Discussion Community

HTC Wildfire - LG p500 - samsung galaxy

hi  all, i wish to buy one  of this mobile.. can any one say whic is best ... and whc one has less features..

HTC Wildfire - LG p500 - samsung galaxy (samsung galaxy 3)

all this mobile has similar configuration and price...

HTC wildfire has android 2.1V (upgrade to 2.2) but  LG p500 - android 2.2

Samsung has more talk time battery backup ..

HTC - 5Megapixels

also can say ,is any other good mobile with this configurations..

Pros and Cons of Android Mobiles

Can any one say about the Android mobiles features , Both Advantages and disadvantages. problems facing by using Android mobiles.

I wan to know what all r the basic feature whc is not present in Andorid , but present in  other mobile like Symbian. What abt MS office file doesn't supports by Android..? Email application....?

The browser whc comes with Android did supports all kind of web sites.... ?

Can we able to sync with windows OS based computer....?

What all the things need to consider to whn buy a Android mobiles...

General Motors REPLY TO BILL GATES

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,
"If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release Stating:
"If GM had developed technology like microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part, esp 7th point and 10'th point):
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would ! run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed an Illegal Operation" warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna. (Read CTR-ALT-DEL)

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off. "

Never undervalue the manufacturing & automobile industries

Symbian goes open source four months early

Symbian has completed the process of open sourcing its entire code base, in advance of its June deadline.

While the release is ahead of schedule, the first phones -- expected to be out early next year -- will hit the market more than two years after the first Android phone became available. The Symbian software will have to be unique and attractive to compete with Android, its main open-source competitor, and other popular operating systems, an analyst said.

The process of making the Symbian operating system open source started with Nokia's announcement in June 2008 that it would buy out the rest of Symbian and release the code to the public.

The Symbian Foundation had expected to finish the process of transition from proprietary to open source in the middle of this year. Larry Berkin, who runs global alliances for the Symbian Foundation, credits the hard work of enthusiastic contributors for the speedier release.

The code is expected to become available on the Symbian developer page on Thursday.

Gmail to drop IE6 support this year

Google will suspend Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) support for its Gmail and Calendar services later this year, the company said today.

The move will come at some point after March 1, when Google will start scaling back IE6 support for Google Docs and Google Sites. Google announced that decision on Friday, two weeks after the company admitted that hackers had breached its network and stolen information.

"We plan to stop supporting older browsers for the rest of the Google Apps suite, including Gmail, later in 2010," a Google spokesman confirmed today.

On Google's no-support list along with IE6 are Mozilla's Firefox 2.0, Apple's Safari 2.0 and Google's own Chrome 3.0.

On Tuesday, administrators of Google Apps accounts received e-mail from Google that informed them of the phasing out of IE6 support for Docs and Sites, and told them of similar steps for Gmail and Google Calendar. "Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar," the e-mail read.

computerworld

How to stop 11 hidden security threats

Shortened URLs
Most tweets, and lots of other electronic messages, include links that have been shortened by services such as Bit.ly, Tr.im, and Goo.gl. The URL aliases are handy, but they pose a risk, too: Since short URLs give no hint of the destination, attackers can exploit them to send you to malicious sites.

Use a Twitter client: Programs such as TweetDeck include options in their settings to display previews of shortened URLs. With such a setting enabled, clicking a shortened URL within a tweet brings up a screen that shows the destination page's title, as well as its full-length URL and a tally of how many other people have clicked that link. With this information at your disposal, you can make an informed decision about whether to click through and visit the actual site.

Install a URL-preview plug-in: Several Web browser plug-ins and services perform a similar preview function. When you create a shortened address with the TinyURL service, for instance, you can choose an option to create a preview version so that recipients can see where it goes before clicking. Conversely, if you're considering visiting a TinyURL link, you can enable its preview service to see the complete URL. For the TinyURL previews to work, though, you must have cookies enabled in your browser.

ExpandMyURL and LongURLPlease both provide Web browser plug-ins or applets that will verify the safety of the full URLs behind abbreviated links from all the major URL-shortening services. Rather than changing the shortened links to their full URLs, however, ExpandMyURL checks destination sites in the background and marks the short URLs green if they are safe.

Goo.gl, Google's URL-shortening service, provides security by automatically scanning the destination URL to detect and identify malicious Websites, and by warning users when the shortened URL might be a security concern. Unfortunately, Goo.gl has limited application because it works only through other Google products and services.

Data harvesting of your profile
Some of the personal details that you might share on social networks, such as your high school, hometown, or birthday, are often the same items used in "secret" security questions for banks and Websites. An attacker who collects enough of this information may be able to access your most sensitive accounts.

Check your Facebook privacy settings: After signing in to your Facebook account, click Settings on the menu bar and select Privacy Settings.

Facebook's privacy settings allow you to choose who may see various personal details. You can hide your details from everyone but your Facebook friends (our recommendation), allow members of your networks to view your details as well, or open the floodgates and permit everyone to see your information. In addition, you can set the privacy level for each component of your profile -- for example, your birthday, your religious and political views, the photos you post, and your status updates.

Don't accept any friend requests from strangers: From time to time you may get a friend request from someone you don't know. If you're serious about protecting your personal information, you shouldn't accept such requests.

computerworld

iPad pricing for 3G models 'ridiculous,' says hardware guru


"The iPad is surprisingly cheaper than I expected," started Aaron Vronko, the chief executive of Michigan-based Rapid Repair who last week filled a slate of tablet predictions. "But the $130 difference [between models] is a little ridiculous. 3G chips run in the mid-single digits. For $7 you can get a really good one."

Apple has priced the iPad in an unusually complex matrix of two basic models -- one with WiFi 802.11n connectivity only, the other with both WiFi and 3G -- available in three memory storage configurations of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. The WiFi+3G model of each is $130 more than the cost of the WiFi-only iPad with the same amount of storage. In other words, while Apple will sell the WiFi-only tablet in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models for $499, $599 and $699, respectively, the iPad with WiFi and 3G will cost $629, $729 and $829.

"Six models? And with only one display size?" Vronko asked, clearly taken aback.

No wonder, since Apple typically trims the number of models in each line to a minimum. The iPhone 3GS, for example, comes in just two configurations -- 16GB and 32GB -- while the iMac is available in just two models for each of two screen sizes.

"The fact that they came out with this segmented pricing tells me one thing: that they had to work harder than they thought they would have to make a pricing constraint," Vronko said.

The $130 price difference and the multiple models led Vronko to conclude that Apple had underpriced the less-expensive WiFi-only iPad to make the magic sub-$500 price point. He speculated that buyers of the more expensive 3G-equipped iPads will, in effect, subsidize the relative bargain for WiFi-only customers.

"My guess is that the 3G price is where Apple wanted the price of the iPad to be, but they felt a lot of pressure to hit a pricing mark," .

computerworld

What Apple's LaLa Acquisition May Mean for iTunes

Apple has struck a deal to buy the streaming and downloading music Web site LaLa.com, according to reports from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It would add to Apple's music empire, but how might this acquision change Apple's tune?

Lala (click to enlarge the screen shot) gives users the option of downloading MP3s for 89 cents each or (this is where things get interesting) buy a stream-only version of the song for ten cents or an entire album for a dollar or so.

The New York Times' unnamed source says talks initiated with Apple after Lala executives determined service wouldn't be profitable in the near future. The source said Apple was more interested in buying the people behind Lala's streaming service and their experience than the service itself.

Lala started as a CD swapping service and morphed into a music hub before it joined forces with major music labels and launched the streaming and downloading service. In October, Lala made a deal with Google to become a part of its music search, which allowed searchers to preview songs directly in Google search results.

The increase in popularity of streaming music services such as Pandora, Rhapsody and Grooveshark, and streaming muusic applications for iPhone and iPod Touch, left questions if Apple would join the streaming bandwagon.
Apple Spokesman Steve Dowling told the New York Times that Apple generally doesn't sharing its purpose or plans when purchasing a small tech company -- but that doesn't mean we can't make a wish list for what we want out of the deal.

1. Cheaper Prices and Streaming Options
Obviously there isn't much forcing Apple to reconsider how it charges for MP3s, but a drop in prices or streaming options would be a welcome addition to iTunes.

Lala's claim to fame is a streaming song for a dime or a Web album for a dollar. Let's face it, with more and more iTunes users toting around iPhones and iPod Touches with less storage space, more Apps and 3G or WiFi connections, streaming music might be a viable model for the future of iTunes.

In 2008 Steve Jobs famously called Blu-Ray a "bag of hurt" partially because of its complex technology licenses and consumers lack of support for the HD disc at the time. Apple embraced HD streaming options on the Apple TV and iTunes; why not extend to streaming music?

2. Full Song Previews
Besides offering cheaper prices than iTunes and streaming options at its music store, Lala also allows users to preview entire songs. After listening to the entire song once, you can preview a 30-second clip before purchasing.

Listening to a whole song instead of a predetermined 30-second snippet can prevent buyers from purchasing a song that sounds good in the previews but ends up being three minutes of blah with a catchy chorus.

3. Genius Radio
Apple has poured a lot of work into Genius. Steve Jobs equates the software to a personal DJ that makes playlists and recommends new songs based on your library. The feature works great, except that it is limited to your existing library or recommends new purchases for you to make. If a streaming subscription, or advertisement based service were created Genius could quickly turn into a behemoth challenger to Pandora, with the backing of Apple's oh-so-famous fanboys.

4. Speaking of Pandora . . .
Let's not forget how badly the whole Google Voice App rejection went down. If Apple is indeed planning to venture into the streaming music world, one hopes it won't suddenly perceive currently supported Apps as iTunes revenue threats and reject them from the App Store.

Apple always had a following for its products' ease of use and quality. Instead of forcing people to use the Apple streaming service on Apple hardware, Apple should continue supporting existing music applications and rely on quality and ingenuity to ensure its solution gets used.

PCworld

Bhopal gas tragedy survivors mark 25 years

25 years on, still waiting for Bhopal gas research

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Disaster, the Madhya Pradesh high court at Jabalpur dealt another blow to the victims in their quest for justice. The victims of the world's biggest ever industrial disaster have received only about one-fifth of the compensation promised to them under the 1989 agreement.

    Stung by the injustice of this paltry compensation, the victims had approached the apex court, which had approved the 1989 agreement.

It was only in 2004 that the Supreme Court admitted a plea by gas victims to reopen the compensation issue. Three years later, in 2007, the court rejected it, asking the victims to approach the state government.

    An application was then filed before welfare commissioner R S Garg who rejected it in January 2009. The desperate victims knocked on the doors of the MP high court to quash this order. But the HC turned it down on November 30.

    ''It's back to square one. We will go to the Supreme Court again,'' says N D Jayaprakash of the Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahyog Samiti, one of the victims' organisations spearheading the struggle.
    The gas leak from Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 killed an estimated 20,000 people and left over 5.69 lakh with a range of injuries and disabilities.

    In 1989, the Supreme Court approved a settlement between the central government and Carbide under which the company agreed to pay $470 million (Rs 713 crore in the exchange rate of the day) as compensation and the government agreed to drop all civil and criminal proceedings against it.

    The government declared that this compensation amount was to be distributed amongst 1,05,000 injured and kin of 3000 dead. It soon became clear that this figure of casualties was a gross under-estimate, arrived at without any survey. Yet the government distributed the same amount among five times the number originally stated.

    Of the Rs 713 crore paid by Carbide, Rs 113 crore was paid to people who had suffered property or livestock damage. The remaining Rs 600 crore was distributed among nearly six lakh victims or family members of those who died. On an average, each victim has received Rs 12,410.

    In contrast, in the high profile Uphaar tragedy of 1997, in which after a sustained legal battle for over six years, the kin of those who died got Rs 15-18 lakh and the injured got Rs 1 lakh each. Victims were also paid 9% interest for 6 years elapsed in the court case. In the Bhopal case, no interest was paid.

Times View

    Our executive and judiciary have badly let down the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy, the world's worst industrial disaster. The meager compensation paid, that too badly delayed, and the fact that not one individual has been punished despite clear evidence of shocking negligence make that clear. But merely beating our breasts about it won't do. If we are to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world — and of our own people — and prove that human life and safety is not cheap in this country, two things must be done. The criminal cases meandering along for 25 years must be vigorously pursued and the guilty brought to book. As for the victims' claim for more compensation, the shameful settlement with Union Carbide can perhaps no longer be reopened. But the government, which negotiated that deal, must make good the loss to victims resulting from its gross underestimation of their numbers initially. Or else, India will appear a banana republic.

Criminal Cases

Pending in lower courts; non-bailable warrant against Carbide chairman Anderson since 1992. Anderson was arrested on Dec 7, 1984 in Bhopal, bailed out within hours, flown to Delhi in a state govt plane and allowed to flee the country

Health Status

Total hospital visits by gas victims (2008):

2 million (6,000 per day) Suffering From

Breathing distress, gastro-intestinal problems, menstrual irregularities, spontaneous abortions, neurological problems, immunological disturbances, susceptibility to infections, chromosomal abnormalities, chronic conjunctivitis, trachoma and early age cataract, anxiety and neurotic disorders, psychological trauma, proneness to muscular weakness Carbide Got Away Real CHEAP

http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?Daily=TOICH&showST=true&login=default&pub=TOI&Enter=true&Skin=TOINEW&GZ=T

Mozilla adds extra Firefox 3.6 beta, still plans to ship final in 2009

Mozilla last week slipped in a fourth beta of its upcoming Firefox 3.6 browser, but said this week that it is still shooting to ship the final code by the end of the year.

Last Thursday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 after developers decided that the browser upgrade needed further testing before moving on to a release candidate.

"Due to the excellent work on knocking down the Firefox 3.6 Beta topcrash list, we've decided that it would be worthwhile to ship another beta update to our close to half million testers to confirm our expectations," Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, said in a message posted to the Mozilla developers planning forum last Tuesday. "We'd also like to get as much feedback as possible on the more than 140 fixes we've made since we shipped the update last week."

Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 on Nov. 17.

In a follow-up post on the Mozilla developers blog last Thursday, Beltzner bragged that about 70% of the available Firefox add-ons -- a crucial component to the open-source browser's success in grabbing market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- had been upgraded so that they were compatible with Firefox 3.6.

The insertion of the fourth beta has pushed back the delivery of a Firefox 3.6 release candidate, as well as the final code, although Mozilla maintained that it would still wrap up the latter before 2010 begins.

"Closing on blockers in order to deliver a release candidate build this week," Mozilla said in a note published Monday. "Still aiming to be ready to ship in late December."

As recently as September, Mozilla was shooting to deliver the final of Firefox 3.6 by early November. Subsequently, Mozilla began using a before-the-end-of-the-year window to describe its release plans for Firefox 3.6.

computerworld

Microsoft delays open-sourcing of Windows 7 tool

Microsoft has delayed re-releasing a Windows 7 installation tool that it has admitted included open-source code, saying that it's still testing the revamped utility.

The company now plans to issue a new version of Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool (WUDT) in the "next few weeks," said Peter Galli, Microsoft's open-source community manager in a post to the firm's Port25 blog last Friday.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft yanked WUDT from its Web site after blogger Rafael Rivera accused the company of lifting code from the GPLv2-licensed "Imagemaster" open-source project. Rivera, who writes the Within Windows blog, said Microsoft compounded the problem by not acknowledging the source of the code embedded in WDUT, and by not sharing the source code for its modifications, or the tool itself, to the project, as required by the terms of GPL (GNU General Public License).

Galli admitted the error Nov. 13, also on the Port25 blog, saying that it was "not intentional on our part." He blamed a third-party developer Microsoft had contracted to create WDUT, but said Microsoft took final responsibility for the snafu.

"We share responsibility, as we did not catch it as part of our code review process," Galli said.

At the time, Galli also promised that Microsoft would make the source code and the binaries for WDUT available the following week under the GPLv2 terms.

However, he had to backtrack on Friday. "While we worked extremely hard to try and get the code ready for release by today [Nov. 20], we still need to test and localize it," said Galli. "Our goal is now to release the tool in all languages on the same day in the next few weeks."

Microsoft originally released WUDT in October, when it touted the tool as a way for netbook owners to create a bootable flash drive from a downloaded .iso file, or disk image, of Windows 7 purchased from Microsoft's online store. Most netbooks lack an optical drive and so can't install the new OS from a DVD.

Google Chrome OS: A Simple FAQ

Everyone's all a-twitter over Google's newly announced operating system, Google Chrome OS. Some swear it'll be a hit; others are convinced it's destined for failure. Love it or hate it, though, this puppy's one tough piece of software to ignore.

So what's Chrome OS all about, and what could do it for you? Here are some answers.

What is Google Chrome OS?

Google Chrome OS is a lightweight, cloud-based operating system demonstrated by Google for the first time this week.

How's it different from Windows 7?

Well, it won't feature any launch parties, to start (at least, as far as we know). But the primary difference is that Google Chrome OS is designed to operate entirely off of the Internet. That means you won't store data or run programs on the computer itself; rather, everything will Web-driven.

So, what's the advantage?

Speed is one big plus: Because of the cloud-based configuration, Chrome OS can boot within as little as three seconds. That instant-on capability is a large reason why Google describes the Chrome OS experience as more like using a TV than using a computer: You press a button, and seconds later, you're doing your thing.

Security is another expected advantage. Since you aren't storing data or running applications locally, the odds of contracting a virus are significantly reduced. In fact, the Chrome OS won't even allow applications to make changes to the operating system if they want to -- and, on top of that, the OS will continually update itself and correct any corrupted modules automatically. The critical pieces of the OS will also be stored in read-only memory.

Do you actually save any data locally?

Not much. Chrome OS will store a small amount of data locally, such as your system preferences. Even that data will be encrypted, though -- and synched with an online storage center, too. The idea, as Google explains it, is that you could lose your Chrome OS system, go get another one, and have everything back exactly the way it was within a matter of seconds.

Will you be able to work offline?

Kinda-sorta-maybe, a little. Since Google Chrome OS runs cloud-based applications, your options will be limited when you aren't connected. Developers, however, may be able to build in a small amount of offline functionality for their programs.

What's the Chrome OS interface like?

No big surprise here: It's just like the interface of the Chrome browser. All of your applications run in tabs, and all of the tabs reside in windows. You can drag and drop tabs between windows at will. And there's a permanent tab called the application menu that shows you new and noteworthy apps for your system.

computerworld

Google, Bing take bigger bites of search market; Yahoo slips

Market analysis firm comScore Inc. is set to announce this afternoon that between September and October, both Google and Bing inched ahead. The increases were far from dramatic but at least they saw increases.

According to comScore, Bing's share rose from from 9.4% to 9.9%. At the same time, Google saw a share bump, moving from 64.9% to 65.4%. While comScore hasn't yet made all the figures available, analysts did confirm that Google in October saw a 17.4% year-over-year increase.

Yahoo, which remains in second place between market leader Google and third-place Bing, didn't have such a strong month. Yahoo saw its share slip, slipping from 18.8% in September to 18% last month, according to comScore.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, Inc., said Google, with steady control of more than 60% of market share, is such a force to be reckoned with that Bing is doing well to make even modest headway.

"Bing has established a position that is, for now, stable," said Gottheil. "If Bing innovates effectively, it can move forward. It's in a not bad position, considering Google's momentum, but there's nothing happening now to show that it can take share from Google. With Google, it's not so much about growth any more, but the large number of people for whom Google is the search engine. Google is an ocean liner. It's going to take a lot of effort and a lot time to slow it down."

When it comes to Yahoo, Gottheil said the company's search presence is on a downhill slide that could become hard to control.

"Yahoo's search engine now is a lame duck," he added. "Yahoo has been on a long-term decline. The battle between Bing and Google raises awareness about search engine capabilities, and may drive some users to try other products, but basically, Yahoo has not given its search engine users a good reason to stay."

Supercomputers with 100 million cores coming by 2018

The push is on to build exascale systems that can solve the planet's biggest problems

There is a race to make supercomputers as powerful as possible to solve some of the world's most important problems, including climate change, the need for ultra-long-life batteries for cars, operating fusion reactors with plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius and creating bio-fuels from weeds and not corn.

Supercomputers allow researchers to create three-dimensional visualizations, not unlike a video game, to run endless "what-if" scenarios with increasingly finer detail. But as big as they are today, supercomputers aren't big enough -- and a key topic for some of the estimated 11,000 people now gathering in Portland, Ore. for the 22nd annual supercomputing conference, SC09, will be the next performance goal: an exascale system.

Today, supercomputers are well short of an exascale. The world's fastest system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to the just released Top500 list, is a Cray XT5 system, which has 224,256 processing cores from six-core Opteron chips made by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). The Jaguar is capable of a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops.

But Jaguar's record is just a blip, a fleeting benchmark. The U.S. Department of Energy has already begun holding workshops on building a system that's 1,000 times more powerful -- an exascale system, said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility that includes Jaguar. The exascale systems will be needed for high-resolution climate models, bio energy products and smart grid development as well as fusion energy design. The later project is now under way in France: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the U.S. is co-developing.

"There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today," said Bland.

As amazing as supercomputing systems are, they remain primitive and current designs soak up too much power, space and money. It wasn't until 1997 that the first teraflop system, ASCI Red at Sandia National Lab, broke the teraflop barrier, reaching one trillion calculations per second. In 2008 IBM's Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory achieved petaflop speed, or one thousand trillion (one quadrillion) sustained floating-point operations per second.

The Energy Department, which is responsible for funding many of the world's largest systems, wants two machines somewhere in the 2011-13 timeframe that will reach approximately 10 petaflops, said Bland.

But the next milestone now getting attention from planners is something that can reach an exaflop, or a million trillion calculations per second, (one quintillion). That's 1,000 times faster than a petaflop.

computerworld

What UID will really do

The Unique Identity Authority (UIA) will not plug the chronically leaky delivery of public services, which means, it may not improve the targeting of these services. To that extent, it may not turn out to be the tool for poverty alleviation that some expect it to be.

Its high-profile Chairman Nandan Nilekani says fixing bad governance isn't exactly what he signed up for. "My primary concern is to ensure every resident of India gets a unique identification (UID) number," he says. It's a tall order that has never been achieved before by any other country and, at any rate, will be of huge service to national security. Nilekani isn't guaranteeing whether an unique identification will provide unhindered services that its holder is entitled to - since that's for the providers of these services to ensure.

The big-buck project, he explains, will involve two stages: first, the technical infrastructure will be laid out and the database built by acquiring data from the likes of PAN card issuing authorities.

The enrolment drive will form the second stage where partners such as mobile phone operators will assist in the collection of biometric samples. In the third stage, in which Nilekani sees only a consolatory role for the UIA, the new infrastructure and database will be used to drive transparency and accountability in public services.

"We could hold workshops for departments and offer consultation on leveraging the database, he explains. The database will partially resolve bad targeting by preventing a claimant from usurping more than his share of benefits. Nevertheless, it will not be able to differentiate between undeserving and genuine claimants, feel observers.

So, is mass faith in the UID project misplaced? The globally acceptable rate of error in biometric identification technologies is 0.4 per cent, which for the UID project turns out to be a whopping 40 lakh Indians. It's the overarching faith in technology as a tool for addressing socio-political issues that seems to be the trouble here. It's not a magic wand and technologists are no wizards.

1-in-4 now use Firefox to surf the Web

One in every four people on the Internet are now using Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser, a Web metrics company said this week.

Firefox reached the 25% milestone on Sunday, said Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of California-based Net Applications, which measures browser usage by tracking the machines that visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients.

"We always thought that Firefox would be in a great position to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer if it made 10%," Vizzaccaro said today. "Now one in four people globally are browsing the Internet with Firefox."

Mozilla passed the 10% market share mark in March 2006, said Vizzaccaro.

The move past 25% wasn't a surprise. Last month, for example, Net Applications estimated Firefox's share as slightly over 24%.

Mozilla also touted the milestone. Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla Corp. and the current chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, mentioned the 1-in-4 figure in a post to her personal blog earlier this week when she trumpeted Firefox's fifth-year anniversary.

Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 on Nov. 9, 2004.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's community coordinator, echoed Vizzaccaro's take on the significance of Firefox's climb. "Before we launched Firefox 1.0, the people on the team, the eight or 10 of us, said that if we could get to 5%, we would stay alive and stay meaningful. If you don't get to 5%, you don't have a seat at the table."

computerworld

INDIA before independence Some images

Open-source CRM and ERP: New kids on the cloud

Flash forward to the early 2000s: The camera and imaging company decided to host its entire CRM needs with RightNow, a cloud computing CRM provider based in Bozeman, Mont. The vendor builds its wares with open-source technologies including MySQL database software, the Linux operating system, Apache for its Web servers and PHP for a lot of the coding.

A study Nikon did two years ago revealed a "ridiculous, 3,200% return on investment figure,'' says Dentry. That figure considered the amount of money Nikon had invested in RightNow -- specifically in end-user support -- and calculated how many calls Nikon staffers were able to deflect because customers had found information for themselves on the Nikon Web site, he explains. The number also took into account how many e-mails Nikon's customer service people could answer without having to generate a phone call.

That translated into a cost savings of over $14 million after the first three years of the RightNow implementation; a 50% reduction in call response times; and a 70% reduction in e-mail response times.

"The percentage seems so high that it almost feels like it couldn't be true," Dentry acknowledges, "but I implemented the system and generated the numbers, and I know they're correct."

ERP, CRM on the cloud: A 'significant' trend

Moving CRM and ERP applications to the cloud is a pretty significant trend, says Rebecca Wetteman, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, Boston. "We talk to lot of folks and see broad adoption of cloud computing and open-source tools out there,"

The major players so far

Cloud computing isn't yet supported by most of the key corporate vendors, according to Forrester Research, but many vendors have still jumped into arena offering open-source applications. In addition to Compiere and RightNow, they include:

SugarCRM
Concursive
CentraView
Red Hat
Zoho
Jaspersoft and Talend, two open-source business intelligence (BI) and data integration vendors, announced in August 2009 a joint partnership with Vertica and RightScale Inc. for cloud-based application deployments. The four companies released a self-service, pay-as-you-go cloud stack that will allow users to implement BI applications from Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica on the RightScale Cloud Management platform. During the same timeframe, VMware announced it was acquiring SpringSource, an open-source Web application provider.

copmuterworld

NASA brings chemical sensor to iPhone

If you are in need of finding out if there is ammonia, chlorine gas or methane in the air around you, there's an iPhone app for that. A researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center has developed what NASA calls a proof of concept of new technology that would bring compact, low-cost, low-power, high-speed nanosensor-based chemical sensing capabilities to cell phones.

The device NASA researcher Jing Li developed is about the size of a postage stamp and fits in the iPhone to collect, process and transmit sensor data, NASA said. The device senses chemicals in the air using a "sample jet" and a multiple-channel silicon-based sensing chip, which consists of 16 nanosensors, and sends detection data to another phone or a computer via telephone communication network or Wi-Fi.
Li along with researchers working under the Cell-All program in the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate developed the app.

Cell-All is designed to provide greater chemical detection capabilities in cell phones. Cell phone owners could use their phone's GPS to provide sensor location information to emergency operation centers, NASA stated.

This isn't NASA's first iPhone app. Last month, Ames also developed the first NASA iPhone application to deliver up-to-the-minute NASA content directly from the space program to your iPhone. The application aggregates and delivers a range of dynamically updated information, images and video links.

computerworld

Windows 7 tricks: 20 top tips and tweaks


Just got your hands on Windows 7 and want to bend it to your will? No problem. We've got plenty of tips, hacks and secrets to keep you busy for a long time, including automatically opening Windows Explorer to a folder of your choice, speeding up taskbar thumbnails, finding hidden desktop themes, forcing User Account Control to act the way you'd like, keeping your Explorer searches secret from others, and more.

So check out these tips. If you like them, we'll keep more coming.

General tips
We'll start with a few nifty tips that can make your desktop more interesting, make it easier to get around and increase your computer's power efficiency.

   Use hidden international wallpapers and themes
When you first install Windows 7, it asks for your language, time and currency. Based on your responses, it installs a set of wallpapers and themes. If you choose English (United States) for your time and currency format, for example, the available desktop backgrounds and themes will include a United States section with scenery from locations such as Maine, the Southwest and so on.

Hidden, though, are background scenery and themes from other English-speaking countries -- Australia, Canada, Great Britain and South Africa. Normally, you can't access those backgrounds or themes, but there is a simple way you can install and use them:

1. In the search box in the Start menu, type C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and press Enter. (Note: If Windows 7 is installed in a drive other than C:, use that letter instead.)

2. Windows Explorer will launch and show you a list of subfolders under C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT: MCT-AU, MCT-CA, MCT-GB, MCT-US, and MCT-ZA. Each subfolder has wallpapers for a specific country: AU for Australia, CA for Canada, GB for Great Britain, US for the United States, and ZA for South Africa.

For any of the countries whose wallpaper and themes you want to use, go into its Theme folder, for example, C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT\MCT-ZA\Theme. Double-click the theme you see there (for example ZA).

3. That will install a shortcut to the theme and wallpapers in the Personalization section of Control Panel.

You can now use them as you would any other theme or background, by right-clicking the desktop, choosing Personalize, and choosing a background or theme. They will be listed in their own section.

computerworld

Mozilla fixes Firefox crash bug

Just a week after it last updated Firefox, Mozilla has rushed out a new version of its browser to fix a crash bug that programmers inadvertently introduced.

Firefox 3.5.5, which Mozilla posted for download late Thursday, fixes a small number of what the company called "stability issues" in the release notes that accompanied the update. Unlike almost all interim updates that Mozilla issues about once every six weeks, version 3.5.5 did not patch any security vulnerabilities.

The main bug quashed Thursday was one that was causing a high number of crashes in the Windows version of Firefox 3.5.4, the update that Mozilla launched Oct. 27 to patch 16 flaws.

"We're seeing lots of crashes in the GIF decoder," noted Mozilla developer Joe Drew in the message that kicked off the discussion on Bugzilla, the company's bug and change tracking system. Only the Windows edition of Firefox 3.5.4 was crashing, others reported on Bugzilla. The GIF decoder is the component that parses .gif image files embedded in Web pages.


computerworld

All schools in Chennai, nearby districts to be closed on Monday

All schools in Chennai and the neighbouring districts of Tiruvallur and Kancheepuram districts will remain closed on Monday, with the government declaring a holiday due to heavy rains. District collectors have issued the order although the forecast for Monday suggests only a few heavy spells.

The north-east monsoon, lashing most parts of Tamil Nadu, have so far left resulted in widespread damage and loss of 21 lives so far, including four on Sunday. In Chennai, residents of some low-lying areas remained marooned and traffic was disrupted due to flooding of subways.

The intensity of the rain has varied over the region, with some of the southern districts bearing the brunt—Tirunelveli and Nagapattinam saw 20% excess rainfall. Farmers in the delta region and adjoining districts too are worried that any intensification of the current spell of torrential rains may severely damage their crops. Yet 13 districts are still experiencing deficient rainfall, with the deficit ranging above 50% of the normal seasonal quantum.

TOI

Joining the tariff war, India's largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel on Friday introduced a "pay per second" plan across the country.

In this plan, called Freedom Plan, Airtel customers will be charged one paise per second for all Local and STD calls to Airtel numbers and 1.20 paise per second for local and STD calls to other networks.

Some of the new operators, however, are offering pay per second tariff plan across networks.

The plan will be available initially only to pre-paid subscribers of Airtel, an Airtel statement said. This will be one of the tariff plans besides others already existing.

"As the undisputed leader in the Indian telecom industry, we are committed to delighting our customers through superior network, great customer service and best value for money.

Today, our network covers 110 million customers, has 100,000 sites and is available across 4.25 lakh towns and villages in 1.5 million outlets," Atul Bindal, President, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel, said.

Sprint Nextel next year will introduce a new, more open application store on its feature phones, turning to a third party to manage it with the goal of getting new offerings out to consumers in an average of one week.

The third-largest U.S. operator also will remove its own built-in set of application offerings, or "deck," from future BlackBerry handsets and from Windows phones from Windows Mobile 6.5 onward, said JP Brocket, general manager of wireless consumer applications, at the Sprint Open Developer Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Sprint's Android and Palm WebOS phones already ship without a Sprint application deck, relying on the Android Marketplace and Palm's own stores.

Carriers have come under fire from mobile application developers for taking too long to approve new applications and placing too many restrictions on them, and they have been moving toward outside app stores since the successful launch of Apple's iPhone App Store. Sprint wants to get out of devoting its resources to lengthy evaluations of software for its own deck and believes a third-party specialist would be better equipped to handle the path from development to sale, Brocket said.

"It's kind of a big new day for us to relinquish that management," Brocket said. "But ultimately, if you make good content and customers want it, you should have the right to get it out there and succeed. ... I don't need 10 people behind a desk, behind a wall, looking at every piece of content and making the call whether it's good or bad. Customers will make that choice."

Sprint plans to start up the new store early in the first quarter of next year. As long as a potential application works and meets basic requirements such as a core set of controls and support mechanisms, it should be approved for the new store, he said.

The main aim of the new store is to get more applications out to consumers, Brocket said. In addition to speeding up the approval process, Sprint will bring its revenue-sharing plans with developers in line with the industry norm. Though the market will be more open, Sprint will offer application providers marketing opportunities to make themselves stand out among others,

computerworld

DOD open-sources more than 1M lines of code

This isn't the first time the DOD has released code to the public. In June, a PC-based mapping application developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute for the military, FalconView, was also made available as open source.

In short, the DOD is making use of open-source applications a two-way street, and there may be more DOD-funded open-source software on the way.

There's evidence of a new, aggressive tone being set by the department's top CIO, David Wennergren, on open source use. A memo he wrote this month encourages adoption of open source and pointedly said that open source can "provide advantages" to the department's need to update its software "to anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements."

But Wennergren's memo, intended to ease adoption hurdles among defense agencies, comes just after the Pentagon's IT unit, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), has released under as open source a human resource and workforce management system that includes about 50 applications.

It's a system that has been in development since 1997 that is Web-based and was moved in 2005 to Adobe's ColdFusion platform and Microsoft SQL Server.

The human resource system DISA is comprehensive. The agency won't put a value on it, but there are seven developers supporting it and they have continued to build out new capabilities that are used to help manage its workforce of 16,000 people.

computerworld

Google Social Search aims to make social networks more useful

The experimental Google Social Search service, which went live today, adds opinions from friends and others to search engine results on products and services like a new restaurant or smartphone.

The new service, created in Google Labs, adds a long-missing piece to the search puzzle, Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products, told Computerworld last week following its unveiling at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

"We came up with a way to have social networks influence your search results," Mayer said. "If you're signed into Social Search, you get content from your friends.

"There's a huge amount of data on social networks," she added. "Think about social networking, and it's really about people as sensors. Is the power out over there? How is the snow there? Are the speakers good at this conference? If I can search this massive amount of data, a user can find out what it's like over there right now. That's very exciting."

Google announced Social Search last week at the same time it disclosed that it had inked a real-time search deal with Twitter. Mayer noted that the two announcements are related in that users will eventually see Twitter posts, or tweets, in Google search results.

For today, however, the search focus is on the addition of Google Social Search to Google Labs.

Google Social Search is designed to let searches return traditional results along with updates and tweets that users' friends and other people they follow on various social networks have posted. For instance, a user could use a regular search engine to find information and reviews on a car he wants to buy and then use Social Search to find pertinent posts from his friends and colleagues.

Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., said the experimental new service has the potential to make social networking more useful.

computerworld

Microsoft opens Outlook format, gives programs access to mail, calendar, contacts

Microsoft on Monday said it will provide patent- and license-free use rights to the format behind its Outlook Personal Folders opening e-mail, calendar, contacts and other information to a host of applications such as antimalware or cloud-based services.

Five fantastic open source tools for Windows admins7 Reasons Not to Use Microsoft Outlook for Company E-mailDocumenting and publishing the .pst format could open up entirely new feature sets for programs such as search tools for mining mailboxes for relevant corporate data, new security tools that scan .pst data for malicious software, or e-discovery tools for meeting compliance regulations, according to Microsoft officials.

The written documentation would explain how to parse the contents of the .pst file, which houses the e-mail, calendar and contact contents of Outlook Personal Folders. The documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. The effort is designed to give programs the knowledge to read Outlook data stored on user desktops.

"You could also imagine this being used for data portability possibly into the cloud," said Paul Lorimer, group manager for Microsoft Office interoperability. "A user might have data on a hard drive that they would like to migrate to a cloud service. This would allow the cloud service developers to write code on the server so someone could upload their .pst and have it read on the server rather than needing Outlook to be running on the client and somehow get the data that way."

Microsoft plans to publish in the first half of next year documentation outlining the .pst format. The information will be released under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), which began in 2006. That year, Microsoft dropped intellectual-property and patent claims to 35 Web services protocols it developed mostly for use in its identity infrastructure. In 2008, Microsoft added the Office file formats to OPS even while critics said the formats were incomplete and the submission was designed to boost Office Open XML (OOXML) in the eyes of standards bodies.

In 2008, Microsoft added its Interoperability Principles and promised to support data portability in its most popular "high-volume products," including SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.

computerworld

Ubuntu 9.10 Linux creator calls Windows 7 'excellent release'

"It's a substantial improvement on the past. Even on netbooks, it's a credible release," Shuttleworth said today during a conference call launching the Ubuntu 9.10 operating system.

Ubuntu 9.10's launch five days after Windows 7's is no coincidence. For the past several years, Ubuntu has carried the Linux community's flag in its valiant-but-so-far-unsuccessful attempts to erode Windows' dominance in the desktop PC market.

Ubuntu and Linux generally continue to be hamstrung by the operating system's technically forbidding image, its smaller selection of applications and games, device compatibility issues, and the reluctance of PC makers to preinstall Linux, due to its lack of popularity and the desire to keep good relations with Microsoft.


But Shuttleworth sees three potential openings for Ubuntu and other desktop alternatives to Microsoft's OS. First, Microsoft is continuing to hawk Windows XP to netbook makers, despite the eight-year-old operating system being a "ghost" of a platform at this point, he said.

Second, Microsoft hopes PC makers will adopt the pricier Windows 7 Starter Edition over XP despite what Shuttleworth describes as "significant restrictions" on its capabilities compared with full-fledged versions of Windows 7.

Finally, Windows "remains a proprietary and relatively expensive piece of technology

computerworld

You Too Can Watch U2 On YouTube, Live

Over that three decade span, the group has had music that has ranged from brilliant (War, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby) to self-indulgent (Pop) to a bit odd (Zooropa). But there has been one constant: They've always been a great live act. And tonight, a lot of the world will be able to see that from their computer screens.

U2 is streaming their concert tonight from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California live to YouTube. As the site announced earlier this week, some 16 countries will be able to view the show live: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, U.K., U.S. (other countries were presumably excluded due to streaming rights). The show will start at 8:30 PM PT tonight, and you can find it here.

During the show, YouTube will also feature a Twitter widget below the video player that will be displaying tweets from people who use the #U2webcast hashtag.

If you miss it live, YouTube will also put up the entire recording tomorrow on its U2 page.

U2 and technology have long gone hand in hand. Their ZooTV tour to support their albums Achtung Baby and Zooropa famously featured a massive amount of television monitors and live streaming video from all around the world. Later, U2 of course got chummy with Apple, and released their own branded iPod. But when the private equity firm Elevation Partners (which U2 lead singer Bono is a partner in) purchased a huge stake in Palm, the U2/Apple love affair seemed to sour. And since then, U2 has now seen their most recent tour sponsored by Palm and Apple rival BlackBerry.

techcrunch

Google to launch music service, phone

Google gunning to become the next Apple? The search company is reportedly set to unveil its own music service and is also working with a smartphone manufacturer on an own-brand Android phone.

Two separate reports from TechCrunch and The Street say that the search company is developing a music service, dubbed Google Audio, and a smartphone that will not be sold through traditional wireless carriers.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch quotes multiple sources, saying that Google has "spent the last several weeks securing content for the launch of the [music] service from the major music labels."

Google Audio would be available for U.S. users, but it is unclear whether it will be a download or streaming service. Arrington notes that Google Audio would be "very different to the Google China music download service that they launched in 2008."

In a separate report, Scott Moritz of The Street, quotes analyst Ashok Kumar, saying that Google is also working to develop its own Google-branded smartphone, which will be sold through retailers, not through wireless carriers, by the end of this year.

The Google phone would also "fulfill Google's pledge to bring a new generation of open-standard mobile Internet devices to consumers." Kumar adds that the Google phone and a Chrome OS netbook will use Qualcomm chips, the latter running on the Snapdragon platform.

If the rumors of a Google-branded smartphone are true, it will be interesting to see how the device will perform against other new Android devices, such as the Verizon Droid or the Sprint Hero. Mortiz speculates that HTC would be the most likely manufacturer of the Google phone -- as HTC was the first to develop an Android phone, the T-Mobile G1.

computerworld

Toon Boom Studio 5

So many artists today want to venture into the animation world but either don't have the hand-drawing artistic capabilities or the time and resources to learn 3-D animation. Many of us have tried our hand at stop-motion with in-camera techniques or perhaps clever editing. Toon Boom Studio 5 however offers infinite possibilities with easy-to-use stop-motion, traditional paper, or digital animation, and even cut-out and rotoscoping. The cut-out feature is like grabbing various elements and compositing them together.

Versatile new features

With this software, you can draw, scan, import, or capture artwork and video, then animate it in any number of ways. You can paint art work and add it to your drawings, or even paint over your imported files. You can animate with motion paths as well as audio, and you can animate the camera in real time. Let's say you're more of a real world modeler and have created miniatures you'd like to bring to life. Take your digital camera and photograph the minatures over time and bring them into Toon Boom to animate. From there, you can add unique visuals, and even audio. If you're not a traditional sketch artist, the new stop-motion feature is perfect for you.

But let's say you're into traditional animation. You don't have to worry about drawing on transparencies and shooting each image to make a film. Rather, with Toon Boom you can scan in drawings and use the program's rich toolset to bring your drawn animations to life. Add sound, additional drawings, and even publish to the Web. Moreover, you can draw, create, or import various cut out elements to build characters and store them in a personal library. Once imported, you can use those elements with motion paths to create movement and a complete 2-D animation.

Over the years, rotoscoping has grown in popularity, and now with Toon Boom Studio 5, it's easier than ever. Rotoscoping is the art of drawing over or around a photograph, or more commonly a video sequence. The advantage is that you get realistic movements with a hand-drawn, stylized look.

Interface

Upon initial launch, the Toon Boom Studio 5 interface seems simplistic. It closely resembles Adobe Flash in many ways with its clean white palettes and array of panels. There are numerous icons that offer up a range of controls, many of which only become active once your project has begun. The Toon Boom Studio interface is not intuitive, but once you go through one or two of the tutorials, the navigation makes more sense.

Additional benefits

The new version of Toon Boom Studio offers annotation layers for better communication with and feedback from clients and colleagues. There is also a new multi-discipline project-based curriculum to help you get up to speed fast. But that's just the beginning. As you would expect from a 2-D animation program, Toon Boom Studio 5 offers onion skinning, letting you see the frames before and after your current frame to assist with timing and movement. There is also a text tool, and OpenGL anti-aliasing, for smooth and clean renders.

computerworld

The best free open-source software for Mac OS X

Most Mac lovers love the Mac for the carefully wrought user interfaces and the crisp design, and never pay attention to the open source at the heart of the operating system. But underneath this beautiful facade is a heart built upon the rich -- if often chaotic -- world of open-source software.

If you want to go through the pain and joy of building the OS yourself from scratch, you can even download the open-source core of Mac OS X known as Darwin.

That's just the foundation. There are thousands of open-source tools available for the Mac, some built for the Mac alone and others that are translations of software created for other operating systems. Some are aimed at a niche of programmers or scientists, but a good number are supremely useful tools for everyone.

This list includes just 10 of the most essential open-source applications for a Mac, all precompiled, polished, and ready to run.

Downloading the software is just the beginning because many of them have yet another layer of openness hidden inside. Several of the applications have their own built-in environment for extending the software. Some accept plug-ins, some have pop-up windows for writing short extensions, and some have both -- so you have even more options for customization.

In many cases, you're not just getting an open-source tool; you're getting a range of options to add to that tool.

Fix your Mac with AppleJack

One way to fix the permissions and perform a host of housekeeping chores is to run AppleJack, an open-source tool that triggers many of the standard housekeeping scripts like disk repair and cache cleanup. The only limitation is that you need to run it in Single User mode

AppleJack won't ask you how you want to set the permissions because, well, that would shatter the myth by letting you, the system owner, know what's going on. So don't worry your pretty little head. The permissions will all be fixed and your Mac will run faster and smoother. If you ask too many questions, you'll end up burning the time you've saved by making your Mac more efficient -- so don't.

Logic Express 9

Reviewing Logic Express 9 after the latest version of Logic Studio ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ) has been reviewed is an interesting proposition. After all, Logic Express is really a slightly stripped down version Logic Studio's core digital audio workstation (DAW) application, Logic Pro 9. And because it is, any review of Logic Express 9 risks a "me too" rehash of points culled from the Logic Studio review.

Like Logic Studio, Logic Express 9 offers some of Logic Studio's marquee features--the Flex Tool for easily warping audio phrases and individual notes, the Amp Designer and Pedalboard features, which simulate amps, speakers, microphones, and pedal effects; Varispeed, for slowing down an entire project without changing the project's pitch so that you can, for example, record a difficult solo; Drum Replacer for replacing real drum tracks with triggered samples; and a new feature for adding guitar chord grids to a score. These elements work just as they do in Logic Studio. They're musical and add tremendous value to an already capable DAW.

There just isn't a better DAW deal than Logic Express 9. At $199 it's $50 more than Steinberg's Cubase Essential 5, but it has far more features. Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer 7 is $395, introduces its own line of guitar amps and effects, and provides such professional features as Pro Tools and surround-sound mixing support that are found in Logic Studio but not Logic Express. Ableton's Live 8--a DAW that takes a different approach to recording and music creation than traditional DAWs such as Cubase, Digital Performer, and Logic--is $450. Wonderful though all of these DAWs are, if you don't need features intended for the pros, Logic Express 9 delivers huge bang for your buck.

computerworld

Hyper-V R2, Microsoft sets its sights on VMware

Competition between VMware and Microsoft got a little tighter on Thursday with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, which includes a major update to Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software.

VMware dominates the server virtualization market, but Microsoft hopes to change that with its new offering, Hyper-V R2. The update adds important capabilities that help Microsoft close the functionality gap with VMware and other rivals. But analysts still see the product falling short in a few areas required for running enterprise-class applications.

"They've got a lot of the basics covered if you are doing basic consolidation, but they are lacking a lot of the advanced use-case stuff like business continuity, resource optimization and VDI (virtualization desktop infrastructure)," said Gary Chen, research manager for enterprise virtualization software at IDC.

The next version of the product will likely address many of these issues, he said. In the meantime, Microsoft will try to exploit the advantages it has historically used to push its data center server products, including lower prices and a close tie-in with other Microsoft software. "They are definitely more competitive on pricing," Chen said.

Hyper-V R2 ships free with Windows Server 2008 R2, although to get some of the new features, such as Live Migration, customers will have to purchase System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which costs US$869 per physical server.

Live Migration allows virtual machines to be moved from one physical server to another without interrupting service. Hyper-V R2 can also take advantage of more powerful servers, with support for up to 64 physical processors, and allows virtual machines to be migrated between two servers based on the same processor family, such as AMD's Opteron chips.

In the end, the choice of which product to use may come down to whose vision customers most believe in for how the future of virtualization will play out.

computerworld

The Buzz at Oracle OpenWorld 2009

At Oracle OpenWorld, Sunday was all about the partner ecosystem-some some 21,000 strong-and Larry Ellison's trashing of IBM up and down on the main stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Ellison, with the comedic assistance of Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy, was in full-out attack mode, going after his new target: IBM. "We're looking forward to competing with IBM in the systems [business]," said the Oracle CEO, "and we think the combination of Sun and Oracle [is] well-equipped to compete successfully against the giant." (That's the lite version of his comments.)

Never one to shy away from the dramatics or fact-challenged hyperbole, Ellison boasted that Oracle would give $10 million to any enterprise whose existing database application would not run at least twice as fast as on Sun gear. (Can't wait to see what happens when an enterprise calls him on this.)

Read the Enterprise Software Unplugged Blog

Monday morning kicked off with a less dramatic but exceptionally important co-presentation by Oracle co-presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz.

Their presentation to the more than 10,000 in the audience might have been titled "The Art of the Possible," but it was actually more about The Science (well, the computer science) behind Oracle's strategy to transform the IT landscape "from a bespoke potpourri of components interconnected by consultants to one that is actually delivering ready-to-deploy appliances."

computerworld

iPhone apps, Web used to manage, monitor consumption for Solar Decathlon

The 20 suburban houses standing this week on the National Mall demonstrate the use of alternative energy systems. One of many interesting aspects of this government-sponsored project is how IT is used to manage and monitor energy consumption via iPhone apps and Web interfaces. The end results are remarkable.

Undergraduate students from Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, for instance, have built a solar powered house that monitors and measures every aspect of energy generation and consumption. The house produces 150% more energy than it uses, making it a net supplier of electricity to the power company.

Along with solar energy and computerized management technologies, the houses created for the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon put a lot emphasis on design aspects such as blinds and shades for directing light.

iPhone apps, Web used to manage, monitor consumption for Solar Decathlon

Even more impressive is that the large windows are as sturdy as normal Canadian stud walls that prevent the escape of heat. The house also includes salt-hydrate packets under the floor that, with the help of sunlight directed by blinds, absorb heat and release it as the temperature cools. The construction includes solar panels on the side of the building so light can be captured light from low angles, another aspect conducive to northern climates, said Lauren.

Electric power is measured at every circuit through a branch circuit power meter by Schneider Electric. The solar systems are also monitored, as is hot water usage. An industrial computer by Beckhoff Automation manages the control system but also works with a Windows-based, touch-screen system, which has controls that are also accessible via an iPhone application.

From the iPhone, users can control lights, exterior shades, interior blinds, temperature and humidity. The app also inlcudes a switch that will retract the bed into the ceiling to create more floor space in this 800 square-foot house, the maximum size limit for any house in the biannual decathlon.

Oracle buys technology for media IP management

Oracle Corp. today said it has acquired "substantially all" of the assets of Sophoi, which makes software that media companies use to manage and track their intellectual property. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sophoi's product, which has been rebranded Oracle Media Intellectual Property Management, helps companies fight "revenue leakage, minimize the instances of rights conflict, and reduce the risk of non-compliance with rights terms and conditions," Oracle said in a statement.

The increased complexity of today's media world, where content is delivered over multiple channels, from the Internet to broadcast television, presents too great a challenge for older IP-tracking systems, many of which are custom-built, according to Oracle.

But Sophoi apparently found business challenges of its own. The Los Angeles, California vendor filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September.

Oracle has a history with Sophoi, having invested in the company in 2007. The deal announced today is the latest in a long string of acquisitions by Oracle, which is also attempting to purchase Sun Microsystems. That transaction is on hold while European officials conduct an antitrust review.

The Sophoi announcement came at the start of Oracle's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, which continues through Thursday.

computerworld

Ten Teen Entrepreneurs

Kids these days. It seems like they're writing HTML before they learn how to talk. And a lot of them are starting companies before they graduate from high school.

Jessica Mah

[smg id=6902 type=full]

Jessica Mah, 19, is currently the CEO and Co-Founder behind Indinero, a Mint.com for small businesses. Mah started her first startup at 13. Last year, she founded internshipIN.com, a site to help high school and college kids find internships in their area. Now, at 19, Mah is finishing up her Computer Science degree from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as being the CEO of Indinero.

Ashley Qualls

[smg id=6903 type=full]

Ashley Qualls, 19, started WhateverLife when she was 14, a site designed to give MySpace users free Myspace layouts and HTML tutorials. She employs both her mom, and her friends who do graphics for her. Qualls started WhateverLife in 2004 as a hobby, and now has turned into a business, with her site getting anywhere from 150,000 to 360,000 daily page views.


techcrunch.com

Why IBM still matters

To read the headlines in the business and technical press during the last several years, you'd think that the once world-beating IBM had fallen off the face of the earth. Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft -- those seem to be the names that garner all the publicity. IBM comes off at best as an afterthought, and at worst as a company slipping into dotage,


You might be surprised, then, to learn that IBM is flying high these days, a success as much driven by its forward-thinking services and software businesses as by its ability at the same time to milk its old cash cow, the mainframe line. Even as the rest of the economy tanked, recent launch of LotusLive iNotes, a cloud-based e-mail, calendaring and contact management system, shows why IBM still matters. IBM recognizes that for businesses of all sizes, cloud computing is the future, and it plans to be there in a very big way. LotusLive iNotes aims at taking away business from Microsoft's Exchange as well as users of Google Apps Premier Edition. In years past, IBM would have sold the hardware that runs a system like LotusLive iNotes, rather than selling it as a service. But the company realized a decade ago that its future was in software and services rather than hardware, and it began selling off much of its lower-margin hardware businesses, while retaining mainframes. Those moves have paid off handsomely and could be even more profitable if companies do indeed opt for a cloud-based future.

IBM is also well positioned to take advantage of another long-term trend in IT  greening IT infrastructures. The pressure to go green will only grow in the coming years, with the potential for regulations governing carbon emissions. A year ago, IBM launched its green consulting practice, and it didn't stop with green IT. The practice also focuses on using technology to green the rest of an enterprise as well, including how to make a product's entire life cycle more green. It also has a "Green Sigma" consulting service that applies the Lean Six Sigma method of improving efficiencies to corporate energy and water use.

computerworld

Samsung releases its first dual-function Blu-ray drive

Samsung Electronics Co. announced its first dual-function internal Blu-ray disc player, the SH-B083 Combo, which reads Blu-ray discs and reads and writes to CD and DVD format discs.

The Samsung Blu-ray disc drive for PCs is available with capacities of up to 25GB for a single-layer disc and 50GB for a double-layer disc. The Blu-ray drive reads BD-R and BD-ROMs at up to 8x speeds. The drive also reads CDs at up to 40x and DVDs at up to 16x.

The SH-B083 will be available in November in the U.S. through retailers like Amazon.com and NewEgg.com. Pricing wasn't disclosed.

The Combo drive features an average access speed of 350 milliseconds, which Samsung claims is faster than any other internal PC drive on the market.

"With Samsung's new BD drive, users can not only watch HD movies on their PC, but they can also record HDTV broadcasting onto a DVD with the bundled software Cyberlink Powerproducer. They also can record HD camcorder movies to a DVD disc with Powerproducer," said John Suh, director of Samsung's optimal media solution (OMS) sales and marketing.

The drive is equipped with Samsung's Cyberlink TrueTheater software, which upgrades a DVD resolution movie to full HD resolution, according to the company.

Suh said the Combo drive is equipped with two lenses for more stable reading and writing. One of the lenses is for Blu-ray reads and the other is for CD/DVD reads and writes.

Samsung said that new technology, known as spherical aberration compensation, improves reading quality on a Blu-ray drive whose protective layer does not have a uniform thickness. The drive also has higher resolution in its optical pickup head unit position control system, which helps to transmit the smaller track pitch of Blu-ray discs.

computerworld

How the iPhone works

To take a closer look at how some of the technology inside the iPhone works, read on.

Screen coating protects against dirt
Earlier generations of the iPhone were dirt magnets, leaving the screen smudged up after normal use, but the new iPhone 3GS has a protective coating that wards off oily grime. Amazingly, it works -- the 3GS is relatively smudge-free, although it does still pick up dust easily.

Gizmodo, a gadget blog, posted a helpful description from Bill Nye the Science Guy about the oleophobic coating that Apple engineers stuck on the new model's glass. It is an anti-bonding agent, similar to car wax sealants that cause water to bead, rather than pool, on your car's roof, Nye explained.

The same effect happens with Apple's polymer coating, preventing the grime from bonding, building and leaving telltale smudges behind.

Screen dims when iPhone sits idle for a while

When you have not used your iPhone for a while, the screen dims to save power. In addition, as you use the phone, brightness adjusts depending on whether you are in sunlight or darkness.

Don't think this is just a timed event based on an internal clock that knows when the sun goes down -- it's not. The iPhone uses an ambient light sensor, describes The New York Times' David Pogue, in an illuminating 2007 column.

Light sensors scan for electromagnetic intensity. On the iPhone, a chemical-based photocell changes its power setting depending on an infrared reading. A photocell is better at reading environmental data than a simple on-off light sensor you might have installed above your garage -- photocells can detect sustained differences, knowing when you have just passed your hand over the sensor versus entered a dark room or walked outside.

Touch screen

On its iPhone site, Apple has revealed some clues about how the touch screen works. A panel under the screen glass senses your touch using an electrical field. The panel then sends this reading to an LCD below it.

In other words, your finger changes the electrical charge, which in turn feeds the phone operating system and determines which pixels have changed and which activities have been triggered.

Every touch screen phone uses a similar method, but what makes the iPhone unique is how the iPhone OS responds so quickly to swipes, pinches, and finger presses -- so fast that there is a burgeoning market for high-quality iPhone games that some say rival even the mighty Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable.

Google patches DoS vulnerabilities in Android

Researchers at the Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team (oCERT) disclosed two denial-of-service vulnerabilities in Google Inc.'s Android 1.5 mobile phone platform, both of which have already been patched by the vendor.

One of the vulnerabilities stems from Android's handling of SMS messages, according to an advisory released by oCERT earlier this week. The flaw allows an attacker to use malformed WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) Push messages to disconnect a mobile phone from a cellular network. WAP Push messages are typically used to send ringtones, wallpapers and other content to mobile users.

According to oCERT, a maliciously crafted WAP message can cause the phone to reboot without the user's knowledge, which can lead to a temporary loss of connectivity and dropped calls. In cases where the phone's SIM (subscriber identity module) is protected by a PIN, users will need to re-enter the PIN to re-establish connectivity, causing longer delays. When the bug is triggered repeatedly, it could result in a denial-of-service condition, oCERT said.

A similar vulnerability was discovered in several Sony Ericsson handsets earlier this year. In that case, a malformed WAP Push message could be used to remotely reboot a vulnerable handset.

The other DoS vulnerability was reported in the API for Android's Dalvik virtual machine. It also allows an attacker to create a DoS condition by causing a handset to repeatedly reboot without the user's knowledge.

computerworld

Yahoo Kills Xoopit For Gmail

Yahoo is killing support for a popular Gmail plug-in from Xoopit, a startup it acquired in July. An email was sent out today to Xoopit users on Gmail tited, "Xoopit for Gmail is closing. Here's the info you'll need." It details different ways users can export their files, photos, videos, and other attachments which may be stored on the service. From the email:

We will be officially turning off Xoopit for Gmail on November 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making My Photos for Yahoo! Mail an amazing product and bring those features to all Yahoo! Mail users. Given our focus, we decided we cannot adequately support the Xoopit for Gmail product and give you a great experience in the future. Here are some details to guide you through this transition.

Xoopit is a handy email plug-in that works with both Gmail and Yahoo Mail, where it powers the My Photos feature. In Gmail, it creates a strip across the top which shows you images of all recent attachments, making it possible to visually scan email for their contents instead of by subject lines. You can also click on the Xoopit thumbnail strip so that it takes over the whole screen with a grid of photos, images,videos, and docs.

Back in July when Yahoo bought Xoopit, we wondered why Google didn't buy it instead. Now at least we know why Yahoo bought it—to take it away from Google (and it' also a really cool feature). Yahoo certainly has the resources to keep supporting the Gmail plug-in, which is very popular Shutting off support is a small gesture, but it shows that Yahoo is starting to play for keeps. And it doesn't want to share its toys with Google, despite all of that talk about how open it is.

techcrunch

Gmail, Yahoo Mail join Hotmail; passwords exposed

Google's Gmail and Yahoo's Mail were also targeted by a large-scale phishing attack, perhaps the same one that harvested at least 10,000 passwords from Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail, according to a report by the BBC.

Microsoft, for its part, said late yesterday that it had blocked all hijacked Hotmail accounts, and offered tools to help users who had lost control of their e-mail.

Gmail was the target of what Google called a large-scale phishing campaign, the company told the BBC. "We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts," a Google spokesperson told the news network.

The BBC also said it has seen a list of some 20,000 hijacked e-mail accounts; the list included accounts from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Comcast and EarthLink. The latter two are major U.S. Internet service providers.

computerworld

600 video courses to come in 2 yrs

Under First Phase, IITs, IISc Have Developed 120 Web-Based Programmes

Over the next two years, more than a thousand professors at the seven old Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, will develop at least 600 web and video-based courses in the fields of engineering and science that will be available for free downloading by students and teachers across the globe. The videos containing recorded classroom lectures in different subjects will be up-loaded on Youtube as well. Besides, students and colleges can buy DVDs containing the video lectures for a nominal fee.
   
This is the target the IITs (Madras, Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kharagpur, Kanpur and Roorkee) and the IISc have set under the second phase of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) for which the central government had sanctioned Rs 96 crore. Already in the first phase, nearly 325 faculty members of the eight institutions had devel-oped 120 webbased courses and an equal number of video courses in civil, mechanical, computer science, electronics and communication engineering. "We want everybody to have access to the best quality lectures in science and engineering. The NPTEL initiative is a social revolution that seeks to transform the education system, taking it from gurukula (teachers' place) to shishyakula (students' place)," IIT Madras director M S Ananth said on Monday. "In Mexico, the best students don't go to colleges, they learn from virtual universities. A similar transition in India will lead to social changes where students can have education at their own place," he added.

    Ananth was confident that the 600 courses, that will also cover subjects in postgraduate science and engineering courses, including the humanities components, would be ready for upload by end of 2011.

    What the professors do is to divide each course into 12 to 15 modules and record live lectures delivered by highly competent faculty members at the eight institutions and upload them on a dedicated Youtube section  www.youtube.com/iit  and the webbased material is hosted on the NPTEL website. "Currently, 24,000-odd persons have subscribed to the Youtube content, which is the largest subscription for any content on the Youtube in India," said professor Mangala Sunder Krishnan, who heads the NPTEL initiative at the IIT Madras.

timesofindia

After a few months' rest, SQL Web attack spreads anew

A botnet network of hacked computers has sprung back to life in the past few days and started infecting Web sites so that they attack PCs of unsuspecting visitors.

Named Asprox, after the toolkit used in its attacks, this network gained attention in May and June when it infected an estimated tens of thousands of Web pages on more than 1,000 Web domains, typically infecting the Web sites of small businesses, schools and local governments.

"After several months of no activity, this botnet is back to its old tricks," wrote Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in a Thursday blog post.

Security vendor SecureWorks picked up on the attack "a couple of days ago," when it noticed an uptick in so-called SQL injection attacks against the company's clients, according to Jason Milletary, a security researcher with the company. However, it's not clear whether the attacks are as virulent as before, he said.

In a SQL injection attack, the criminals take advantage of database programming errors in order to trick Web sites into posting their attack code. With Asprox, the SQL injection process is automated, so it can add malware to a lot of Web sites in a very short time.

Asprox places a bit of JavaScript code on the hacked Web site that generates an invisible HTML element, called an iFrame, which in turn launches the attack code. According to Warner, at least some samples of the Asprox code exploit a bug in Adobe's Flash Player.

Researchers with the security watchdog group Shadowserver say they've tracked more than 2,000 Web pages that have been infected by this latest Asprox attack, far fewer Web pages than were attacked with the first version of the malware.

In an e-mail interview, Shadowserver's Mike Johnson said that the Asprox gang has revised its malware, changing the configuration file structure of their code and adding new command and control computers that they haven't used in the past. "It almost looks as if they're starting over from scratch after losing control of the previous botnet," he said.

Asprox is not a major problem for most Web users, security experts say. It's another sign of the ever-present dangers on the Web.

"People should be expecting malicious sites," Johnson said. "People should be expecting innocent sites being compromised in some way, shape or form that then in turn try and attack the browser."

computerworld