was opened in 1998, the Richmond Public Library’s Ironwood Branch employs a modern design that attempts to bring together technological resources with a comfortable and warm environment. A large computer center, laptop stations and a digital resource center form a large part of the library. There are also numerous listening stations for music, a quiet study room, a large children’s section and a huge Chinese language collection to reflect the area’s large Asian population. The library also uses express check out stations so librarians are free to do other things, and the library boasts a huge online collection of resources.
Denver Public Library: The Denver Public Library, housed in a whimsical modern facility designed by Michael Graves, has worked to make the Internet a major part of its operations, even having its own MySpace site. The library also has an extensive webpage, a podcasting series, and a huge digital download site. Users of the digital downloads can get audio books, online movies and ebooks for use on their computer or MP3 player. Additional modern conveniences include Denver Library Firefox plug-ins, an iGoogle catalog gadget, and a toolbar for IE.
San Diego Public Library: This library was one of the first to embrace wireless technology, offering free wifi at all of its locations. The website for the library is extensive with services for live online homework help, a variety of ebooks and audio books, online assistance and more. Sleek modern design at its present location, plans to build an ultra modern facility and self checkout systems help make this a modern facility.
Cleveland Public Library: The Cleveland Public Library offers patrons a wide range of downloadable materials on its website including audio books, ebooks, music and video. The library is part of a network of libraries in Ohio and offers patrons access to materials not only at the main location but at other locations as well. The library works with a NetNotice plan sending information on the library or reserved materials directly to patrons’ inboxes. Additionally, the library has an iGoogle gadget for its catalog, a Twitter feed, and participates in the Library Elf notification program.
Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh: This library is one that is making big strides to be different than the traditional library. With online services that provide patrons with online chat with librarians, an RSS feed, a blog, podcasts, online requests, downloadable media and more, the library is making the move into the next century. Of course, their services extend beyond the web with career classes, gaming competitions and self checkout kiosks on site to keep patrons engaged as well. The library has made an effort to reach out to teens with MySpace and Facebook pages, gaming nights, art and anime clubs and a variety of teen centered programs and organizations.
New York Public Library: The New York Public Library is one of the largest in the nation offering patrons access to millions of books, periodicals, CDs and more. It also offers a large number of digitized collections that include images, prints and photographs. The library worked with Google to create a selection of digital books and offers patrons a large number of online text collections. The library is also highly tech savvy with an active RSS feed as well as podcasts on iTunes U. Patrons can download ebooks, video and audio directly from the website or enjoy video storybooks, video on demand and webcasts as well.
Digital Collections

These libraries boast extensive digital collections.

National Diet Library: Japan’s National Diet Library provides a huge online catalog system so that it’s easy to locate and request many of the library’s materials. Users of the catalog can search the library’s entire collection from anywhere in the world, with sites in both English and Japanese. This service allows anyone to request materials from the library. Perhaps more impressive, however, is the library’s digital collection of Meiji era books, numbering around 60,000. Users can search through these and see actual digital images of the materials. Additional online collections include almost 37,000 rare books from the pre-Edo periods of Japan, making researches of Japanese history easier for those who cannot physically travel to Japan.
Bavarian State Library: Located in Munich, this large library was named Germany’s library of the year last year. It’s part of a nationwide program called Libraries-Link which serves as an access portal to all of Germany’s libraries making it easy to find information on any library. Additionally, it has partnered with Google to scan and make public many works that are public domain. The library is home to many rare books, numerous online databases and journals and a fast and nationwide resource search program. The library is working to digitize much of the rarer elements of its huge collection so that those within Germany and around the world can enjoy them from anywhere.
Library of Congress: The Library of Congress has some of the most impressive online collections of material that you will find anywhere. With materials ranging from historical photographs to sheet music, the library offers high quality digital images of tens of thousands of items from its collection. The library’s American Memory site provides visitors with a visual, audio and historical account of some of the most important events in American history. Visitors to the site can also search through the library’s catalog, request materials, and get detailed information on the goings on of congressional matters. In 2005, the library announced plans to begin putting together a World Digital Library that will put together important text, photographs, rare books and recordings from cultures all over the world.
The British Library: As one of the largest and most prestigious libraries in the world, the British library has loads of resources to offer researchers and patrons from all over the world. The library has access to its complete catalog online so that anyone can see what materials the library holds. Of course, online resources are much more extensive than this. The sound archive has placed over 4,200 hours of archival sound recordings online for download. The main online collections are housed in the digital library which contains rare items like Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. There are approximately one hundred million items available digitally, including journals, patents, dissertations, reports and more.
National Library of Australia: The National Library of Australia is Australia’s largest reference library, providing access to millions of items related to Australia and cultures abroad. This library is a world leader in digital preservation techniques and has so far digitized over 105,000 items from its collection including a range of photos, maps, manuscripts, books, sheet music and audio recordings. These materials are accessible to patrons both in Australia and around the world.

Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar.

2008-07-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we’ve heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.

Last year, salaries of up to $70,000 were common for the best students. This year, Facebook is said to be offering $92,000, and Google has increased some offers to $95,000 to get their share of graduates. Students with a Masters degree in Computer Science are being offered as much as $130,000 for associate product manager jobs at Google.

Apparently the popular Facebook Applications class is getting a lot of attention from other startups, too. Slide and RockYou are both recruiting hard. One source says that RockYou is approaching students and telling them they aren’t hiring them, they’re “acquiring” their “companies” and will let them continue to work on their applications after graduation. That is, of course, some serious smoke blowing - any code they’ve been working on in the class is likely to be shelved by RockYou. Still, it’s a great way to recruit by making these students feel like they’re entering into some kind of an M&A transaction.

Something tells me the Pitzer students who’ve enrolled in the Learning From YouTube class aren’t getting the same types of offers.

If you are a CS student at Stanford or another top university, tell us what’s happening with recruiting.

How my desktop look like…

2008-07-31T02:49:00.002-07:00

There has been a meme going in the blogosphere about how does your desktop look like. So all those who are tagged by some other post a snapshot their desktop.

Well i am not being tagged by anyone for my desktop , but i like share my desktop with all my readers so i m posting about my desktop right now.

Here is a snapshot hows my desktop look like.

Welcome 2008 and 2007 round up

2008-07-31T02:49:00.001-07:00

Hi , to all the readers of Technix Update , wish you all a happy and a prosperous 2008 ahead.

Technix Update had gone through much up and down in the first half of 2007 ,when I lost almost all the post database of my posts and had to start from the scratch ,but with time it attains new heights both in terms of traffic and readership got PR5 with increased traffic.

I have learned a lot from 2007 will use it in 2008, I will try as much as possible to keep posting about the topics as per readers interest.

Proposed Plan for 2008:

Technix Update Finally Moved to new web host

2008-07-31T02:48:00.000-07:00

After facing some issues , finally we were able to move Technix Update from the old web host ( lunarpages.com ) to the server with new web host ( zzhosting.com ).

As the lunarpages offered to us upgrade our account from basic hosting to vps hosting with an approximate amount of 600$ excluding the cost for moving the data from the server which is 75$ per hour job for them. All these charges forced us to change our web host.

For those who are interested in reading, let me tell you guys the story in detail.

On the weekend( 3 and 4th may ) we decided to move Technix Update which is the largest site of our group, from the shared server on lunarpages , due the repeated warnings from the lunarpages admin team that our account ( which has three sites mobiletipstricks.com , technixupdate.com , troublefixers.com) was using too much resources which is far beyond the acceptable limit in terms of CPU usage, RAM usage and MSQL etc.

Basically this was the first time for both us, to move our blog and we did not know the procedure do’s and don’t, so first we studied across the web for any type of info regarding this, also consulted with some of the friend blogger’s .

Time 12:30 pm 4th may:

We take the blog database backup , and entire public_html folder as we don’t want to take any kind of risk on Saturday 3rd May in the night.

Proto.in The Startup Community Event in India.

2008-07-31T02:47:00.002-07:00

Proto.in is the premier Startup Community Event that happens in India. It is about giving entrepreneurs a platform to express their visions and showcase their imagination, with a working prototype, for the world to see. It’s about increasing partnership, collaboration and mindshare among a distinguished, qualified and well-connected audience. Proto.in provides a unique platform for promising startup talent to communicate their creativity and innovation potential.

Proto.in strive by their mantra — Create, Contribute, Collaborate.

Event is happening on dates of July 18th and 19th, 2008 in Delhi, I am going to attend the event for sure , are you coming? Read more in detail about the event at brajeshwar.com on the link given below.

Guest Bloggers Needed

2008-07-31T02:47:00.001-07:00

Hi guys

I am on a vacation right now till 15 jun, writing this post from a internet cafe in aligarh. I won’t be able to blog so, would like to invite all the fellow bloggers who would like to write for TechnixUpdate.com

TechnixUpdate.com is about computer tips and tricks so we can accept any article on computer tips and tricks. In return you will get a link back at the end of the post and the winner whoese post recieves highest amount of traffic will get a 125* 125 banner ad in the sidebar for one month for free.

If you are interested, mail us your entries at abhishek.bhatnagars@gmail.com .We hope to receive lot more entries. Cheers !

Greasemonkey “gmail skins” scripts to customize gmail interface to make it look smarter

2008-07-31T02:45:00.001-07:00

Lots of people including me are just bored of seeing the same gmail interface again & again. Gmail itself doesn’t offer any customizations on it appearance.

But don’t worry there are other ways to give gmail a different look to make it look much better both in terms of functionality and appearance.

Gmail Hack Series Part 2..How to move Chat on the right in Gmail Interface

2008-07-31T02:44:00.002-07:00

This post is the second trick or hack that can be applied to gmail with greasemonkey extenstion in firefox…as the one i have discussed in my previous mail about Today i am going to tell all readers about how can we move the “Gmail Chat ” to the right of the gmail interface as shown below in the image.

Download free greasemonkey scripts and hacks for enhancing the functionality of your browser.

2008-07-31T02:44:00.001-07:00

Presenting you the top five greasemonkey scripts which are pretty useful in our day to day netsurfing i hope you may find them intersting…

Requirement:

For using these scripts you need to have firefox installed at your machine and also greasemonkey extension should be installed and if you don’t have firefox or greasemonkey extension pls install them first.

Get Firefox / Get Greasemonkey

Here they are….

No need to remember or enter username and password hack or trick for yahoo mail!

2008-07-31T02:42:00.002-07:00

This post is an answer to a question raised by a reader “Sumit” a very good friend of mine. He asked about “Some way for “remembering yahoo id n password” in the yahoomail” here is your answer in this post.

There are so many ways of making your password remembered in yahoo mail..like

Some of them are..

1.AI Roboform Toolbar with Firefox

How to Hack or Recover Password of Instant Messengers and Internet Explorer for free.

2008-07-31T02:42:00.001-07:00

This is the first time I am writing about some freeware hacking utilites for recovering passwords .There are large no. of softwares available in the market for recovering password of various instant messengers , also for recovering the passwords stored in various other email clients used now a days and other passwords stored in internet explorer and other applications . So I am going to share some information about these utilities with my readers.

How to use Patch It To Run Multiple Instances of Yahoo Messenger.

2008-07-31T02:38:00.000-07:00

Patch It is a new patch which will allow you to run multiple instances of Yahoo! Messenger.It almost supports all the versions of yahoo messengers released till yet.

How To Run Multiple Instances Yahoo Messenger With Patch It

Stop Gtalk and yahoo messenger to load automatically at startup.

2008-07-31T02:35:00.000-07:00

It happens some times when you remove some particular program like yahoo messenger ,gtalk from system startup. But when you restart your system these programs get loaded again.

When you open msconfig will see a new entry for yahoo messenger in the startup tab.This happens because there is a option being checked in yahoo messenger which says automatically adds yahoo messenger to system startup when ever you run yahoo messenger.(as shown in the image below)

Removal of Yahoo messenger from startup , follow the steps given below

Hide your online status on yahoo from various services like buddy spy

2008-07-31T02:33:00.000-07:00

Now a days ,there are large number of applications and services available on web to track your online or offline status activity of your yahoo ID.

If you want to pretend your self offline to all these applications from where your friends or buddies would be tracking your online offline status , you just need to set a simple option which is available Account Information Section of your yahoo id.

Let see how can check that option which says: Check the box to hide my online status ( ) from other users.

By pass blocking firewall restrictions using HTTP-Tunnel-Client

2008-07-29T23:57:00.001-07:00

We have written numerous articles on how can you access blocked web sites like at your work place listed below.

By pass download limit restrictions and access any blocked site with ultrasurf
Access blocked, banned websites like orkut, myspace, facebook from school or office part 1.
How to access blocked or restricted orkut or any site with proxy but without using any proxy servers for free.
How to access restricted orkut by free proxy servers available for orkut.
But still we are receiving many comments where the users complains they are not able to access blocked web sites.

We found a free http tunneling utility called HTTP-Tunnel-Client last night which lets you bypass the restrictions of the firewall.

How it removes restrictions?

Read the rest of this entry…

Tweet your blog RSS feed on twitter with twitterfeed

2008-07-29T23:55:00.001-07:00

I just found a cool way of sharing your latest articles with your twitter followers if you are blogger or a person writing some thing on the internet.

I just got this idea from some of the fellow blogger’s so, I am assuming that most of the people already know about twitterfeed.

For those who don’t know

As it says in the tag line of twitterfeed says: “feed your blog to twitter” you can use twitterfeed free service to tweet your latest articles you publish on your blog automatically.

Read the rest of this entry…