nikhil's tech zone

This ‘Free Money’ Email Was Real, Not Spam

2010-01-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

What do you do when there’s a new email in your inbox saying that you’ve won a few thousand dollars and all you have to do is furnish your bank details so that they can transfer the money to your bank account.

Like most smart people, you’ll see this message as another Nigerian scam and will immediately delete it without giving a second thought. Right?

Now watch this video where a London based company really wanted to give out $10,000 for free via email but found very few takers. [via]

Intel Announces Next-Generation Atom Platform

2010-01-04T05:34:00.000-08:00

First Intel Chips to Integrate Graphics and Memory Controller in CPU; Enables Power Reduction, Smaller Systems and Performance Improvements

Higher level of integration plus 45nm manufacturing enables significant power reduction, performance improvements and smaller package size
Average power consumption down 20 percent over previous generation, enabling longer battery life in netbooks
Over 80 netbook design wins from major OEMs including ASUS, Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Samsung and MSI
Next-generation Intel® Atom™ systems available Jan. 4

Intel Corporation announced new Intel Atom processors today that feature integrated graphics built directly into the CPU, enabling improved performance and smaller, more energy-efficient designs in a new generation of netbooks and Atom-based entry level desktop PCs. Major OEMs have committed to having systems on the new Intel® Atom™ processors and a new companion chipset available within the next few weeks.

The newest Intel Atom platform for netbooks consists of a new Intel® Atom™ processor, the N450, and a new low-power Intel® NM10 Express Chipset. For entry level desktop PCs, it consists of either the Intel® Atom™ processor D410 or the dual core D510, also paired with the Intel® NM10 Express Chipset. The Intel Atom processor was designed from the ground up for small devices and low power, and remains Intel's smallest chip, built on the company's 45nm high-k metal gate manufacturing process. The overall package, including chipset, just got smaller due to the increasing integration and 45nm manufacturing, which means smaller, more compact system designs, lower costs for OEMs and improved performance.

Broad Industry Momentum
Intel continues to see broad industry support for the Atom platform as netbooks in particular have been hot sellers during a recessionary year due to their affordability, function and small size (7-10.2" screens). Additionally, Intel is expecting to see broad channel adoption for Atom in a variety of small form factor entry-level desktop PCs at low price points, including ultra-small designs (less than 1-litre chassis), fanless designs, and low-cost all-in-one designs.

Since Intel announced the first Atom processors for netbooks and entry-level desktop PCs in June 2008, the market has expanded rapidly. Since introduction, Intel has shipped over 40 million Atom chips for netbooks to every major OEM around the world. In the same timeframe, netbooks ramped faster and sold more units than Apple's iPhone or the Nintendo Wii.* According to ABI Research, total Atom shipments for all segments are expected to continue to grow into the 100s of millions by 2011.* Intel is not letting up, offering the next-generation platform for OEMs to continue to innovate around.

"The Intel Atom processor has fueled an entirely new category of computing over the last year and a half and we think the growth will continue for devices like netbooks and entry-level PCs built around basic computing and Internet usage models," said Mooly Eden, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's PC Client Group. "We're excited to be delivering the next-generation Atom platform and working across the industry as we head into a second phase of growth, powering innovative new system designs with better performance, smaller footprints and better battery life."

Intel has over 80 design wins to-date for the new Atom platform from such leading OEMs as ASUS, Acer, Lenovo, Dell, MSI, Toshiba, Samsung and Fujitsu. While the bulk of the systems will feature the new Windows 7* Starter or Home Basic operating system, consumers will have a choice when it comes to selecting an operating system, with some OEMs offering MoblinTM Linux v2 as an alternative for customers who desire a customizable and differentiated user interface.

Worldwide netbook shipments by telecommunications companies such as T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange and others are also growing and expected to fuel another round of expansion. Intel has been working closely with mobile operators and modem vendors to advance 3G capabilities in netbooks in established and emerging markets. To-date approximately a dozen service providers offer netbooks in various markets, and the numbers are expected to grow with the newest platform.

Improved processor and graphics performance
One of the most significant features of the new platform is the integration of memory controller and graphics into the CPU, a first in the industry on x-86 chips. That means two chips (CPU+chipset) instead of the previous three (CPU, chipset, I/O controller hub), a lower TDP, and substantial reductions in cost, overall footprint and power. The netbook platform features a 20 percent improvement in average power and a smaller package size over the previous Atom platform. This translates into smaller and more compact system designs and longer battery life. Because of the integration, the total footprint for the netbook platform has decreased by approximately 60 percent. For entry level desktop PCs, it's a nearly 70 percent reduction in footprint and about 50 percent lower TDP than the previous generation.

About the platform
The N450 is a single core Atom processor with 512k of L2 cache and a 7 watt total kit TDP including chipset. The D410 for entry-level desktop PCs is a single-core Atom processor with 512k of L2 cache and a 12-watt total kit TDP including chipset, and the D510 for entry-level desktop PCs is a dual core Atom processor with 1meg L2 cache and a 15-watt total kit TDP including chipset. The new chips all run at 1.66GHz. Pricing and availability will be announced in January as systems become available from OEMs.

LG Chocolate BL40, the phone that does everything, for Rs. 30,000

2010-01-04T05:25:00.000-08:00

LG recently revealed the successor to its highly successful Chocolate, Shine and Secret phones. It has a very unorthodox long shape which sets it apart made of glossy black plastic with a touch silver trim here and there. The phone is extremely slim for a phone having a 4-inch touch screen. Apart from the unorthodox design, another feature that is highly unusual about this phone is the 21:9 aspect ratio of the 4-inch touch screen. It has 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi to boost its connectivity on the go. Its camera is a demolishing instrument with a 5MP auto-focus Schneider-Kreuznach lens, LED Flash, geo-tagging, image stabilization, face detection, smile and blink Detection. It is capable of recording VGA videos at 30FPS. Its touch screen is capacitive and supports 16M colors.

It is also a very capable multimedia device with TV-Out, DivX/XviD support, Motion gaming with the Built –in Accelerometer, 3.5mm Audiojack and an FM transmitter. It runs on the lates S-Class UI. The FM transmitter can be used to broadcast songs from your phone to a range of 15m. Now, you can sit in your car with a stereo that just has FM radio, and listen to the songs stored on your mobile phone! The USP of the phone is certainly its design which is unique in every manner. The phone has released in India and is priced around the range of Rs. 30,000.

The complete list of specification is listed below -

General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 1900/2100 MHz, EDGE class 10, HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
Form factor: Touchscreen bar
Dimensions: 128 x 51 x 10.9 mm
Display: Unique 4" TFT capacitive touchscreen with 21:9 aspect ratio and 800 x 345 pixels resolution, multitouch support, scratch resistant glass
Platform: Latest S-Class UI
Memory: 1GB internal memory, microSD card slot
Camera: 5-megapixels auto-focus camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens, LED flash, geo-tagging, image stabilization, face detection, Smile Shot, Blink detection, Intelligent shot, Beauty and Art shot, VGA video recording at 30 fps
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack
Misc: Accelerometer for screen auto rotate, Proximity sensor for screen auto-turn-off, FM radio with RDS, FM transmitter, DivX/XviD support, Dolby mobile, TV out, multi-touch input, office document viewer
Battery: 1000 mAh battery

Samsung Corby Pop C3510 for Rs. 7,000 - cheapest touchscreen phone?

2010-01-04T05:21:00.000-08:00

Samsung, it seems, is determined to bring the cheapest touchscreen phones to the Indian market. The Samsung S3650 Corby saw moderate success even at its cheap price tag of around Rs. 10,000. Samsung has now decide to launch a scaled-down version of the extensively marketed Samsung S3650 Corby phone - The Corby Pop C3510. It is speculated to have most of the features of its predecessor and a retail price tag of around Rs. 7,000. This will take the low-budget touchscreen phone battle to a completely new level.

The complete feature set of the Corby Pop has not been announced yet, however rumors suggest that it will sport a 1.3-Megapixel Camera, 22MB internal memory and a strong Li-ion Battery suitable for a continuous conversation of as much as 8 hours! The Corby Pop also features a 2.8-inch touchscreen based on QVGA technology. It also has support for MP3 files and FM radio. The handset, like the S3650, will also have the trademark Samsung features such as ‘multi-instant messaging’ and support for social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Though the price is quite decent for a touchscreen phone, it lacks features like 3G and Wi-Fi support. Although the 3G base is not very strong in India, lack of Wi-Fi support is something which will bother the user.

Incidentally, Samsung has also announced a better version of the C3650, which is Wi-Fi enabled as well. Although both phones were displayed on Samsung websites ‘Coming Soon’ section, there has been no official announcement by Samsung about their specifications and price which only allows people to speculate. The Cartoon UI went down well with the Indian consumers who found the interface ‘funky’ and easy to use. Another point favoring Corby is the presence of a Capacitive touchscreen which seems to be the preference among the Indian consumers. The aggressive pricing of this handset not only is a stiff competition to touch screen phones, but also to the basic phones sold around the price tag of Rs 5000-6000. Lets see if this price tag encourages other companies to follow suit.

HTC HD2 unboxing

2009-10-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

Nokia N900 running Google Wave

2009-10-30T23:13:00.001-07:00

I was wondering how the Nokia N900 Maemo device would cope with Google Wave... would it work? Have Google created a custom version, as they have for iPhone and Android? How would it perform?

Nokia N97 mini

2009-10-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

iPhone 3g v HTC Touch Diamond v Samsung Omnia

2009-10-30T23:08:00.002-07:00

Three of the heaviest heavyweights take center stage in this PhoneDog Dogfight. In this corner - the iconic iPhone 3G. In that corner - the "Windows Mobile with a cherry on top" HTC Touch Diamond. And in, uh, that corner - the super-spec'd Samsung Omnia. Whose cuisine will reign supreme. Have a look..

Sir James Dyson explains his bladeless fan

2009-10-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

Sir James Dyson explains the technology behind his latest innovative invention, the bladeless fan. Also, Dyson explains his backing of the Tories.

How's a USB Flash Drive is Made? Trip to the Kingston Production Plant

2009-10-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Courier - more details pour in...

2009-10-04T06:23:00.000-07:00

After Gizmodo uncovered the first prototype video of Microsoft’s upcoming tablet ‘Courier’, the site has now come up with one more video clip that shows new details about the device.

Opera Mini 5 beta out..

2009-09-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

The Opera Mini browser is probably the only thing which makes internet browsing feasible on a mobile phone, especially with the kind of connection we have in India. The beta of version 5 brings the browser to the level of Desktop browsers. Almost.

While the recent Opera 10 browser introduced one of the best Opera Mini features for the desktop, namely Opera Turbo, the fifth iteration of the Opera Mini browser brings with it some of the best features of desktop browsing, tabs, and a password manager!

The browser if full of visual upgrades too. Starting with the home screen, which now offers a visual overview of your tabs rather than just text links. The entire interface seems to have been given a makeover, and it quite unrecognizable from the old Opera 4 interface. There doesn't seem to be an option for browser themes any more. Besides, this being just a Beta, it is likely the option will be back by the final release (or afterwards as was the case with Opera Mini 4.2).

The tabs feature is of such obvious benefit that it perhaps needs little introduction. In a mobile browser this is quite a feat, and will surely make mobile browsing a richer experience. With mobile memories increasing steadily, this option will hopefully be more welcome over time.

Get the latest version of Opera Mini 5 beta from the Opera website.

Nokia booklet 3G...

2009-08-25T04:26:00.000-07:00

Marking Nokia's entry into the PC market, is a not-exactly-revolutionary -but-innovative netbook offering. Nokia chooses to diverge from general netbook manufacturers by steering away from low end hardware and offering a high end product. Featuring aGPS, Ovi Maps, HDMI output, 12 hour battery, Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G/HSPA networking, 10-inch HD display besides the run-of-the-mill features, this horse from Nokia's stables weighs only 2.75lbs and has a scant thickness of 2cms.

Given that it's likely to be more expensive than your typical netbook, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Booklet 3G ship with either Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional instead of the stripped starter edition. If this is the case, then this Nokia might surpass the typical 1GB memory and 160GB hard disk limitations that manufacturers using Windows 7 Starter are stuck with. The HSPA-equipped Booklet 3G likely be packaged with a mobile data plan and subsidized accordingly. Business travelers who are frustrated with trying to use an iPhone or other smartphone as a GPS in a foreign city are likely to have a better experience on the Booklet's 10-inch screen. Netbooks like this could create a market shift away from smartphones in general. Rather than pay for a separate data plan for both a smartphone and a netbook, it may make sense for some mobile professionals to carry a simpler phone and pull something like the Booklet 3G from their briefcases or purses when it comes time to check a map, search the Net, or write an e-mail. Certainly this would help alleviate the frustration that many experience with their smartphone's battery life. Since Nokia's intention is to bundle its Ovi services with its netbook, I think we can expect to see some tie-ins with Nokia mobile phones. I'm sure Nokia would like to see mobile professionals carrying a Nokia phone to accompany the Booklet 3G. Nokia's netbook certainly isn't revolutionary, but its unique combination of features will meet the needs of the mobile professional better than the inexpensive plastic netbooks that are currently flooding the market.

More details will be announced at the Nokia World conference on September 2.

Zune HD packs a big processing punch

2009-08-25T04:25:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Zune HD will use one of the most powerful chips to go into a portable media player yet: Nvidia's multicore Tegra processor.

Tegra packs two processor cores based on intellectual property from U.K.-based chip designer ARM. One is the main processor--based on the ARM11 core--which runs the operating system. Tegra's defining feature, however, is an additional Nvidia GeForce graphics chip.

"Nvidia brings powerful graphics to the portable media player. This is a unique capability," said Jeff Orr, senior analyst for mobile content at ABI Research.

In total, Tegra integrates eight independent processors, according to Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile business unit. "We accelerate Flash, we have HD video, we do acceleration of rendering of Web pages on the GPU," Rayfield said Wednesday in a conference call, referring to the graphics processing unit. "The Zune HD will be an amazing showcase of what Tegra is capable of doing."

Its processing prowess notwithstanding, Tegra's design flies in the face of the hot, heat-sink-clad Nvidia graphics processors that power the fastest gaming rigs today. Tegra uses less than 0.5 watts of power, an attribute the chip inherits from its power-stingy ARM parentage. This trickle of power consumption is a tiny fraction of Nvidia's bread-and-butter desktop GeForce processors that are often rated well over 100 watts.

The Zune HD comes with a 3.3-inch, 16:9 OLED (480x272 resolution) screen. And also includes an HD (high-definition) Radio, HD (720p) video out, Wi-Fi, a Web browser (with tap-to-zoom technology), built-in accelerometer, and touchscreen QWERTY keyboard.

Audio codec technology has been developed by PortalPlayer, which Nvidia acquired in 2006.

Zune HD will also include a full-screen Internet browser optimized for multitouch functionality.

source

Unlocking the potential of feature phones........ with OneApp

2009-08-25T03:12:00.000-07:00

"Microsoft OneApp is a new software application that enables feature phones—commonly found in emerging markets—to access mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other popular apps and games. Now, people around the world who own feature phones will be able to do more and enjoy a better mobile experience with their existing phones. Microsoft OneApp will be offered initially through partners in emerging markets worldwide."

A great mobile application experience

OneApp appears on a phone as a single application that allows users to easily access all of their mobile apps. It dynamically launches just the parts of an app that a person wants to use, eliminating additional installation time and the need to store all of their mobile apps on their phone. OneApp enables users to easily customize their mobile experience.

Designed for feature phones

OneApp was designed from the ground up to make it easy for people to access mobile apps on feature phones with limited memory and processing capability. Its lightweight on-phone footprint of just 150 KB makes the installation easy and fast. OneApp also includes cloud services that help offload processing and storage from the phone to the Internet, improving overall performance. OneApp runs on a wide range of phones with more being tested all the time.

The most popular apps—and more coming all the time

OneApp removes the need for people to visit several sites searching for the apps they want and hoping they work on their phone. With OneApp it’s all right there, and apps are automatically updated with no extra effort by the user.

The app gallery currently features a few apps such as live messenger, facebook and tweetlite...

MobileNavigator for iPhone:The GPS competition is heatin’ up

2009-08-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

G-Map from X-Road was an AWESOME replacement for my GPS needs, but it still lacked some of the other features that newer standalone GPSs offer. Enter MobileNavigator.

Sony Walkman X

2009-08-09T07:35:00.001-07:00

Sony has also decided to compete in the multi-touch portable entertainment device market with its new product, the Walkman X. And just like the Zune HD, i have no idea when it's being released....

Zune HD.... a video

2009-08-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has announced the Zune HD, the latest in it's product range which was supposed to be an answer to apple's iPod i.e an iPod Killer. Unfortunatley for MS, not long after the first Zune was released Apple released its own iPod killer -> the iPhone. . . . and iPod touch. Now Microsoft is finally releasing it's Zune equivalent of the iPod Touch, The Zune HD. No exact word when this will be available. Here's a video demo of the Zune HD:

Want to run Google Android on a PC using live CD ? Here is how

2009-08-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

Want to give Google Android a try, but don't feel like buying a T-Mobile G1? LiveAndroid lets you download a LiveCD disc image of the Google Android operating system. Just burn the image to a disc, stick it in a CD-ROM drive, and reboot your computer and you can check out Android without installing it or affecting any files on your PC.

You can also use the disc image in a virtualization application like VirtualBox, VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC if you want to try the operating system without even rebooting your computer.

Go to - http://code.google.com/p/live-android/ or directly to http://code.google.com/p/live-android/wiki/readme to get the iso file.

Just burn that to a CD and thats it.

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter

2009-08-07T22:42:00.000-07:00

The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”

The blogger, a refugee from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia, writes under the name Cyxymu, but identified himself only by the name Giorgi in a telephone interview. Giorgi, who said he taught at Sukhumi State University, first noticed Thursday afternoon that LiveJournal, a popular blogging platform, was not working for him. “I decided to go to Facebook,” he said. “And Facebook didn’t work. Then I went to Twitter, and Twitter didn’t work. ‘How strange,’ I thought, ‘What a coincidence they all don’t work at once.’ ”

Security experts say that it is nearly impossible to determine who exactly is behind the attack, which disrupted access to Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and some Google sites on Thursday and continued to affect many Twitter users into Friday evening.

But Beth Jones, an analyst with the Internet security firm Sophos, said the assault occurred in two stages.

Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi. This technique, a “joe job,” is intended to discredit a Web user by making him appear to be the source of a large amount of junk e-mail. “These hackers wanted to make him look responsible for millions of spam e-mails,” said Ms. Jones.

The messages contained links to Giorgi’s accounts on several social networks and Web sites, including Twitter.

The next leg of the attack, Ms. Jones said, was a distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attack aimed at knocking Giorgi off the Web. The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers, to direct huge amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu’s pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them, Ms. Jones said.

The junk messages overwhelmed the services, slowing them, and in the case of Twitter and LiveJournal, shutting them down entirely for a time.

Giorgi said his pages were providing a place for refugees from Abkhazia to exchange memories of their home. The Twitter page had a sepia photograph of a palm-lined city street. “It was nostalgia,” he said.

This week, he began posting day-by-day accounts of the run-up to the conflict that drew partly on posts from his readers inside of Abkhazia, who he said had been describing how the Russian army staged its forces in the region in early August 2008.

“I feel a bit ashamed for the people who lost service because my blog was blocked,” said Giorgi.

The hundreds of millions of Internet users affected were simply “collateral damage,” said Ms. Jones.

The attacks and their aftermath show just how vital Web tools and services are becoming to political discourse — and how vulnerable they are to disruption.

“They aren’t set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they’ve come to represent that,” said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The attacks that felled Twitter shed light on the fragility of the popular microblogging service, especially compared to its competitor Facebook, which quickly recovered from the pummeling, said Stefan Tanase, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security firm. Twitter, a small San Francisco company, has been struggling to improve its security even as it tries to manage hypergrowth in the number of users and messages it handles.

But, Mr. Tanase said, “Twitter is definitely a company that is learning fast and reacting fast.”

The outage frustrated many Twitter users. Some migrated over to better-functioning social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed to send messages and follow conversations, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research and a prolific tweeter.

“If Twitter goes down or shuts down permanently, the conversation just shifts somewhere else,” he said.

For others, solving the problem wasn’t quite as simple.

Soren Macbeth, founder and chief executive of StockTwits, a service that lets investors trade news and information about companies, said his service, which is built on Twitter’s infrastructure, was offline Thursday and still hadn’t fully recovered Friday.

“Having the service be intermittent is almost worse than having it be totally down,” he said. “It makes it seem more like our issue, a problem with our service.”

Mr. Macbeth said the service, which receives as many as 10,000 postings a day, had been at Twitter’s mercy since its inception. “It’s very challenging to run a business on top of Twitter,” he said. The difficulties of working with Twitter had already prompted StockTwits to begin developing a stand-alone platform, which the company plans to introduce on Sept. 1.

But for most businesses, Twitter is merely a supplemental marketing tool.

Ben Van Leeuwen, who runs trucks that serve scoops of ice cream to customers around New York City, said he didn’t even notice the service was down. “Sales were the same yesterday as they were the day before,” he said.

Aaron Magness, who heads up new business development and marketing at Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer with a sizable following on Twitter, said in an e-mail message that the outage didn’t affect the company.

“Twitter is one of many communication tools we utilize,” he said. “Luckily, we love talking to our customers and Twitter going down doesn’t impact our phones."

What Intel has on offer ....... this september

2009-07-14T02:16:00.000-07:00

Rumors of intel's supposed launching of a new breed of processors built upon the new Nehalem microarchitecture in september are spreading across the blogosphere. Though at the time on this posting, i have no means to verify the authencity of this claim . . . but intel is sure set to release them in the second half of 2009. This article will explore the known features of these upcoming chips and what we can expect of them when they are released.

The Nehalem microarchitecture on which these chips are based will be able to execute more tasks i.e do much more processing, while drawing less power. These chips fabricated for highend desktops and laptops, include quadcore desktop chips codenamed Lynnfield and quadcore laptop chips codenamed Clarksfield.These two chips will be manufactured using the 45 nm fabrication process, and according to intel should be shipped before it's shift to the more efficient 32 nm process later this year. Amongst the company's other offerings will be the celeron SU2300 and celeron 743, both of which are chips for ultrathin laptops.

After being limited to mainly expensive systems such as servers and highend gaming PCs, this will be the first time Nehalem based chips wil be made available to the mainstream consumers. Integrating a memory controller into the CPU, and providing a faster pipe for the processor to communicate with graphics cards; the new processors will also allow the execution of two software threads simultaneously for quicker application performance.

While the use of the 42nm manufacturing process means that the New Nehalem chips will be limited to the Computers of HIgher priceband, affordably priced systems could see new processors when Intel switches to 32nm fabrication. The 32nm chips will feature prominently the integration of a graphics processor core and CPU in one chip package. This will boost graphics and computing performances, while using much lesser power than the current chips, making these 32nm chips a product we can really look forward to.

Google Chrome OS . . . of what is yet to come

2009-07-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

As had been speculated for quite some time, Google has announced a new operating system: Google Chrome OS. This is nothing to do with Google’s Android OS for mobile phones. ‘Initially’ aimed at the netbook segment, the OS is very likely to mature into a platform for all kinds of computing devices. This ‘open source, lightweight operating system’ as Google describes it, won’t be available till the second half of 2010 but its source code will be made available to the developer community later this year. . . . So it wouldn’t be surprising to see some sort of usable version released during this timeframe.

The announcement of this new OS had been simultaneously shocking as well as expected. At this moment it’s difficult to predict the features that it will sport, but one thing is sure . . . the heart and soul of this OS will be in the Clouds. Making it a cloud OS won’t be any major problem for Google though, as it’s got a browser and a wide array of online cloud based services such as Google Docs, Gmail etc... Etc... . What remains to be seen is how well and to what extent Google will enhance the Chrome OS’s offline capability. The offline capability will be a crucial factor for not only developing Asian market but also the west, because absence of offline capability will demand round the clock internet access which of course comes at a premium … that is sky high tariff. Besides this, Google is very certainly going to offend the open source community. Keir Thomas of PCworld elaborates on how that’s going to happen on his blog. Read his article here.

Windows 7 Family pack to cost $150

2009-07-10T20:15:00.000-07:00

The price tag of $150 for a three licence pack will save buyers $210

Prematurely posted pricing details of atleast one online retailer has revealed that the multi-license "family pack" of Microsoft latest Windows 7 OS will be available at a price tag of around $149.99

NOKIA: No plans to go android....

2009-07-06T23:58:00.000-07:00

Nokia has denied the rumors of it planning to release a phone running Google's android OS.

The Guardian, a british newspaper had quoted "industry insiders" saying that Nokia would unveil in September a mobile phone running on the Google Android operating system. But Nokia has denied Guardian's speculation, telling Reuters that there is "Absolutely no truth to this whatsoever." The denial continued by quoting a company spokesman saying: "Everyone knows that Symbian is our preferred platform for advanced mobile devices."

Indeed, Symbian is Nokia's OS of choice for smartphones and it has invested heavily in symbian in recent years, most prominent being buying out the partners in the Symbian OS joint venture last year. The finnish giant plans to offer the symbian platform free of charge to other mobile device manufacturers. And interestingly this is the same approach being used by google in promoting it's open source Android OS. This model has proved to be increasingly popular, with plenty of Android cell phones coming out this year such as the HTC hero. But while Google's Android OS was built from the foundation up with touchscreen use in mind, Nokia's latest devices featuring the Symbian OS including it's flagship N97 have been criticized for the lack of finger-friendly navigation. Symbian, originally designed for devices with alphanumeric keyboards, and then revamped for touchscreen phones, still requires the use of a stylus in many cases.

But there is a chance that Guardian's "industry insiders" are not entirely wrong though. Late last month, Nokia has partnered with Intel to create a new stable of mobile products. While Nokia has the Linux-based Maemo OS, which powers the company's Internet tablets, Google Android could be the company's OS of choice for this new breed of devices.

Moblin : intel's open source OS

2009-07-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Moblin is Intel's open source Linux based operating system built specifically for the new breed of computers called netbooks that run Intel's propreitory Atom x86 chips. As it is targeted at Netbooks segment, the operating system developed by the world's largest chipmaker is more focussed and centred around Internet and Multimedia, and less on productivity tools such as office suites. It is more about twittering, updating social networking profiles and watching movies on the go. For those who cannot live without an office suite, there are many online alternatives, most of them free such as google docs and zoho writer ...... but surprisingly the moblin developers seem to have steered away from google as the OS does not support google gears and uses Yahoo! as the default and 'recommended' search engine. The developers do seem out of touch with time for this surprising choice.

Technically, Moblin is nothing but a linux distro, but benefits largely from its uniquely tweaked refinements and a radical user interface. Missing from this OS are popular linux softwares such as GIMP ( GNU image manipulation program ) and openoffice.org .Though the distro is based around the familiar GNOME/GTK desktop environment, the fact is easily overlooked and largely invisible because of the UI improvements.

The offline functionality of this OS is limited to playing movies and music. Being free of charge and based on the widely used x86 chips, you can download and try it for yourself on virtually any computer or using OS virtualization solutions such as virtualbox or VMware fusion. However it's requirement of 3D graphic drivers means its performance on VM software will be far from optimal. The first beta of Moblin 2.0 has just been released, so dont be surprised to find more than a few bugs.

You can download it here and take it for a testdrive.

iPhone OS 3.1 Beta available for developers

2009-07-02T03:21:00.000-07:00

Following closely on the heels of the official release of iPhone 3.0, Apple has seeded a developer build of the upcoming 3.1 version, build 7C97D, along with the SDK. And this new version update is not just bug fixes, but a whole lot of new features have been added. Several blogs including Gizmodo are reporting features such as:

Faster boot time.
Bluetooth Voice control.
Access to video editing through APIs for third party developers.
Non-destructive editing of videos by allowing saving of copies.
Fraud protection, or phishing warnings an option in preferences for Safari.

MacRumors also has an interesting list of new features:

A carrier selection preference though apparently not fot AT&T customers.
An MMS option, though again thi does not apply to AT&T customers yet.
Saving videos recieved/sent through emails.
Direct copying an d pasting in the address book.
Cancelling text messages as they are sent.
Choose picture size/quality for MMS.

As for bug fixes, the biggest problem with the iPhone 3GS is not with the OS but the hardware. whether the new firmware solves the widely reported overheating issues is not known yet.

for more:

~ PCworld

~ Channelweb

~ Apple Insider

Improved Virtual Box 3.0 runs Multiple OSes Simultaneoulsy

2009-07-02T03:17:00.000-07:00

dual boot methods have eliminated the need to rely solely on one Operating system to meet our computing needs. But choosing and locking on to only one OS at boot time can be quite constraining. Thats where Virtual Machine (VM) software play an important role. The VM software eliminate that constarint by allowing us to run an OS inside an OS, almost parallely. The commercial solutions out there such as tose offered by VMware solve this problem very well . . . . but at a cost. But for those on budget, Sun's Open source Virtual Box is the best.

This free community developed OS virtualization solution is now available in it's third major iteration and this update adds a whole bunch of features previously available only with the commercial solutions. Some of the new features include support for OpenGL 2.0 and Direct3D 8/9 in Windows, as well as the ability to for the guest Operating systems to use upto 32 virtual CPUs. The entire changelog is here and its filled with other enhancements and bugfixes. Nothing can beat it at the price its offered for - free. It works on any Windows, Linux or Mac OSes out there and is a must-try if you want to run multiple Operating Systems at the same time.

get virtual box at : virtualbox.org

Breaking news: Pirate Bay Sold!!

2009-06-30T04:17:00.000-07:00

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. GGF claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world.

The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the site.

The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will launch new business models so that copyright owners get paid, which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.

“Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality,” he added.

GGF will acquire the site’s domain names and sites for SEK 60,000,000 ($7.8 million) - SEK 30,000,000 in cash and the rest in newly issue shares.

File-sharing technology company Peerialism will also be acquired by GGF for a total of SEK 100 million, of which at least SEK 50 million will be in cash.

According to GGF, Peerialism has developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. The technology is said to be backwards-compatible with BitTorrent although details are scarce at the moment.

At the time of writing, shares in GGF are up 155% - this will quickly become outdated, so check here for latest stats.

Sources:
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE55T1QF20090630
http://www.betanews.com/article/Swedish-firm-looks-to-board-The-Pirate-Bay/1246358826

Intel and Nokia do it again: Allied for the 3rd time in a decade

2009-06-29T02:21:00.000-07:00

For the third time in just a decade, the leaders in chipmaking and mobile manufacturing join forces to form a formidable alliance. their goal the same, is to create a revolutionary wireless device. Success in this venture would create a stir in the world of tech.

Both the giants hope that their third time is the key. After two aborted attempts over the decade to collaborate on fabricating wireless devices, the world's largest computer chip manufacturer Intel and the largest mobile phone maker Nokia are at it again. they are embarking on a "long-term partnership" to create mobile devices that combine high performance computing with high-speed wireless communication. As part of this alliance, Nokia will purchase Intel chips and Intel will license Nokia's Mobile phone radio technology.

This collaboration will extend even to the softwares that will run on these devices. These include Intel's Moblin and NOkia's Maemo OSes.

"Nokia and Intel share a similar technology vision," said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice-president and general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group.

In a June 23 press conference announcing the deal, the companies said little about the kinds of devices they're planning. But if they succeed, the alliance could broadly reshape the computing and communications industries. Nokia has been trying to expand beyond its core mobile-phone business into other types of handheld computers such as netbooks, while Intel for the past decade has been looking to challenge chipmakers Qualcomm and Texas Instruments in the fast-growing market for advanced mobile devices.

While slim on details, Nokia and Intel hinted that they may attempt to create entirely new categories of devices. In a press release, Intel and Nokia said the mobile products will move "beyond" existing wireless computing devices, including smartphones, netbooks, and notebook PCs. Intel has been trying to create a new class of pocket-sized products it calls mobile Internet devices, or MIDs. Nokia has offered what it calls an "Internet tablet" for several years but has not gained much traction with the device.

"This collaboration will likely lead to a class of device…that recognizes the context of its user's environment and bends to its user's needs," Kevin Burden, a practice director at consultant ABI Research, wrote in a research note.

Intel has been trying to emulate its competitors by offering complete packages of processors and such related products as flash memory and modems that handset makers can more easily integrate with their devices, thereby getting finished products to market more quickly. As part of that effort, the Santa Clara (California) chipmaker has been working to improve the performance of its low-cost, wireless-friendly Atom processor while lowering its overall energy consumption. The alliance with Nokia gives Intel yet another platform in which Atom could be used.

"The big takeaway for Intel is, they've got another radio and communications standard they can use with the Atom," Gartner (IT) analyst Leslie Fiering says. "It could increase its attractiveness in communications devices."

The 8MP N86

2009-06-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

Thought the 5MP of Nokia's new flagship, the present ultimate king of convergence, N97 was good enough??............. time for a rethink. Nokia now bests its best with an 8MP camera on its newest Nseries entrant - The N86.

Sporting a 2.6'' OLED screen, the N86 also comes with nokia's standard 5-key navigation which was missing, but was not missed in the bigger beast. True that considering other major manufacturers such as Samsung and Lg are rolling out 12MP models and sony is to soon join the fray with IDOU, Nokia's move may seem an underplay. However it will be more than enough for anyone but the hardcore mobile photography enthusiast. It also has a Carl Zeiss lens and autofocus with dual stage image capture and dual-LED flash. It supports VGA resolution video recording upto 30 fps. like the N97, it also comes with A-GPS, digital compass, ambient light and proximity sensors but falls short because of its smaller screen and lack of touch sensitivity.

The phone offers a 3.9 hour talktime with 3G and 6.3 hours whilst on a GSM network. The Nokia N86 has been priced at Rs. 27,359 in India and will be soon available at a dealer near you!

The N86 will compete with the the likes of the Samsung Innov8 and the Sony Ericsson C905 in the battle for the 8MP crown. The Innov8 from Samsung incidentally also sports the Series 60 Third Edition Interface, same as the N86.

With the recent release of the N97, this might just steal some competition away from the bigger beast, especially those attracted by its camera. Either way though the ball's in Nokia's court.

The HTC Hero

2009-06-26T23:53:00.000-07:00

At first look the HTC Hero seems to me, oddly reminiscent of Count Dooku Lightsaber, with the slightly swayed look. However this Android based device has quite a bit under the hood to impress those not immediately taken by such vague impressions. The HTC Hero is a sleek beauty with a large 3.2`` TFT LCD capacitive multi-touch touch-screen with hepatic feedback and a resolution of 320x480, and comes with a 5MP camera with auto-focus.

It runs the Android OS and shows off some of the UI customization that Android promised, with its “Sense UI”, and the UI is perhaps as beautiful as the device itself. The UI looks remarkably unlike Android as it heavily customized. However, the multiple home-screens and widgets that are part of the Android 'Cupcake' experience are all there. The widgets shown off range from intensely graphic portrayals of weather conditions to social networking gadgets like twitter.

On top of it all the HTC Hero runs the full Flash Player 10! Which means that you can now enjoy a PC equivalent web experience in your mobile browser, (which wont go to waste with its 7.2MBPS HSDPA support).

The Pirate Bay to Sue Sweden for Human Rights Violations

2009-06-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Swedish Appeal Court decided that the judge who handled the Pirate Bay trial was not biased, despite his membership of several pro-copyright organizations. In true Pirate Bay style spokesman Peter Sunde responded full force, and says they are ready to sue Sweden for human rights violations.

There will be no retrial for The Pirate Bay, the Appeal Court decided today. According to the Court the judge was not biased based on the requirements of the European Convention, a decision that can’t be appealed.

However, Pirate Bay’s spokesman Peter Sunde says that they will not give up that easily. On his blog he writes, “When people think you’re down and out, that you’ve lost and have no way to win… that’s the perfect time to hit them harder than ever before.”

On Twitter Peter announces that their next step is to “file charges against Sweden for violation for Human Rights.”

In order to do so they will have take the case to the European Court of Human Rights, who will then conduct a review to see if the Swedish legal system did indeed violate the rights of the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial.

Peter also points out that Anders Eka, the judge responsible for reviewing the bias case, was biased himself. He is referring to his connection to The Stockholm Center for Commercial law, together with movie industry lawyers Monique Wasted and Peter Danowsky who represented the music industry in the Pirate Bay trial.

The appeal court was well aware of this connection, but said before that there was no reason to take Eka off the case.

“The group Anders Eka is a member of has no connection to copyright issues and the interests that are present in the case. I cannot see how this specific connection could lead to that Anders Eka isn’t suitable to try the question of bias,” Fredrik Wersäll, the president of the appeal court has said.

The exact nature of the charges against Sweden remain unclear. Peter Sunde was not available to comment but we guess it wont take long before we find out.

stay tuned with the latest developments at : torrent freak

Google Squared!

2009-06-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

Google Squared is an experimental tool that takes a category (like US presidents, roller coasters, or digital cameras) and attempts to create a starter "square" of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web. You can modify your square by removing rows and columns you don't like--or by adding new rows and columns and having Google Squared attempt to fetch the relevant facts. Verify and correct the facts in your square by exploring the original sources and investigating other possible values. If you're happy with your square you can save it and come back to it later. Google Squared does the grunt work for you, making research fast and easy.

http://www.google.com/squared

Nokia phone recharges without wires!

2009-06-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Pardon the cliche, but it's one of the holiest of Holy Grails of technology: Wireless power. And while early lab experiments have been able to "beam" electricity a few feet to power a light bulb, the day when our laptops and cell phones can charge without having to plug them in to a wall socket still seems decades in the future.

Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.

While "traditional" (if there is such a thing) wireless power systems are specifically designed with a transmitter and receiver in mind, Nokia's system isn't finicky about where it gets its wireless waves. TV, radio, other mobile phone systems -- all of this stuff just bounces around the air and most of it is wasted, absorbed into the environment or scattered into the ether. Nokia picks up all the bits and pieces of these waves and uses the collected electromagnetic energy to create electrical current, then uses that to recharge the phone's battery. A huge range of frequencies can be utilized by the system (there's no other way, really, as the energy in any given wave is infinitesimal). It's the same idea that Tesla was exploring 100 years ago, just on a tiny scale.

Mind you, harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy is never going to offer enough electricity to power your whole house or office, but it just might be enough to keep a cell phone alive and kicking. Currently Nokia is able to harvest all of 5 milliwatts from the air; the goal is to increase that to 20 milliwatts in the short term and 50 milliwatts down the line. That wouldn't be enough to keep the phone alive during an active call, but would be enough to slowly recharge the cell phone battery while it's in standby mode, theoretically offering infinite power -- provided you're not stuck deep underground where radio waves can't penetrate.

Nokia says it hopes to commercialize the technology in three to five years.

source: thinkdigit forums

Whats New in Firefox 3.5...

2009-06-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

Mozilla Firefox version 3.5 will be a major new release (it’s due out at the end of June) with a stack of new features. I’ve just started beta testing the latest release candidate (3.5b4) and already noticing improved performance compared with version 3.1, although it’s still not as fast as Google Chrome according to independent reports. The trade-off there is that Chrome doesn’t yet support the various tools and addons I use, such as NoScript and various Greasemonkey scripts.

Firefox 3.5 does seem to perform better than previous versions and didn’t take long to start up from a cold start. When I saved the draft of this page it seemed to refresh within a split second, whereas on 3.1, I’d normally wait several seconds before I could carry on writing or editing in Wordpress. That’s a much appreciated boost for me.

Mozilla says improvements are partly due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. They are also due to improvements in the Gecko layout engine, which include speculative parsing for faster content rendering. Firefox has also improved security and privacy features, including the now obligatory “Private Browsing Mode,” (equivalent to Chrome’s Incognito tab).

“Geo” is the current buzz word of the day and Firefox now has the ability to provide location aware browsing using web standards for geolocation. Additionally, it supports new web technologies such as HTML5 video and audio elements, downloadable fonts and other new CSS properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 offline data storage for applications, and SVG transforms, for those interested in the technical aspects.

If your web browser is mission critical, don’t download it just yet, this is a beta, well officially it’s a release candidate, which is like the final, final beta. Either way, before you install, make sure you’ve backed up your favorites, bookmarks, settings etc.

Surf the waves with Google............ GOOGLE WAVE

2009-06-20T01:04:00.000-07:00

About Google Wave

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?

People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared.

Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live.

With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

for more details, visit: wave.google.com

Microsoft's Project Natal

2009-06-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

The battle between the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 began long before they came out. With people comparing specs, availability of games, features, even which has a cooler name, so it came as a surprise to most people, Wii won, without ever competing. None of it seemed to matter in front of the Nintendo Wii's revolution in gaming.

Microsoft is trying to grab a piece of its pie again, with project Natal. It is their take on the new interface of interactivity introduced by Nintendo. Except with Project Natal you dont even need to hold controllers in your hand, it manages it all with a simple camera!

This is truly a testament to what cameras can accomplish today. A great amount of detail needs to be captured so that body movements can be discerned even at a distance. Even besides that processing an image and understanding each the context of each object. Thus with Project Natal you can jump right into the game without needing any controller, instead the camera captures your body motions and uses it to control your avatar in the game.

This brings in a much deeper level of involvement than even Nintendo Wii, since instead of the contoller you have all the dimensions provided by your body, infact your body itself is like a wireless controller.

Opera Unite: a Web server on the Web browser

2009-06-19T20:26:00.000-07:00

With Opera 10, we are introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today's fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time. Read about how Opera Unite is going to change the way we interact on the Web on labs.opera.com.

Take control of what you share online

Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

Share with other Web browsers

What if you use Opera at home, and a different Web browser at work? Opera Unite services can be accessed from any modern browser, including mobile browsers! At home, just select what you want to share, and you can view it later using your work Web browser without any problems.

Integrated and extendable

Simply enable Opera Unite when you start Opera, and you are ready to go. Find and install services with one click from its online catalog or easily create your own by using Web standards like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and AJAX.

unite.opera.com

NVIDIA unveils tegra

2009-06-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

Amidst the hype about Intel's processor platform for MIDs called Moorestown, NVIDIA has unveiled an answer of its own, its Tegra Processor.

They unveiled 12 high definition capable MIDs powered by the Tegra chip which are capable of delivering a desktop like browsing experience complete with Flash. As can be expected of any NVIDIA product, it has powerful graphics support with animation acceleration, flash video support, and the capability to play back video at full 1080p.

Since it is targeted for portable devices, it is also optimized greatly for lower power usage and may give as much as 5 times the battery life that we can see in the netbooks of today. It is capable of 25 days of playing music on a single charge, and 10hrs of full HD 1080p video playback.

According to Michael Rayfield, general manager of mobile business at NVIDIA, “These new Tegra-based products combine excellent Internet and media capabilities, always-on operation, and wireless connectivity for the un-tethered Internet experience consumers have been craving.”

In order to have a desktop-like browsing experience, support for Adobe Flash is necessary. For this NVIDIA tied up with Adobe to optimize the Flash Player for Tegra, by enabling it to utilize the powerful GPU of Tegra based devices to make the online Flash video and animation experience as smooth as possible. The Tegra architecture utilizes multiple processors working in unison for giving the composite experience. A separate processor is used to processing HTML, and HD video.

With the capability to support 3G, WiFi and WiMAX it also welcome by wireless carriers. As stated by Antonio Domit, Executive Technology Advisor to America Movil, Grupo Carso, and Inbursa, “Devices based on NVIDIA Tegra will allow us to offer a mobile Internet device that delivers an amazing level of functionality at minimal cost or even free through subsidies, The combination of a Tegra-based MID and our high-speed national coverage will allow millions of people to access the Internet and have an unprecedented experience. I can imagine the story is the same for every country around the world.”

Tegra devices are expected to start coming out in the second half of this year.

The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser

2009-03-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

quote:

"Web browsers originated as applications that people used to view static web sites sequentially. As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site principals. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals.

In this paper, we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle's Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection. We elaborate on these issues and provide comprehensive solutions.

Our prototype implementation and evaluation experience indicates that it is realistic to turn an existing browser into a multi-principal OS that yields significantly stronger security and robustness with acceptable performance and backward compatibility.
"

source:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=79655

Is IE8 the end of the line for Internet Explorer?

2009-03-11T07:34:00.000-07:00

Dropping IE in favor of a newer rendering engine may be not be as easy as it seems

quote: " I'm hearing through the grapevine. It seems that Microsoft is preparing to throw in the towel on its Internet Explorer engine once and for all.

And just what will be its replacement? I’m getting conflicting stories on that one. Some are still claiming that Microsoft will go with WebKit, which, thanks to the popularity of Apple's Safari browser and also Google's Chrome, is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for all non-IE and non-Firefox implementations.

Others insist that that the whole WebKit story is merely a feint and that Microsoft will in fact be adopting a brand-new engine coming out of its Microsoft Research division. Dubbed "Gazelle," this new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected. "

sources:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2009/03/is_version_8_th.html

http://weblog.infoworld.com/fatalexception/archives/2009/02/gazelle_the_bro.html?source=fssr

coming soon: super fast internet

2008-04-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.

The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.

It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.

“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

The 1 Teraflop chip : intel shows the way ahead!

2008-04-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

A chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (Teraflops) has been unveiled by Intel.
The Teraflops chip is not a commercial release but could point the way to more powerful processors, said the firm.
The chip achieves performance on a piece of silicon no bigger than a fingernail that 11 years ago required a machine with 10,000 chips inside it.
The challenge is to find a way to program the many cores simultaneously.
Current desktop machines have up to four separate cores, while the Cell processor inside the PlayStation 3 has eight (seven of them useable). Each core is effectively a programmable chip in its own right.
But to take advantage of the extra processing power, programmers need to gives instructions to each core that work in parallel with one another.
There are already specialist chips with multiple cores - such as those used in router hardware and graphics cards - but Dr Mark Bull, at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, said multi-core chips were forcing a sea-change in the programming of desktop applications.
"It's not too difficult to find two or four independent things you can do concurrently, finding 80 or more things is more difficult, especially for desktop applications.
"It is going to require quite a revolution in software programming.
"Massive parallelism has been the preserve of the minority - a few people doing high-performance scientific computing.
"But that sort of thing is going to have to find its way into the mainstream."
The first time teraflop performance was achieved was 11 years ago on the ASCI Red Supercomputer built by Intel for the Sandia National Laboratory.
That machine took up more than 2,000 square feet, was powered by almost 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity.
"Our researchers have achieved a wonderful and key milestone in terms of being able to drive multi-core and parallel computing performance forward," said Justin Rattner, Intel Senior Fellow and chief technology officer.
This advancement points the way to the near future when teraflops-capable designs will be commonplace and reshape what we can all expect from our computers and the internet at home and in the office.
The Teraflops chip uses less electricity than many current high-end processors, making the design attractive for use in home computers.
It consumes 62 watts, and the cores can power on and off independently, making it more energy efficient.
The commercial spin-offs of the chip could see it being used in high-definition entertainment PCs, servers and handheld devices.
Possible uses include artificial intelligence, instant video communications, photo-realistic games and real-time speech recognition.

world's fastest net speed: 100 HD movies in a second!

2008-04-04T09:23:00.001-07:00

Researchers in France have managed to optically transfer data at a record speed of 16.4 terabytes per second ( yes! Read that again for the full impact ) . it may seem shocking to those who thought that it was a Swiss granny with a 40 gigabytes per second who had the fastest connection ( actually it is the fastest RESIDENTIAL connection ).
this comes as a tight slap in the face for some of the Indian broadband users boasting about their 2 Mbps. Back to the point.
This connection is a 16.4 Tbps .............. becomes quite hard to imagine... that's approximately 100 HD movies being downloaded every second.
This breakthrough research will eventually result in 100 Gbps ethernet connections. And to add to the shock ( of those who don't know it as of yet ) , the data was not transferred over a few inches as some might be speculating. But over 2,550 km.
The Bell Labs researchers said that to achieve these ludicrously high transfer speeds, several new technologies were used. These include a "highly linear, balanced optoelectronic photoreceiver and an ultra-compact, temperature-insensitive coherent mixer" - I had been expecting something like that.
This transmission was achieved using 164 Wavelength-Division Multiplexed (WDM) channels modulated at 100Gbps and represents a world record for capacity by distance.
The result is a critical step forward in the development of 100Gbps Ethernet because it ensures the maximum exploitation of the fibre bandwidth to cope with future capacity needs.
"These breakthroughs highlight the depth and breadth of the work done by Bell Labs researchers in optical networking and physical technologies around the world, and show how they must constantly improve and innovate across various technical areas to pave the way to the future of communications," said George Rittenhouse, vice president at Bell Labs research.
Well, maybe after this, things wont seem too shocking for us.

featured: FUTURE OF THE INTERNET

2008-03-20T22:41:00.000-07:00

After having a look at what web 2.0 actually is, it's time to play soothsayer and have a peek into what the future holds for the internet.
The new generation of the internet web 2.0 has been around for quite sometime now but it's limited scope and potential has prevented it from completely replacing the older generation web 1.0.2 as i would like to call it.
The current internet is thus just a blend of these two domains.
But the future will be completely different, different not only in terms of interface, it will have little or no features of the current net. It will be an entirely different and be based on a single unique high tech platform.
The web would best be described as web X.0, and not web 3.0 or 4.0 because it would be just too advanced to be even compared to what we have today.
It will be structured web with all the data sorted out into appropriate categories. There would be virtually no need of search engines, as the required data will be readily available. Sifting through millions of search results would be then regarded as prehistoric. All the net services will be interconnected to provide the best of usability. It would be similar in qualities to the much hyped about soon to be released winFS (windows future storage). For those who have not heard about it, why not just google it up. Seriously, it's something that will cause a revolution in desktop computing, something that might very well be the the end of local computing and computing will fully shift online.
We would be booting off the internet instead of our hard drives. This is no fantasy, everyone knows that that you can boot off a network and internet being a large network it is very much possible, the current restrictions of having such a facility are bandwidth woes and net speeds. Internet today is not really accessible. But we can expect the web X.0 to be free.
We could expect google to launch something like google OS that would power the online desktop .......... why even Microsoft would be able to release it's net OS maybe something like Live OS or maybe open windows.
But what would even better is that Microsoft and Google merge into one, combining both their expertises to present the world with something beyond our imagination.
Net speeds may eventually cross more than a thousand terabytes per second and all that for free. Eventually Software prices will fall sharply and piracy will become more expensive and will eventually die out. Access to resources, educational as well as commercial will be free. Malpractices such as pornography may be put off the new internet. Increased levels of security will make cyber-crime next to impossible. Quality content will be the primary feature of this new web and it will aim to promote literacy and intellectual enlightenment. Voicing of public opinion through the medium of Discussions and debates over the net will be quite popular.
E-governance will make administration much easier. Important notices and warnings will be circulated at the click of a button.
Moreover all these technologies will be life savers for those who work in hostile or risky environments. For example, Fishermen at sea would be able to stay in tune with the latest changes in weather through their mobile web browser.
Before i end this post I'd like to mention that there is no end to human demands and there is no complete satisfaction.
Then maybe several years later say in 2050, people might be reading a blog post just like this by a blogger similar to me speculating about the future of the future web. The only difference then will be that what the future would then be is much beyond our imagination.
-Nikhil G. Salgaonkar

they all hate it! so what is this DRM?

2008-03-20T22:39:00.000-07:00

Digital rights management or DRM, whatever you call it, it creates holes of millions of dollars worth in the pockets of innocent 'confused' people. It is something that is more commonly associated with lawsuits rather than digital media.
DRM is an organization, it think, but doubt it ,because the rules laid down by it are the least organised. It like hardly anyone knows or understands what the rules are.
That naturally corresponds to increase in confusion; confusion of the consumer, artists , retailers, recording companies and the DRM.
Such is the state of the DRM that the Free Media Foundation has a come up with a more suitable and deserving acronym for it......... digital restrictions management , they like to call it. They as well as the many people out there who got sued are of the opinion that DRM doesn't tell you what your rights are, but on the contrary what aren't.
Sensing fear of a possible uprising, the folks at Apple got into an agreement with EMI, one of the big 4 recording companies (and not every month instalment ) EMI's song DRM-free (well somewhat) at 256 kbps, much better than what was available earlier in terms of quality. This what came to be called as 'fairplay' is but just another 'flavour' of DRM.
Yes, even fairplay's not being fair. It restricts you to play the media on up to 5 PCs. Now that's bad news for regular upgraders. But as this is just another DRM, there's got to be something that adds to the confusion. It appears that you can play the song on unlimited number of iPods, so much for those restrictions. Now enough of (un) fairplay....
sometime back there was this hype about the 'iPod killer', the Zune that marked Microsoft's entry into the world of PMP (portable media players). So how can we forget this software giant. You guessed it?
Even MS has got it's flavour of DRM, WMDRM, that is 'windows media'+ DRM. Nothing much different from the original. Only thing it demonstrates how powerful Microsoft is. The pirates are finding it hard to keep MS property cracked. Even if cracked it doesn't stay cracked for long, thank to the highly intelligent folks at Microsoft who are constantly playing with code.
So as you read this post, people keep on getting sued for disobeying rules never known and the rest of the big four, Sony BMG , Time warner and universal have adopted a wait and watch policy.
One thing is certain, this industry is heading towards revolution.
Please voice your opinion as comments.

web 2.0

2008-03-18T02:29:00.001-07:00

Web 2.0
the phenomenon that is web 2.0 is something that every newbie may have heard of . In simpler words, as per the views of those who coined the phrase , it is a social phenomenon : a social web.
So, what exactly is the potential of this new web?
What will be the powers that this successor to Sir Tim Berners -Lee 's world wide web, shall behold?
Is it going to be just another mediocre combination of social networking sites and chatting or is it something more like Wikipedia?
Naturally the first thing that comes to our minds is that it's definitely something to do only with AJAX, or may be social networking sites ,blogging or wikis. But, O'Reilly* proves us all wrong.........
*for those who don't know him, he is one of the coiners of the term web 2.0
Before we go ahead any further with our discussion, let's have a look at what O'Reilly ,founder and CEO, O'Reilly media has to say about web 2.0 ....................
quotes from a wired news interview:
“absolutely anybody who thinks that this is about AJAX is completely missing the boat”
“We're still trying to move people towards really understanding what that new world looks like. I don't think a lot of people are there. A lot of people still think, 'oh, it's about social networking. It's about blogging. It's about wikis.' I think it's the data created by those mechanisms, and the businesses that that data will make possible.”
well, he's not too clear about it, is he? He seems to talking only about the data rather than providing an illustration of that data and it's control on this new web, web 2.0 as he calls it.................................
.......... as he calls it.
Reality check:
the term web 2.0 is nothing official. You can call it anything you want. As you can see O'Reilly is not the owner of the web. He is just a user and a benefiter, what really happened is that he just happened
to express his opinion which was published somewhere, quoted another place and people readily accepted it. So even you could name it anything you like, publish it along with a good definition say on a blog and if you get many readers, they'll start using your definition. Wanna start doing it? Do it; but before that finish reading this post.
If you do a google search of this word you'll find many definitions to it that is after sifting through the almost millions of results that google will give you. You'll see that all of them are conflicting. Everyone has their own opinion and they know that they have their freedom of speech and expression.
Most of the definitions are based on the following:
1. the web as a platform
2. harnessing collective intelligence (as in social web)
3. lightweight programming models and
4. rich user interface
to name a few............... also ... I've read in an Indian tech magazine that a person called DMBlackthorn says that web 2.0 is confusing and he'd prefer calling it the interweb........... i wonder why.......... maybe I'll google his name up and check it out. If any of you readers know about it please comment.
The data defined by O'Reilly in the quotes mentioned above, plays a key role in this web 2.0, most of this data is generated by the social web as we've mentioned early. So i feel that it is not right to fully accept O'Reilly's definition, as the social web should be considered a part of the web 2.0 or web X.0 or web 1.0.2 or 'interweb' or whatever you may call it.
The data generated by these 'social web' sites make the business of the 'social web' site possible. So as per O'Reilly's definition they should be part of the new web, but he himself says at the beginning that they are not.
Let's forget about that 'oh really' for the time being and define the new web as the “people's web” as most of it run by the people, without people all that user generated content that makes the new web would not be possible!
[ i shall discuss more about this social web in some other post. Till then if you know some other definitions or have your own definition, please voice it through comments ]

notice: upcoming posts

2008-03-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

after a few days of starting this blog, i've now decided to post about upcoming blog posts from time to time:
I) confirmed
1. web 2.0
2. what is the future of the internet? web 3.0 or web x.0?
II) not confirmed
1. should it be web 2.0?
2. the end of DRM ?
if you are interested in seeing any topic of your choice in these columns, please add it as a comment to this post.

google vs. the others: quest for the better mail

2008-03-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

GOOGLE versus YAHOO!
I have been wondering recently how people decide which e-mail service to select, i mean we have many options available; for example gmail, yahoo , Microsoft live Hotmail, etc. many of these just like search engines are unheard of. for me the choice had been easy, for i had my objectives sorted ..........my obvious choice was gmail because i had been for a while considering blogging on blogger. But then i am not the world or vice versa. In my quest for a satisfying answer i decided to consult some friends. So i hit the compose button in my in-box any fired out e-mails à mes amis. Fast came the replies. The first to reply was using a slow connection approx. 1 kbps
....... believe me, THIS IS INDIA. So according to him rediff suits him best because it is very light for use. I decided to check on that claim and, really he was not kidding. I also tried it on cell phone's web browser, it was really fast....... well at least considerably. another rediff user pointed out to the unlimited storage part..... well, but according to me it would be of no use because the 6 GB mail box of gmail is much more than enough for most of the users.
It had been a couple of mails and had almost been led to believe that rediff was the most popular but then just before i was to click on the “X” at the top right of the screen, a mail popped in from ol' vesley, one of the few people i know who have a considerably faster access to internet who sided yahoo!. Again what featured at the top of the reasons was 'unlimited storage space' followed by 'faster'. I quick to ask him,
“faster than what?” and even quicker came his reply “ faster than something prehistoric”. Well, that's definitely true, but something kept me from arguing further. This mail was followed by many gmail(s) and yahoo!(s) and a few of zapak mail and rediff.
The most common reason sited for gmail was Orkut which is really popular in India.
None from live Hotmail.........thought of reviewing it myself but only after yahoo! Because of reports yahoo's home page is one of the most visited. So i went to yahoo.com;
the registration form surprised me. I hated it. The ask for too many 'unnecessary' details. Yahoo should take a lesson or two from google, registering for which is child's play, clicked next to realize that yahoo require even more proof of identity and the user has to be logged on to his own countries home page so quickly switched over to yahoo's India page. Registration was somewhat similar but i finally got it done.
It's not that i am new to yahoo but just a couple of years back it was much easier ............ maybe it got something do with keeping a check on terrorist activities. In the end i was too tired to go in for msn, maybe some other time....
......so after going through all that mail, here's what we (I) conclude;
I. Gmail is the best choice
1. having a gmail id grants you access to other google services also.
2.storage space: 6 GB (quite enough ).
3.recommended for 40 kbps and above.
The others (les autres)
yahoo! Seems to be the next most popular mainly because of brand value and good marketing. It also offers some good services.

rediff is the poor man's mail client, very useful for those who cannot afford faster speeds.
Live mail, owned by Microsoft and has the honor of being the pioneer, so should be good, let's see some other time
oh! And also zapak!

note: this is topic on which views may vary
but i encourage comments. Please have your say on which mail utility you prefer.

alternate search engines

2008-03-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

As the world of the internet grows in size by the day , we are left with virtually no option but to seek help from the 'mighty' search engines. And note, that it is not wrong to term these as 'mighty'. For example, have a look at GooGle ( just in the rarest, most unrealistic case; if anyone out there reading this article has not heard about GooGle, please do visit http://www.google.com/ ) **
**actually i would advise you to ignore whatever is enclosed in the brackets
above because it is clear that if one happens to be reading this post , then one
SHOULD be knowing about google.
Okay, now back lets get back to the topic . . . . . . err . . what was i talking about????. . . . . yeah, google. So, as i was saying google, the mightiest and most popular search, but , then what makes it so popular is the fact that it provides us with the most relevant search results for majority of our queries. A newbie would ask, why yahoo and live search (a.k.a msn) don't provide similar results?
Well, what makes the big difference here is the search algorithm p.s: it is rumoured that Google's search algorithm is more than a million lines long (actually much more than a million) .
now back to the point:
exactly how do you find out where these search engines?????????
um.....well....let's google it.
and we get something that shows why some people worship google as god.
ALL the results are relevant.
the first one: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alternative_search_engines.php
looked interesting......... clicked on it!
well the list was really long and well most sounded alien to me.
then i came across 2 which i have heard about but never bothered to waste by bandwidth on: riya and rollyo.

rollyo a beautifully designed red and white engine is part of the much hyped-about web 2.0 phenomenon.it is much more of a community search. it is actually a huge collection of search engines which can be built by any average net user (that's the community part). so no need to browse through the results that the popular web engines give you because the results given here are suggested by users who have found them usefull.

the interface is very simple. you quickly browse through the 'search roll' depending on the category. this site would be really good for reference work. if it gets the required boost it can surely be the next competitor to google.

Processors: just what u need to know!

2008-03-15T10:16:00.001-07:00

processors............. the monsters that power today's world.........well at least the world of computing. one of the most rapidly advancing sectors in computing. core 2 series have brought in the era of the dominance of multi-core processors.newer multiple core processors are going to make their entry soon.

back to basics, what is a processor???? they are literally numerical crunching monsters that are always eager to consume a few thousands of floating point numbers. it is no exaggeration.

now that we are 'somewhat' clear with what a processor basically is , let's go into the details. first of all when we talk processors the first thing that comes to our minds (um.... well...atleast mine) is INTEL. intel whose processors are highly sought after and are regarded as the best shares the processor market with AMD another market giant. there is always a raging battle between these very competitive companies. the result of which is the drop in processor prices of both camps making computing power ridiculously cheap. processors which would dent a rs. 28,000 hole in our pockets are now up for grabs at around rs. 8000.

it is also surprising to note that the one can get a processor for even rs. 1500 that is from AMD. today we see nothing more than 3-4 Ghz, but we soon will.

point to note: cell phone processors are much faster than pc processors. so it won't be too long before either intel or Amd bring super computing to the desktop.............

......................................i'am in a hurry to end this post here. this is my first post so i've concentrated more on style. please send in your opinions and what you want to see in these columns. till then the wait is on for intel to release nehalem and amd to release fusion...............

for those wondering what these are: they are the hybrids........... 'believe-or-not'

GPU+CPU cores in one package.............. that would be a killer product in today's value sensitive market.

2008-03-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

"hello world!!"
the famous sentence with which programmers formally declare their entry into the world of coding, i dunno about others but atleast i did.................... but i am repeating it to mark the beginning of my blogging career. don't be dissapointed readers this blog is going to grow bigger very soon. this is just the beginning.......................................