Technicism

From Adobe to Apple

2011-03-09T20:25:00.001+11:00

If you were one of the people who just loved Apple's spat with Adobe over Flash support - or rather, Flash non-support, because Apple won't let it onto iOS devices - then we've got bad news for you.

Flash is coming to the iPhone, the iPad and the iPad 2. IN YOUR FACE, FLASH HATERS!

Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that. Steve Jobs hasn't changed his mind, and iOS hasn't got a secret Enable Flash switch. What's changed is at Adobe's end. Its new Wallaby tool takes a Flash file and turns it into HTML5, which means it'll work quite happily in Mobile Safari.

Adobe stresses that Wallaby is basic - it's an Adobe Labs experiment rather than a complete piece of software - but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. Does it mean the end of Apple's Flash ban - or is it the beginning of the end of Flash itself?

I don't want to keep you in suspense. The answer to both questions is no.

So what's happening here?

It's all about the ads

In the short term, this is about ads. Flash ads don't work on iOS devices, so if Adobe can make it easy for site builders to turn their Flash ads into HTML5 ones then it'll make a lot of people happy.

That's essentially what Wallaby does: it takes basic flash ads and repackages them.If you're looking for a tool that turns your multimedia extravaganza or game into something that you can stick on an iPad, Wallaby isn't it.

In the longer term? Flash was created to do things HTML simply couldn't, such as animation and later, video. As HTML and related technologies have evolved, developers have been able to do more and more things in HTML5; over time, the lines between "things you can only do in Flash" and "things you can easily do in HTML5" have blurred.

As that process continues, Adobe can do two things. It can do nothing, put its fingers in its ears and go "NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH CAN'T HEAR YOU" and try to squeeze as much cash out of Flash as it can before it becomes obsolete.

Or it can look at ways for its tools to be the market leaders not just in Flash creation, but in HTML5 creation too - and it can look for ways in which its tools can make life easier for designers and devs who need to create for IE and iPads.

That's what I think is going on here, because that's what Adobe does.

Photoshop was originally something you used for print; when the web came along, Adobe changed it and made it something you use for print and web. InDesign was originally something you used to make print publications; when publications went digital InDesign went digital too.

Wallaby isn't an admission of defeat. It's Adobe hedging its bets.

May 31: Day to quit Facebook

2010-05-17T23:11:00.000+10:00

Has that time finally arrived when you’d be better off deleting your Facebook account? If so, then May 31 is looking like D-Day.

A website called Quit Facebook Day has set the last day of May as the day everyone keen to leave the social network should finally take the plunge and hit the Delete key.

Several high profile technology pundits and celebs are kicking the world's number one social networking site to the curb.

The bridge too far has been Facebook's recent introduction of a platform that, by default, gives third-party companies access to members' names, friend lists and hobbies to "personalise" their surfing experience.

When a member logs onto a partner site, such as Yelp or Pandora, the content displayed is shaped by their own interests, as well as the activities of their Facebook friends. To disable this feature, a manual opt-out is required.

According to a security expert website, Facebook users unwittingly expose themselves to five dangers that might be beyond their control: their information is shared with third parties; their privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign; malware from Facebook advertisements; fake profiles from scammers; and real friends who unknowingly make them vulnerable.

Google Canada reports that the top online search related to "Facebook account" is "delete Facebook," while the fastest-rising related query is "deactivate Facebook account," up 40 per cent over the past 90 days.

Worldwide, the search engine's results on Facebook account deletion ballooned from 15.9 million to 19.5 million between May 11 and 13 alone. There are 400 million members in total.

Privacy and security must be dirty words at the Facebook HQ at the moment as the world's largest social media network comes under fire for its privacy policy that has left users exposed and vulnerable.

Amazingly, it was reported that Facebook's privacy policy is a whopping 5,830 words long, even more verbose than the Constitution of the United States which reads at 4,543 words. Meanwhile, Facebook is making it difficult for users to delete their accounts. Let's wait for May 31!

My Take On The iPad – It Rocks!

2010-02-07T12:53:00.002+11:00

Few days ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed the world the iPad. During the presentation, I had a good time making fun of the new device with the interesting name. I tweeted, Apple will introduce a big screen version call the MaxiPad plus a small screen version call the iPad with Wings.

There were a bunch of features missing from the iPad that many people were hoping for, like a camera, SD card reader, USB, etc. Judging by the Twitter streams and many blog posts I’ve read, most are calling the new device a failure. However, I believe the iPad rocks and is going to be a massive win for Apple.

It’s Not Meant To Replace An iPhone Or A Macbook

The iPad is not an iPhone or a Macbook. Stop thinking of it as such. It’s a brand new category. Had Apple put features like card readers, USB, cameras, etc., the only thing they’ll be doing is cannibalizing their laptop sales. That’s what netbooks did to laptops and it’s the reason why 90% of laptops sold for $1,000 or more are Apple Macbooks. No, Steve Jobs is not dumb enough to make the same mistake PCs did with the Netbook.

Amazon Should Be Worried

With a starting price of $499, the iPad is only $10 more than a Kindle DX. Anyone in the market for an eBook reader is going to think seriously about the iPad. For $10 more, you can get a device that can do so much more than read books. Who wouldn’t go for that?

While E-ink is a great way to display written pages it has limitations. The contrast is still too low and it’s only black and white. While the iPad’s LED screen may cause eye strain sooner it has the ability display materials that e-ink doesn’t perform well at, like comic books, children books and text books.

The Kindle is designed for linear reading. It doesn’t work well for non linear materials like text books or the bible, where you’re scanning through chapters or verses. I have the NIV Bible on both my Kindle and my iPhone and the iPhone verison works way better. The Kindle navigation is extremely cumbersome. I can navigate to a verse in less than five seconds on my iPhone compare to 30 seconds for the Kindle.

The main advantage the Kindle has right now is the size of Amazon’s library. However, giving the marketing power of Apple, I suspect the iBookstore is going to get huge really quick. Don’t be surprised if you see Amazon announce a price reduction on the Kindle in 60 days.

At $499, It’s An Impulse Purchase

Had the iPad been priced at $999 as some speculated, the iPad would have been a massive failure. However, at $499 this thing is a game changer. People would buy it just for the novelty factor alone . At this price, Apple is going to sell millions of these things and it’s going to create a whole new revenue channel for them not just in iPad sales, but book sales as well. The iPad could do for books what the iPod did for music.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

Some Very Useful Websites !!!

2010-01-24T12:14:00.001+11:00

Did u know that the un-catalogued information on the net is around 500 times more than the information that is catalogued by the search engines?

So I thought of sharing with you links of some websites which can prove useful to us. You can comment on some other useful websites with description so that we can share it with others.

www.bhookh.com Lets start with 2 minute charity. Donate without money, with just one click

www.bored.com Some cute games & applications to try it if you are bored!

www.picanswers.com Post a picture/photo & ask a community questions about it.

www.wigflip.com/signbot Make your own animated scrolling text LED sign.

www.a1vbcode.com The ultimate VB, VB.NET, ASP, and ASP.NET source code resource.

www.hypergurl.com Learn how to create, improve and promote a website.

www.tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ Use this online tool to easily create favorite icons

www.dynamicdrive.com #1 place on the net to obtain free, original DHTML & Javascripts to enhance your web site

www.mindtools.com This site will help u do develop your leadership skills, management capabilities, problem solving skills, memory improvement. Do not think as just n ordinary advertisement site. The designers are really serious about helping their visitors. The site is designed my some great experts who have been active in the field of social services for a long time.

www.star28.net/snow.html Let the Penguin Write Your Name in Snow!

www.printwhatyoulike.com/

With this online utility, you can remove ads, images of a webpage before printing. You can also change font size or font type. Save money and environment by reducing paper and ink usage.

www.quillpad.com It is a free online typing tool. You can write/email in 10 Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu etc. with its online editor.

www.crosstips.org If you like to play crossword it gives u hint when u r stuck somewhere.

www.ted.com Powerful and Inspiring talks!

http://indiarailinfo.com/ This is an interesting site that helps you visualize the current geographical location of any train in India. Just type train name or train number and check its exact location on the map.

http://www.befunky.com/cartoonizer/index.phphttp://www.befunky.com/cartoonizer/index.php

Try this!

Just upload the image or capture one live using the webcam and convert it in to the cartoon image. It can be downloaded or you can either convert the picture into a black and white pencil sketch or a colored one.

http://postcard.fm/ Send audio postcards to your friends

http://www.indianchild.com/amazing_facts.htm Collection of interesting facts, strange facts, and fun trivia

http://www.didyouknow.org/ Fascinating facts and useful trivia factoids about people, products and places

http://www.ranksheet.com/ 100% Free Online Certification and Job. Free Online exams in Windows,.Net, SQL Server, PHP, My SQL, Linux, J2EE, Oracle and more

http://beeks.eu/Screensaver.htm You will find 14 different clock screensavers on this site.

The handwritten one is very cool and the timeline is very slick.

http://www.freewarefiles.com/ Free Downloads of over 14000 free software programs. All freeware downloads include ratings, reviews and screen shots.

http://www.meebo.com/ chatting for all messenger. Can chat with http port on computers where chatting is blocked.

http://www.brainyquote.com/ Your source for famous quotes and quotations from thousands of famous people.

http://www.scribd.com/ Free online Library & Reference for any document or topic.

http://www.lifetips.com/ Actual tips, tricks & tricks to lead a good life

www.desktopnexus.com Good website for free nice wallpapers

www.savevid.com Download youtube videos with this online tool as FLV or MP4 format.

http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/ Animal Corner is an animal encyclopedia that can be used by students and teachers or anyone wishing to learn about animals and their environments. Animal Corner is constantly expanding, featuring new animal species from around the world regularly. Use the menu on the left to learn about various types of animals from different parts of the world or click on Alan the Ape to visit animals in general.

www.photofunia.com Provides a variety of cool backgrounds to edit your photos

www.blogbard.com Convert your favorite blog into audio and listen to it

www.pixelgroovy.com Tutorials for Adobe Photoshop, Java and many more software’s.

www.educationsupport.nic.in Government website for info on scholarships, fellowships etc..

http://www.coloringpage.org/ Online coloring pages for kids of all ages with a variety of drawings to print and paint. All coloring books are free for everyone to enjoy.

http://www.fun4child.com/paint_online/house_k01m.html Draw a House paint picture online for kids. You and your child can paint online this picture. Fun this free Paint online game. Draw a House online paint game.

www.freebookspot.in This is an excellent website for any kind of book u needed if u doesn’t get any books in torrent try this it will be helpful for professional and various seasonal educationists

http://www.wordle.net/ Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

http://fixmypcandmac.com Free tech Support for Windows, Mac, Linux, Router, Servers etc

http://listverse.com/ The ultimate site for top 10 list of every topic ranging from crime to religion.

http://www.testq.com/career/quizzes/show/121 Comprising of 40 questions, this site gives a complete analysis of your intellect. Do try this one when u are free…

http://www.devx.com/DevX/Door/6947 DevX.com helps software, web developers and IT professionals get answers to tough development questions. Other features are a buyer’s guide, an event calendar that covers significant events in the computer industry, a career link, and a searchable database.

http://trendy.org/magic/interactivemagic.html Home of the original mind-reading Mysterious Rabbit ™ interactive card trick along with a few other interactive oddities.

http://www.readprint.com/ A good place for bookworms to read books free. It is an online library which offers thousands of books for students, teachers and enthusiasts.

http://www.howjsay.com/ This site is dictionary but it also tells how to pronounce a word. If you are not sure how to pronounce a word just key it in the text box and when it appears in pink, move your mouse over and it will pronounce the word for you.

http://www.querycat.com/ This is a questions and answers site which answer almost FAQs with over 5 million Qs and As and could be one of the biggest FAQ database on the net.

http://www.photonhead.com/ For shutterbugs, this site offers everything you needed to know about photography. a beginner’ s guide, buying guides, for cameras, tips on photography as well as photo editing. The resource also offers camera reviews and a few easy tutorials.

http://www.dafont.com/ Archive of freely downloadable fonts. Browse by alphabetical listing, by style, by author or by popularity

http://www.howtocleananything.com/ If you need the answer to how to clean something quickly this website probably has the answer

http://www.xe.com/ Currency converter covering every world currency.

http://www.ehow.com/ Learn how to do just about everything at eHow, the world’s most popular place to find How To instructions. New on eHow: Publish your own

http://www.addtoany.com/ Help your visitors share, save and subscribe to your content with AddToAny widgets

http://www.encalc.com/ Encalc is an online scientific calculator. Its strength lies in its ability handle units and dimensional analysis, to define variables and its large database of constants. Parenthesis and scientific formulas are also supported.

Encalc can be used for unit conversions and dimensional analysis. To convert from Metric to US Customary Units, try inputting “2 cm + 3 meters expressed in feet” and hit “Encalc!” Other conversions are handled similarly.

http://www.googlefight.com/ Googlefight is a website that allows users to compare the number of search results returned by Google for two given queries

http://www.powerset.com/ A better way to search and discover information in Wikipedia articles.

www.quotesdaddy.com Over 1000000 Life quotes, Death quotes, Funny quotes, Love quotes, Inspiring quotes and many more. If you need it, the Quotes Daddy quotes it.

http://www.clocklink.com/ ClockLink offers a huge selection of online flash clocks that can be easily added to almost any webpage

http://www.howstuffworks.com/ The name itself gives away what the site is all about… This site answers questions about the way all kinds of things work– from refrigerators to computers to the human body.

http://www.errorkey.com/ Search engine for Error codes and messages.

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest This site provides a One-Click solution that looks at your computer’s hardware and system software to determine whether or not your current system can run a product. Each of your computer’s components is evaluated to see how well it meets the minimum and recommended requirements for specific products. Recommendations are made on how to update or upgrade each component which does not meet the listed requirements. Sometimes, a simple, free software download is all that is needed. Sometimes you’ll find that you need a different video card to fully experience what the game has to offer

http://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov/index.htm This site provides facts about common household products. It discusses possible safety hazards and health effects. You can enter the name of a household product and the site provides explanations about ingredients and health information related to automotive products, landscaping, pesticides, pet care products, products used during arts and crafts, personal care and home maintenance.

http://www.straightdope.com/ This site brings all the strange question & answers at you fingertips, like what does OK stand for??? What is a MOJO?

www.ezinemart.com Read and download all Indian Magazines for free

Thanks to all my online communities & friends for sharing with me the above information

5 Worst Websites

2009-11-27T19:33:00.002+11:00

What is it that makes a site good or bad? The answers are sure to differ. However, tardy navigation, old design and features, and intrusive ads are sure spoilers for Netizens worldwide on a website.

Time.com has come out with a listing of what it calls 5 Worst Websites. According to it, these are the sites users may want to think twice before logging in to.

Over to 5 Worst Websites.....

1. eHarmony.com

Topping the Time's Worst Websites list is eHarmony.com. The site claims to be the `#1 trusted online dating site for singles'. However, Time.com seems to differ. According to it, after making users answer some 436 compatibility survey questions and taking its premium charges ($21 to $60 a month), the site many a times delivers terrible recommendations -- or worse, even rejects users as unmatchable.

Also, eHarmony.com's advice to users to continue with it for several months to improve their odds of finding a soul mate too looks self-serving, considering that the longer a user stays with the site, the more he pays.

2. Evite.com

Next on list is Evite.com, a popular online invitation and social planning website. Time.com writes that the site is crying for an overhaul. In today's time when UGC (user-generated content) rules the roost, Evite's fill-in-the-blanks approach appears clumsy and dated. The ads on the site too are said to be intrusive, and navigation a drag.

The site has also been rather slow in adopting some of the media-sharing tools that have become almost a standard way of the Web. Incidentally, many of these features are said to be in development.

3. Meez.com

The virtual hangout Meez.com too makes it to the Worst Websites list. It may be a trend to tack poems, photos, icons, logos etc onto e-mail messages, however, the 3D animations and other digital doodads created with the help of Meez and other sites of its ilk - Blingee, Iconator - are just plain annoying, writes Time.

Plus, these also end up clogging the recipient's inbox with unnecessary bits. Though the Meez.com insists that the app is not a spyware or an adware, however, it still slows down one's computer.

4. MySpace.com

This name will surely surprise most Netizens. For, MySpace is not only one of the most popular social networking sites, but also happened to be the no. 1 social networking site till sometime back.

However, lately the MySpace community seems to have become infested with marketers and other opportunists who create false profiles and spam other users, all under the guise of “making friends.”

According to Time.com, though MySpace has always been known to carry loads of profiles of fictional characters, created to help market a movie or promote some brand, the recent `bait-and-switch tactics' have turned the things a bit sad.

5. SecondLife.com

Another hugely popular site on the list is a virtual world Second Life. The site has not only people logging in, but also has companies such as IBM, Cisco and our very own Wipro among its members.

However, according to Time.com, SecondLife.com is notoriously slow to load and difficult to navigate, even with a broadband connection. Users interact in the space through an avatar, but creating and personalizing of this animated representations of oneself is tedious. Most sites offer a learning curve for new users, but there is no such consideration on Second Life.

Also, "there are crazy people around every corner - disruptive types who spread graffiti and get in your way and throw you off your groove," writes Time.

Are you looking for an ex-lover?

2009-09-23T06:49:00.001+10:00

Most people look for their long lost love on the Internet, a new survey has found.

The study found that one out of four people are using social networking sites like Facebook to search a childhood sweetheart.

Search engine Ask Jeeves claims that nine per cent even confessed trying to know details of a one-night stand.

Thirty seven per cent said they wanted to learn about their ex to just "see what they were doing these days," reports the Sun.

However, only four per cent wanted to rekindle the romance.

Twenty per cent apparently ignored an emailed request to break the ice with long-lost former boyfriend or girlfriend.

Surprisingly, four per cent even looked for former flame to just inform them how happy they were without them, while three per cent searched to find out how miserable their ex were.

Apart from searching for previous lovers the poll also suggested that a trend of ''vanity searching,'' which means looking for yourself on the net, has become increasingly popular.

In fact, 59 per cent admitted they had typed in their own name, with the men apparently doing it more than women.

The survey claimed two thirds of men compared to just over half of women did vanity searching.

How to turn your iPod into iPhone

2009-03-23T21:08:00.000+11:00

I try to keep a stiff upper lip about not having an iPhone. Just couldn't afford it -- not with the $75 a month or so AT&T charges for service on top of the $199 upfront cost for the device.

I could, however, afford the $229 iPod Touch -- and got it as a gift, as it happened. It has most of the same goodies: a Web browser, email, YouTube. And it stores way more music than the iPhone. Plus, the other day I used it to call China.

Yup, a call around the world -- on a device that doesn't have a phone. A handful of applications on Apple Inc's iTunes store will let you do this, as long as you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot.

My iPhone complex hasn't disappeared, but at least now I have a device that looks just like it, has no monthly service fees, and lets me make free or cheap phone calls.

The best part of these applications -- which require the second-generation iPod Touch that came out last year -- is that they are free to download, and calls to other people using the same app won't cost you anything.

Two of the services I've tried, Truphone and Fring, will also let you make free calls to Google Talk users and type instant messages to friends online. Both automatically queue up a list of buddies from different services you might have, including Gmail chat, AIM and MSN Messenger, once you log in.

But it's Truphone's pay feature that puts it ahead of the others. TruPhone charges you to make calls to landlines or regular cell phones, but generally at better rates than most wireless carriers. And it's upfront about what you pay.

Your balance -- which you can add to with a credit card, either on the device or on your computer browser -- pops up with the dial screen. Calls in the US are all 5 cents per minute (2 cents if you sign up to pay a $4 monthly fee).

Rates outside the US vary wildly but you can check in the application before you dial. To call cell phones in China, for instance, is only 5 cents per minute, while France is 25 cents. Antarctica? A whopping $2.25.

You can make regular calls with Fring using a Skype account, but that's another layer to deal with.

The calls on these services sound pretty good, a little tinny but clearer than my regular cell phone connection. IPod Touch users will need Apple's $29 ear buds that have a tiny microphone on the back of the volume control along the cord.

The most serious drawback is the most obvious: While the iPhone uses AT&T's wireless network to provide Internet access anywhere, on the iPod Touch you'll need to stick to Wi-Fi hot spots.

For rural or suburban dwellers who don't encounter lots of free Wi-Fi zones, that may very well mean limiting yourself to your house, or other places where there's a computer with the same Internet phone call capabilities anyway.

That means these apps probably won't replace your cellphone. But they can moderate your iPhone envy.

World's 10 worst passwords

2009-03-23T21:07:00.001+11:00

'123456' is the most common password used by people on the Internet.

Obscenities, names of fast cars and even ncc1701 -- the ship number for Star Trek's Starship Enterprise, have made it to the list of top 500 worst passwords of all time.

Compiled by Whatsmypass.com, the list features passwords most commonly used by Internet users.

And topping the list of the most common password is 123456, followed by "password" in second place.

Other popular password choices were first names, repeated letters and numbers, pop-culture references.

Even batman, bond007 and cocacola made it to the list, reports the Courier Mail.

The website said that almost one out of nine people use at least one of the passwords mentioned on the list, and one out of every 50 people use one from the top 20.

In fact, a study commissioned by digital communications agency @www found that an average adult had as many as 15 passwords to remember.

But 61 per cent of people used the same passwords for as many different accounts as possible in order to make life easier.

What iPhone 3.0 means to users

2009-03-22T14:59:00.002+11:00

Apple has just previewed its OS 3.0 for the iPhone, featuring 100 new features. With the new release, Apple aims to further strengthen its presence in the smartphone market.

Incidentally, last year too Apple introduced iPhone 2.0 at a March event. This was followed by iPhone 3G launch two months later.

Here's what the new Apple software, iPhone 3.0, exactly offers to the users.

When do I get iPhone 3.0?

The software is available for outside developers interested in building mini-programs for popular iPhones and iPod Touch MP3 players, however, the operating system will not be publically released until mid-year.

The company blamed security and user-interface design complexities for the delay in adding it to iPhone's operating system. Analysts are betting on the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), likely to take place in early June this year, as the platform for the introduction of new iPhone models.

How much will the upgrade cost me?

iPhone users, including those holding first-generation iPhones, will be able to upgrade to 3.0 for free. However, iPod Touch users, first or second generation, will have to shell out $9.95 for the update.

The new operating system runs on the latest version of the iPhone, released last year, as well as the original model.

What's new in iPhone 3.0?

A lot, according to Apple and analysts. "It's a significant update," said Gartner analyst Van Baker. The improvements in iPhone 3.0 address some of the complaints that iPhones lacked functions basic in competitors such as the Blackberry Storm, the Google Android G1, and the as-yet-unreleased Palm Pre.

What's the biggest new feature?

So far the most analysts say the biggest addition is the much longed-for cut-and-paste feature. Says Gartner's Baker, "When it ships, cut, copy and paste as well as multimedia-media messages will resonate most with consumers."

The feature will let users highlight text with a tap, drag it, deselect it by shaking the phone, or to copy and paste it into another application.

Users can copy and paste photos, as well as select multiple photos -- also a first on the iPhone -- to paste into an email message.

What else?

Also, top on most lists is the new Apple app-wide search -- Spotlight -- to match the integrated search within Mac OS X that will let users search through Mail, Calendar, Notes and iPod on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Prsently, the only available search was in Contacts.

iPhone 3.0 also lets accessory makers connect devices, such as radios, to Apple's smartphones.Another big miss in iPhone 2.0, makes its presence with upgrade. Users will now be able to read and compose email and text messages in landscape mode.

MMS will be added, which means that photos, contacts and audio files can be sent with the messages application. 3G iPhones will also have stereo Bluetooth after the software update, which allows for wireless stereo headsets to connect to the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Will iPhone 3.0 allow me to run more than one app at a time?

For those users who, say, want to keep their IM open and still do other stuff, Apple has finally added the much-awaited push notification to the iPhone. The push notification would allow developers to build applications that can provide automatic alerts of items such as sports results or the arrival of an instant message.

The alerts would show up automatically even if the user is in another application. It will also allow developers to offer subscriptions and sell content within their applications that have items for sale within them, such as electronic books or additional levels of a video game. And developers will be able to access the music within users' iPhone libraries, so songs they own can be included in games, for example.

Do first-gen iPhone users get everything in iPhone 3.0?

Sorry, no. According to Apple, the older hardware doesn't support MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and stereo Bluetooth A2DP. There may be some other features too that may not work on the original iPhone, however, so far Apple has only mentioned these two omissions.

What is missing in iPhone 3.0?

Upgrades did not include being able to record video with iPhones or play video made using Adobe's ubiquitous Flash software; an omission deeply irking many iPhone owners.

During a question-and-answer session, Apple executives responded with "No comment" to clamors for video recording and compatibility with Flash.

"They did not address the camera, which is a fairly low quality for a smartphone these days, and they also did not mention video support, which would be nice to see," said Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin.

94% of Facebook users hate new design

2009-03-22T14:48:00.000+11:00

Facebook's redesign is getting an emphatic thumbs down from the notoriously change-wary users of the social network.

Ninety-four per cent of the nearly 800,000 Facebook users who have voted in a poll on the site said they do not like the changes rolled out in the past two weeks.

Only six per cent said they approve the redesign.

Among those writing comments alongside the poll, user Nik McCarthy said the change "Pretty much sucks. Better before."

"I was still figuring it out and it changed," said Melissa Reed, and user Mark Wysocki wrote that the design was too cluttered, with "way too much information."

"Bring back the old style," he urged.

"Hard to navigate," said Chanel Chartrand. "Really don't like it."

Mara Soriano was among the minority who liked the changes. "I think it's fantastic," she wrote.

As TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington wrote, Facebook maybe should have heeded the old saw: "Don't ask a question you don't want the answer to."

Changes to the home page include making the status update question "What's on your mind?" adding real-time Twitter-like chatter and tools that let people organize and filter messages or updates from those listed as "friends."

The fast-growing Facebook boasts more than 175 million members and founder Mark Zuckerberg believes the number will reach 200 million by the end of this year.

Google removes street images

2009-03-22T14:44:00.000+11:00

US software giant Google said Friday it had removed several images from its Street View software, which allows web surfers to view parts of 25 British cities, after users raised privacy concerns.

Street View displays 360-degree ground-level images captured by roaming cars using digital photography equipment.

The cars began taking images last summer, and continue to capture images across the country, allowing the service to expand after its launch here on Thursday.

Just 24 hours after its release in Britain, however, Google said it had removed several pictures, including ones that users found embarrassing, such as one of a man leaving a sex shop in central London's Soho neighbourhood, or another one of a man vomiting outside a pub in the east of the British capital.

A spokeswoman for the American Internet company declined to confirm the precise number of photos that were removed, but said it had been "less than expected."

Individual Internet users who do not want either their image or that of their home to be used in Street View can request it be taken off Google's database by filling out an online form.

Google says it has developed sophisticated software that ensures that individual's faces and vehicle license plates are blurred.

After initially being launched in the United States in May 2007, Street View is now available in Britain, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

Sweet tweets: making Twitter sing for you

2009-03-17T20:24:00.000+11:00

Two years after winning the top blog award at an indie festival in the deep south of the United States, micro-blogging site Twitter has grown in size and popularity.

On September 2007, internet tracking company Nielsen Online found Twitter had 533,000 US users.

One year later, it had 2.4 million users. That's a 343 per cent growth, making Twitter the fastest growing social networking site for the US in September 2008.

Famous personalities using Twitter include British comedian Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), pro cyclist Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) and US actress Demi Moore (@mrskutcher).

Here, Twitter's growth has been greater. It had a 520 per cent increase in the same time period, local web tracking company Hitwise reports. Users were spending 30 minutes on the site, 19 minutes more than the average time spent on other sites. Top federal politicians PM Kevin Rudd (@KevinRuddPM) and Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) have adopted the 140-words-a-post platform.

British technology commentator James Harkin wrote that Twitter "more than just a social networking site: Tweeting is changing the way we think." Even Facebook was impressed with Twitter - it started talks to buy it out - but they fell through.

But Twitter, as its name suggests, is like a large aviary of birds - with all the birds bursting into song at the same time. While the bare-bones nature of the site's interface encourages new users, making sense of all the dialogue taking place on it is harder.

So how do you differentiate from one user to another? How do you find people with similar interests? How do you make your tweets sing louder than all others?

A range of Twitter-related websites and apps have sprung up to deal with such questions. They attempt to categorise, spruik and manage users' tweets.

Here's 10 of the many we've found out there:

1. WeFollow

WeFollow is a user-powered Twitter directory that aims to group users according to labels that are determined by the users themselves. Twitter users just need to send @wefollow #yourtag #yourtag #yourtag (replace '#yourtag' w/the tags you'd like to be listed under, example: #blogger - max 3 tags)

2. Monitter

As you can tell from the name of the site, Monitter is a web tool to help people monitor tweets through keywords and locations. It's real time, and so a great way to get on-the-spot reactions.

3. TwitterLocal

It's an app you can download to filter tweets by location.

4. TweetStats

It helps you generate graphs from your tweets to analyse your tweet timeline (tweets per day), tweet density, aggregate daily tweets, aggregate hourly tweets, interfaces used to access twitter and even replies to (@personyouarereplyingto). It also logs the latest trending stats, trend clouds and the top 50 trends of all time.

5. twistori

A random visualisation of what people are tweeting on six themes - love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish.

6. Tweet O'Clock

Trying to get the attention of another Twitter user? This web app allows you to enter a Twitter username to get the time within a week when they are most likely to be online. The only problem for Australian users? It gives the the results in US or UK local times.

7. Twitter Jobcast

Looking for work in the US? Twitter Jobcast simplifies your search of the site for available jobs and for those looking for one. You can narrow down your search by choosing one of 32 US cities.

8. Twitrans

Exactly what it says above. Send your tweets to @twitrans in English, specifying what language you want it translated to, and hey pesto!, it comes back to you translated. Great since there are many users out there who surf the net in another language.

9. Twittown Blog

All the latest news that's fit to print about Twitter.

10. Remember the Milk

Yes, this is about managing your daily tasks such as remembering to buy that carton of Low Fat High Calcium Strong Bones etc etc Milk. Just add @rtm as your friend, sent @rtm a direct message with the task and the time you want to be reminded about it. (It was first set up by a Sydney team in October 2005, long before Twitter went live.)

And ... if you are looking to access Twitter on the go, here's a few mobile apps:

iPhone

Twitterrific, Twinkle, Twittelator, TwitterFon, Twitfire.

Blackberry

TwitterBerry, Tiny Twitter, Twibble, BlackBird.

Windows Mobile smartphones

ceTwit, SQIJ, Twobile.

'Nokia 5800 speakers defective'

2009-02-28T13:40:00.001+11:00

Are you among the proud owners of Nokia's recently launched 5800 XpressMusic, or planning to soon buy the touchscreen phone? Here's an important piece of news for you.

According to a Russian tech website Mobile-Review, nearly all 5800 XpressMusic devices manufactured before February come with defective speakers. The ones that may not be showing problems now are likely to go defective sooner or later.

In an official statement from Nokia, Vitoria Eremena, head of Nokia PR for Eurasia, reportedly told Mobile-Review, "The problematic speakers were replaced with speakers from another supplier, both in production and warehouses. I’d like to emphasise that we have replaced not only the speakers but also their supplier, i.e. at the moment we use speakers from the new supplier at our manufacturing plants, as well as in our service centers. It is very easy to confirm this, because the new speakers are visually different. Service centers started receiving the new speakers during the last decade of January, so all users who replaced the speakers since then shouldn’t face this problem."

The mail which is a translation from Russian says, "If you had to replace your speakers, from the end of January -- everything should be all right; if you bought the phone earlier and you have problems, now they can truly be solved in service centers by replacing the speakers."

However, so far there is no official confirmation on whether the shipments to India too have been affected or not.

Interestingly, the touchscreen phone that is available at almost half the price of its other touchscreen rivals, including Apple iPhone, recently made headlines for a new sales record in India with over 58,000 units sold within three weeks of its launch.

Twitter experiments with money-making schemes

2009-02-16T19:06:00.000+11:00

Twitter has spawned a new way to communicate by limiting messages to 140 keystrokes. So here's a way to describe the internet's latest craze within Twitter's space restrictions:

It's a potluck of pithy self-expression simmering with whimsy, narcissism, voyeurism, hucksterism, tedium and sometimes useful information.

One vital ingredient has been missing from the mix so far - revenue. That raises questions about whether the nearly three-year-old service can make the leap from intriguing fad to sustainable business.

Twitter intends to start testing ways to make money this year. And co-founder Evan Williams promises it won't drive away the more than 6 million people who have set up accounts on the unconventional communications network.

"We don't see any reason why this can't be a very large and profitable entity," said Williams, the San Francisco-based company's chief executive. "We have enough traffic on our website that we could put ads on there and maybe we could make enough to pay our bills, but that's not the most interesting thing we can do."

Williams, 36, won't say what he has in mind besides selling ads, but he and the handful of other people who own privately held Twitter seem confident the mystery strategy will pay off - even as a devastating recession destroys much-larger companies.

Just three months ago, Twitter rejected a $US500 million takeover offer from an even bigger phenomenon, Facebook, the owner of the world's largest online hangout.

Although shooing away Facebook was risky, Twitter still isn't under immense pressure to generate revenue. The 29-employee company has already raised $US55 million, including a $US35 million round recently completed with Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.

Like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other communal websites that have become internet sensations, Twitter gives people a stage where they can express themselves and connect with kindred spirits.

Twitter's twist is a more succinct approach, which has been likened to the 21st-century version of a telegraph.

Here's how Twitter works: After setting up a free account, people are encouraged to post frequent updates about what they are doing, seeing and feeling. The messages, known as "tweets," must be limited to 140 characters and can be sent from a mobile phone or a computer.

Although the updates are available for anyone to see, Twitter users usually set up their accounts to monitor the tweets of people they know or admire. These "followers" are automatically fed tweets from the people they are shadowing.

With more than 265,000 people tracking his messages, President Barack Obama has the most Twitter followers even though neither he nor his staff have tweeted since he moved into the White House last month.

Many other politicians and celebrities, such as basketball star Shaquille O'Neal (more than 72,000 followers) and former rap music sensation MC Hammer (more than 55,000) regularly share tweets.

Twitter also has become a way to peek at dramas unfolding behind closed doors.

When Yahoo laid off hundreds of workers last year, some of the casualties used Twitter to provide a blow-by-blow account of their final day at the office. Surgeons at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit recently gave a rare glimpse inside an operating room by tweeting about the removal of a tumor from a patient's kidney.

Twitter also has proven to be a valuable source for breaking news, sometimes even beating long-established media outlets to the punch.

When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River last month, a picture of the accident scene was quickly posted on Twitter by Janis Krums, a Sarasota, Fla., entrepreneur who was on one of the ferries that rescued passengers from the water. In November, Twitter provided harrowing, first-person accounts of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 164 people.

But Twitter mostly amplifies the humdrum of ordinary folks with apparently nothing better to do but share their monotony. There's plenty of posts along these lines: "Sitting at Corner Bakery in Frisco, Texas. Lunch was good." Or, "Another boring day at work, ugh." Or even, "I really do enjoy picking my nose." (A widely practiced pastime, based on recent tweets).

Finding out what's happening on Twitter is getting easier through a search engine called Summize that the company snapped up for an undisclosed amount last summer.

Both Williams and another Twitter founder, Biz Stone, suggested the search technology could emerge as their company's crown jewel. Its value lies in its ability to quickly sift through a steady stream of tweets to provide almost instantaneous insights about what's going on around the corner or around the world. Not even Google's internet-leading search engine can match that now.

Stone relates how he used Twitter's search engine to ease his anxiety after he recently heard loud noises around his neighborhood. A quick search on Twitter informed him it was just a local celebration down the road.

The search engine will become even more valuable if people keep flocking to Twitter.

The site attracted 2.7 million U.S. visitors in December, a nearly eight-fold rise from the end of 2007, according to Nielsen Online. But Twitter's traffic increasingly is coming through mobile phones, making its usage more difficult to monitor. Nielsen estimates 666,000 U.S. users accessed Twitter on mobile devices in December.

The service is especially appealing to people between 18 and 34. About one in every five people with Internet access in that age group used Twitter or a similar service to update their status at least once, according to a survey of more than 2,200 adults in November and December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Meanwhile, usage of Twitter and rivals such as Jaiku, Pownce, FriendFeed and Plurk was seen in just 5 percent of respondents between 45 and 54. Only 2 percent of people older than 65 had tweeted, according to Pew.

This matters for Twitter's financial future because most younger people don't make a lot of money, which could make it more difficult for the company to appeal to advertisers.

Even so, corporate America is paying attention.

Several major companies, including JetBlue Airways, have set up Twitter accounts to monitor what people are saying about their brands. The companies sometimes send out tweets offering to address a complaint.

All that chatter could yield a huge moneymaking opportunity if Twitter chooses to mine the data and sell the insights to marketers, said Marita Scarfi, chief operating officer for Organic, an internet advertising agency. "It could be rich vein for brand analysis," she said.

And though Twitter hasn't sold any ads yet, it is being used as a marketing tool. Computer maker Dell Inc., for instance, is offering exclusive discounts to its more than 18,000 followers on Twitter after holiday promotions broadcast on the service produced more than $US1 million in sales.

Both Williams and Stone hinted the company is exploring ways to charge for expanded commercial access to Twitter, but emphasised that all personal accounts will remain free.

Online retailer Zappos.com is a big fan of Twitter, using it for promotions and customer feedback. But the Las Vegas-based company won't necessarily stay on board if Twitter starts imposing fees on businesses, said CEO Tony Hsieh.

"It would depend on what they're charging for," said Hsieh, who has attracted more than 58,000 followers since opening his Twitter account about a year ago. "We don't see it as a marketing channel, but as a relationship channel."

Comments like that feed the doubts about Twitter's future. Its prospects are clouded even further by the resistance that Facebook and MySpace have faced as they have tried to inject ads into forums where people primarily goof off or fraternize.

"It's the same kind of challenge for these sites," said Peter Daboll, who has studied consumer behavior on the Internet for years, including in his latest job as CEO of Bunchball Inc. "How do they build on their great audiences and keep them engaged, without alienating them with a bunch of crap?"

Funds flow to Twitter as it vows to expand

2009-02-15T20:55:00.001+11:00

Fast-growing micro-blogging service Twitter has reportedly raised an additional 35 million US dollars in funding and said Friday that it is ready to "begin building revenue-generating products."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a post on the company blog, said a new round of funding came from venture capitalists International Venture Partners and Benchmark.

Stone said Benchmark's Peter Fenton will join the board of directors of the San Francisco-based service that lets users share what they are doing at any given moment in brief text messages on computers or mobile telephones.

Twitter claims to have more than six million users.

"We weren't actively seeking more funding," Stone said. "Nevertheless, our strong growth attracted interest and we decided to accept a unique opportunity to make Twitter even stronger with a very attractive offer.

"Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate," he added. "Active users have increased 900 percent in a year."

Stone did not provide a figure for the new funding round but several well-informed technology blogs put the amount at 35 million US dollars.

Twitter, which allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less, has grown rapidly in popularity since it was launched in August 2006 but has been unable so far to generate revenue.

Stone said that would change.

"We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products," he said.

Stone said Twitter's current workforce of 29 employees would expand.

"Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead," he said.

"With these new partnerships and this new funding, we are in a position to move more confidently toward our vision for a robust and successful Twitter Inc," he added.

AFP

Computers go missing from nuke lab

2009-02-15T20:51:00.000+11:00

Eighty computers have been lost, stolen or gone "missing" at a major US nuclear weapons lab, the nonprofit watchdog group Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has said.

The group posted online a copy of what they say is an internal letter outlining what appear to be worrisome losses at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the state of New Mexico.

The letter says that 13 lab computers were lost or stolen during the past year, three of the machines taken from an employee's home in January. Another 67 computers are deemed "missing".

"The magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued," the letter dated February 3 maintains.

The letter, addressed to Department of Energy security officials, contends that "cyber security issues were not engaged in a timely manner" because the computer losses were treated as a "property management issue."

What became of the missing computers and the "security ramifications of each of the 80 systems" was to be detailed in a written report to lab officials by February 6, according to the letter.

AFP telephone calls to the lab on Friday in search of comment were not returned.

Los Alamos was created as a secret facility during World War II and was the site for the Manhattan Project that gave birth to the first nuclear bombs.

It is a major center for research related to national security, outer space, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing.

AFP

Gmail gets Multiple Inboxes

2009-02-10T21:32:00.000+11:00

Gmail has got another new feature: Multiple Inboxes. The new feature from Gmail Labs allows users to have more than one inbox in their default Gmail view. That is the new tool lets users see up to four lists of email messages in addition to their inbox, all on one screen.

Labels and filters are two Gmail features that allow users to highlight and handle email based on their own search criteria. While these features help them stay organised, a user needs to switch between views to see what's going under each Label or Filter. Multiple Inboxes aims to clean that up and enable users to see all their different lists at a glance.

In a company blog post, Google software engineer Octavian 'Vivi' said, "I'm seriously into filters and labels. All the email I get related to Flash goes under my 'flash' label, everything about paragliding goes under 'flying', and they all skip my inbox because that's how I like to stay organized. But when new email arrives I have to switch to the 'flash' label first, then click on 'paragliding', etc. I wanted a way to see it all at once."

According to Google, once a user, turns on Multiple Inboxes from the Labs tab under Settings, he can configure what he wants to see, as well as set the number of messages displayed and the positioning of his panels from the Multiple Inboxes section under Settings.

How Google is threatening Yahoo

2009-02-04T22:03:00.002+11:00

Many people have sent an email while angry, exhausted, inebriated or just by mistake that they later regretted. Now, Google has way to help protect you (and others) from such a faux pas.

As part of its quest to attract users to its Gmail service, the Internet search company has introduced dozens of features, including one that, after a certain time, makes a user solve a math problem before sending an email, giving them time to rethink it.

Because Google makes money every time email users click on ads, it is enhancing its email service to increase advertising and take market share away from Yahoo.

Unique visitors to Google's sites increased 32 per cent worldwide to more than 775 million last year, according to comScore, which tracks such data.

Yahoo had a 16 per cent gain to 562.6 million visitors and Microsoft had a 20 per cent increase to about 647 million visitors.

Analysts have attributed part of Google's visitor growth to email features that are being turned out at a dizzying rate by the company's Gmail Labs. This month, Google introduced a feature to automatically download mail so users can read Gmail offline in a Web browser. That matches an existing feature in the client version of Microsoft's Outlook but when Outlook is accessed from the Internet it does not have that feature.

The offline mail feature was announced in a press statement, but most other features to Gmail have been introduced more quietly. Engineers created and posted 34 experimental features in the seven months since Gmail Labs launched in June.

"They're able to improve the products much faster than anyone else," said Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler.

Google said those features are for adventurous Gmail users because the rapid addition of them means they may not work smoothly or that they will last.

Tests, reminders
"Mail Goggles" helps users avoid sending regrettable email or Gchat messages, an instant messaging system, by making them pass a simple math test before sending.

Another feature alerts users who forget to upload promised attachments. And another lets users send free SMS (short message service) messages to friends via Gchat.

The new features can be found in "Labs" on the main Gmail account page in the upper right corner under "Settings".

Google engineer Dave Cohen took half a day to code an experiment that lets users add a photo next to a friend's conversation in a chat window. It was available for users to try out a few weeks later.
Cohen said it used to be "hard to take an idea you had and get it out there." Now, he said, Gmail Labs "has increased our freedom and flexibility, and we can do more at a whim when there's something you really want to add."

Analysts said the quick roll out of experimental features puts pressure on Yahoo, Time Warner and Microsoft. Helping to speed development is a "Send Feedback" link in each experimental feature that allows users to make suggestions directly to the developer on how to improve it.

"We didn't ... have that kind of direct feedback between engineers and users," said Keith Coleman, product manager. "Now, we have engineers looking at the raw feedback that they are getting."

'Google Ocean' launched as extension of Google Earth to map the seabed

2009-02-03T18:16:00.000+11:00

Google Ocean, which will be included in the newest version of Google Earth, will allow users to swim around underwater volcanoes, watch videos about exotic marine life, read about nearby shipwrecks, contribute photos and watch unseen footage of historic ocean expeditions - all from the comfort of their homes.

Footage of polar bears, beluga whales, sea urchins and king penguins from the BBC's award winning series Planet Earth and The Blue Planet will also be available.

The world's oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet's surface and contain 80 per cent of all life on Earth, yet humans have only ever explored around 5 per cent of that space.

Google Earth, which combines satellite imagery, maps and information to allow users to explore streets and cities around the world, has been downloaded 500 million times since it was introduced in 2005.

Google Ocean was developed with an advisory council of more than 25 leading ocean advocates and scientists.

Pen Hadow, the artic explorer and director of Catlin Arctic Survey, told the Daily Telegraph: "This is a watershed moment of shared global understanding of our oceans. My passion for the Arctic Ocean is matched only by the urgency of our need to understand how it works within the global Earth system. Ocean in Google Earth will enable a global audience to follow the progress and findings of the Catlin Arctic Survey, an international scientific endeavour resolving the likely meltdown date of the Arctic Ocean's sea ice cover."

Sylvia Earle, oceanographer and Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, said: "I cannot imagine a more effective way to inspire awareness and caring for the blue heart of the planet than the new Ocean in Google Earth.

"For the first time, everyone from curious kids to serious researchers can see the world, the whole world, with new eyes."

In addition to Ocean, Google has also introduced other tools for Google Earth 5.0 users, including Virtual Time travel - where users can revisit the past and observe changes in areas where historical satellite imagery is available. For example, users will be able to see construction of Germany's soccer stadiums in the build up to the 2006 World Cup, witness the desertification of Africa's Lake Chad and track the melting of ice on the Grinnell Glacier in Montana.

Users can visit the planet Mars with a click of a button to see high resolution imagery and 3D terrain and a bit closer to home, users will be able to download GPS Tracking, making it easy to visualise and record running, hiking and biking routes.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said: "In discussions about climate change, the world's oceans are often overlooked despite being an integral part of the issue. About one-third of the carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere ends up in the oceans. Furthermore, biodiversity loss in our oceans in the next 20-30 years will be roughly equivalent to losing an entire Amazon rainforest, but this goes unnoticed because we can't see it. This is why today's launch of Google Earth 5.0 is so important - it gives us an opportunity to change everyone's perspective."

Sir David Attenborough said: "It is surely an extraordinary privilege not only to be able to see the great jungles and deserts of the world in Google Earth, but also now, thanks to the Ocean project to be able to explore the bottom of the sea. ARKive's new marine layer illustrates life in the ocean, using the world's best wildlife films and photographs, and includes some of the rarest and most amazing creatures you will ever see."

Now, access your Gmail offline!

2009-01-29T20:35:00.000+11:00

If you have been banking on Gmail for your communication needs, there have always been times when you have desperately wanted to access your account to dig out that important mail but have found yourself haggling with an unreliable or unavailable connection. Not any more.

If the Google Gears version of Gmail rolls out smooth, you can open your web browser, go to the mailbox, and get to your mail even when you are offline. In a nutshell, your Gmail is going offline.

The logic is simple but it could be a great value ad. If you install the Google Gears plug-in to your browser from the Gmail Lab, Gmail detects when you are offline. The new version caches your e-mail so that you can read it, respond to it, search it, star it, or label it. When you are connected to the Internet again, it sends all the messages that you have prepared while being offline. You can even open attachments.

As Gmail product manager Todd Jackson puts it, "it works exactly the way Gmail already works on mobile phones such as the Android and those that support Gears. The underlying sync engine is exactly the same for Android and offline Gmail."

Here's how it works. Once the feature is turned on, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers.

When the connection is lost, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network.

Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. And if you're on an unreliable or slow connection, you can choose to use "flaky connection mode," which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.

According to web reports, Google is making offline Gmail available to everyone who uses Gmail in US or UK English over the next couple of days. If you don't see it under the Labs tab yet, it should be there soon.

The only bad news is some features that require an Internet connection, such as spell check, won't work offline. And while you can open attachments, you won't be able to add attachments at launch. But Google promises to make them available soon!

The system is in beta and accessible through Gmail Labs. But it won't be immediately available to everyone - Google is parsing out access as it experiments with the new feature.

If Gmail lives up to the user expectations, then this would be a big step forward in bringing web mail offline given that presently there are options of offline access to your mailbox, but they all come with strings. You can access your Gmail account through a client like Mozilla Thunderbird. But that doesn't give you all the Gmail functionality like labels.

Yahoo Mail has offered offline access since last summer using Zimbra Desktop. But that also involves using a client on your desktop. For offline access to Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft suggests using their Mail client software.

Junking old PC? Be careful

2009-01-26T12:41:00.000+11:00

If you're planning on getting rid of an old computer, make sure you remove the hard drive first and smash it up with a hammer, a British consumer group advised.

Which? Computing magazine said the only way to make sure fraudsters could not steal personal details from an old computer's hard drive was to utterly destroy it, as simply deleting files or wiping the drive was not sufficient.

The magazine said it had bought eight second-hand drives from Internet auction site eBay and recovered 22,000 "deleted" files, including some information that could be confidential.

Criminals, who it said trawled council waste sites and Internet sites like eBay, would be able use specialist software to retrieve the information which could then be used to commit identity theft.

"PCs contain more valuable personal information than ever as people increasingly shop online, use social networking sites and take digital photos," said Sarah Kidner, Editor of Which? Computing. "Even if you delete your files, you'd be surprised how easy it is to recover your personal data. It sounds extreme, but the only way to be 100 per cent safe is to smash your hard drive into smithereens."

Almost all music downloads illegal: report

2009-01-19T20:54:00.002+11:00

The global music industry is making progress in clamping down on online piracy by evolving radical new ways of selling tunes, but 95 per cent of downloads remain illegal, a report said.

New business models helped the legal online music sector balloon for a sixth straight year in 2008, growing by 25 per cent to $US3.7 billion dollars in trade value, it said.

But some 40 billion music files were still illicitly shared last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in its annual report on the state of digital music.

"The music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online," it said, citing studies in 16 countries showing that only one in 20 downloads are via legal channels.

Cutting pirates' internet connections is an increasingly-used option for dealing with persistent offenders, rather than threatening people with fines or other criminal sanctions.

But overall, things are looking up online: digital outlets - as opposed to CDs and other traditional forms of music - now account for some 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007, said the 30-page report.

Sales of single tracks continues to drive the digital music expansion, and were up 24 per cent in 2008 to 1.4 billion sales, while online album sales also grew by 36 per cent, according to the IFPI's Digital Music Report 2009.

New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" was the biggest-selling digital single worldwide last year, with 9.1 million copies sold - a figure 1.8 million bigger than the best-selling single in 2007.

But new methods of selling are exploding, including a a new generation of music subscription services, social networking sites and new licensing channels, led by services like Nokia Comes With Music and MySpace Music.

Partnerships with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are also opening up as a new sales route, including TDC in Denmark, Neuf Cegetel in France, Sweden's TeliaSonera and BSkyB in Britain.

"The recorded music industry is reinventing itself and its business models," said IFPI chairman John Kennedy.

"There is a momentous debate going on about the environment on which our business... depends. Governments are beginning to accept that... doing nothing is not an option if there is to be a future for commercial digital content."

The music industry body welcomed the way governments were collaborating with internet providers to curb piracy.

"In 2008 a tipping point was reached, with governments in France and the UK leading the way in looking to ISPs to help bring piracy on their networks under control," it said.

In particular ISPs are cooperating in cutting internet access for offenders.

"The momentum for ISP cooperation extends beyond France and the UK. New Zealand will start requiring ISPs to implement a policy of terminating the accounts of repeat infringers in February," it said.

Authorities in the United States, Italy, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea are also thinking of such a move, according to IFPI.

There is also evidence that the digital expansion is having a negative effect on locally-produced music, reducing the number of home-grown artists, who struggle due to easy availability of music from around the world.

In France, album releases by new artists fell by 16 per cent in the first half of 2008, and home-grown music accounted for 10 per cent of albums, compared to 15 per cent in the first half of 2005.

In Spain, just one new local artist featured in the Top 50 albums from January to November 2008, compared to 10 in 2003.

Overall, though, the IFPI report was positive, saying it "shows an industry that has shifted its approach from one based only on unit sales of music to 'monetising' access to music across a multitude of channels and platforms.

AFP

7 challenges before Apple

2009-01-17T22:31:00.002+11:00

It is always tough to replace a leader. And it’s all the more tough, when the leader is an icon like Steve Jobs: the man who signifies his company for most. Other than, may be Bill Gates, no other CEO commands the following that Jobs has.

Often called the prophet of personal computer revolution, Jobs letter to his employees stating that he would take himself "out of the limelight" for six months after learning in the past week that his still vaguely defined health issues are more complex than I originally thought," has it seems conformed the worst fears of the technology industry. There has being rumours about Jobs’ health, a pancreatic cancer survivor.

With the company's driving force taking a four-month medical break, stormy weather seems to be looming over the company's future. Being the face of company which he co-founded in 1975, Apple may have to reel under tough times to cope up with Jobs absence.

Task seems tough for Tim Cook, who will oversee the company while Jobs takes medical leave. Cook, 48, had also filled in for Jobs before, during his cancer treatment in 2004. Here are some of the critical challenges that Apple will have to deal with without Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs

One of the biggest challenges for Apple as well as the interim CEO is Jobs himself. As, to many people, Apple is Steve Jobs. In the 33 years since he co-founded Apple, Jobs has attracted the fervent devotion of his followers -- the Mac faithful, and more recently, iPod and iPhone fanatics. To them, Steve is a secular messiah; to his detractors, a cult-leader.

Apple's unmatched record of hit products has only been achieved under the famously tyrannical leadership of Jobs, whose obsession with sleek design and the hard to define "cool" factor of his gadgets is unique in the corporate world. Again and again, it is this aesthetic, and Jobs' commercial success exploiting it, that have distinguished Apple products from so many copycat competitors.

Investors

The markets have forever been hyper about Steve Jobs. As some say: Jobs sneezes, and Apple's share prices drop. This time too the markets didn't respond any differently. The company's share price dropped as much as 10 percent on the announcement of his medical leave.

There are also speculations that Apple Inc probably will be sued by investors unhappy with the company's about-face on the health of its visionary chief executive. Analysts and investors complained that Apple was slow to disclose Jobs' true medical status and to form a succession plan after his 2004 cancer treatment because of his crucial role in vetting the company's forward-looking designs.

However, legal experts said that the law is not clear on what duty the company has to disclose personal medical information of its CEO.

Also, in case if Jobs is not back at the helm and he misses Apple's own World Wide Developer Conference, analysts fear that share price will again tumble.

Need a product blockbluster

This year's Macworld had little surprises for Apple lovers. According to an analyst in San Francisco, "There were some innovative products, but no true blockbusters. People were bullish going into it, and now they're kind of taking money off the table."

Also, many analysts believe that Apple has no breakthrough announcement to make after the launch of its iconic device 3G iPhone. In 2008, Apple launched world's lightest and slimmest laptop, Macbook Air, at MacWorld. However, this year's Trade show saw no big unveiling.

Also, Jobs is an elite product developer whose name is on the patents for most of Apple's key products, including most notably its iPhone and iPhone 3G smart phones. Analysts fear that the lack of clarity over who will hold the reins in coming years could affect the company in many ways, including whether it can keep coming out with popular products like the iPod and iPhone.

Recession

The sudden absence of Steve Jobs couldn't have come at a more tough time for Apple. The troubled economy and weak consumer demand are bound to make the task of the interim CEO more difficult. Both economy and consumer spending seem to be going down.

According to figures from analyst firm Gartner, Apple's share of the US computer market fell to 8 per cent during the fourth quarter of 2008 from 9.5% in the third. It seems Apple is losing out to cheaper models thanks to the global recession.

Also, shares have fallen from a May 2008 high of $192.24, on worries about Jobs' health and the impact of the economic recession on demand for Apple's premium products.

Apple watchers are raising questions about what's really behind the swing in sentiment about the nature of Jobs' treatment in such a short period of time. Only last week, Jobs told Apple employees he was undergoing simple treatment, and he will stay on the job. A week later, Jobs disclosed that his treatments are now much more complex than expected, and require he take an extended leave of absence.

No succession plan

The company remaining tight-lipped about a succession plan has only worsened the matter further. Though Apple named chief operating officer Time Cook as Jobs' interim successor, the paucity of details has not been taken too kindly by some Apple watchers.

"Basically, Apple has done everything wrong from a succession standpoint," said Marshall Goldsmith, author of the best-selling books on corporate succession plans.

Apple tried to answer the succession question during the recent Macworld developer conference in San Francisco, but the effort fell flat. The keynote featured a bevy of executives, most notably Senior Vice President Phil Schiller, who took over for Jobs as keynote presenter, making him an instant heir-apparent to some. Meanwhile, more than a dozen engineers and Apple vice presidents also got some stage time in one form or another.

Apple's behavior of late has made analyst wonder whether Apple even has a succession plan to begin. This despite the fact that the company is often praised by equity analysts for its deep bench.

Falling sales

According to a recent report from research firm IDC, Apple has slipped from third place to fourth in US PC market share. The Mac producer is estimated to have shipped about 1.25 million computers to the country, dropping it from its previous position and lowering it from 9.1 per cent market share in the summer to 7.2. The company's sheer unit growth has also cooled from 32 percent year-over-year in summer to 7.5 percent.

However, Apple Inc reported a stronger-than-expected 26 per cent rise in quarterly profit in October 2008, spurred by strong sales of its 3G iPhone.

Apple posted a six-fold increase in iPhone shipments during the September quarter, the first since it released a faster, next-generation model. The company said it sold 6.89 million iPhones during the quarter, outpacing Blackberry-maker Research in Motion Ltd.

Google layoffs above 5,000

2009-01-09T19:19:00.001+11:00

Google Inc has jettisoned over 5,000 temporary workers in a recent austerity drive spurred by the recession. Though the Internet search leader still intends to spend billions of dollars during the next two years on product research, development and acquisitions.

The spending plans were outlined in a regulatory filing that also provided some clues about the magnitude of a recent payroll purge targeting Google's legion of contractors and other workers who aren't considered full-time or part-time employees.

The filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission was submitted on December 15, but it was made on paper, leaving it unavailable through the various Web services that track reports to the agency. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the records this week.

A key section of the filing is being kept confidential because Google maintains it contains trade secrets, but the publicly accessible parts provide some information that hadn't previously been disclosed.

For instance, Google revealed it has 24,400 employees, including 4,300 interns, temporary workers and contractors. That contrasts sharply with the roughly 10,000 contractors that Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company had in October. “It's really high,'' Brin said in an October 16 interview with the San Jose Mercury News.

Google acknowledged in late November that it planned to significantly reduce the number of its contractors and retain all of its full-time employees.

Although the company's revenue is still rising, Google's growth has been decelerating. The recession has caused consumers to shop less frequently on the Internet and advertisers have trimmed their marketing budgets. Those factors have slowed the money flowing to Google because online ads generate virtually all the company's revenue, which is expected to total about $20 billion in 2008.

To help shore up profits, Google's management has curbed some of the generous employee perquisites that have been a company hallmark for the pa
st decade. It has closed some company cafeterias that serve free meals and last month withheld a $1,000 holiday gift that's traditionally distributed to all employees.

Instead, the company handed out free cell phones that run on Google software -- a gift that management valued at about $400.

But Google doesn't plan to scrimp on research and development or acquisitions. In the SEC filing, the company said it expects to devote roughly 18 per cent of its annual expenses to research and development during each of the next two years. That's roughly the same percentage as the past four quarters, when its expenditures in the category totalled $2.7 billion.

Google also said it expects to buy other companies at a pace consistent with the past two years, when $4.2 billion in cash went toward acquisitions. Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc, completed in March, accounted for most of that amount.

“Given the consolidation occurring in the online advertising industry, it is reasonable to expect that Google may in the future spend considerably more to acquire companies in this sector,” the company wrote in the SEC filing.

Google is under greater pressure to boost its profits coming off a year in which its stock price plunged by about 55 per cent.

In the last four quarters ending September 30, Google said it earned $415 million from its investments, accounting for about 8 per cent of its total profit of $4.7 billion during that period. In calendar 2007, Google earned $452 million from its investments, generating nearly 11 per cent of its income.

Apple may unveil cheaper iPhone

2009-01-03T16:19:00.002+11:00

Apple Inc will probably begin selling a lower-priced version of the iPhone in the first half of 2009, tapping a new chipmaker for a key component, according to Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.

Qualcomm Inc will replace Infineon Technologies AG as the supplier of the baseband processor -- the chip that translates radio signals into voice and data -- in the new model, analyst Craig Berger said in a report. The phone might debut in the second quarter, he said, citing unidentified industry sources.

Apple may be turning to lower-cost products to fuel sales in developing countries as the US economy shrinks. The company is planning a smaller version of its Shuffle music player and a cheaper MacBook laptop, Berger said. None of the devices is likely to be ready to be unveiled at next week’s Macworld conference, where Apple typically makes product announcements.

“Mobile phone sales figures will continue to grow worldwide in 2009 and most of that growth will come from developing countries,” said Hakim Kriout, a portfolio manager at Grigsby & Associates, a New York-based securities trading firm that owns Apple shares.

“Turning the iPhone into a product line by adding another device for the lower end of the market is the next logical phase.”

Jennifer Bowcock, Apple’s spokeswoman for the iPhone, didn’t immediately return a call or email seeking comment. San Diego-based Qualcomm’s Bertha Agia also didn’t immediately return a phone call.

Wal-Mart, Best Buy

Apple currently sells two versions of the iPhone, an 8GB model for $199 and a 16GB device for $299. Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world’s largest retail chain, began offering the product last week, with its starting price at $197. Best Buy Co, the biggest electronics seller in the US, sells the phone for $189.99 and $289.99.

Berger, who contacted parts suppliers, also said that Apple made fewer iPhones in the fourth quarter than originally estimated. That shortfall will be partially offset by greater first-quarter output, he said. About 10 million phones were available for purchase in the fourth quarter, he estimates.

Apple said this month that chief executive officer Steve Jobs won’t appear at the Macworld show, fuelling speculation that the company doesn’t have a significant new product to offer.

Apple will probably use the event to show updated versions of its aluminum-cased iMac desktop computers and a new operating system, Brian Marshall, an analyst at
Broadpoint.AmTech in San Francisco, said.

Homework is fun on an iPod touch

2009-01-03T16:14:00.000+11:00

A PILOT program in which teenagers used iPods for school work has increased attendance and increased enthusiasm for homework.

A class of year 8 students at Shepparton High School in central Victoria are the first in Australia and among the first in the world to use iPod touches in the classroom for a global "mobile learning" project.

The students use the hand-held media players to search the internet, download music, do quizzes, research and submit assignments and collaborate with a school in Singapore.

Preliminary research on the program found students were more willing to come to school, did more homework and used their iPods more than laptops or desktop computers.

Using an online learning program called Studywiz, students and teachers accessed school-wide emails and saved their homework to an "elocker".

Pupils also used the iPods, which were lent by Apple, for science experiments - to see how many decibels they produce - and in history classes.

Louise Duncan, the teacher who set up the project, said the devices were cheaper than laptops and allowed students to tailor information and stay focused in class.

The project had also shown not all teenagers were comfortable in a digital environment. "We assume that 14-year-olds are really technologically savvy, but they're often not," she said.

Google Earth rebuilds ancient Rome online

2008-11-13T21:47:00.001+11:00

Google today resurrected ancient Rome online, opening a three-dimensional virtual version of the city for cyber-explorers interested in trips back through time.

People using free Google Earth software can seemingly fly past more than 6500 buildings that stood in the city at the peak of the Roman Empire in 320 AD.

Online visitors can swoop in for close-ups of structures and peruse pop-up information "bubbles" written by historians.

Some buildings feature full interiors. Internet surfers can visit the Roman Forum; linger in the Colosseum; pass through the Arch of Constantine and follow in the footsteps of gladiators in the Ludus Magnus.

Rome is the first ancient city recreated at Google Earth, an interactive online Atlas that provides tools and technology that enable people to explore the world.

To commemorate the launch, Google is inviting US educators to take part in a contest promising prizes for innovative lesson plans based on the virtual Ancient Rome feature.

AFP

FireEagle is Scary

2008-11-10T20:27:00.000+11:00

Fire Eagle, Yahoo's new geolocation service, is fresh out of the company's Brickhouse development team, and third parties are lining up to cut deals.

Who can deny that location is going to become increasingly important for Web services? In the initial rush of coverage, MG Siegler correctly noted that Fire Eagle essentially serves as the intermediary between services offering that geolocation capability and those wishing to make use of it. (Fire Eagle's not an original idea.
There's also Loopt, a cell phone-based service that allows people to track and communicate with friends, as well as Whrrl and Brightkite.)

So this is progress? Maybe it's just my particular hangup but, truth be told, knowing that "they" (and that includes friends and family) may be watching me does not fill me with much enthusiasm. Sometimes it's comforting just being off the grid. I don't think I missed something growing up in a Fire Eagle-less world and I'm in no hurry to change now.

From a business perspective, Yahoo probably has a winner. Whether it's Fire Eagle or a better, similar incarnation by someone else, this is another signpost of a future where we choose from a panoply of location-based services. From what I understand of Fire Eagle, I can't find any evidence that it won't succeed. Already, more than 50 services make use of the Fire Eagle technology and more will follow. Unfortunately, don't you just know that some marketing go-getter is going to figure out a way to exploit location-based programs to shove targeted advertising (and spam, naturally) down our throats as we navigate around town. Again, you don't have to play. And you can shut the darned thing off for a time. Still...

The reassuring part is that Fire Eagle is permission-based. And Tom Coates, who joined Yahoo from the BBC to serve as product director at Yahoo's Brickhouse, said all the right things about protecting privacy rights at the Fire Eagle debut. The service does allow you to restrict location reporting or even shut it down for a period of time.

Without that variable privacy feature, Fire Eagle would be one more hellish intrusion into our already over-snooped, overwrought lives.

So now, Yahoo's (rightly) taking a "let 1,000 flowers bloom" approach by opening up the APIs to the rest of the Internet, and the wisdom of the free market will decide the matter. For better, or for worse. We'll see.

From: Yes, Fire Eagle's cool. It also freaks me out
By: Charles Cooper

Microsoft CEO rules out Yahoo acquisition

2008-11-08T12:02:00.001+11:00

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer says any notion of the software giant acquiring Yahoo is a thing of the past.

Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang this week said it was in Microsoft's best interests to lodge another bid for the global internet company, after its failed bid earlier this year.

Mr Yang's comments in the US came after a proposed advertising partnership between Yahoo and Google was scrapped to avoid a legal battle with US regulators.

Speaking at a business lunch in Sydney today, Mr Ballmer said Microsoft had moved on after its rejected Yahoo acquisition bid.

"We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn't want to sell the business to us and we moved on," Mr Ballmer said.

"We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don't know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share."

Yahoo shares last traded at $US13.96 on the New York stock exchange.

However, Mr Ballmer did raise the notion of a Microsoft and Yahoo partnership in the search engine market.

"I'm sure there are still some opportunities for some kind of partnership around search, but I think acquisition is a thing of the past."

Mr Ballmer took a swipe at internet search providers, saying Microsoft saw an opportunity to "reinvent the whole darn thing".

"If anybody thinks the future of search is going to look like the present search, that's crazy.

"The user interface on search hasn't changed for six years. You still get the same dull, boring ten blue links for God's sake. Can't we do any better than that?"

The average English language search was 2.2 words because users had worked out that "search engines are so dumb that if you tell them more they actually do a worse job", he said.

"Everybody needs a good competitor, and we just want the other guys in this business to have a good competitor that they have to think about every day," Mr Ballmer said.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft boss said optimism could soften the damage of the global slowdown.

"You have got to get out of the sense of pessimism and back into a sense of optimism.

"As long as we are still in the downward spiral, where people don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, we are going to get job cuts and unemployment."

He said Barack Obama's presidential election win could be a catalyst for change.

On the local broadband debate, he simply stated high speed broadband was "very important".

"We need high speed broadband networks," Mr Ballmer said.

The federal government's process of selecting a builder for its national broadband network has repeatedly been delayed, while the potential bidders have been debating the logistics and details of the massive infrastructure project.

The federal government will contribute $4.7 billion to the project, aimed at delivering high-speed internet to 98 per cent of the population.

Sea change for father of the iPod

2008-11-05T23:23:00.001+11:00

Apple announced on Tuesday that the employee credited with being the "father of the iPod" is stepping down from his post at the iconic California company.

Apple said iPod division vice president Tony Fadell and his wife, Danielle Lambert, who is vice president of the company's human resources department, are "reducing their roles" to "devote more time to their young family."

While the spotlight routinely shines on Apple's notoriously involved chief executive Steve Jobs, Fadell is said to be the one behind the idea for iPod MP3 players that rocketed to global success and revived the company's fortunes.

"Tony and Dani have each made important contributions to Apple over the past eight years," Jobs said in a release.

"We're sorry to see Dani go, and are looking forward to working with Tony in his new capacity."

Lambert is to leave Apple at the end of the year and Fadell is to become an advisor to Jobs.

IBM executive Mark Papermaster has been hired to replace Fadell. Papermaster's former employer is challenging the move on the grounds Papermaster is contractually restricted from working for a competitor.

AFP

Is it time to bury the desktop PC?

2008-10-30T23:01:00.000+11:00

Quarterly sales of notebook computers have topped those of desktop computers for the first time ever in the United States, market intelligence firm IDC reported on Wednesday.

IDC said notebook sales made up 55.2 per cent of computer sales in the July to September quarter, 18 percent growth over the same period last year and the first time they have surpassed 50 per cent.

It said a record 9.5 million notebooks were shipped during the quarter.

"These figures were reached amid a relatively active back-to-school season and the burgeoning financial crisis, which captured headlines but did not immediately affect the PC market's performance," the IDC said.

"The consumer market continued to be the top driving factor in the notebook offensive but the commercial sector played a critical role too," IDC research manager David Daoud said.

"Prolonged economic tension could have an adverse effect on the PC space leading to reduced growth, but the good news is that virtually every buyer considers PCs as must-have products and not a secondary wish-list items," he added.

AFP

Report warns of terrorist Twitter dangers

2008-10-27T22:33:00.001+11:00

A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Twitter, Global Positioning System maps and voice-changing software as potential terrorist tools.

The report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), examines a number of mobile and web technologies and their potential uses by militants.

The posting of the report on the FAS site was reported Friday by Wired magazine contributing editor Noah Shachtman on his national security blog "Danger Room" at wired.com.

The report is not based on clandestine reporting but drawn from open source intelligence known as OSINT.

A chapter on "Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter" notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as "Tweets," reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.

Hacktivists refers to politically motivated computer hackers.

"Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives," the report said.

"Extremist and terrorist use of Twitter could evolve over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use by hacktivists and activists for surveillance," it said. "This could theoretically be combined with targeting."

The report outlined scenarios in which militants could make use of Twitter, combined with such programs as Google Maps or mobile phone pictures or video, to carry out an ambush or detonate explosives.

"Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool," it said. "However, it is unclear whether that same theoretical tool would be available to terrorists in other countries and to what extent."

Besides Twitter, the report examined the potential use by militants of Global Positioning Systems and other technologies.

"GPS mobile phone service could be used by our adversaries for travel plans, surveillance and targeting," it said, noting that just such uses have been discussed in pro-al-Qaeda forums along with the use of voice-changing software.

"Terrorists may or may not be using voice-changing software but it should be of open source interest that online terrorist and/or terrorist enthusiasts are discussing it," the report said.

This Parrot Will Bring You a Lot of Fun!

2008-10-26T01:32:00.003+11:00

The Bluetooth technology has obviously being one of the latest and necessary technology trends, which you can easily find it on the mobile phones, sunglasses and now on the motorcyclists' helmets as well.

As one of the motorcyclists, I loved to drive my bike to my workplace three times a week, where it can help me to reduce the expenses of high oil price. Well, when I'm driving my car, I can easily answer to my mobile phone calls with hands-free without even needing to picki it up.
However, it will become a difficulty if I'm driving my bike, as I need to stop at the roadside and answering my phone calls!

I knew there is something out there that can help me overcome this hassle and I've finally found it. Guys, let's meet this amazing Parrot Bluetooth, SK4000 model. This is a Bluetooth enabled earpiece, which is specially designed for the motorcyclists!

By wearing it, you can answer to any incoming phone calls without even needing to stop your bike on the roadside and you can listen to MP3 music while there is no phone call.

Yeah, I know this is a cool stuff and I have waiting for it to be released. I will keep you all inform about the release date for this Parrot SK4000 model!

Apple reports 'jaw-dropping' iPhone sales

2008-10-22T20:43:00.000+11:00

Apple has reported a 26 per cent profit jump in the last quarter thanks in large part to sales of its new iPhone 3G which outsold the market-leading BlackBerry smartphone from Research in Motion Ltd.

Apple sold a staggering 6.9 million of its iPhone 3Gs in the quarter, more than the 6.1 million total first-generation iPhones sold. The iPhone launched July 11 and is available in more than 50 countries.

Research in Motion reported it sold 6.1 million BlackBerry smart phones in the quarter that ended August 30.

Edward Jones analyst Bill Kreher said overtaking RIM in such short order was a "tremendous accomplishment".

"It's jaw-dropping," Kreher said.

On a conference call with analysts, chief executive Steve Jobs claimed the result made Apple the world's third largest mobile phone company, based on revenues.

"But even more remarkable is this: measured by revenues, Apple has become the world's third largest mobile phone supplier. I know this sounds crazy, but it's true. As measured in revs, not units, Apple has become the third largest mobile phone supplier."

Based on revenues, Nokia and Samsung are first and second.

Apple also set quarterly records for Macintosh and iPod sales. Apple said it sold 2.6 million Macs and 11.1 million iPods, further allaying fears that the sluggish economy would weigh on Apple's back-to-school sales.

California-based Apple's profit reached $US1.14 billion ($A1.62 billion), or $US1.26 per share. Sales jumped 27 per cent to $US7.9 billion ($A11.2 billion) in the three months that ended in September.

Despite the blockbuster performance, which sent Apple's shares soaring in after-hours trading, the company issued what it called "prudent" predictions for the current quarter, because of broader economic uncertainty.

On the conference call, Jobs addressed concerns that economic weakness will eat into Apple's business through the holidays and beyond.

Jobs said Apple's customers are more likely to put off buying a new computer than to defect to other brands of PCs with lower prices. Apple, which is sitting on about $US25 billion in cash, could use the downturn to invest in research and development, he said.

"We may get buffeted around by the waves a little bit, but we'll be fine," Jobs said.

The company said Mac sales growth was hit as educational institutions cut back on computer purchases, and as regular consumers waited for news of new laptops, which Apple unveiled last week.

Apple's profit topped Wall Street's expectations, but sales missed. Thomson Reuters says analysts had expected the company to sell $US8 billion ($A11.35 billion) worth of Macintosh computers, iPods, iPhones and other gadgets, for a profit of $US1.11 per share.

iPhone a goldmine for geeks

2008-10-15T21:16:00.001+11:00

The iPhone has become a virtual goldmine for budding software developers.

The iPhone App Store - like iTunes but without the music - allows iPhone users to buy third-party plug-in applications to expand the functionality of their devices.

Virtually anyone can create an application and list it on the App Store for sale or as a free download.

Games have fast become the most popular applications. Trism, a $5 puzzle game similar to Bejeweled, earned $US250,000 in profit in just two months, its creator, Steve Demeter, announced at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco last month.

Applications on the iPhone are usually small, simple ideas that can easily be built by software developers or by paid contractors for a small fee. There are more than 3000 applications to choose from so far and that number is booming as developers realise their money-making potential.

Mick Johnson, 28, born in Townsville but educated in Sydney, works as a marketing manager for an internet start-up in Silicon Valley and develops an iPhone application in the evenings.

"I don't sleep much. Sleep is for the weak," he said in a telephone interview.

Johnson's partners are two other geeks in Sydney and another in California. Their project is a tool called GasBag, which pinpoints the user's location on a map using the iPhone's built-in GPS and shows them all of the petrol stations in that area, including fuel prices.

GasBag relies on users to enter fuel prices when they are filling up or driving past a petrol station.

The app, supported by advertising, has already been launched in the US and Johnson said he was aiming to have an Australian version by next month. More than 100,000 users had signed up to the US version in under six weeks.

"We reckon we can monetise this to the tune of between $1 to $5 per user per year," Johnson said.

"We got 100,000 [users] in six weeks ... we grow at 2000-2500 users a day and that's just for the US."

Another popular iPhone app is Tap Tap Revenge, a music rhythm game in the tradition of Guitar Hero that is free to download and counts more than 2 million users. It is also supported by advertising.

Andrew Lacy, an Australian living in Silicon Valley, is the chief operating officer of the game's developer, Tapulous.

Tapulous is keeping mum on how much profit it makes but its CEO, Bart Decrem, recently told Wired that top iPhone apps made roughly $US5000 to $US10,000 a day.

New Zealand artist David Frampton's $7.99 helicopter game, Chopper, launched in July was earning Frampton $4000 a day, The Australian Financial Review reported.

But not everyone is in it for the money. Dean Robinson, 24, a web developer at the University of Newcastle, created an application called Hahlo as a way of "getting my name out there".

Hahlo is a version of the Twitter messaging tool optimised for the iPhone. It's free, contains no advertising and now services 150,000 users a month, Robinson said.

"One of the main reasons [for not placing advertising] was the limited screen space; I didn't want to fill it up with ads and push people away," he said.

Building apps and widgets for large internet and mobile phone platforms has become a thriving industry following the introduction of "applications" on Facebook, which was soon copied by MySpace.

Facebook has created an "FBFund" grant program, offering some of the best application developers between $US25,000 to $US250,000 each from a total pool of $US10 million in grant money.

On mobiles, the iPhone App Store is rivalled by a similar store for phones based on Google's Android platform. Research in Motion is also working on an "application centre" for its BlackBerry devices.

Apple, which takes a 30 per cent cut from all App Store sales, has been heavily criticised for rejecting certain applications for arbitrary reasons or because they compete with Apple's own products.

The company earned $US30 million from sales of iPhone applications in the App Store's first month of operation, CEO Steve Jobs told The Wall Street Journal.

Pictured: The amazingly detailed snap of Jupiter taken from Earth

2008-10-12T01:39:00.001+11:00

Scientists have revealed the sharpest ever image taken of Jupiter from the ground.

The incredible image reveals changes in the gas giant's smog-like haze, probably in response to a planet-wide upheaval more than a year ago.

It was taken using a new image-correction technique that removed atmospheric blur over a two-hour observation.

A series of 265 snapshots were captured using a prototype instrument, the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD), mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT).

The new images of Jupiter prove the value of the advanced technology used by MAD, which uses two or more guide stars instead of one as references to remove the blur caused by atmospheric turbulence.

'This type of adaptive optics has a big advantage for looking at large objects, such as planets, star clusters or nebulae,' says lead researcher Franck Marchis, from UC Berkeley, California.

'If it were not for MAD, we would not have been able to perform these amazing observations.'

MAD allowed the researchers to observe Jupiter for almost two hours on 16 and 17 August 2008, a record duration, according to the observing team.

Conventional systems using a single Jupiter moon as reference cannot monitor Jupiter for so long because the moon moves too far from the planet.

The Hubble Space Telescope cannot observe Jupiter continuously for more than about 50 minutes.

Using MAD, ESO astronomer Paola Amico, MAD project manager Enrico Marchetti and Sébastien Tordo from the MAD team tracked two of Jupiter's largest moons, Europa and Io.

'It was the most challenging observation we performed with MAD, because we had to track with high accuracy two moons moving at different speeds, while simultaneously chasing Jupiter,' says Marchetti.

With this unique series of images, the team found a major alteration in the brightness of the haze around Jupiter's equator, compared with images taken by the Hubble Telescope in 2005.

The Hubble images show more haze in the northern half of the bright Equatorial Zone, while the 2008 new images show a clear shift to the south.

'The change we see in the haze could be related to big changes in cloud patterns associated with last year's planet-wide upheaval, but we need to look at more data to narrow down precisely when the changes occurred,' team member Mike Wong said.

Apple to unveil new laptops next week

2008-10-11T19:49:00.000+11:00

Apple is expected to unveil new notebook computers, perhaps even one priced for those with tight budgets, at a "town hall" gathering at its northern California headquarters next week.

In typical enigmatic style, Apple hinted at the theme of the invitation-only event but provided no details other than that it would be held on Tuesday morning at the iconic firm's headquarters in the city of Cupertino.

Invites sent out by email bore the lone message "The spotlight turns to notebooks."

While discussing earnings with investors earlier this year, Apple executives tempered profit expectations by saying it is investing in new designs but didn't give specifics.

Apple's Macintosh computers remain a distant second place to world-dominating PCs based on Windows operating systems from Microsoft but have been gaining market share.

Analysts believe the popularity of Apple's trendy iPod MP3 players and iPhones revived the company's cachet and attracted buyers to its computers.

The internet is buzzing with rumors and unconfirmed reports that Apple will try to shake off its reputation for selling premium machines at premium prices by introducing its first model priced at less than $US1000.

"There is a possibility they might go there, but in general they have consistently played at the very high end of the market," said Gartner analyst Van Baker.

"While I would love to see Apple compete in the $US799-999 price range, based on past history I am skeptical they are going to do that."

Baker says it is more likely Apple is giving its MacBook Pro line of laptops a thinner, more industrial design that proved successful with its MacBook Air model.

Apple is expected to be shifting from plastic laptop casings to more stylish and eco-friendly aluminum.

Google bringing ads to video games

2008-10-10T06:19:00.000+11:00

Google, the leader in online search and advertising, is muscling in on video game territory - though it won't exactly be in the form of a shoot 'em up game.

Google has announced it is launching the beta version of "AdSense for Games", a technology designed to put relevant advertising in web-based games.

It is an expansion of Google's AdSense program, which matches ads to the content of websites. Similarly, AdSense for Games will show, for example, ads targeted at young men in sports and action games. The ads themselves would be videos that players watch before or after a game, or after completing a level.

AdSense in Games lets Google offer advertisers "yet another place" to reach customers, said Christian Oestlien, senior product manager at the Mountain View, California-based company.

Google's entry into the gaming space has long been anticipated and could be a hedge against slippage in online advertising from the economic downturn. Google bought Adscape Media, a small in-game advertising company, in early 2007, less than a year after Microsoft bought in-game ad company Massive.

Google's chief rival, Yahoo, already offers ad-supported, downloadable games. Double Fusion and NeoEdge, two in-game advertising companies, are selling video ads integrated into the games.

Even so, Jameson Hsu, chief executive of San Francisco-based online gaming network Mochi Media - which is working with Google to provide in-game ads in Europe - said Google's entrance into video game ads is "validating the market."

"It's a very big milestone," he said.

Facebook co-founder leaves for new venture

2008-10-08T21:24:00.000+11:00

The college roommate who helped Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook is leaving the fast-growing social networking website in a matter of weeks to create a new Internet technology firm.

Dustin Moskovitz promises to remain at Facebook at least one more month before setting out to follow "another passion: making companies themselves run better."

"I didn't want to construct efficiencies, I wanted to engineer them," Moskovitz said of his vision for a new startup.

Moskovitz, who helped Zuckerberg start the social networking service in their Harvard University dormitory nearly five years ago, is taking Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein with him on the new business adventure.

"Whether I work here or not, I'll forever bleed Facebook blue," Moskovitz wrote in a message posted, appropriately enough, on his Facebook profile.

"Our new project is not a replacement for what we build here, but instead both a complement and a compliment, and we have every intention of making it feel like a natural extension of Facebook's product and purpose."

Rosenstein says that he and Moskovitz are setting out to "build an extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up."

Moskovitz said that he expects Facebook to continue doing fine without him and that his departure is merely him pursuing another passion.

"Dustin has always had Facebook's best interests at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice," Zuckerberg said in an email announcing the move.

Moskovitz is described as a member of Facebook's technical staff on the company website responsible for internal tools and strategy.

Dumb design flaw in iPhone

2008-10-03T23:25:00.000+10:00

An Israeli researcher Aviv Raff has gone public with security flaws in iPhone after what he terms two-and-a-half months of inaction from Apple.

Writes Raff on his blog, "I have disclosed the technical details to Apple few weeks before that post, in a hope to get those security issues fixed as soon as possible. Unfortunately, two and a half months later, and still there is no patch for those vulnerabilities. I've asked Apple several times for a schedule, but they have refused to provide the fix date."

The first is the URL display flaw in the iPhone's Mail that could allow an attacker to send a message containing a malicious URL that looks legitimate. "In most mail clients (example on your PC/Mac), you can just hover the link and get a tooltip which will tells you the actual URL that you are about to click," explains Raff in a blog post. "In iPhone it's a bit different. You need to click the link for a few seconds in order to get the tooltip. Now, because the iPhone screen is small, long URLs are automatically cut off in the middle."

This makes it possible for an attacker to create a long URL that displays a trusted domain while taking the user to another domain entirely, he explains. The user would only see the portion of the domain designed to look familiar and is more likely to click on the malicious link.

Opening the URL in the iPhone's Safari browser would not help as it too displays only a portion of the long URL.

The second bug according to Raff is in the iPhone's Mail application, which makes it easier for spammers to identify valid email accounts, and thus mark them for more spam.

Since iPhone automatically downloads all image attachments, and there is no way to disable this feature, it is easy for spammers to identify a working email account. "The spammer who controls the remote server will know that you have read the message and will mark your mail account as active in order to send you more spam," said Raff.

Raff recommends that since there is no way to disable auto-image download on the iPhone, users should refrain from using Mail until Apple patches the problem.

Raff calls this "a pretty dumb design flaw" which has already been fixed by most other mail clients ages ago.

Apple sells unlocked iPhones in Hong Kong

2008-09-28T14:48:00.000+10:00

Apple has started selling unlocked models of its popular iPhone 3G in Hong Kong which allow users the freedom to choose the telecom provider of their choice.

The eight gigabyte version was on sale Saturday at Apple's online store for 5,400 Hong Kong dollars (about 700 US dollars), while the 16 gigabyte model was 6,200 dollars. Apple said that the phone can be activated with any wireless carrier.

The move is a shift from the US technology firm's previous strategy of tying the phone exclusively to mobile operators in each country or territory.

The iPhone 3G was previously only officially available in Hong Kong bundled with a two-year contract with tycoon Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Telecom on tarriff plans ranging from 188 to 498 dollars a month.

The gadget latest offers a touch screen, high-speed Internet browsing with third-generation network, WiFi, e-mail, GPS and an integrated music and video player.

Apple sold a million 3G models in the first weekend after its July 11 launch in 21 countries and territories around the world.

'I'm a PC' made on a Mac

2008-09-24T22:35:00.000+10:00

Microsoft's "I'm a PC" advertising campaign was created on a Mac and the celebrity spruikers brought in by the software giant are all professed Apple fans, it has been revealed.

Hidden information contained in images from the ads published on Microsoft's website show they were created on Macs, a Flickr user revealed in a published screen shot.

Microsoft responded by quickly scrubbing the hidden "metadata" information from the images.

It issued a statement saying: "As is common in almost all campaign workflow, agencies and production houses use a wide variety of software and hardware to create, edit and distribute content, including both Macs and PCs."

The revelation is ironic because the ads are part of a broader $300 million campaign designed to spruce up Windows Vista's image and tout the PC's advantages over the Mac.

Microsoft has already run two ad spots featuring Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld awkwardly meeting in a discount shoe shop and attempting to reconnect with real people by moving in with a normal family.

But even though a third ad featuring Seinfeld was filmed, Microsoft dumped the comic last week in favour of new ads featuring more current celebrities such as actress Eva Longoria, singer Pharrell Williams and even author Deepak Chopra declaring "I'm a PC".

But all three are Mac fans, Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag revealed. Longoria owns a MacBook and Williams carries an iPhone encased in gold, while Chopra, in a column on nuclear weapons published in the Huffington Post, said it was "good to sell more iPods" as they were "entertaining and harmless".

Seinfeld used a Mac in the apartment he lived in on his namesake show and has even appeared in an old Apple "think different" ad.

The Seinfeld ads didn't mention Microsoft's products but now the focus has shifted to Windows Vista in a second wave of the campaign dubbed "I'm a PC".

The new ads are a direct attack on Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, which portray the Mac as cool and intuitive and the PC as boring and clunky.

Microsoft has ignored Apple's ads at its peril, allowing the Mac maker to own the narrative and frame the PC's image. Now the company is looking to use Apple's stereotype to its advantage.

The ads will seek to counter Apple's elitist Mac user vibe by including a slew of everyday PC users, such as scientists and teachers, espousing the virtues of their platform of choice. In one spot a diver appears in a cage surrounded by sharks holding up a sign saying "I'm a PC".

Microsoft is encouraging people to "tell us what kind of PC you are" by submitting their own videos to its website centring on the "I'm a PC" theme.

The company will choose some to display on the big screen in New York's Times Square and in its online advertising.

Doomsday collision set for early next week!

2008-09-17T19:15:00.000+10:00

The first collisions between subatomic particles will take place in the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) next week, among fears that it might create a doomsday-like scenario for our planet.

The LHC circulates particles in a 17-mile circumference underground tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, known by the acronym CERN.

According to a report in Telegraph, although there was much uproar last week about the first particles - protons - to whirl around the LHC at a shade under the speed of light, the real aim of the exercise is to bring counter rotating beams of particles into collision in the four "eyes" - detectors - of the machine to recreate conditions not seen since just after the birth of the universe.

This is the aspect of the experiment that has triggered all the angst and hand-wringing by doomsayers and Jeremiahs, who fear that the collisions will mark the end of the world, as it tumbles into the gaping maw of a black hole.

These fears have been dismissed as nonsense by Dr Evans, along with scientists such as Prof Stephen Hawking, who say that the end of the world is not nigh.

The original plan was to take 31 days from the first proton beams circulating in the LHC to smashing protons for the first time.

"We were going along at a real good lick," Dr Evans said of the days after particles first circulated.

But, the cryogenics that keep the great machine cooled went down on Friday, as a result of thunderstorms disrupting the power supply.

"We have had problems with the electricity supply for various reasons and the cryogenics is recovering from that, so we will not have a beam again, probably until Thursday morning," said Dr Evans.

The team now hopes to achieve collisions at between one fifth and one tenth of the full energy in a few days.

"We are very confident that we can go quite quickly. The experiments have asked us for some early collisions, at low energy. If we get stable conditions, we will get there next week," said Dr Evans.

The collisions will take place in the two general purpose detectors of the giant machine, called Atlas and CMS, though Dr Evans added that the team will also attempt collisions in Alice, which will study a "liquid" form of matter, called a quark-gluon plasma, that formed shortly after the Big Bang, and an experiment called LHCb, which will investigate the fate of antimatter in the wake of the Big Bang. (ANI)

How Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) will Work ??

2008-09-16T22:50:00.002+10:00

Technology and Nostradamus Phrophecy:

Hackers penetrate Hadron Collider network

2008-09-14T15:17:00.000+10:00

Hackers claim they have broken into the computer system of the Large Hadron Collider, the mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos.

A group calling itself the Greek Security Team left a rogue webpage mocking the technicians responsible for computer security at the giant atom smasher as "schoolkids", The Times and Daily Telegraph reported.

The hackers vowed they had no intention of disrupting the experiment at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border, they just wanted to highlight the flaws in the computer system's security.

"We're pulling your pants down because we don't want to see you running around naked looking to hide yourselves when the panic comes," they wrote, according to the Daily Telegraph.

The hackers claimed to have gained access to a website open to other scientists on Wednesday as the LHC passed its first test with flying colours, the reports said.

They appear to have tried to gain access to the computer system of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment, one of the four detectors that will be analysing the progress of the experiment.

James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, told The Times: "We don't know who they were but there seems to be no harm done. It appears to be people who want to make a point that CERN was hackable."

Scientists hailed the success of the start of the experiment on Wednesday in the Large Hadron Collider, the 27-kilometre circular tunnel in which parallel beams of protons will be accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

Superconducting magnets will then steer the counter-rotating beams so that strings of protons smash together in four huge laboratories, fleetingly replicating the conditions that prevailed at the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.

AFP

Physicists firing up atom-smasher

2008-09-10T18:48:00.000+10:00

Scientists have fired the first protons into a 27km-long tunnel at the world's largest particle collider in science's next great step to understand the make-up of the universe.

Project leader Lyn Evans gave the order to send the protons into the $US3.8 billion ($A4.75 billion) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) below the Swiss-French border early Wednesday.

Scientists hope it will provide the necessary power to smash the components of atoms so that they can see how they are made.

The start-up has been eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments.

Some sceptics fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil Earth. They took the experiment's architects to court in the US and France, believing it could create black holes in which the earth could disappear.

The collision of particles will briefly stoke temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun, fleetingly replicating conditions which prevailed in split-seconds after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.

In this primordial soup, novel particles may lurk that will resolve mysteries clouding our understanding of fundamental matter, scientists say.

"This machine will probably bring unexpected results that could turn particle physics on its head," French astrophysicist Hubert Reeves says.

Wednesday's operation kicks off a long and cautious commissioning process, testing equipment and procedures, before experiments begin in several weeks.

When all is ready, the LHC will whiz two parallel beams of protons, one clockwise and the other anticlockwise, around the tunnel.

Superconducting magnets cooled close to absolute zero - the chill of deep space - will then steer the beams so that they converge inside four chambers, like racing cars in a chicane.

Some protons are bound to collide, and subatomic wreckage from the smash will fly into the detectors, leaving a calling-card trace of their identity.

Over the years in which will the LHC will operate, masses of data will spew from these collisions and will be closely scrutinised by universities and laboratories around the world.

The Holy Grail will be finding a particle, called the Higgs Boson after British physicist Peter Higgs, who devised the theory of its existence in 1964.

The "Higgs" would explain how particles acquire mass, and some particles are more massive than others.

The idea is that these particles exist in a sort of invisible background field. Other particles passing through the Higgs field would acquire mass, like feathers passing through treacle.

Another big challenge will be testing the theory of supersymmetry, which postulates that the members of the known bestiary of sub-atomic particles have related, but more massive, counterparts.

Such particles could explain the unsettling discovery of recent years that visible matter only accounts for some four per cent of the Universe. Enigmatic phenomena called dark matter and dark energy account for the rest.

Before the startup, internet-driven rumours said the LHC would create black holes or a nasty hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would gobble up the planet.

CERN has commissioned a panel to verify its calculations that such risks are, by any reasonable thinking, impossible. France too has carried out its own safety probe.

Melbourne University physicist Geoff Taylor has led an Australian contingent which designed detectors and shielding as well as software that triggers the collection of information.

Professor Taylor says the experiment's opponents are "completely misguided" in their stance.

"One of the things we are trying to do is create mini-black holes which scientifically would be a magnificent thing and tell us we don't live in three dimensions but that we live in nine or 10 dimensions," Prof Taylor said.

"As soon as you say there is the possibility of creating black holes you have people saying we are going to be swallowed up by black holes.

"That's where the furore has come and it's completely misguided."

Prof Taylor said the results could have a similar outcome as when Copernicus discovered that the earth was not the centre of the universe.

"That changed the whole way we looked at ourselves and realised that everything did not revolve around us - that we were just a part of something much, much bigger," he said.

He said if the experiment showed there were more than the three dimensions - height, width and depth - it could change the way we look at life.

If scientists can verify the existence of the Higgs Boson, it would be a big step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which aims to bring together three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

"One of the key reasons for building the machine is to find out if (the God Particle) exists," Prof Taylor said.

"The existence of such a particle would give us a whole new view on the structure of the universe."

Cathy Foley, president of the Australian Institute of Physics, said particles would be smashed together at speeds that generate large amounts of energy but when compared to more everyday events they were less impressive.

"Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes," she said.

"It's like a rice-bubble pop."

Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says he has bet $US100 ($A122) that the mega-experiment will not find the elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs," said Hawking, whose books including A Brief History of Time have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.

While questioning the likelihood of finding Higgs Bosons, Hawking said the experiment could discover superpartners, particles that would be "supersymmetric partners" to particles already known about.

"Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together," he told the BBC.

"Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe," he added.

Hawking, the 66-year-old Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, was diagnosed with the muscle-wasting motor neuron disease at the age of 22.

He is in a wheelchair and speaks with the aid of a computer and voice synthesiser.

Massive Physics Experiment

2008-09-08T22:02:00.000+10:00

Particle physicists believe they will throw open a new frontier of knowledge on Wednesday when, 100 metres below ground, they switch on a mega-machine crafted to unveil the deepest mysteries of matter.

The most complex scientific experiment ever undertaken, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together, with the aim of filling gaps in our understanding of the cosmos.

It may also determine the outcome of novel theories about space-time: does another dimension - or dimensions - exist in parallel to our own?

After nearly two decades and 6 billion Swiss francs ($A6.6 billion), an army of 5,000 scientists, engineers and technicians drawn from nearly three dozen countries have brought the mammoth project close to fruition.

At 9.30am (1730 AEST) on Wednesday, the first protons will be injected into a 27-kilometre ring-shaped tunnel, straddling the Swiss-French border at the headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Whizzed to within a millionth of a per cent of the speed of the light, the particles will be the first step in a long-term experiment to smash sub-atomic components together, briefly generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the Sun in a microscopic space.

Analysts will then pore over the wreckage in the search for fundamental particles.

"We will be entering into a new territory of physics," said Peter Jenni, spokesman for ATLAS - one of four gargantuan laboratories installed on the ring where a swathe of delicate detectors will spot the collisions.

"Wednesday is a very major milestone."

The LHC is massively-muscled machine compared to its CERN predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider, and an ageing accelerator at the legendary Fermilab in Illinois.

It has the power to smash protons or ions - particles known as hadrons - together at a whopping 14 teraelectron volts (TeV), seven times the record held by Fermilab's Tevatron.

The leviathan scale of the project is neatly juxtaposed by its goal, which is to explore the infinitely small.

Physicists have long puzzled over how particles acquire mass.

In 1964, a British physicist, Peter Higgs, came up with this idea: there must exist a background field that would act rather like treacle.

Particles passing through it would acquire mass by being dragged through a mediator, which theoreticians dubbed the Higgs Boson.

The standard quip about the Higgs is that it is the "God Particle" - it is everywhere but remains frustratingly elusive.

French physicist Yves Sacquin says that heroic work by the LEP and Fermilab has narrowed down the energy range at which the devious critter is likely to spotted.

Given the LHC's capabilities, "there's a very strong probability that it will be detected," he said.

Some experts are also hopeful about an early LHC breakthrough on the question of supersymmetry.

The supersymmetry theory goes way beyond even the Higgs. It postulates that particles in the Standard Model have related, but more massive, counterparts.

CERN Director General Robert Aymar is confident the massive experiment will yield a correspondingly big breakthrough in penetrating these mysteries.

"It is certain that the LHC will yield the identity and understanding of this dark matter," he said in a video statement.

CERN has had to launch a PR campaign aimed at reassuring the public that the LHC will not create black holes that could engulf the planet or an unpleasant hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would turn the Earth into a lump of goo.

It has commissioned a panel to verify its calculations that such risks are, by any reasonable thinking, impossible, and France too has carried out its own safety probe.

Either way, the end of the world will not happen on Wednesday, for the simple reason that the LHC will not generate any collisions that day.

These will probably be initiated "in a few weeks" as part of a phased programme to commission the LHC, testing its equipment and evaluating work procedures before cranking it up to full strength, said Jenni.

Looking at the daily mountain of data that will have to be analysed, "it will take weeks or months before one can really hope to start discovering something new," he cautioned.

"The LHC is more than a machine. It is the intellectual quest of our age," the British weekly New Scientist said in this week's issue.

"With luck... today's physics textbooks will start to look out of date by the end of 2009."

Chrome has 'defensive component': Google boss

2008-09-05T23:59:00.000+10:00

Google's chief executive admitted Thursday there was a "defensive component" to the web search giant's launch of its own internet browser, thereby pitting it against Microsoft's dominant software.

Speaking to the Financial Times from the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Eric Schmidt said: "Microsoft has a history of favouring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that."

Schmidt added that "there is a defensive component" to the launch of Google Chrome, the code of which will be open source so no rights will have to be paid by anyone using or adapting the software, which will be a competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the dominant internet browser.

"It is true that we actually, and I in particular, have said for a long time that we should not do a browser because it wasn't necessary," he told the business daily.

"The thing that changed in the past couple of years ... is that people started building powerful applications on top of browsers and the browsers that were out there, in particular in Explorer, were not up to the task of running complex applications."

Schmidt continued: "There is an opportunity for a platform and that platform for running these new applications is something that you can't really do on IE7 (Internet Explorer version 7), and that's the argument."

Chrome is Google's latest weapon in its bid to become the leader in all internet areas. The last major browser war was won by Microsoft when it won the battle for dominance in the 1990s against Netscape Navigator.

The move comes amid growth in browser market share by Firefox, a project of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which ironically get a large portion of its funding from Google.

According to estimates by the research firm Net Applications, Internet Explorer is used by 74 per cent of computer users worldwide compared with 18 per cent for Firefox.

Google's Chrome browser ready for download

2008-09-03T13:47:00.000+10:00

Google's new browser software is designed to work "invisibly" and will run any application that runs on Apple's Safari web browser, company officials said.

The company said the new web browser, dubbed Google Chrome - a long-anticipated move to compete with Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers - is now available for download at http://www.google.com/chrome/.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company's Mountain View, California headquarters.

"You actually spend more time in your browser than you do in your car," Brian Rakowski, group product manager for the browser project, said of the significance of offering a faster browser and forcing greater competition in the market.

Google Chrome relies on Apple's WebKit software for rendering web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla. Google is a primary financial backer of Mozilla.

"If you are webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome," Pichai said.

Officials said Chrome's code would be fully available for other developers to enhance. A Google official said it planned to share code that makes Chrome work with WebKit openly with other WebKit open source developers.

Apple WebKit is widely used by web developers, not simply for Apple applications like the iPhone but also by Google itself with its mobile phone software, called Android.

"We have borrowed good ideas from others," Pichai said. "Our goal here was to bring our point of view but do it in a very open way," he said in response to a reporter's question.

"We don't want to live in a world where all that (innovation) is locked up and kept secret," Google co-founder Larry Page told the news conference. Page was a primary supporter of the Chrome project among Google's executive team.

Sergey Brin, Page's fellow co-founder, said Google planned to continue to work closely with Mozilla and hoped to see future version of Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox become more unified over time.

"It is probably worth noting that they (Mozilla Corp) are across the street and they come over here for lunch," Brin said of Mozzilla employees visits to cafeterias at the Googleplex headquarters. "I hope we will have more and more unity over time."

Chrome introduces various features that promise to make Web browsing faster, more secure and stable.

The browser allows users to keep working even when one of its open windows crashes.

Chrome is designed to take advantage of multi-core chips, recently offered by Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices, which allow computers to handle multiple processes simultaneously and with greater speed, Google engineers said.

Google Chrome: First Look

2008-09-02T21:47:00.004+10:00

Internet search giant Google has finally made its much-rumoured entry in the browser space. After the latest releases by Mozilla (Firefox 3) and Microsoft (IE 8 beta 2), here comes Google browser Chrome.

Designed to better handle video-rich or other complex Web programmes, Chrome poses a tough challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics. Google calls the move "a fresh take on the browser" and said that it will be introducing a public trial for Microsoft Corp Windows users starting September 2.

The software, which is in beta, will be distributed for free to PC users in over 100 countries via Google's blog. The Internet search leader is also working on versions for Apple Macintosh and Linux users.

Here's looking into what all the Google browser packs.

Special Tabs

Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox or Internet Explorer, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.

Web programmes can be launched in their own dedicated windows.

Speed Dial

As a default homepage, the browser offers a “speed dial” feature, similar to the one in Opera browser. This gives users a view of their most visited Web pages in 9 screenshot thumbnails.

Similarly, users can also view some of their recent searches, recently bookmarked pages and recently closed tabs.

Privacy Mode

Like IE8 Beta 2, Chrome also comes with privacy mode or porn mode feature. This mode lets users create an "incognito" window where "nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged onto your computer."

This is a read-only feature with access to one's bookmarks or favorite sites.

Address Bar

The browser has an address bar ‘omnibox’ with auto-completion features. It offers search suggestions, top pages that a user visited and pages he didn’t visit but are popular.

The omnibox also gives suggests searches. The browser's search blank keeps a track of keywords in a users' previous visit, allowing one to type in, say, "cellphone" to pull up any web pages he visited recently that pertained to cellphones, say Nokia.

Security

For safe browsing experience, Chrome will regularly keep on downloading a list of harmful sites. This is the Internet search giant's attempt to fight malware and phishing attacks.

Google also promises that whatever will run in a tab will be filtered so that it doesn't affect user’s machine.

However, users who install plugins may loose this security feature.

Multi-Tasking

The browser supports multi-tasking. Just like in a typical operating system each application is given its own memory and its own copy of global data structures. Applications will launch in their own windows so that if one should hang or crash it won’t affect the others.

This will also prevent the whole browser from crashing because it’s essentially been partitioned off.

JavaScript Virtual Machine V8

Google Chrome has a new engine for loading interactive JavaScript code, dubbed V8, which is designed to run the next generation of future Web applications. V8 will speed up JavaScript performance in the browser.

What's Inside an Ipod - Secrets Revealed

2008-08-31T19:30:00.001+10:00

Ha Ha Ha...

Funny Isnt it ?? :)

Internet Explorer 8 heralds stealth browsing

2008-08-31T19:26:00.001+10:00

Microsoft has released a second test version of Internet Explorer 8, delivering a feature-complete upgrade to the world's most widely used web browser.

The world's largest software maker said the latest version - beta 2 - of Internet Explorer, which has a market share of about 75 per cent, comes with new features to enhance privacy, ease-of-use, and security.

Microsoft first released a test - or beta 1 - version of IE 8 in March, but that was aimed at letting web developers take a first look at the new browser. This latest version is aimed at a broader consumer audience.

The company would not disclose when it planned to officially launch IE 8 nor how many people are expected to download the test version of the new browser. It released Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006.

Microsoft has pledged to deliver more regular updates of Internet Explorer, whose lead has been chipped away by Mozilla's Firefox browser.

The latest version of Internet Explorer replicates features found in Firefox 3, the latest version of that web browser, including a "smart" address bar that remembers and redirects user to website addresses they have visited before.

Internet Explorer 8 also offers a mode called "InPrivate Browsing", which ensures that history, temporary internet files and cookies are not recorded on a user's PC.

There is also a security feature that allows a user to block content coming from third-parties trying to track and aggregate the user's online behavior.

Microsoft also updated already announced features such as "Activities", which allows a user to use information found on one page, such as an address, in conjunction with an online service such as mapping without leaving the original site.

The latest test release of Internet Explorer 8 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Steve Jobs - Alive And Kicking

2008-08-30T21:29:00.000+10:00

An obituary on Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs published on Wednesday, presenting among other things his accomplishments with the company, quickly circled the globe before the mistake could be corrected.

The blooper was caused by Bloomberg News, as its ads department was supposed to just update the premature obituary marked "hold, not for release." This update system is extremely common for many news organizations, which access and complete the information from time to time.

The first few lines provide a general view over his entire career and his most appreciated contributions to today’s technological progress. "Steve Jobs, who helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones, changed the way animated films are made, persuaded consumers to tune into digital music and refashioned the mobile phone, has XXXX. He was TK. Jobs XXXX, TK said XXXXX. "

Bloomberg’s editors deleted the story and wrote, "An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m. New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted."

The obituary presents a detailed analysis of his career, from the 1976 founding of the Apple Company, to the introduction of the Mac computer in 1984, the reach of the number one spot on the music market with the iPod and many other data. There are also some quotes taken from Microsoft Corp. Co-Chairman Bill Gates’ statements about Apple’s CEO, back in January 1998: "in terms of an inspirational leader, Steve Jobs is really the best I’ve ever met […]. He’s got a belief in the excellence of products. He’s able to communicate that," and some from his fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak who back in the day focused on the engineering part and Jobs came up with the sales campaign. "Every time I designed something great from when we were very young, he would say ‘let’s sell it,’ […] It was always his idea to sell it," said Wozniak during an Intel Corp. conference in August 2008.

Aside from Jobs’ long list of accomplishments displayed in four pages, the piece discussed Apple’s stock direction and also presented a list of his survivors, which included his wife, children and sisters.

Even though many considered it a joke from the start, there were several who bought into the news, as there were some concerns about Jobs’ suffering from a reoccurrence of pancreatic cancer that he beat back in 2003. These rumors were also fueled by his significantly thinner appearance at The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. Last month, Steve Jobs addressed the health issue during an off the record talk with Joe Nocera, a New York City Times reporter, who only revealed that Jobs’ health problems "weren't life-threatening and he doesn't have a recurrence of cancer."

Jobs is considered by many analysts as the man who saved Apple, after he returned to the company in 1996. Jobs, who co-founded Apple, resigned in 1985. But he returned as CEO when Apple bought his company, NeXT. He became Apple’s permanent CEO in 2000.

Since his return, Steve Jobs has been involved in all Apple major achievements such as the launch of iPod and iTunes and the company’s transition to Intel-powered Macs. In 2006, after another speech also at WWDC, several news sites reported that Jobs has health problems, but Apple dismissed the information as rumors.

Even though Steve Jobs is looking to keep a low key on his public appearances, the plan proves to be extremely difficult, as his name keeps showing up in all sorts of situations which even though might not cause any significant harm, could become rather irritating.

Troubles for new iPhone

2008-08-30T21:24:00.000+10:00

Poor battery life is proving a bane for iPhone owners.

It took a year for the love affair between fans and the Apple iPhone to sour. The original iPhone was greeted with round-the-block queues and near-universal praise. But its 3G successor has not fared quite so well. Within a short time of going on sale, complaints started to appear online from users who found the handset could not make it through the day without a recharge. The 2G iPhone was designed to last for eight hours of normal use; on anecdotal evidence, the 3G lasts about five.

On top of that, people in the US and some other countries found that their handsets kept dropping calls. Blogger Darlene McNeill claimed she went from a Nokia Series 60 phone to the 3G iPhone and back in less than two weeks because the battery life "just couldn't cut it" (bit.ly/iphone3).

Yet in its tests with consumers, Strategy Analytics found the iPhone's battery held up well, although 3G phones generally do not last as long on one charge as 2G handsets. Standby time on the phone is average for a 3G handset; talk time is generally better.

"As a phone, it's in the right ballpark," says Neil Mawston, associate director at Strategy Analytics.

The iPhone's power problem revolves around its big selling point: how it handles data and internet access. Apple built a device that makes people want to use those services but they suck the life out of the battery. Apple was perhaps not prepared for the users who love the iPhone too much.

"Because it is such a feature-rich device, people are using more of the functions than they would on a smartphone-type device," says Doug McEuen, senior analyst at ABI Research.

"Traditional (mobile) phones have been designed to cope just with voice and SMS. The iPhone came along with lots of data-intensive applications and features and they, naturally, consume more battery power," Mr Mawston says.

Manufacturers do not yet understand how data usage affects battery life. "It is going to be trial-and-error at this stage," Mr McEuen says.

Gartner analyst Ken Delaney found a weak spot in how the iPhone deals with email pushed from servers running Microsoft Exchange.

"We seldom experienced a full day of use," Mr Delaney wrote in a report on iPhone use for business. That was with limited browsing and no telephone calls (www.bit.ly/iphone4 Note: paid-for report).

Apple is not alone. Microsoft had to fix its version of Exchange for push email on Windows Mobile because of a similar problem, according to Mr Delaney. Firmware changes are likely to address some of the applications that drain the battery and Apple urges users to keep the product up to date for this reason (www.bit.ly/iphone5).

A firmware update could also solve the problem of dropped calls, although 3G experts are unsure whether the breaks in service are down to the wireless networks, the phone or interactions between the two. T-Mobile in the Netherlands at first blamed the phone, then claimed the problem is still under investigation (www.bit.ly/iphone6). In Britain, O2 says it tested the phone extensively before launch but found no appreciable difference in behaviour to other phones.

Francis Sideco, an analyst at iSuppli, says Apple and others have to go further to improve the performance of handsets and make software energy-aware. Asmore people use the data services, they are going to find their handsets running out of juice unless the manufacturers can find power savings.

With its $275million purchase of chip-design company PA Semi in June, Apple indicated it wants to have more control over the iPhone hardware, and power efficiency is the most likely beneficiary.

Allan Yogasingam, technology analyst at TechOnline, says the purchase is a major change in direction for a company that prefers to use off-the-shelf silicon, often using older parts to keep costs down.

Don Scansen, technology analyst at Semiconductor Insights, agrees: "Apple's value is all about the software. They don't need cutting-edge technology to do it."

Apple's decision to delve into processor design appears to be tied to an unusual licence deal that ARM revealed at the end of July (www.bit.ly/iphone7). Apple will not say whether it took out the licence and ARM chief executive Warren East says the mystery licensee demanded confidentiality.

An architecture licence makes it possible for designers to alter the inner workings of the processor, although they cannot sacrifice binary compatibility with other ARM cores. Almost all chipmakers prefer to buy the ready-made designs produced by ARM.

In 1995, Digital Equipment became the first company to buy an ARM architecture licence. The result was the StrongARM. This processor ran four times faster than the ARM processors but needed 40% less power to run each instruction (www.bit.ly/iphone8: PDF).

Dan Dobberpuhl, a processor designer, led the Digital team up to its 1999 sale to Intel, where the StrongARM mutated into the XScale. Founding PA in 2005, Mr Dobberpuhl recruited a number of the original project's engineers to help build the 150-strong chip-design company. Almost 15 years later, the PA team looks ready to repeat the feat.

Jim Tully, vice-president at consultancy Gartner, speculates: "If they found a way of really reducing the power dissipation such that other companies had to go to a new generation of silicon to get the same power reduction, that would allow Apple to stay on a lower-cost technology for longer."

Mr Sideco points to the new generation of multicore processors as a way of making the hardware more efficient. Apple wants its Grand Central project to improve software speed on Macs by spreading the workload across processors. In a mobile device, there is another option.

If each processor can run slower because many of them are working in parallel, you can design them to use far less power. And you can turn off processor cores completely if the phone is just ticking over.

"The car companies have done the same thing. If you are cruising down the highway, they shut down four out of the eight cylinders to save fuel," Mr Sideco explains.

But designing the new processor chip will take time.

Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group, an analyst, says: "For this sort of chip, it could take anywhere from one year to two years to get to having the first test chips. It's closer to three years before I would expect to see an iPhone that had any kind of Apple-designed chip in there."

The project could cost between $40-$60 million, he estimates.

Nokia unveils two N-series phones

2008-08-26T20:48:00.003+10:00

Nokia has unveiled two new high-end phone models, N79 and N85, as the world's top cellphone maker battles against increasing competition from the likes of Apple and Samsung.

Both new phones, upgrades to Nokia's older models, will have 5 megapixel cameras and pre-loaded games.

Both new models will go on sale in October. The N85 will retail for 450 euros ($662), excluding operator subsidies and taxes, and the N79 will go on sale for 350 euros.

Earlier, Nokia confirmed that it plans to roll out a portfolio of touch phones across the low-to-high end of phone market.

Sources said Nokia’s first touch phone, code-named Tube, will target the mid-segment and have features that compete against iPhone 3G at a much lower price.

Nokia’s Internet services platform Ovi will have a music store, which will be loaded with regional music, sources said.

Nokia said, “We will launch touchscreen phones by December. Ovi will also be launched by then and will have a host of entertainment services, among others.”

Wireless power 'eliminates chargers'

2008-08-23T17:26:00.000+10:00

Intel showed off a wireless electric power system that analysts say could revolutionise modern life by freeing devices from transformers and wall outlets.

Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the California firm's annual developers forum in San Francisco.

Electricity was sent wirelessly to a lamp on stage, lighting a 60 watt bulb that uses more power than a typical laptop computer.

Most importantly, the electricity was transmitted without zapping anything or anyone that got between the sending and receiving units.

"The trick with wireless power is not can you do it; it's can you do it safely and efficiently," Intel researcher Josh Smith said in an online video explaining the breakthrough.

"It turns out the human body is not affected by magnetic fields; it is affected by elective fields. So what we are doing is transmitting energy using the magnetic field not the electric field."

Examples of potential applications include airports, offices or other buildings that could be rigged to supply power to laptops, mobile telephones or other devices toted into them.

The technology could also be built into plugged in computer components, such as monitors, to enable them to broadcast power to devices left on desks or carried into rooms, according to Smith.

"Initially it eliminates chargers and eventually it eliminates batteries all together," analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said of Intel's wireless power system.

"That is potentially a world changing event. This is the closest we've had to something being commercially available in this class."

Previous wireless power systems consisted basically of firing lightning bolts from sending to receiving units.

Smith says Intel's wireless power system is still in an early stage of development and much research remains before it can be brought to market.

Rattner spoke of technological transformations he expects by the year 2050.

"You'd like to cut the last cord," Smith said.

"It's great that we have wireless email and wireless internet and stuff like that but at the end of the day it would be nice to have wireless recharge as well."

What rivals have that iPhone doesn't

2008-08-23T17:11:00.003+10:00

The release of 3G iPhone has once again refueled the raging mobile battle. It has renewed the fight which has been on since January 2007 (at MacWorld), when Steve Jobs first showcased his touchscreen magic to the world.

Jobs keynote address at MacWorld woke up the telecom world to a new opponent and since then the cellphone manufacturers have been on their toes to develop a formidable iPhone rival.

Almost all top cellphone makers, including the mobile giant Nokia either have an iPhone rival ready or are vigorously working on the same. Companies are leaving no stone unturned to dissuade Apple from taking over the cell phone market.

Case in point is the unveiling of Nokia N96 two days prior to Apple iPhone's official release. So, here's looking into all where and how these hottest competitors manage to score over iPhone.

3G iPhone comes in 8GB and 16GB models, and with no expandable memory. While its rivals, Nokia N96 and Samsung Omnia offer higher storage.

Nokia N96 offers memory expansion of up to 24GB. This smartphone packs 16GB of internal memory, which is expandable up to 24GB.

According to Nokia, the phone can store up to 60 hours of video or 20 full-length movies. The 24GB N96 can store up to 18000 songs and up to 20000 images.

Similarly, the Samsung Omina has same storage variants, 8GB and 16 GB, and it also allows users to expand memory.

In the days when 5-7 megapixel camera seems to have become a rule, Apple iPhone's 2 megapixel seems pale. Its closest rival, Nokia N96 boasts of 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash and video light. The video camera captures at 30 frames per second.

Not only this, N96 predecessor N95 also boasted of a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss autofocus lens. It has support for multiple scene bright flash, high quality VGA video recording at up to 30 fps and front-facing VGA camera for video calling.

However, missing features like video recording and optical zoom in iPhone only add insult to injury.

Samsung's iPhone wannabe Omnia too features a 5 megapixel camera. It supports auto focus, image stabliser, auto-panorama shot, wide dynamic range and face detection options.

It also supports video recording, video editing and audio and live dubbing.

The latest touchscreen smartphone from BlackBerry, Bold, though has a 2 megapixel camera, but support video recording, built-in flash and digital zoom, unlike iPhone.

HTC's Touch Diamond too has high-resolution camera (3.2 megapixel) with an optical auto-focus lens, video calling capability and auto sensor screen pivoting.

Like HTC's smartphone, Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA X1 too has a 3.2 megapixel camera with photo light. The phone is company's answer to Apple iPhone.

Another feature where Nokia's 'Killer Product' steals a march over iPhone. For music lovers, Nokia N96 has media keys, 3.5 mm headphone connector and built-in 3D stereo speakers. Users can access digital video broadcasting, wireless Internet and Bluetooth.

To engage gaming enthusiasts, there are N-gage games. Nokia N96 has support for stereo Bluetooth (A2DP), but iPhone lacks this.

Samsung Omnia too stands high on multimedia features with a TV-Out feature to playback content from the phone directly on the television screen. DivX technology enables video content transfer from the PC to the mobile.

Not just this, Apple iPhone also doesn't let users transfer data using Bluetooth and lacks regular FM and offers users streaming Internet radio. Users can only use the Bluetooth feature in iPhone for hands-free calling.

Another area where iPhone lags behind is no MMS and message forward. Users cannot simply forward text messages. Users can only send text messages or snapshots via email. Also, there is no option to send SMS to multiple contacts.

Also, while the iPhone offers the popular Google maps, the drawback is that these maps do not offer voice directions in certain countries. The N96 offers Nokia Maps 2.0 with voice directions for almost all countries.

Even BlackBerry Bold boasts of high-end multimedia features. For music and video, the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software includes Roxio Media Manager as well as Roxio Photosuite 9 LE, to edit pictures and create photo albums on the computer.

One of the biggest plus points of iPhone rivals is that they are service provider agnostic. As a user, you need not get tied to Airtel for certain period with a certain rental plan just to own them.

Most iPhone rivals, including Omnia, N96 and BlackBerry Bold can be bought off the shelves with no operator bar.

Another area where iPhone struggles to compete with rivals is no user replaceable battery. Users cannot change an iPhone battery on their own. They will have to send it to an Apple outlet for this. On the other hand, Nokia N96 offers users the freedom to remove and replace the battery.

Though Apple reportedly claims that it has intentionally left out the user-replaceable battery because it adds bulk and weight, but users may not wish to buy that reason.

However, it’s rival BlackBerry’s Bold that supports removable/rechargeable battery which provides multi-hour usage with a target talktime of approximately 5 hours and standby time of 13 days.

Unlike Apple iPhone, Samsung Omnia supports a removable battery.

Nokia touchscreen phone by Dec

2008-08-20T21:10:00.002+10:00

Setting at rest speculations, cell phone major Nokia has confirmed it will launch a full touchscreen handset by the end of this year.

"We have been working on the Series 60 platform for touchscreen user interface and a mobile device is expected to be launched by the year-end," Nokia Spokesperson, told reporters.

The Nokia full touchscreen phone, codenamed the 'Tube' was also featured in the latest Batman movie "The Dark Knight" and will be Nokia's second full touchscreen device, the first of which was launched in 2003 but was later discontinued.

The past year has seen cellphone majors such as Samsung and LG debuting their full touchscreen mobile phones in the market after the success of the Apple iPhone.

It is widely anticipated that Research in Motion (RIM) -- the makers of Blackberry -- are also working on a full touchscreen phone, codenamed 'Blackberry Thunder'.

Nokia first unveiled the touchscreen S60 interface last October.

"The new software would allow licensees to develop devices with a variety of input methods, such as touchscreen with traditional keypad, QWERTY keyboard, or standalone touchscreen, supporting both finger or stylus optimised input," a Nokia statement had then stated.

Mobile phone maker Symbian Ltd, in which Nokia held a majority stake till a few months ago, has developed the S60 platform.

The Finnish giant announced the acquisition of the remaining 52 per cent stake in Symbian in June this year from Sony Ericsson, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens.

"With the acquisition of Symbian, we will be able to offer our customers more innovative products and the latest technology," Kishore said.

On being asked about the Apple's OS X, the fastest growing mobile operating system, Kishore said, "Symbian is the largest mobile phone software developer globally and it is up to our customers to decide how popular and accepted our software is."

OS X recently displaced Microsoft Windows for mobiles as the number three mobile phone operating system after Symbian and Blackberry.

Google, which some time back announced the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), is also working on a mobile OS -- Android, based on the Linux platform.

A robot with a biological brain!

2008-08-20T20:57:00.001+10:00

Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

"The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects.

Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

"If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said.

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.

This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer. From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections," said Warwick.

"Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human -- brain, he added.

But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months. "Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways," explained Warwick.

To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.

To help this process along, the researchers also use different chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up during particular actions.

Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities -- several MEA "brains" that the scientists can dock into the robot.

"It's quite funny -- you get differences between the brains," said Warwick. "This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to."

Mainly for ethical reasons, it is unlikely that researchers at Reading or the handful of laboratories around the world exploring the same terrain will be using human neurons any time soon in the same kind of experiments.

But rats brain cells are not a bad stand-in: much of the difference between rodent and human intelligence, speculates Warwick, could be attributed to quantity not quality.

Rats brains are composed of about one million neurons, the specialised cells that relay information across the brain via chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Humans have 100 billion. "This is a simplified version of what goes on in the human brain where we can look -- and control -- the basic features in the way that we want. In a human brain, you can't really do that," he said.

For colleague Ben Whalley, one of the fundamental questions facing scientists today is how to link the activity of individual neurons with the overwhelmingly complex behaviour of whole organisms.

"The project gives us a unique opportunity to look at something which may exhibit complex behaviours, but still remain closely tied to the activity of individual neurons," he said.

Firefox hack attack warning

2008-08-17T16:30:00.000+10:00

Several security holes have been discovered in Firefox and other software from Mozilla.

The Thunderbird e-mail program and the Seamonkey program suite have also been affected.

Users should update their software as soon as possible once patches become available, recommends the German Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology (BSI) in Bonn.

The warning applies to Firefox versions prior to 2.0.0.16 and 3.0.1 as well as to Seamonkey. In the latter case, any version prior to 1.1.11 is vulnerable to hacker attacks.

Those who do not receive automated updates can download them manually at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox or http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases.

No update is available as yet for Thunderbird, which is affected in all versions prior to 2.0.0.16.

DPA

iPhone 3G woes a hardware problem

2008-08-14T19:28:00.000+10:00

Spotty wireless broadband connectivity for some of Apple's new iPhones most likely results from a hardware problem introduced during mass production, a Swedish technical magazine has reported.

Ny Teknik, Sweden's foremost engineering weekly, obtained a report on tests conducted by unnamed experts that showed some handsets' sensitivity to third-generation network signals is well below the level specified in the 3G standard.

So-called 3G networks offer the promise of faster web surfing on mobile phone browsers, and make bandwidth-hogging applications like video calling feasible. Phones that access 3G networks must meet certain engineering and technical specifications, which are set and maintained by the International Telecommunication Union, a Geneva-based organization.

The report said the most likely cause of the 3G problems is defective adjustments between the antenna and an amplifier that captures very weak signals from the antenna. This could lead to poor 3G connectivity and slower data speeds.

The iPhone 3G, which went on sale July 11 in Australia and 21 other countries, was meant to offer faster web browsing than the year-old original model.

Since the launch of the next-generation iPhone, Apple's message boards have been flooded with complaints of dropped calls and poor 3G connectivity indicated by few or no "bars" on the phone's display.

Some users said they performed side-by-side tests and found that the iPhone had connectivity problems in locations where 3G phones from other manufacturers did not. The reports were made by users who said they lived in Australia, United States, Canada, Japan, Britain and other countries.

Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris declined to comment on whether the problem lies in the iPhone's hardware or software, or with the various carriers' 3G networks.

In the United States, AT&T is the only wireless provider to sell the iPhone. Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T's wireless unit, said AT&T has not received a significant number of complaints and that, "overall, the new iPhone is performing just great on our 3G network."

In an interview, Siegel recommended that iPhone 3G users sync the devices with Apple's iTunes program frequently to take advantage of improvements that may come via updated software.

Connectivity is just the latest of Apple's problems with the iPhone 3G.

Just hours before the new phones were set to go on sale, users of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company's old data-synching service were locked out of their accounts when it took Apple longer than expected to get the new version, MobileMe, up and running.

On launch day, Apple's servers buckled as buyers tried to activate new iPhones in stores, while owners of older iPhones and the iPod Touch were updating and reactivating their devices at home.

Francis Sideco, a senior analyst for El Segundo, Calif.-based research group iSuppli Corp., said the connectivity problems described by users - dropped calls and the low number of bars in particular - could be caused by any of a number of parts, from the phone's antenna and amplifier and the radio frequency transceiver to the baseband that processes the digital signal and sends it to the speaker or screen.

A faulty part could cause the phone to think there isn't enough signal strength to keep a call connected, he said, and could prompt the phone to display too few bars.

Different parts from different manufacturers also vary in their ability to draw the 3G signal from the air, the analyst said, which would support users' claims that different phones held side by side show different numbers of bars.

Ny Teknik's report suggested the error was introduced during mass production. Sideco noted that cell phone chips, or the phones themselves, go through a testing and certification process before reaching consumers, but only a fraction of the chips or handsets are tested.

"We've seen this in the past before, in Motorola's Razr line. It was a very big seller, but the first version of that phone had RF (radio frequency) problems. They had to recall it, fix it, (and) put it back out there," he said.

Sideco said such a problem could explain another oft-heard iPhone 3G complaint, the shorter-than-expected battery life.

"It could end up drawing more power because now the phone thinks it's (getting a) worse signal than it actually is. When it goes to talk to the network, it speaks louder than it needs to," he said.

The analyst said similar complaints from people in more than one geographic location indicates that the problem is with the phone, not the network.

Without knowing exactly what is going wrong, Sideco could not say whether software or firmware updates could fix the glitch, or whether Apple could be facing the possibility of a recall.

Dell gearing up for iPod battle

2008-07-30T18:25:00.000+10:00

In recent months, personal computer maker Dell has been testing a digital music player that could go on sale as early as September, the Wall Street Journal newspaper said, citing several Dell officials.

Dell's new foray would put it into an Apple-led market that has defied assaults. Companies like Microsoft Corp and Sony Corp have tried and failed to make a dent in the market dominated by Apple's iPod players and iTunes store, the Journal said.

The music player which Dell has been testing features a small navigation screen and basic button controls to scroll through music play lists, the Jornal reported.

It would connect to online music services via a Wi-Fi Internet connection, and Dell would likely price the model at less than $100, the Journal said.

Dell's first foray into the music market in 2003 was a huge disappointment. It withdrew from the music-player market after its DJ Ditty player failed to make major inroads.

This time, if the company goes ahead with the music player, the strategy is different, Michael Tatelman, Dell's vice president of consumer sales said, according to the paper.

Instead of simply selling a piece of hardware tied to someone else's music service, as it did in 2003, Dell is working on software for a range of portable PCs that will let users download and organise music and movies from various online sources, the paper added.

Moon Man: Aliens Real

2008-07-25T14:47:00.003+10:00

Aliens started contacting our world 60 years ago, but the truth has been covered up, a US astronaut claimed.

Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, said he was aware of many UFO visits to Earth, but each one was covered up.

Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had contact with aliens described the beings as "little people who look strange to us".

He said they were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.

He claimed our technology was not nearly as sophisticated as theirs and had they been hostile "we'd be gone by now".

"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,' Mitchell said.

"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the past 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

"I've been in military and intelligency circles who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes, we have been visited.

"Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."

He also said the supposed alien crash at Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.

"This is really starting to open up. I think we're headed for real disclosure and some serious organisations are moving that direction," Mitchell Said.

A NASA spokesman said: "We do not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere.

"Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue."

Google unveils reference tool after 7-month test

2008-07-24T17:14:00.000+10:00

Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show off - and profit from - their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed "knol" in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader's marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company's answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web's leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. Google reasons that Wikipedia's contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia's existing entries.

With a seven-year head start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The initial topics covered include an overview of constipation by a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google's own software engineers.

Unlike Wikipedia, knol requires the authors to identify themselves to help the audience assess the source's credibility. Google doesn't intend to screen the submissions for accuracy, Dupont said, and instead will rely on its search formulas to highlight the articles that readers believe are credible.

Google has had mixed success so far in its attempts to expand beyond its ubiquitous search engine, which generates most of its profits. While products like its e-mail service have been hits, other forays like a listing system called "Base" and a social network called Orkut haven't fared as well.

What 3G iPhone doesn't have

2008-07-17T16:17:00.002+10:00

iPhone sequel is red hot. Even as it rolls out across the world in phases, the demand seems to be increasing with each passing day.

And as every buyer would proudly wink and declare his iPhonic status, the have nots will recoil and steel their resolve to acquire one.

By now you would surely remember by heart what the iPhone has. But wait, do you also know what it does not have?

Bringing you a list of features that tells you what even the iconic iPhone doesn’t have...

Miss 1: Little on the looks front

Apple products are known for their design and looks. So, expectations about a new look were high. In fact, rumour mills worked over time on the looks of iPhone 2, it was speculated that the new back of the phone will no be longer metal -- but the whole thing will be glossy black, from top to bottom.

However, the new iPhone offers nothing new in terms of looks. The 3G iPhone looks pretty much like its predecessors.

The new iPhone is only about 0.1 ounce lighter than the previous model. The 3G iPhone shows a few cosmetic changes from the front, with similar display size and resolution, and the single Home button placed below the screen.

The phone's black plastic skin back has been replaced by silver-aluminum back. While the 8GB model comes in black only, the 16GB version is available in both black and white.

Miss 2: Video camera

There were speculations for a higher-resolution camera and a possible support for digital video recording. However, 3G iPhone disappoints with the same 2 megapixel camera and no video recording option and flash and optical zoom too missing.

This is specially a dampener since video recording feature is today found in most cell phones, even those at the lower end. Also, most of Apple’s rivals in the cell phone space like Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung are offering higher version cameras.

Sony Ericsson recently introduced an 8 megapixel camera. Samsung already has one in the range. Others Nokia and Motorola too offer 5 megapixel camera phones.

Miss 3: Multimedia deficit

Another sorely missed out features are multimedia messaging and voice dialing. Users can send text messages or snapshots via email, but there's still no MMS (multimedia messaging) feature on the iPhone!

Also, the phone disappoints fans who were hoping for a bundle of new multimedia features in 3G iPhone.

Miss 4: User replaceable battery

User replaceable battery and tactile feedback for the touchscreen, both have been given a miss in the new iPhone. User-replaceable battery is a serious drawback.

Though Apple reportedly claims that it left out the user-replaceable battery because it adds bulk and weight, users can’t help comparing it with other smartphones.

Miss 5: Incompatible Bluetooth

Users were expecting a landscape keyboard, capability to cut and paste, expanded memory and additional Bluetooth profiles - which all too is missing.

For example, while iPhone supports Bluetooth headsets, the lack of keyboard or headphone would be a hindrance for those who want to optimise their experience with wireless peripherals.

Also, 3G iPhone does not have A2DP Bluetooth. Users may also sorely miss the support for Bluetooth stereo or in-car Bluetooth handsfree.

Miss 6: No support for Adobe Flash

Adobe says it is working on iPhone Flash, but sadly for now there is no support for Adobe Flash in 3G iPhone.

Presently, when users will browse through Web pages with Adobe Flash it will display empty spaces with missing icons. Apple claims Flash would run too slowly on the iPhone.

Thus, the lack of Flash support for the Safari Web browser limits the access of several websites on the iPhone.

Miss 7: No cut-and-paste

This may be hard to digest. BlackBerry has it, Nokia has it, however, 3G iPhone lacks it.

Most of the smartphones available in the market support the cut and paste feature, but somehow Apple has preferred to stay away from it.

11 cool new apps for the iPhone

2008-07-14T18:37:00.003+10:00

It's the third-party software that makes it rock

With the release of the iPhone 2.0 software on Friday and the opening of the App Store -- where hundreds of third-party applications are now available -- Apple Inc.'s iPhone has taken a major leap toward becoming a premiere mobile platform.

Since the iPhone's arrival last year, one of the constant complaints about it was that the hardware was a technological marvel but the software was lacking. A little over a year after its debut, Apple released not only the most significant hardware upgrade since the iPhone's inception, but also the most significant software release to date. Best of all, the apps work on the first-generation iPhone as well as the newer iPhone 3G, and on the iPod Touch. (You have to pay $9.95 to update the iPod Touch so it can run third-party applications, though.)

While new hardware is important for attracting new buyers -- what with a lower cost of entry and the 3G chipset -- it's the software and the arrival of the App Store that allows the iPhone to transcend being just another mobile phone. Officially opened on July 11, though accessible the day before, the App Store sprung to life with more than 550 third-party applications ranging from games to sketch pads to medical applications.

To get you started, we've chosen 11 applications that are decidedly worth looking at, though you should check out the App Store yourself and weigh in below with your own favorites. The first six are free; the rest will cost you a few bucks. All are worth a look:

AOL Instant Messenger (free)

This handy application provides a fast and easy way to talk to your peers via AOL's instant messaging system, as well as buddies on ICQ and .Mac/MobileMe. Already one of the most downloaded applications on the App Store, this program is a simple and straight-forward way to connect to the AIM network with your iPhone.

Upon first launch, the application presents you with three login options: AIM, MobileMe, and .Mac. Once the service is chosen, username and password is entered, you're presented with your Buddy List groups, which, upon selection, displays your buddies, their availability and their status messages. From the main Buddy List, there are arrows beside your Buddy names that can be tapped, bringing you to a Buddy Info screen. From this screen, you can change their display name, the group they're associated with, and even add your buddy to a Favorites list for even easier access.

This application uses the swipe gesture to switch between active chats, and the entire app is straight-forward, taking full advantage of the available screen real estate without clutter. This app is easily on my own personal must-have list, especially in light of AT&T's SMS price-gouging on its new monthly plans. (Just because AT&T isn't the only carrier to overprice on SMS doesn't make it any less wrong.)

There are a few caveats, though. AIM doesn't tie in with your Address Book and it does not run in the background. Once it's quit, you're logged off.

Apple is already working on that last issue and is devising a notification API that will allow messages and alerts to be pushed from their servers to a person's iPhone. That will eventually allow IMs to show up as alerts, just like SMS messages. Another feature this API will bring is the ability to display badges on Home Screen icons -- just like Mail does. Once released, this API will provide immediate IM notifications without cutting into battery life or wasting processor cycles, both of which are inherent to background applications. It also showcases Apple's commitment to making the iPhone a better mobile platform.

Remote (free)

This slick little app from Apple allows you to remotely control an iTunes library with the iPhone or iPod Touch -- as long as there's a WiFi connection. It goes beyond simple remote control and allows you to browse playlists, scroll through lists of artists and albums and even see album art for currently playing music or videos.

Upon first launch, you're greeted with a screen prompting you to search for an iTunes library. Remote app found my iTunes library instantly. Once I selected my library, my iPhone became available on the iTunes sidebar on the Mac. Clicking on the iPhone icon brought up a simple prompt asking me for a four-digit set of numbers displayed on the iPhone. Once I typed in the numbers, the phone paired with my iTunes library on my computer, and I had instant access to remotely control my media.

The app itself is simple and easy to use, borrowing liberally from the design of the music playing software that comes with every iPhone and touch. It's that interface familiarity and seamless integration that makes this remote control software brilliant, though there are a few caveats: you can only remotely control your iTunes library when you're in range of WiFi, and Remote is limited to one basic function: the remote control of your iTunes library. There's no streaming of music or movies, so you cannot listen or watch your media on the device. There also doesn't seem to be lyric support in music, and there's no cover flow support either. Both would be nice, although they're not necessary.

This is highly recommended to anyone that uses their Mac or PC for listening to music.

Loopt (free)

This is one of the best implementations of social networking on the go. This application uses Location Services to keep you and your friends up to date on each other's activities, including pin-pointing their locations on a map. To quote the CEO of Loopt, Sam Altman, "We show you where people are, what they're doing, and what cool places are around you." Loopt also supports Facebook and Twitter integration, allowing content and location to be kept up to date between the three services.

After a brief account creation and log in, you're presented with Loopt's main screen: a map of your location, a couple of icons at the top of the screen for finding places and friends, a small status section, and four buttons at the bottom for interface navigation.

The default view, the Map, begins by finding your location and uses Microsoft's Virtual Earth for its mapping software. Tapping the upper left button reveals a search (featuring restaurant reviews from Yelp), though Loopt takes the initiative once the search field is opened and starts finding local restaurants automatically. Clicking on any of the search results once they populate the map brings up an info screen that can display reviews, comments from friends about the place, plus the usual phone number and address.

Besides Map, there is an on-screen navigation button called What's Up. This button brings up a screen that allows you to update your status, location and picture. Once sent out, your Loopt buddies are kept in the loop. You can also see what your friends have been up to, which brings me to the best part of Loopt: the ability to track your friends from the Map screen. Every time Loopt is launched, your Location is auto-updated, as is the location of your friends. Not only can you see where they are in respect to your location, Loopt taps into the iPhone's services by allowing you to call or text them, and get directions to them. For those friends that haven't logged in to Loopt recently, the software allows you to Ping them. Ping is a prompt for their location, which is instantly sent via SMS message, and when returned, gives you their location- after receiving their permission, of course. While it sounds a bit Big Brother-ish -- and it can be -- the most paranoid amongst us can rest assured that the auto-location services can be turned off.

AOL Radio (free)

This is for the people who scoffed at the lack of built-in radio for FM and AM frequencies. AOL radio offers music from slightly more than 30 cities, with radio streamed to your phone regardless of connection -- Edge, WiFi or 3G. AOL Radio uses Location Services to track down local radio stations, which are displayed by Cities in the Locals tab, with all of the available stations displayed by genre under the Stations tab. Two other interface tabs called Favorites and Recents do exactly what their names imply: they display favorite stations and recently played stations.

When a station is selected, track information and artist are displayed next to the station's logo or album art. With certain songs, a magnifying glass -- similar to the Spotlight icon in Mac OS X -- displays underneath the track information; tapping this icon allows you to Find on iTunes, Find on AOL Music and Remember This Song for future reference. Adding stations to favorites is simple: Just tap the star icon in the upper right portion of the station's menu bar.

A cautionary note: This application reminded me exactly why I use the iPod/iPhone to listen to my songs: every station I tried just happened to be running commercials at the time. That's not a reflection of the application, which worked exactly as it should have. It's a commentary on radio stations in general. One neat thing I noticed with this app: you can close out of the app by hitting the Home button, silencing the radio. But if you press the sleep/wake button on top of the iPhone, the radio plays, even though the screen is off.

Shazam (free -- for a limited time)

This little app will help you identify a song, even when you can't recall its name. Shazam allows you to record music from any source using the built in microphone. After analyzing the tune, it kicks back results in seconds.

The interface couldn't be any easier to use (I detect a recurring theme with iPhone apps). You record a snippet of audio -- the default allows for 12 seconds of recording -- and the results of the lookup are displayed with astounding accuracy. I've sampled a dozen songs so far. Not only does Shazam give you the song name, artist, album and label, but there are even links to the iTunes store so you can purchase the song or album. You Tube videos are also linked, if any are available.

From there, you can build up a collection of songs you've recorded -- called Tags -- attach photos to them, share them with friends or delete them.

Bonus freebie: Midomi

This application is similar to Shazam in that it allows you to take bits of audio and use that to find a song. Where this differs from Shazam is that you can actually search for a song by singing, humming or whistling the familiar bits, or by using the Shazam-like ability to record audio for look up. You can also search for a song or artist just by stating their name or typing it out. Midomi is a simple app with a basic function; the fact that these two music finders are free means you can try them both and decide which one you like best.

Tips ($1.99)

This application has a very simple purpose: to help parties figure out tips for restaurant bills. It's a single-screen application that's exactly what you want during what is perhaps the most stressful part of eating out: figuring out the bill.

Upon launching the app, you're faced with a blank subtotal section, and the question "How much was your bill?" A service slider adjusts the tip percentage from 5% to 30%, and another slider adjusts party size from 1 to 12. A Tip and Total section breaks down the results, and hopefully, ends all discussions about who owes what.

Simple. Effective. And you're bound to save the $1.99 purchase price by making sure everyone at your table pays their fare share.

Enigmo ($9.99)

Since the first time I saw this game's opening level flyby at the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote last month, it's been on my gotta-have list. The main point of this game is to guide liquid droplets from point a to point b, with increasing levels of difficulty. With each level, you're given the task to guide liquid from its start point to its destination point, using a variety of tools and objects to help you do so.

This simple premise is extremely well-implemented, providing brain-teasing fun and 50 levels to challenge you. The game itself utilizes positional audio, takes advantage of the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities and 3D graphics -- and ties it all together with an amazing physics engine.

This game's fun factor is right up there with the best puzzle-based games. Highly recommended.

Comic Touch ($4.99)

From the makers of Comic Life comes Comic Touch, porting some of the best features of Comic Life to surprising effect for a mobile device. Just like Comic Life, you can easily add dialogue balloons to pictures, as well as captions and even some Core Image effects. Unlike Comic Life, you do this on a 3.5-inch screen. The application is so well designed that manipulating photos and text with this app feels completely natural. Kudos to the designers for creating an interface that uses the iPhone's capabilities without adding clutter.

When you first launch Comic Life, you're prompted for an image source. After selecting your photo from the Photo Library or Camera, you can then add dialogue balloons, captions and familiar Core Image effects like budge and squeeze. Once done, you can share the results with friends via e-mail, or save the image directly to your Photo Library.

Fans of Comic Life will be fans of Comic Touch, and this application may bring in new fans of Comic Life. If you like to manipulate photos of your friends and want to do so on the go, this is certainly the perfect solution.

Texas Hold 'em ($4.99)

This nifty take on Hold 'Em style Poker takes advantage of the iPhone's video capabilities, displaying impressive graphics, including footage of your computer opponents. Not only that, this game also allows you to play with your friends within a local wifi network. (I'm assuming it uses Apple's Bonjour services for auto-discovery, which means you can't play across the internet).

Upon first launch you're presented with two game modes (single player and multiplayer), settings, statistics and help. There are options for play locations such as an Apple-themed Garage, an Aquarium, and even a seat at a poker table in Dubai.

The computer opponents are digitized humans and they're very well implemented into the game. Their reactions during the game play is amusing, but you can skip over their animations by touching the screen. The game itself uses great work of the touch screen, allowing you to check by double-tapping, fold by dragging your cards to the table, and go all in by doing the same with your chips. By turning the phone from portrait to landscape mode, the view is switched from first person to table-top view of the action. And when you tap on the Home button, the game is automatically saved until the next time you want to play it.

One hint: Read over the Help section, which offers up a series of pictures detailing what you can do with the interface and gestures. It may sound obvious, but as impressive as the graphics are for this game, there aren't really any visual cues to let you know what does what.

For Poker fans, this game is highly recommended. Go ahead, see if I'm bluffing.

Super Monkey Ball ($9.99)

This is easily the most addictive iPhone application yet. I've watched this one with great interest since it was announced during Apple's iPhone 2.0 event in March, and it hasn't disappointed me now that it has finally been released.

The game itself is simple: guide a monkey in a ball through 3-D levels while picking up bananas along the way without falling over a ledge. This simple premise hides the true challenge of the game: navigating said monkey using just the iPhone's accelerometer. You move the phone around to move the monkey.

The game's layout is easy to navigate, and the action is fun. Sporting over 100 levels, this game uses the accelerometers to great effect. The graphics and motion are surprisingly crisp and well done. There are several game modes included, from the Main Game option, to Instant Play and Practice. Start in Practice mode, as this game relies on a specific landscape angle to start, and there's no way to calibrate. Getting used to this specific position is key to enjoying the game, and you should know that the iPhone's accelerometer is very sensitive; wild, Wii-like movements aren't necessary.

Super Monkey Ball is what great, fun gaming is all about: simple enough to pick up and play; challenging enough to keep you coming back.

A few App Store caveats

As wonderful as these apps may sound, there are still a few niggling questions about what can't -- or won't -- be allowed at the App Store. For instance, even though the ability to record video was available via third-party applications on a Jailbroken previous-gen iPhone, no such utilities exist in the current App Store. Given that the iPhone's camera is capable of recording video, the lack of such an application is glaring. There's also a suspicious lack of navigation utilities featuring spoken directions, and a surprising lack of MMS applications. I can't imagine Apple didn't see a need for this, and like video recording, MMS capabilities were available on an application repository for Jailbroken iPhones.

It's too soon to tell whether such applications will eventually make their way to the App Store, but their absence shouldn't detract from the fact that the App Store opens the iPhone up to so many new, innovative and entertaining third-party possibilities. Maybe Apple froze them out because it's working on similar apps itself.

Easy to navigate through iTunes and on the iPhone/iPod touch, the App Store is skillfully designed to the point of being nearly effortless to use. Apple has even made it easy for people who may have accidently deleted application. Just re-download the app! The App Store will check your purchase history, see that you've already bought the item and allow you to transfer the file again at no cost. It's all automatic and all behind the scenes.

My only problem with the App store is also it's greatest strength: It's incredibly simple to browse through and purchase apps without thinking twice. As my iPhone's abilities expand, my bank account decreases. It's a testament to the development efforts by the third-party developers and a warning to you: Keep an eye on your spending.

My last piece of advice? You're going to want a mobile charger. With everything that can be done with the iPhone and iPod Touch now, you might find yourself reaching for it often. Trust me: you're going to want that extra juice.

Courtesy: Computer World

Apple Fans Find it Hard

2008-07-12T17:10:00.001+10:00

Some Apple fans were finding it hard to make use of their new 3G iPhones on Friday as a flood of shoppers trying to activate their new handsets overwhelmed Apple’s iTunes servers. The overload caused Apple’s iPhone activation process to crash for part of the day, turning thousands of new 3G iPhones into glorified paperweights.

Tech-savvy Apple fans, many of whom waited in line for hours - and in some cases overnight - to get their hands on the 3G iPhone should have seen this coming. It doesn’t take a computer genius to figure out that, with tens of thousands of people queueing up from Tokyo to San Francisco, there was bound to be a crushing load on Apple servers at some point during the day.

But over-eager early adopters were not the only ones suffering yesterday, according to reports from the blogosphere. Apparently, owners of first-generation iPhones who plugged into iTunes for a software update also found their phones turning into bricks, as crashing iTunes servers left them unable to complete the update process.

The result was, as they say in California, a bit of a bummer.

By midday in San Francisco, the problems that had plagued both sets of users throughout the day were showing signs of easing. Asia had gone to bed, lessening the load on servers. By mid-afternoon, the frantic Twittering about failed software updates had largely ceased.

By all accounts, the 3G iPhone is one of the most exciting devices to launch this year. Too bad for Apple that its launch got off to such a rocky start.

Apple's iPhone could find Asia tough to crack

2008-07-07T18:53:00.001+10:00

The iPhone 3G, which Apple is billing as twice as fast and half as expensive as the debut model, will roll out in cities from Tokyo to Sydney on Friday -- but it could face challenges in Asia it will not have elsewhere.

The company is betting the new phone's third generation (3G) capabilities, such as faster Internet access and file transfer, will make the phone a hit. Like the first version, the new model also has an iPod built in.

Many analysts are upbeat about its prospects, seeing Apple as a brand with a strong cachet in tech-savvy Asia.

Mancy Li wants to get her hands on Apple's newest version of the iPhone, but she won't bother to queue up in Hong Kong when it is released in Asia this week.

"I want to get one because it is trendy. It has a touch screen, it looks pretty and it's made by Apple," the 22-year-old visual arts student says.

But she's prepared to wait and see what happens to the price of running the new version of the phone, which Apple hopes will become as big a global hit as its iconic iPod music player.

"It is going to do well," Aloysius Choong, of Singapore-based industry research group IDC, told AFP.

"Apple is a strong brand in Asia and this is their maiden mobile phone offering in Asia. Just the Apple aura or the Apple halo means that there will be non-Apple users who will look at the product."

But in a region where having the latest gadget is almost an obsession, black market debut-version iPhones are already widely available, serviced by countless shops that "unlock" the software to allow them to operate.

With the phone already in circulation, the novelty factor will be less, which could emphasise the importance of pricing for the new model.

And that could prove to be an obstacle. Like elsewhere, Apple is only allowing the iPhone for sale through a limited number of operators -- whose pricing plans are not always particularly inexpensive.

Hong Kong users could pay the equivalent of up to 65 US dollars a month under a two-year contract, a steep price in a market where monthly mobile packages often cost one-fifth of that.

In Australia, Telstra says customers who sign up for packages around 30 dollars a month will be able to buy the cheapest iPhone 3G for around 270 dollars.

Pricing has not been announced in New Zealand by Vodafone, the country's largest mobile communications carrier, but is likely to be crucial in deciding the iPhone's success.

"If Vodafone can get close to Telstra's pricing in Australia, I think they will be on to a winner," says Scott Bartley, reviews editor of PC World New Zealand.

The iPhone could also face an uphill battle in Japan, where handsets allow users to watch television and pay for goods like a credit card -- neither of which the Apple phone can do.

"I can foresee the iPhone storming the rest of Asia but not Japan," said Yusuke Tsunoda, a telecom analyst at Tokai Tokyo Research Centre.

"Compared with Japanese cellphones, it is not technologically superior."

In the Philippines, meanwhile, where text-messaging is now a routine way to communicate, the phone's on-screen keyboard -- instead of the regular buttons of a traditional cell phone -- may be a turn-off.

"This could limit its appeal to the Filipinos, who love to text," said tech journalist Kendrick Go of the Manila Times.

He said pricing could also be a factor in the Philippines, where much of the population lives on two dollars a day or less.

"The iPhone's popularity in the Philippines will likely be confined to the high-end market," Go said. "It is just too expensive for the average consumer."

Finally, some consumers could be turned off if the iPhone becomes too much of a success -- and loses its cachet as a status symbol.

"Apple wants to make a big impact but it does not want to make too big an impact in the sense you want to create an image of scarcity and exclusivity," said the IDC's Choong.

Mancy Li, in Hong Kong, says the iPhone would lose its appeal for her if everyone had one.

"I won't get one if I see too many people using it," Li says. "It won't be special anymore."

World's biggest tech myths

2008-07-02T15:40:00.002+10:00

What's common between the Lochness monster, Yeti and radiation from PC monitor causing cancer? Well, they all are myths!

One of the long timer in the list of tech-related myths is that switching off power without shutting down damages the PC.

Also, many believe that as their email account is password-proof it can never be hacked.

Well, with little grounding there are many such myths that haunt the tech world.

Here I bring you some of the most common technology myths :

No magnets near my PC

This would have been true in the case of a floppy drive, however, hard drives and laptops are immune to magnetic radiation as they are free from magnetic composition.

And like this, thumbdrives, memory cards and CDs too are, so don't get hyper and go crazy with those fridge magnets.

Most of the storage devices, like SD cards are immune to magnetic fields.

PC monitor radiation causes cancer

No! It won't. Radiation from your cell phone might give you a brain tumour, but a monitor is harmless.

The radiation from your monitor is too weak and also at a different frequency, so rest assure you are totally safe.

In fact, according to several studies the amount of ultra violet radiation produced by a computer monitor is only a small fraction of that produced by florescent lighting.

Cookies track every move

Cookies do track your activities on a website. But they are simple things which will make sure that your next visit to the site is simple and hassle free.

Cookies are basically small text files that help the browser remember specific information like your ID and password, preferences, shopping cart information etc. Plus, they are usually deleted when you shut down your browser.

To delete cookies in IE, go to Tools, click Internet Options, click the Privacy tab, and click Advanced to override automatic cookie handling.

Stop a USB device before unplugging

This applies only in a few cases. This is said to ensure that the USB device is not unplugged while data is being read from or written to it.

Doing so would corrupt the file being transferred or maybe damage the USB drive. However, when the USB is in an idle mode it can be unplugged without going through the entire process of 'Safely Remove hardware’.

For devices like keyboard, mouse, printers and scanners, you can just unplug them when not in use.

Never switch off before Shut Down

Many believe that turning power off without shutting down PC physically damages its hard drive. However, this is an age-old myth and has no grounding.

However, users do lose their data if they were working and have not saved before switching off the power.

Also, many users believe that one should shut down PC every couple of hour so that it can rest. The thought may be nice, but shutting down your PC every few hours may actually be harmful to your PC.

Components in the PC are most stressed when they have to either boot or shut down. Doing that every few hours will keep it under constant stress. However, this doesn't mean you must keep your computer on forever. Operating systems do need a shut down once in a while, because even the best operating systems crash if not given a rest.

Clearing recycle bin deletes data forever

Well many may relax when they delete their trash files.

However, this is no reason to cheer. In fact, Windows just marks the area of the disk occupied by such files as empty, but does not delete the data.

There are many file recovery software available such as TOKIWA DataRecovery that enables you to undelete files, even if they have been removed from the recycle bin. Such programmes can track the deleted files in the hard disk.

Recovery of the deleted files is possible as long as the disk area is not overwritten by any new disk.

Anti-viruses are foolproof

Though an anti-virus is a must-must, but one cannot just relax especially in a 24X7 connected world.

No single antivirus programme can completely safeguard you against virus, trojan, malware and spyware attack.

There may be chances that the anti-virus programme loaded in your PC may not be effective against spyware or other kinds of malware not classified as viruses.

Also, in case of a bigger attack, the security vendor may take long time to issue a security update.

Hence, users should make sure that their PCs are loaded with anti-spyware programme. Also, keep regularly updating your anti-virus software.

Outsourcing life's tough or mundane tasks

2008-06-30T16:40:00.001+10:00

One woman outsourced the breaking off a relationship.

A man sought bidders to clean his ears, and found someone highly qualified.

Both turned to a new breed of company that harnesses the worldwide web to get someone else to take on the difficult and tedious tasks in life or the little things that never seem to get done during a packed working day.

"One woman called and had us break up with someone for her. I assume it was a break-up because we canceled a date on her behalf and sent the guy her regards. I would hope he wouldn't want to see her again after that," Steve Ludmer of AskSunday.com, one of the new life-facilitator service companies.

AskSunday was founded around one year ago by Ludmer and a partner, both of whom were "time-starved professionals" with a fantasy.

"We thought: wouldn't it be great if we had a personal assistant ... but not the one at work, who you're often reluctant to ask to do personal tasks for you," Ludmer said.

Friends also liked the idea, but pulled back because they anticipated the cost of hiring an assistant would be in the thousands of US dollars, Ludmer said. "So we came up with the idea of offering a pool of assistants in India who people could call or email to ask for help. With that model we can offer a very affordable rate," Ludmer said.

When you call an AskSunday number that appears to be in Washington, New York, London or Sydney, you get patched through to Hyderabad, India, where personal assistants are on hand, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to help.

A competitor company to AskSunday - oddly called Get Friday - operates out of Bangalore, India.

"Over there, we attract college graduates who are interested and motivated by having a job at an international call centre. Here, at the wage levels that we would need to make it work, it's harder to attract motivated, dedicated people," Ludmer said.

Another company, Do My Stuff, operates differently: users wishing to outsource an onerous or unpalatable task post it on the site and invite bids for it.

"Someone asked for someone to clean his ears. We thought it was a joke but we left it on there and he got some bids. The winning bid was from a doctor who said, 'I know how to professionally clean ears and I can show you how to do it properly,'" David Davin of Do My Stuff told AFP.

Do My Stuff is free of charge and after one-and-a-half years of existence has 50,000 users.

"Looking to the future we foresee something where you can go onto the site and say: 'I'm going to run an errand in this part of town today.'

"You would input that in Do My Stuff and it looks for anything you could do along the way - pick up someone's dry cleaning - and make some money while you're out running an errand because you're already going that way. That's where we want to take the site," Davin said.

AskSunday would not say how many members it has or how many people work for it out of Hyderabad.

The service, which will turn one next month, charges an affordable $US19 a month for 10 "requests," rising to $US135a month for 90 requests.

Requests include making an appointment with the doctor, a reservation at a restaurant, travel arrangements - tasks that generally can be accomplished in around 20 minutes, over the phone or by email.

Tasks like breaking up with someone, but not cleaning ears.

AskSunday currently only operates in English, which, Ludmer said, limited the company's European penetration.

But, he added, it is always open to new ideas, and could branch out into other European languages such as French by opening a call center in French-speaking Africa.

AFP

Facebook Outage Resolved

2008-06-26T18:44:00.001+10:00

Facebook users have been struggling to log in to to the popular site due to an unknown glitch.

Members of the social networking site, which is used by more than 80 million people worldwide, have been greeted by an error message when they tried to sign in.

Facebook has admitted it is aware of the problem and apologised for the inconvenience.

Bloggers spread the news of the outage by writing posts about it.

The problem comes as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to fight a San Jose court claim he stole someone else's idea when he set up the web phenomenon.

Some of his classmates at Harvard created a site called ConnectU, which they argue formed the basis of Facebook, a charge Mr Zuckerberg disputes.

The case hit the headlines again this week as the judge closed the case to the public. A ruling is expected before the autumn.

Facebook later said the site was now "fully restored" but gave no indication as to what the problem had been.

Fabio Torlini from web hosting company Rackspace said he was surprised a high profile site such as Facebook suffered from an outage.

"You wouldn't expect any downtime from someone who makes their living from a website, during one of their prime times," he told.

Behind the scenes of Firefox 3.0

2008-06-25T16:22:00.001+10:00

There is a clear sense of anticipation building at the Mozilla Foundation's headquarters in Mountain View, California where engineers have been working for the past 34-36 months perfecting Firefox 3.0.

"This is the biggest release by far of Firefox," says Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at the non-profit that drives the web browser's development.

"We couldn't have done it without the two million people around the world already running it and the other 20,000 helping give us feedback, working out the bugs and constantly refining it," he said.

Version 3.0 of Firefox is set to debut on 17 June and the Mozilla Foundation aims to try and set a world record for the most downloads in a day when the software is unleashed.

It will have to do well to beat Firefox 2.0 - that version racked up 1.6 million downloads on the day it was first released in October 2006.

Mr Schroepfer said Firefox 3 promised to be faster, easier to use and more secure than rival browsers.

He claims that Firefox 3.0 loads webpages three to four times faster than Firefox 2.0 and more than seven times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).

However, with all manner of factors beyond Mozilla's control affecting browsing speed those claims may prove hard to sustain.

Alongside the speed improvements goes the "Smart Location Bar" - a feature known as the "Awesome Bar" internally at Mozilla.

Mr Schroepfer calls this novel feature: "The biggest user experience change... since tabbed browsing."

The feature gives the browser's address bar a mechanism for quickly returning to web pages without bookmarking them, even if a user doesn't remember the address. It can also search "tags" - keywords that users associate with a particular page.

"Arms race"

Security was also high on the development team's list of improvements for the new version.

Mr Schroepfer told the BBC: "It's an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys. This is not scare tactics or boogie man kind of stuff.

"We have seen a huge uptick in malware attacks because they are financially motivated," he said.

"This is billions of dollars a year. There are clear incentives for people to do this because they make money so you need some good guys on your side to block them out."

Included in Firefox 3.0 are malicious software spotters that tell users when they are on a website that has been compromised. A red box will pop up in the middle of the screen warning users of the danger.

Mr Schroepfer said: "This new type of attack where people are hijacking legitimate websites and using them as mechanisms to try and install software on your machine is truly worrying.

Behind the warning system is a list of infected sites that is updated every 30 minutes to keep up with the pace of web attacks.

When Firefox 2.0 was launched, said Mr Schroepfer, its security focus was phishing attacks, where fake websites ask for personal details such as bank account or social security numbers to aid identity theft and give access to a user's financial accounts.

"I think people adapted and thought phishing isn't working and then they switched to malware attacks," said Mr Schropefer.

Other features include almost 5000 add-ons to customise a page, making the image on the back button bigger than the forward button because that is the one used more often, and extending how long history stores page information to three months.

Since Firefox launched in 2004 it has gained a steadily increasing share of the web browsing market. Now, on average, about 15% of web users browse the web with Firefox.

"Our goal because we are non profit isn't world domination," said Mr Schroepfer. "It's just to make sure the internet is open, collaborative, competitive and innovative."

Could Your Coffee Be A Security Threat?

2008-06-23T15:06:00.001+10:00

A new internet security threat has emerged - and it all comes down to a cup of coffee.

Many household devices can now be hooked up to the internet, but if they are not properly secured, they could allow an easy way for hackers to get into a home or office network.

An IT security specialist discovered a number of flaws after he hooked a coffee percolator up to the web.

The Jura F90 is marketed as fully Internet-compatible, with the link allowing problems with the machine to be diagnosed remotely or the machine to be fine-tuned according to taste.

Geoff Sweeney, CTO of Tier-3, said: ""This security situation is an all too common one.

"Making the coffee too weak is a problem that can easily be fixed, but if a security flaw allows a remote hacker to take over your desktop PC, then you have a real problem on your hands."

Mr Sweeney said that internet users should be careful before hooking up the most benign of Internet-enabled devices to the office network, as there may be unknown problems lurking and waiting to be discovered.

He added: "Hackers will always look for part or least resistance. The coffee machine is not going to hold any personal details, but it is a push to get vendors to make household products more secure.

"The Internet is now so pervasive that you are going to see a lot more office devices, including, printers, PDAs, Smart Phones, and even fridges, capable of being hooked up to the corporate network and the Net.

"People need to be aware that some part of their appliance could be exposed."

Jura said in response to a number of reports of this story: "Jura is well aware of these articles which it clearly qualifies as misinformation.

"The internet Connectivity Kit which can optionally be acquired for only one device (IMPRESSA F90/F9) will at no times connect the coffee machine to the world wide web.

"Its settings can therefore only be changed by the machine's rightful owner."

Firefox claims download success

2008-06-19T21:59:00.000+10:00

Mozilla is claiming a download record for the release of Firefox 3.0.

In the first 24 hours the web browser was available the software was downloaded more than eight million times, says its creator Mozilla.

Statistics from the download servers are being scrutinised to produce an official figure that will be passed to the Guinness World Record organisation.

But the launch was marred by news from computer security firms who have found the first flaws in the software.

Big figures

The attempt to set the download record was scheduled to begin at 1300 PST (2000 GMT) on 17 June.

However, the record attempt was almost wrecked from the start as the servers handling the downloads collapsed under the weight of visitors checking to see if new version was available.

Once the servers were up and functioning normally the record attempt began.

At their busiest the servers were handling more than 9,000 downloads per minute. Within five hours the number of downloads for Version 3.0 exceeded the 1.6 million set by Firefox 2.0 in October 2006.

In total Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times over the 24 hour record setting period. The figure beats the five million Mozilla predicted before the day.

Logs from the download servers have been handed to the Open Source Labs at Oregon State University for auditing. The scrutiny will ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads are not counted. The verification process could take a week to complete.

The surge of interest in Firefox 3.0 has continued and Mozilla has reported that the software has now been downloaded more than 10 million times.

However, some of the shine of the launch was removed by reports that a security firm had already found a flaw in the browser.

DV Labs/Tipping Point reported a flaw only five hours after Firefox 3.0 debuted. The flaw potentially lets an attacker take over a PC if a user clicks on a booby-trapped link.

Firefox sets its sites high

2008-06-19T14:58:00.003+10:00

Internet software company Mozilla is hoping to set a world download record of a new version of its popular web browser Firefox.

More than 1.3 million people have pledge to download Firefox 3.0 which was released online early this morning.

With Firefox currently used by about 15 per cent of net users, Mozilla marketing chief Paul Kim said: "It's a global effort to make history."

"There is actually no record for the greatest amount of software downloaded in one day, so for 24 hours from the moment we push the bits live, that's when the countdown starts".

While Mozilla claims it has no specific target for the number of downloads, Kim said racking up five million buyers would be "Awesome".

Firefox 2.0 registered 1.6 million downloads on the day it was made available on October 24, 2006.

New features in Version 3 include - automatic warnings when users stray on to websites bobby-trapped with malicious code.

Also in Version 3 will be a "Smart Location Bar" that lets people return to sites they have visited, even if they have not bookmarked them or cannot remember the full web address.

Firefox 3 will work with Windows 2000, XP and Vista and some Non-Windows operating systems including Linux.

The software first appeared in early 2004 and since then has steadily eroded the hold on the web browsing world of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

And it appears that Mozilla is not alone in marketing the release of the new software. Acoording to the Mozillaparty website, more than 566 parties are planned for when the software becomes available.

World to run out of Internet addresses by 2010: Report

2008-06-18T03:03:00.000+10:00

The Internet will run out of addresses in another two years as only 700 million separate addresses are remaining for allocation out of the 4.3 billion available on the present network.

When originally developed, Internet planners assumed four billion would serve the world when using the Internet, The Australian reports.

Seeing the situation, all Internet users must move to an upgraded platform - called Internet Protocol version 6 - to access the 340 trillion-trillion-trillion new addresses needed to connect not only billions of new users but also the trillions of sensor devices that will require networking as technology takes greater control of people's lives.

"IPv6 provides more addresses in cyberspace than there are grains of sands on the world's beaches," news.com.au quoted Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the Information Society, as saying.

Geoff Huston, chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, which manages address allocation within the region, said he hovered between calling the situation a challenge or a crisis.

A shortfall in addresses would stifle networking of small and simple devices for energy management for lighting, intelligent building systems and remote-control sensors.

Lower costs are drawing more and more users to access the Internet via their mobiles, and opening up opportunities for advertisers, industry players said.

Flat rates for data are becoming increasingly common, and mobile devices for accessing Internet content are more widely available, said Andre Levisse, of management consulting firm McKinsey and Company.

"It becomes cheaper and cheaper to just get one megabyte of data and that enables, probably, some change in the user behaviour," he said during a panel discussion at the start of CommunicAsia, which bills itself as the region's leading information and communications technology conference and exhibition.

"Many people can afford good handsets that can really browse the Web," said Levisse, adding that even second-hand 3G handsets are now available in the region.

On the eve of the conference, Finnish telecom giant Nokia launched two new email-capable handsets for business users, and South Korea's Samsung unveiled its latest smart phone, a touch-screen model.

Last week Apple unveiled its touch-screen-activated 3G iPhone built for high-speed wireless networks, with faster Internet access and more features for users than its previous iPhone.

"I know that there's been disappointments in the past" over digital content, said Mauro Montanaro, chief executive officer of Jamba, a global provider of mobile entertainment, including music, videos and games. The company is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

While the industry tries to offer more entertainment options and easier access, there is also great potential for mobile advertising growth, the panelists said.

"Mobile advertising is the future," Montanaro said.

Meet freelance IT millionaires

2008-06-16T00:50:00.000+10:00

It’s 1 pm in Noida, a suburb near New Delhi. A peanut vendor sits in front of a tea stall adjacent to pan-shop opposite Synapse Communications -- an IT outsourcer.

A barber shop gives customers a shave in the open in front of the IT company.

As we move in Synapse, things change. Various clocks denoting Pacific, New York, Australian and UK time zones are hung on the wall in an air conditioned, marble floored office. Synapse was started by 26-year old Shamit Sinha in 2001 with a capital of Rs 6 lakh, five rented PCs through Elance.com -- a platform for freelance IT work, after the dot com bubble burst.

Synapse now grosses $2 million in revenue and employs 200 people. The economic slowdown is repeating itself in the US now, and many techies are quitting jobs to turn entrepreneurs and hope to become freelance IT millionaires.

As hard times lead to cost cutting, many companies outsource work to freelancers rather than hire full time employees.

Take for instance, 24-year old Rahul Mahajan, who quit his job in Wipro Technologies to start Xicom Solutions in Janakpuri West Delhi on Elance.com with a capital of just his tech skills and a PC.

“My parents were worried after I quit my cushy job. I was earning about Rs 50,000 as a fresh IT employee. But I wanted to make it big. So I partnered with a fellow techie to turn entrepreneur.”

Today, Mahajan is a dollar millionaire and grossed about $600,000 through Elance.com alone, last year. Mahajan managed to rope in many foreign clients and charges a minimum of $20 per hour for work on technologies such as PHP, AJAX, ASP.NET, Flash and Web 2.0.

Elance.com the platform for IT work, seeks to bring together freelance geeks and companies who want to outsource specific projects. Whether it’s creative writing or editing, designing an interior or a building, developing a portal or computer applications, you can freelance any computer job on Elance.com or platforms like -- Getacoder.com, Guru.com, Odesk.com.

ET travelled about 12,500 kilometres to the US Pacific coast to learn about the phenomenon. At Mountain View in Northern California, the dusty roads get replaced by manicured concrete covered with yellow maple leaves -- suggesting the onset of Spring.

There are no cycle repair shops and no peanut vendors. But BMWs, Mercs and Lincolns mounted on top of each other can be seen in multi-layered parking lots in IT campuses of the world’s largest tech companies --Facebook, Google, Symantec, Verisign, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems , Adobe and of course Elance.com.

Like its service providers, Elance.com started around the dotcom bust. “While everybody was flying to US East coast fleeing the Silicon Valley, I was the only one flying West. My family especially, my mother and wife thought I was crazy,” says Fabio Rosati, CEO Elance.com who quit his job at CapGemini to turn entrepreneur.

And Elance.com’s largest and richest service providers come from India. Some of them have even exceeded Elance.com’s headcount while some like US-based Digg.com (started via Elance) have become really big.

Today, Elance does about a million dollars a week. It grossed $40 million revenue in 2007 and plans to gross $200 million in the next 2-3 years and get listed. Elance also outsources works such as webpage design.

The rates are attractive -- $500, $1000 and $10,000 for time bound projects open for bidding at any time.

With an economic slowdown in US, such freelance opportunities are gaining momentum. Small and medium businesses and individuals also prefer outsourcing through such platforms, work like designing a logo, website, maintenance of applications or websites and designing works.

The reasons are simple -- there are no large companies willing to take small outsourcing tasks worth $2,000, $5,000 or $10,000. The other reasons is rising rupee -- which is forcing large and mid-sized companies to increase their billing rates to protect margins.
Slowdown in hiring and salary hikes due to a slowdown in contracting of large projects is also a reason. Some who went bankrupt after dotcom bubble also started afresh though this model.

“Techies should wait a while before they become big on such platforms which can help them become entrepreneurs,” says Synapse’s Sinha. But some like to dive fearlessly. Take for instance, 29-year old Piyush Nigam, an engineer who started PINIG Systems (an IT applications development firm) on Elance.com, after the downturn with small savings.

Today, PINIG grosses $100,000 through Elance alone. There are several techies turning freelance millionaires, are you one of them?

Yahoo ditches Microsoft, hitches up with Google

2008-06-14T01:57:00.000+10:00

Yahoo's efforts to revive takeover talks with Microsoft have reached a dead end, prompting the internet pioneer to hire online search leader Google to handle some of its advertising sales.

The news disclosed on Thursday caused Yahoo shares to plunge 10 per cent as investors abandoned hope that Microsoft would renew a nearly five-month quest to buy the Sunnyvale, California-based company.

While a stock sell-off is never welcome news for any company, Wall Street's disenchantment comes at a particularly bad time for Yahoo and its board of directors.

Yahoo is trying to fend off a shareholder mutiny led by activist investor Carl Icahn, who has vowed to replace the company's board because of the way the directors handled the Microsoft negotiations.

But Icahn has been hoping to engineer a sale to Microsoft, so some shareholders may be reluctant to support his attempted coup unless he can demonstrate his slate of directors has a better turnaround plan than the current board.

Icahn did not return phone calls seeking comment on Thursday.

The fate of Yahoo's board is scheduled to be determined at the company's August 1 annual meeting.

"If you are a Yahoo shareholder, you just have to be scratching your head right now," said Standard and Poor's equity analyst Scott Kessler.

With Microsoft apparently out of the picture, Yahoo is turning to Google to help its chief executive, Jerry Yang, prove he made the right decision last month when he turned down Microsoft's takeover bid of $US47.5 billion, or $US33 per share. Yang asked for $US37 per share, prompting Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to withdraw the oral offer.

If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. competition regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo intends to use it rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own website as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Yahoo estimated the arrangement could boost its revenue by as much as $US800 million during the first 12 months of the partnership.

The deal shapes up as a major victory for Mountain View-based Google, which didn't want Yahoo to fall into Microsoft's clutches.

"I am happy to be helping them to stay independent," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in an interview Thursday.

Yahoo's advertising partnership with Google won't start until the late September at the earliest because the two companies voluntarily agreed to wait at least 3 1/2 months to allow the government to review a deal involving the two leading players in search advertising.

Google already holds about 75 per cent of the $US11 billion search advertising market in the United States with Yahoo in a distant second at 9 per cent, according to the research firm eMarketer.

Microsoft had hoped to use Yahoo as a weapon in its efforts to slow Google's growth, but they couldn't agree to terms.

"Clearly, it's time to move on," Yang said during a Thursday conference call with analysts.

Before signing the Google deal, Yahoo made a last-ditch effort to persuade Microsoft to revive its last takeover offer of $US47.5 billion.

But after withdrawing that bid last month, Ballmer began to focus his efforts on convincing Yahoo to sell its search operations instead.

Yahoo concluded that its search engine was too important to sell piecemeal.

Without explaining its logic, Microsoft said it believed a deal involving Yahoo's search engine would have been more valuable to Yahoo than if it had bought the entire company at $US33 per share. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker said it remains open to buying Yahoo's search operations.

Yahoo's deal with Google includes an escape hatch should Microsoft or another suitor buy the company. If Yahoo is sold, Google would receive a termination fee of up to $US250 million.

That clause could still raise hope that Icahn might be able to renew the Microsoft talks if he can win control of Yahoo's board.

Investors clearly favor a sale of Yahoo in its entirety. Yahoo shares dropped $US2.63, or 10.1 percent, to finish at Thursday at $US23.52, then shed another seven cents in after-hours trading.

The Google partnership expands upon a two-week trial conducted in April while Yahoo was trying to pressure Microsoft into raising its bid. The tests confirmed Google's technology would generate more revenue for Yahoo than its own system, which cost more than $US2 billion to acquire and improve.

Nevertheless, Yahoo still intends to use its own search engine to distribute some ads and process all search requests. Working with Google will give Yahoo "the best of both worlds," Yahoo President Sue Decker said in Thursday's conference call.

But Microsoft and a variety of consumer interest groups already have signaled they will turn up the political heat in an attempt to prevent Google from working with Yahoo.

The outcry already has drawn the attention of U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl, who chairs an antitrust committee.

"The consequences for advertisers and consumers could be far-reaching and warrant careful review, and we plan to investigate the competitive and privacy implications of this deal further," said Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat.

Google and Yahoo have hope they can overcome the antitrust concerns by persuading lawmakers and regulators that their deal is similar to business arrangements between rivals in other industries.

Brin and Google's other founder, Larry Page, both think the partnership could even help foster more competition by providing Yahoo with more money to improve its own search technology. "Having more money is a good thing," Page said.

While a Google deal could help boost Yahoo's short profits, some analysts think Yahoo could be hurting itself by ceding any ground its an already powerful rival.

But Yang was under intense pressure to do something bold after Yahoo repeatedly spurned Microsoft attempts to buy the company or arrange some kind of joint venture to challenge Google.

Besides turning down Microsoft's $US33 per share bid last month, Yahoo rebuffed an informal bid of about $US40 per share early last year, according to a person familiar with those talks. The person didn't want to be identified because the 2007 talks were considered to be confidential.

Steve Jobs unveils Apple's new 3G iPhone

2008-06-11T18:14:00.000+10:00

Apple has unveiled a sleeker, faster, cheaper version of its iPhone in a move designed to boost sales of its popular mobile phone when it hits the shelves worldwide next month.

The new iPhone - which runs on the high-speed 3G mobile network - was introduced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in San Francisco overnight.

Apple says the phone will go on sale from July 11 in some 20 countries - Australia among them. Eventually, the phone will be sold in about 70 countries - compared with the six which sold the first phone.

However, pricing details for only the US have been announced - frustrating many Australians who have been waiting a year since the launch of the first generation iPhone for the device to be rolled out here.

In the US, the base model 3G iPhone with 8GB of memory will sell for $US199 ($210). The 16GB model will retail for $US299. Both these deals require the buyer to take out a two-year contract with AT&T, Apple's US mobile partner.

The comparable models in the first generation iPhone were selling for $US399 and $US499, respectively.

In Australia two carriers - Optus and Vodafone - have signed with Apple to sell the 3G iPhone.

It appears that all new iPhones sold in Australia will be locked to specific carriers - dashing hopes that the phone could be bought outright and used on any network.

There is no mention of the phone being available directly from Apple's online store or from its new Sydney retail outlet, which opens on June 19.

Australian mobile companies typically build the price of the handset into the cost of an overall package.

As a result, many popular mobiles are priced at a symbolic $0 with plans that tie the user to the network for 12 or 24 months.

Mike Smith, the Optus director of marketing, said it was a "reasonable starting point" to assume that the iPhone pricing in Australia would be in the same ballpark as so-called smart phones with similar features.

Smart phones are mobiles that offer a range of additional functions such as email and web browsing.

Both Vodafone and Optus offer plans for the BlackBerry smart phone - Apple's main competitor in this market segment - that range from $79 a month up, depending on usage.

Both carriers will also be offering the iPhone on a prepaid basis. Customers who choose this option usually buy the phone outright, with the phones locked to a specific network.

Both Vodafone and Optus have promised to reveal pricing details well in advance of next month's iPhone launch and are currently offering pre-registration for those interested in taking up one of the plans.

Mr Smith said he was expecting a high level of demand from business users because of a feature in the new iPhone that will allow it to hook up with corporate email systems.

In his presentation, Apple's Steve Jobs also said the company had worked with Cisco Systems to enable the iPhone to establish secure connections with corporate computer systems to protect data being transferred.

Another new feature is a built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) capability - a feature that is becoming more commonplace in high-end mobiles.

The phone will also have a longer battery life that will give users between five and 10 hours of talk time, depending on the type of network being used, and up to six hours of web browsing time.

In conjunction with the release of the new phone, Apple is launching a new mobile storage service called MobileMe.

For an annual fee of $A119, MobileMe users can use it to park up to 20GB of data such as photos, emails and calendar detail.

Apple says subscribers to the .Mac service will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe at no additional cost.

Apple is also launching a so-called App Store where iPhone users can buy hundreds of third-party tools and services. These applications include games, productivity tools, an eBay auction program, and translation software.

"We've learned so much with the first iPhone," Jobs said. "We've taken what we've learned and more and created the iPhone 3G; and it's beautiful."

On the minus side, the camera on the new phone is still the same two-megapixel number that came with the first iPhone. Many competing mobiles now feature five-megapixel cameras as standard.

Apple has sold 6 million iPhones since the device went on sale last June. The company has set itself a target of selling 10 million by the end of 2008.

New iPhone coming next week?

2008-06-04T13:31:00.001+10:00

June has arrived and for Apple fans and investors that means just one thing -- a new iPhone.

The encore to the original iPhone, which launched nearly a year ago amid unprecedented industry buzz, is widely expected to be the main attraction when Chief Executive Steve Jobs takes the stage at Apple's developers' conference next Monday.

The new iPhone will be accompanied by support for corporate e-mail and a slate of new programs that could help boost sales of the devices, which sport a touch-sensitive screen, wireless Internet access and iPod-style media functions.

"The thing for Apple is to be able to leverage the iPhone for further innovation, or they run the risk of being the next (Motorola) RAZR, which was iconic in its own way, but for which innovation did not come fast enough," Shiv Bakhshi, director of mobility research for market research firm IDC.

Apple has declined to comment on what Jobs will announce, but analysts are betting he will show off a long-rumored phone running on a so-called 3G, or third-generation, network.

That would address one of the chief complaints about the current iPhone: the speed at which it calls up Web pages on AT&T Inc's pokey EDGE network.

That is a particularly important concern in Europe, which is ahead of the United States in building new networks and where sales of the iPhone have lagged.

"I see 3G as important for the U.S. but essential for overseas," analyst Avi Greengart of Current Analysis said of a faster iPhone.

"It will be appreciated by technology enthusiasts and anybody who wants to get fast Web browsing outside the hot spots."

A new iPhone may be a catalyst for Apple stock, which has risen 50 percent over the past three months, to a close of $186.10 on Monday. Investors have regained confidence that demand for the company's Macintosh computers and iPod media players is holding up amid fears the U.S. economy is headed for recession.

Thomas Weisel analyst Doug Reid raised his price target on Apple shares on Monday to $225 share from $195, citing strong demand for its laptops and sales of up to 16.5 million iPhones next year.

There is also speculation Apple could bow to a cellphone industry practice and offer a subsidized iPhone, an arrangement where AT&T could kick in a couple hundred dollars to make the devices more affordable. AT&T already gives Apple a slice of the monthly service fees it gets from iPhone subscribers.

"We think that actually Apple could talk about a very disruptive business model, or a change in their business model, embracing subsidies where necessary, multiple carriers to help get the iPhone into more hands," Lehman Brothers analyst Ben Reitzes told a conference call last week.

But more important than the actual hardware will be new services and programs that can tap the increased power.

Some reckon that will include the ability to download songs from iTunes using the cellular network. IPhone users now have to be connected to a Wi-Fi network to get music from Apple's online store.

Apple will also roll out its highly anticipated support for corporate e-mail, a capability it showed off earlier this year and that is expected to give iPhone a push into business, which now overwhelmingly use Research In Motion Ltd's Blackberry devices.

Apple will also launch its iPhone "applications store" that will sell programs made by developers outside of Apple. The service marks an about-face for Jobs, who initially blocked third-party software from the device.

"That's important for developers who can now build this out as a critical platform for Apple," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "The potential here is sort of unlimited."

BlackBerry, India wrangle over 'master key'

2008-05-28T20:17:00.000+10:00

The Canadian maker of BlackBerry, embroiled in a security row with the Indian government, has told customers it is committed to ensuring their emails are safe from snoops.

The statement received on Tuesday followed Indian media reports that Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of the highly popular device, might allow the Indian government access to messages sent using a BlackBerry.

India, battling a host of insurgencies from Muslim-majority Kashmir to the far-flung northeast, has raised fears the cellular device could be used by terrorists to communicate.

RIM said it wished to assure customers it was committed to "serving security-conscious businesses in the Indian market with highly secure" products and rejected what it said was incorrect speculation.

The Indian media reports said India's government wanted "the master key" to allow them access to emails sent between BlackBerry devices.

But RIM said no "master key" existed.

"It is not a question of withholding something," BlackBerry spokesman Satchit Gayakwad told.

RIM does not possess a "master key" to gain "unauthorised access" to data and there is no "back door" in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain access, the company statement said.

BlackBerry's security system is based on "a key system whereby the customer creates their own key and only the customer ever possesses a copy of their encryption key," RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, said.

At the same time, "governments have a wide range of resources and methodologies to satisfy national security and law enforcement needs without compromising commercial security requirements," RIM said.

"There are some ways government can take care of security concerns," the RIM spokesman said, adding other "security-conscious countries (where BlackBerry services operate) are working around this problem."

He declined to elaborate. RIM operates in over 135 countries.

RIM and the Indian government have held talks about New Delhi's security concerns. The RIM spokesman would not comment on the discussions except to say "we look forward to something positive" emerging.

India's telecommunications secretary Siddhartha Behura said earlier this month New Delhi was not considering banning BlackBerry services "at this point" and was keen for RIM to continue operations in the country.

At the same time, India wanted BlackBerry to furnish "satisfactory answers" to its security concerns, he said.

Indian security agencies have said they fear the BlackBerry poses a security threat because of difficulty intercepting and tracing emails sent with the device.

The row triggered sharp comments by Canada's High Commissioner to India David Malone in a letter last month to the Indian government, according to Indian media reports.

"Potential terrorists are now aware of technical issues unknown to most of us previously," Malone said in the letter.

An official of Canada's High Commission in New Delhi said, "We cannot comment on government-to-government communications."

Industry estimates say there are some 400,000 Blackberry users in India's mobile market, the world's fastest growing.

What is new in Firefox 3.0

2008-05-28T08:57:00.003+10:00

The closest rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer is ready to get an upgrade. Browser developer Mozilla has announced June release for its popular browser, Firefox.

Firefox 3 promises to add several new features that will enhance the users browsing experience as well as make it for secure. In fact, Mozilla claims that Firefox 3.0 will run twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory.

So, here's a peak into all the added features users will find in Firefox 3.0.

Enhanced security

Firefox 3 adds several new features that will make it more secure against online frauds, forgeries, viruses and Trojan.

An important addition is One-click site info where the users can click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if their connection is protected from eavesdropping.

Also, the Identity verification is prominently displayed in the new version. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company users are connected to.

The new version has enhanced malware protection which warns users when they enter a site which can install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.

Version 3 also lets users to access Web Forgery Protection page that displays the content suspected of web forgeries.

Also, the new version of Firefox automatically checks new add-ons and plugins and will disable older, insecure versions.

Easing browsing

The new version promises to make users browsing experience more organised and clutter-free.

An information bar replaces the old password dialogue so that users can now save passwords after a successful login. The add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.

The revised Download Manager will make it easier to locate downloaded files, and users can search the name of the website where the file came from. Also, the users will be able to resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting their network connection.

Simplifying add-on installation, the new version will make it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.

Another feature that adds volume to the new version is Full page zoom. This functionality will let users zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Users settings will be remembered whenever they return to the site.

Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph.

Another new feature, called activities, allows users to highlight text on a page, click on it, then instantly send it to another site, like a mapping, e-mail or blogging service.

Smart Bookmarking

Next time a user wants to add a bookmark the new Firefox will make the task easier for him. He will be able to add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click. A dropdown box will let him name it, choose a folder to put it in as well as add a tag to categorise it.

There will also be a Smart Bookmarks Folder from where he can access his recently-bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as his most-frequently visited pages.

Another feature called Places Organiser will help the user view, organise and search through all his bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store his frequent searches.

Also, in case a user wants to install Firefox add-ons, the new Add-ons Manager will also display a list of recommended add-ons and downloads from the Firefox website.

Web apps go faster!

According to Firefox team, improvements to the JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization has enhanced the performance of Firefox 3.0.

The new Firefox 3.0 will enable web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office to run twice as fast compared to Firefox 2. Also, SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.

Also, the new version promises secured data protection. User's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences will now be stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Memory usage

Firefox 3 endeavours to reduce the amount of memory used over a Web browsing session.

Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator has been added to reduce fragmentation, a large number of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.

Developer tools

Firefox 3.0 has several developer tools too. Like there are new tools for graphics and font handling.

New graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.

Regarding colour management, Firefox 3.0 will be able to adjust images with embedded color profiles. There's also offline support option that aims to enable web applications to provide offline functionality.

Phoenix lands on Mars

2008-05-26T20:41:00.001+10:00

The first photos sent back by the Phoenix after landing on Mars.

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft has landed successfully on Mars's frigid north pole region to search for signs of the building blocks of life.

"Phoenix has landed," a NASA official said as the safe touchdown was confirmed.

The Mars Phoenix Lander successfully deployed a parachute and then thrusters to brake in a tense seven minutes from 20,400kmh to manage a soft landing on its three legs.

Mission officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, cheered and gave each other hugs and high-fives after signals sent back from Phoenix confirmed the arrival of the first spacecraft ever to land on the Martian arctic.

The $US420 million ($438 million) spacecraft is designed to help scientists assess whether the Martian arctic has ever had conditions favourable to microbial life.

Given that Mars's polar region is subject to Earth-like seasonal changes, the scientists are looking to see whether there is a point at which the region warms and changes into a water-rich soil with organic, life-supporting minerals.

"Our whole mission is about digging," said Peter Smith, Phoenix principal investigator at the University of Arizona.

"We find that the arctic region is really sensitive to climate change on a planet ... it also preserves the history of life," Smith said.

"We think that organics must have existed at least at one time [from meteorite and other impacts]," he said. The presence of liquid water and organics would signify a "habitable zone", he said.

Phoenix managed an almost perfect landing in a relatively rock-free, flat target area in the flat circumpolar region known as Vastitas Borealis - akin to northern Canada in Earth's latitude, Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at JPL, said.

The team had been worried about the high risk of the project, with a roughly 50 per cent failure rate on all Mars missions since the Russians launched the first one in 1960.

"Frankly, this was by far the hardest part," Goldstein said on NASA TV.

"In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly as it did tonight."

NASA will only know that the landing and deployment of Phoenix's equipment went well after pictures from the probe reach the Earth via NASA's Odyssey Mars orbiter, two hours after the landing.

The first pictures will be of the craft itself, to show NASA if all the equipment deployed in working order, and then possibly shots of the surface.

Phoenix is equipped with a camera and a 2.35-metre robotic arm that can dig as deep as one metre to find ice, and can heat up samples to detect carbon and hydrogen molecules, essential elements of life.

It also has meteorological equipment to study the Mars atmosphere.

Microsoft launches cash-for-search service

2008-05-22T21:15:00.001+10:00

Microsoft has launched a new "cashback" search service that pays users a rebate for buying products they found through the company's Windows Live search engine.

Live Search cashback is the latest attempt by the world's largest software maker to draw users to its online search engine, which is a distant third behind market leader Google and Yahoo.

"This is giving you a reason why you should use a particular search engine," Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said at the company's Advance 08 advertising conference.

(The service is only able to be used by people who are residents of the United Stars and can provide a local - US - address.)

Microsoft sees online search as a critical component to establishing an online advertising powerhouse. By placing text-based ads next to results from its ubiquitous search engine, Google has become the leader in web advertising.

A product search on Windows Live will call up links to online retailers offering that item. The user who buys that item from the retailer's site will get two per cent to 30 per cent of the purchase price back as a rebate.

Consumers would have to sign up for a free Windows Live cashback account to participate in the program. Rebates would be issued after a 60-day waiting period to make sure there are no returned products.

Gates said Microsoft would partner with more than 700 retailers including eBay Inc, Barnes & Noble, Sears and Home Depot.

Microsoft will offer advertisers a cost-per-acquisition model of payment, meaning that they only pay for ads that lead to purchases. The current cost-per-click model charges advertisers for every click on a sponsored link associated with certain keywords.

"If you knew the user and watched their behaviour you could do a lot better for them in terms of taking them directly to the information or presentation they want. Search can be dramatically better," said Gates.

"We think we're entering a period where there'll be quite a bit of change (in search)."

The company's effort to gain more market share in web search led to its unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo earlier this year. It withdrew a sweetened $US47.5 billion ($A49.6 billion) offer a few weeks ago, but said on Sunday it had re-approached Yahoo with an alternative deal.

A source familiar with the talks said Microsoft had offered to buy Yahoo's search business and take a minority stake in the rest of the company after selling off its Asian assets. Microsoft executives did not address the Yahoo issue directly at the conference.

Microsoft also launched Live Search Farecast, based on the airfare-predicting technology that the company bought in April through its acquisition of travel site Farecast. Microsoft also said it would consider cash rebates for flights booked through the search.

iPod rivals: Hot and happening!

2008-05-19T19:25:00.010+10:00

Looking for a digital player to carry around music from your massive collection, but not really an iPod-freak. Don't want to jump on to the almost ubiquitous digital bandwagon. Don't worry, there's choices galore.

For those wanting to steer clear of the legion of iPods, there are several alternatives, from names such as SanDisk Corp, Creative Technology and Microsoft. Styles and colours abound in these digital media players.

Here's looking into some options beyond the almost all pervasive iPod.

Creative Zen Vision M

Here's Creative's rival to video iPod, a video player with 2.5-inch colour screen.

Available in five colours, the Creative Zen Vision M features a customisable shortcut button, and supports a wide range of online music stores and subscription services.

The player which comes with a rechargeable battery delivers playtimes up to four hours with video and up to 14 hours with music and can store up to 15,000 songs or up to 120 hours of video on its hard disk.

Also packs an FM radio and voice recorder. The player can also be connected to the TV to share images and videos. The 30 GB Zen Vision M supports JPEG, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, DivX, and XviD formats with an estimated 4.5 hours of showtime.

Microsoft Zune

For the brand conscious, Microsoft Zune can be an ideal choice. Software giant's 30GB, wi-fi-equipped music and video player comes with an FM tuner and supports MP3 and WMA music files, as well as WMV, MPEG-4 and H.264 video files.

With bright 3" LCD screen, the player lets users browse the Zune Marketplace to access millions of songs. Users can also wirelessly share selected full-length sample tracks, playlists and pictures.

Measuring 4.4 X 2.4 X .6-inches, the player can run up to 14 hours on a single charge. The player is equipped with a circular navigational pad that allows users to both 'flick' through options like on a touch screen or flip through choices.

Zune is available in 4, 8, 16, 30, and 80 GB storage capacity.

Philips SA6185

Here's one from the traditional consumer electronics player. Philips SA6185 8GB features a 3.5 inch LCD display with QVGA resolution of 320 x 240 pixels in 65,000 colours, a built-in microphone and an FM radio.

With 8GB memory, the player supports up to 20 hours of music playback or 5 hours of video playback with built-in rechargeable battery.

The 153 gram player supports all popular formats including MP3, wav, WMA for audio and WMV for video and can be charged directly from your PC via USB.

Creative Zen

Small on size, the Creative Zen MP4 Player has a 2.5" TFT display and weighs 67 gm. The ultra-compact media player available in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB storage capacity can store up to hundreds of photos, up to 2,000 songs and supports 32 hours of video and 25 hours of continuous music playback.

The player has a built-in microphone, an FM radio with 32 presets and 8 equalizers and an SD card expansion slot. It can also sync with Microsoft Outlook allowing users to transfer their calendar, contacts and task lists.

The model support all popular formats including MPEG, MP3, DivX and Xvid. The player also supports iTunes Plus tracks from the iTunes store, in addition to MP3 and WMA music tracks. It is also compatible with music subscription services such as Napster To Go and Rhapsody.

Samsung P2

Here's a touchy-feely option from the Korean cheabol, Samsung. Samsung P2 comes with a 3" touch-screen and measures 0.4" in width and weighs just 82 grams.

The player comes with a built-in FM tuner, Bluetooth audio streaming, photo viewer, video playback, FM radio and support for subscription of music and datacast services.

With 4 GB and 8 GB memory capacity, the player's rechargeable battery provides up to 30 hours of playback and comes loaded with music management software. Samsung P2 supports several popular audio-video formats including MP3, WMA and WMA DRM music formats and JPEG, MJPEG, AVI, MPEG4 AVC, MPEG4 XviD, DivX and WMV.

Sandisk Sansa View

Sandisk Sansa View 16 GB Here's your option from Apple's closest rival, the US-based Sandisk. The company remodeled its Sansa View, giving it a thin, candy-bar shape.

Sandisk Sansa View with 2.4" LCD screen (320x240 pixels) can hold up to 4,000 songs in its 16 GB of memory, double of that of the biggest iPod Nano. It is available in 8, 16, 32 GB memory capacity.

The 8.8mm thin Sansa View features music, photos, FM radio and audio books. The player supports playback of H.264, WMV and MPEG4 encoded videos. For additional storage capacity, the Sansa View has a microSDHC slot that supports storage up to 24GB.

For the navigation, Sansa View offers users a backlit scroll wheel.

Transcend T.Sonic 320

T.Sonic media player sport 1.5 inch dual-colour OLED screen and is available in 2GB and 4GB of storage memory capacity.

The player packs FM Radio, digital recording features, built-in microphone and external microphone. Available in three colours, Orchid, white and black, the player also has a playlist builder, clock and Karaoke-type lyrics display.

Measuring 85.5 mm x 25.5 mm x 13 mm, the T.sonic 320 supports for 13 languages, USB flash drive, 7 equalizer effects and built-in USB 2.0 connector.

The player support several popular formats including WMA, WMA-DRM10 and WAV.

WorldWide Telescope takes you to infinity and beyond

2008-05-13T21:47:00.003+10:00

A screen grab of the WorldWide Telescope in action. Insets: Microsoft's Dr Curtis Wong and the late Dr Jim Gray.

A free program launched today will effectively turn every computer that downloads it into a mini-planetarium capable of displaying high resolution images of millions of stars, planets and other celestial bodies.

The project, called the WorldWide Telescope (WWT), is the result of several years of hard labour by a small team at Microsoft Research, the software company's key R&D centre.

It has drawn lavish praise from some of the world's leading space scientists and educators, including Dr Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

"Galileo's telescope started to give us views of the universe that no one else had seen before and we started asking what was out there and why. And I think the WorldWide Telescope is going to do the same thing for the rest of us," he said in a telephone interview.

"In terms of pushing the envelope, this really pushes the envelope."

The program works in the same way as many online mapping tools, allowing users to zoom around on an interactive canvas combining images and data drawn from the world's leading astronomical research organisations.

At launch, the WWT has access to 12 terabytes of data - enough to fill the equivalent of 1.2 million books. But like the universe, this will expand as new images are added.

Dr Gould believes the WWT will give amateur astronomers and even complete novices an opportunity to assist the scientific community in furthering their research.

"This is going to change our relationship with the night sky in a significant way," he said.

WWT is being offered without strings attached from today as an educational tool and was created to honour the memory of the late Dr Jim Gray, a leading Microsoft computer scientist who was lost at sea in 2007.

Dr Gray believed that the vast amount of space data being collected would change astronomy from being an observational science into a computational one, said Dr Curtis Wong, a leading Microsoft research scientist and the head of the WWT project.

With the growth of the internet and the increasing processing power of standard computers, Gray could see the internet becoming the platform for a worldwide virtual observatory which anyone could use.

A key feature of the program is the ability of users - any user, not just the experts - to create rich media tours to showcase features found on the WWT database.

For instance, one of the tours takes you across the Martian landscape using images captured in the Mars Rover program.

"For millennia ... every different culture has their own story about the heavens," said Dr Wong in a telephone interview. "The WorldWide Telescope is an opportunity for people to create and share those stories."

The Microsoft project is being launched almost nine months after Google rolled out its Google Sky service, a layered map of astronomical images that its part of its Google Earth program.

But there is no sense of a space race between the two giants of the technology world. Both projects have no commercial application and exist as public service tools.

Dr Wong would not be drawn on making comparisons between the two although it has been previously reported that the WWT packs in much more data and imagery than its Google counterpart.

The WWT comes as a 20MB download and is available from the WorldWide Telescope site. The program only works on the Widows operating system.

Turning bad water into good

2008-05-11T19:22:00.001+10:00

Alchemy refers to a medieval science that turns metals into gold. As our planet depletes natural resources at a frantic pace, one brand of alchemy that will become critical to humanity's survival is technology that turns sea water into drinking water.

There are two primary processes today for extracting salt from water--thermal distillation and sea water reverse osmosis--but both are expensive and waste a lot of energy. Enter Energy Recovery. The small San Leandro, Calif.-based company created a ceramic device called the PX pressure exchanger that has helped water treatment plants around the world reduce desalination costs to a fraction of what they were in the mid-1960s.

At that time, the cost of producing a cubic meter of fresh water from sea water averaged $10. With the help of Energy Recovery's PX device, desalination costs now an average $0.46 per cubic meter.

Here's how it works. The PX device captures the energy that otherwise would have been discarded in the reject stream of the sea water reverse osmosis process and pushes it back into the system. Since its debut in 2002, the PX device has become a leading desalination product, installed in more than 300 desalination plants worldwide.

Sales of the PX devices have pushed Energy Recovery's revenues to $35 million in 2007 from $4 million in 2003. In April, the company filed for a public offering and plans to raise as much as $175 million. It plans to use the proceeds to develop more products and ramp up sales and marketing.

Energy Recovery's path to success, however, has been anything but smooth. It was founded in 1993, almost went out of business a few times, had three rounds of significant management changes, and had to fight lawsuits to gain control of its intellectual property.

It took enormous patience and conviction from its management team as well as its investors--high-net-worth individuals from Norway who believed that the company was doing something worthwhile and important. They funneled $12 million of their own money into Energy Recovery over a 15-year period. The company didn't raise an ounce of Silicon Valley venture capital.

"Venture capitalists are coming from the money management side, and, of course, they have the obligation to cut their losses," says Energy Recovery Executive Chairman Hans Peter Michelet. "If a traditional venture capital firm had been behind ERI, they would have pulled the plug long before we did. We went all the way."

Michelet says Energy Recovery expected to reach $20 million in sales by 2000. It finally reached that milestone in 2006. The company had to experiment with multiple generations of technology and initially went to market with a PX device that wasn't powerful enough. The PX product it has on market today is five times more powerful.

Is Energy Recovery's market mainly in the developing world? No, says Michelet. There's also a great need for desalination technologies in industrialized nations. "You don't have to go overseas to look at the critical aspects of desalination," he says. "It's enough to just go to California. We demonstrated that we could now, in California, desalinate a cubic meter of water for a total of 1.58 kilowatt hours."

That number doesn't tell you anything, but let me put it in context. Colorado today spends about 1.9 kilowatt hours just to pump the state water around to California. In addition to that, about 1.6 kilowatt hours of additional energy is spent just to slush the Colorado River water around in California. When you look at all the energy being consumed by California today just by pumping water around, you realize that it is actually cheaper to desalinate water from the Pacific Ocean.

And the Environmental Protection Agency forecasts that the U.S. will have to spend $277 billion on water infrastructure by 2019. Suffice it to say, Energy Recovery has a large market to tap into in building its business.

Spam mail turns 30

2008-05-06T12:12:00.001+10:00

Spam - the scourge of every inbox - has turned 30.

The first recognisable email marketing message was sent on May 3, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now - Defunct computer-maker.

The message was sent via Arpanet, the net's forerunner.

Thirty years on, Spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Statistics gathered by FBI suggest that 75 per cent of net scams snare people through junk email.

Some 85 per cent of all email is spam and 100 billion messages are sent ever day.

The culprit of the said first spam was named Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Digital Equipment Corporation. He send a sales email to 400 users of Arpanet (the ancestors of todays Internet). The said first spammer told the Wall Street Journal that his ground breaking email worked and gained $12 million tech sales. Thuerk never did spammed again instead he does promos for fighting spam-fighting companies. But he doesn’t spend sometime blaming himself for the current epidemic of spam.

Here’s the world first spam in it’s original all-caps format:

Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT
Date: 1 May 1978 1233-EDT
From: THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO
Subject: ADRIAN@SRI-KL

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM. THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040 AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:

TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 - 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 - 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)

A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.

Happy Birthday Spam!!! Internet would not be as colorful without you

Adobe has Flash New Multimedia

2008-05-06T12:05:00.002+10:00

Adobe aims to conquer the mobile device market with its Flash player, in an effort to emulate its success on PCs.

Dubbed Open Screen, the initiative lifts restrictions on how its multimedia-handling software can be used.

Adobe will stop charging licensing fees for mobile versions of Flash and will publish information about the code.

Adobe hopes to repeat on mobiles the success its Flash technology has had on the web estimating that its Flash player is on 98 per cent of net connected desktop computers.

The Open Screen will build on Flash Lite - Adobe's version of its multimedia player designed for mobile gadgets - already on millions of handhelds.

The ultimate aim of Open Screen is to make it much easier for TV and film makers to send content to mobiles and on other devices such as set top boxes.

It aims to do this by creating one flexible player technology that can run on any small-form device, but only demands that developers write code once.

At the moment trying to get games or video on to different devices can be frustrating because of the plethora of hardware and software quirks on each gadget.

Adobe's four step plan involves ending licence fees; removing restrictions on the use of files in SWF and FLV format; publishing detailed information about the program interfaces for its Flash player; and opening up information about its Flash streaming technology.

Technologies for the 'differently able'

2008-05-01T19:43:00.000+10:00

Technology is acting as an enabler for people who have physical disabilities or disorders such as dyslexia or autism. There is a wide range of hardware and software that assists the disabled to use computers for communication, productivity, and learning. Here’s a look at some of these assistive technologies.

Input devices
Joysticks and other pointing devices, along with large-key keyboards make the task of data input easier.

For those with limited dexterity, that is, those who have trouble operating a mouse, roller balls of different sizes are used to enable pointing and clicking. Joysticks with buttons also serve the same purpose. There are USB switches and switch accessories of different types for this too. For instance, there are round switches in different sizes, or switches connected to arms and can be operated by bending the arm, or switches that can be mounted, and switches that require very little pressure for operating. Depending on which muscles a person can use easily, one of these programmable switches can be selected to give various commands to the computer or to control input devices.

Head mice and eye trackers are types of pointing devices that use a person’s head and eye movements respectively. Head mice track a reflective dot on a person’s head, while eye trackers or gaze trackers do this via eye movements. These are useful for people who have limited or no use of their hands, or are paralyzed shoulder downwards.

People with motor control problems can use large-sized keyboards. Similarly, people who have joint pains in their hands and fingers or low muscle strength can make use of keyboard guards to help press the keys without exerting too much pressure. Compact keyboards are also available, which can be mounted on wheelchair trays.

Touch screens and tablet PCs are also useful for people with impairments. In addition, wands and sticks are used to press keys on the keyboard. These can be controlled by strapping them to the head, chin or holding them in the mouth.

Enabling software
Text to speech software, voice-recognition software, screen readers, predictive text entry software and screen magnifiers are some of the solutions that are very helpful for people with visual or hearing impairments, learning disabilities, musculoskeletal disorders, spinal injuries, or carpal tunnel syndrome.

JAWS for Windows
The software called JAWS has been around for a while, and is of great assistance to the visually impaired. It uses synthesized speech to read out what’s written on your screen. It can be used to browse the Web, work with Word documents and use other programs. JAWS can be customized to specific needs; it can also provide Braille output along with speech.

Another screen reader is TextHelp Screen Reader 4. An add-on called WordTalk, which works with Microsoft Word 97 and later versions, reads out the text in Microsoft Word documents. These are useful for the visually impaired or those who have learning disabilities.

Dragon Naturally Speaking
With this voice-recognition software, you can control the computer using your voice. You can send e-mail with attachments, browse Web pages, work with documents, and so on. It is useful for those who have limited use of their hands.

eLocutor
This software enables typing text into a computer, which the computer converts to speech to aid communication. All this is done through the use of a single button. This software, therefore, is useful if you can’t enter text or if you have speech problems.

Dasher
Dasher can be used by people who have limited or no use of their hands. It enables predictive text entry by using devices such as roller balls, joysticks, touch screens and mice. Foot mice, head mice, and eye trackers can also be used with Dasher if you cannot use your hands at all. It can be used to enter text in most languages. It is available for Windows and for other operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Other Literacy Related Software
Software related to literacy include screen readers, screen magnifiers, software that enables word completion or predictive text entry, and may include add-ons such as dictionaries, calculators and spell checkers. These are helpful for people with visual impairments, dyslexia, delayed learning, or those who have poor motor skills. Many of these are also available as shareware.

iCommunicator
This software is useful for people who have hearing impairments. It can convert speech to text; it can also convert speech or text to video sign-language or computer generated voice in real time. Once the speech is in text form, you can use resources such as the Internet or the built-in Dictionary and Thesaurus to find out more about it. When someone is speaking to you, their speech can be converted into video sign language in real time; and you can type in your response, which will converted to computer-generated voice.

Microsoft Windows and Office Accessibility Features
In the Control Panel of Windows, a feature called Accessibility Options enables you to set options for screen magnifiers, on-screen keyboards, and so on.

Various versions of Office also have several accessibility features that enable people with disabilities to work with them. You can find out more about these at the Microsoft site. A useful page is http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA102574141033.aspx, which provides links to other resources on accessibility and assistive technologies.

Google profits jump 30% despite worries over online ads

2008-04-18T13:07:00.001+10:00

Google reported on Thursday that its profits surged more than 30 per cent to 1.31 billion dollars in the first three months of the year, erasing fears of sagging online advertising revenues.

Google's stock leaped more than 17 per cent to 526 dollars a share in after-hours trading on the news.

Google reported that overall revenues rose to 5.19 billion dollars in the quarter and profits equalled 4.12 dollars per share, compared to 3.18 dollars per share in the same period last year.

"We are obviously very pleased," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a conference call with analysts and media.

"It is clear to us we are well-positioned for 2008 and beyond despite the business environment we find ourselves in."

Revenue from Google's main cash source, clicks on online ads, rose 20 per cent in the quarter, mitigating worries that shifting to displaying fewer, better-targeted ads would hurt the California company.

"Google is a cash machine," said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group.

"The only thing that could hurt them is if, for whatever reason, the market re-looks at the value placed on eyeballs on the Web and pushes back on pricing, which is always a possibility, but is extremely remote."

Schmidt was adamant that Google is not being affected by macroeconomic conditions, including the troubled business market in the United States.

Slightly more than half of Google's reported revenues came from outside US borders.

Making the bulk of revenues overseas is a trend among US technology giants including Intel, IBM and Hewlett Packard.

"That shows significant advantage for companies spread out internationally to weather a storm in the US market," Enderle said.

"I think it reflects the fact they could weather anything other than a worldwide storm. As long as the storms remain localized they are okay."

Google co-founder Serge Brin said during the conference call that the firm has improved Internet search pages tailored for users in Asia and other overseas markets.

Merging DoubleClick's ad-targeting technology with Google properties, especially the popular YouTube website, is "hugely strategic" for the company, according to Schmidt.

Google completed its 3.1 billion dollar buy of DoubleClick last month. "As we integrate DoubleClick into our advertising platform, we see exciting new ways to improve the user experience and increase value for our advertisers and partners," Schmidt said.

Blog until you drop

2008-04-14T10:37:00.003+10:00

In the 24/7 web world, some writers don't know when to stop, writes Matt Richtel.

They work long hours, often to the point of exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece - not for garments but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing workforce of labourers and entrepreneurs, wired to the hilt with computers and smartphones, are toiling in their home-offices. The demands of the around-the-clock internet economy have put them under great physical and emotional stress as they try to provide a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers could choose other work but they profess to love the nonstop action and the opportunity to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are wondering if something has gone very wrong: in recent months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

In March, 60-year-old Russell Shaw, a prolific US blogger on technology subjects, had a fatal heart attack. In December, another American technology blogger, Marc Orchant, also had a heart attack and died, aged 50. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack the same month.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the strain of producing news and information for the always-on internet.

There is no official recognition of death by blogging and the premature demise of two people does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased and fellow information workers say those deaths have got them thinking about the dangers of their working lives.

Being well paid is no compensation. The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves and are being well-compensated.

"I haven't died yet," says Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a technology blog. The site has brought in millions of dollars in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost.

Arrington says he has gained 13.5 kilograms in the past three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees.

"At some point, I'll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable," he says.

It is not known how many people blog for pay but an educated guess would be several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the internet and advertising has followed.

The internet has changed how we work, even at established companies, by allowing people to work from any location at any time. That flexibility has a downside: workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving home.

Blogging can be lucrative but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post - in some cases they are paid on a sliding scale that rewards success with more work.

There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for publishers, as employees or contractors, or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.

One of the most competitive areas is technology and blogs about the subject are in a vicious around-the-clock competition to report company activities, reveal details of new products and expose corporate gaffes.

To the victor go the ego points and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.

Some sites, such as those owned by Gawker Media, pay bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting targets, such as if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more.

Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $32,000 a year when they start out, but some can make as much as $75,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1000 a month.

Speed can be essential. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, another post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the greater share of ad revenue.

"There's no time ever, including when you're sleeping, when you're not worried about missing a story," Arrington says. "Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8pm Pacific time and dawn?

"Then we could all take a break," he says. "But that's never going to happen."

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets, and is paid for each reader. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. He stays fuelled by regularly drinking a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake - Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He says he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

"The fact I have a few thousand people a day reading what I write, that's kind of cool," he says. And, yes, it is exhausting. Sometimes, he says, "I just want to lie down."

He has been known to fall asleep at the computer.

"If I don't hear from him, I'll think: Matt's passed out again," says Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo. "It's happened four or five times."

Lam, a manager with a substantially larger income, works even harder. He pulls all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco to keep his site organised and competitive. He says he is well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.

"I've got a background of getting punched in the face," he says. "That's why I'm good at this job."

Lam worries that his blogging staff might be burning out and he urges them to take breaks, even vacations. But he says they face tremendous pressure: external, internal and financial. He says the evolution of the "pay-per-click" economy has put the emphasis on reader traffic and financial return, not journalism.

In the case of Shaw, it is not clear what role stress played in his death. Ellen Green, who had been dating him for 13 months, says the pressure, though self-imposed, was severe. She says she and Shaw had been talking a lot about how he could create a healthier lifestyle, particularly after the death of his friend, Orchant. "The blogger community is looking at this and saying: 'Oh no, it happened so fast to two really vital people in the field,"' she says. "[They are wondering,] 'what does that have to do with me?"'

For his part, Shaw did not die at his desk. He died in a hotel in San Jose, California, where he had flown to cover a technology conference. He had just written a last email dispatch to his editor at ZDNet: "Have come down with something. Resting now, posts to resume later today or tomorrow."

The New York Times

UK.gov publishes alien sightings list

2008-04-04T22:13:00.013+11:00

Terrified Brits reported almost 100 UFO sightings to the Ministry of Defence last year.

Quite what they wanted the bowler-hatted ones to do about the lights whizzing through the skies is unclear, but the full report makes for entertaining reading.

Highlights include "a big round swirly thing" in the skies above East Lothian, "a blue ball of light, with a tail at the end" and "the mothership and two smaller orbs...". Days later another chilling report: "The mothership was seen again."

There are clusters of sightings around 5 November (Guy Fawkes night, when we let off lots of fireworks for the non-Brit audience), and 31 December. One report on New Year's Eve read: "Lights - so many different ones."

Further amusement for the cynics comes from a sighting in Hastings where a two witnesses report seeing "an alien" outside their kitchen window. Hastings is clearly an odd place to visit.

The report also contains good news for Cumbrian drivers. One witness reported seeing: "a triangular object with lights. One green, one red, and the other two amber." We're going out on a limb here and identifying this one as a traffic light.

The MoD, however, remains unimpressed, saying it only investigates those sightings that could be related to military aircraft. Presumably, this means aliens visiting the UK for tourism are welcomed, and are not likely to be chased away by government officials.

A spokeswoman said: "Unless there's evidence of a potential threat we don't investigate to try to identify it."

The disclosures, not the first of their kind, were made in response to a Freedom of Information request. ®

3G iPhone release 'imminent'

2008-04-03T22:44:00.000+11:00

Speculation is mounting over an impending release of a new iPhone supporting 3G networks, suggesting the much-ballyhooed device could reach Australia as early as the middle of this year.

With local mobile carriers rushing to convert their subscribers from 2G to faster broadband-like 3G services, the lack of a 3G-enabled model is viewed by analysts as the key impediment to releasing the device locally.

Analyst firm IDC said Australians wanted more than a large screen and great web browser and the appeal of an iPhone without 3G connectivity would be limited to die-hard Apple fans and the fashion conscious.

"It would appear highly unlikely that a 2G iPhone [would] be released in Australia, with Telstra focusing all efforts to migrate subscribers onto Next G and Optus and Vodafone both building national 3G networks this year. The 2G market in Australia is shrinking fast," IDC telecommunications analyst Mark Novosel said.

"In 2009 the number of 3G subscribers in Australia will outstrip 2G subscribers. By the end of 2009 56.6 per cent of all mobile subscribers in Australia will be on one of four 3G networks."

Apple has said the iPhone will be launched in Australia this year, but has yet to pin down an exact date.

In a research note sent to investors late last week, Bank of America financial analyst Scott Craig said channel investigations showed a 3G iPhone would be produced in small numbers in May followed by a larger production run in June.

The note came after Dow Jones Newswires reported that Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry, the largest contract manufacturer of electronics in the world, had won an exclusive contract to make a new version of the iPhone. It cited "a person familiar with the situation".

As well, a Hon Hai official told the news service that the company was in talks with Apple for the supply of a "more advanced version" of the current iPhone.

Similarly, Taiwan's Commercial Times reported, without citing sources, that Hon Hai had been competing with other manufacturers for the 3G iPhone contract.

This week, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said he expected Apple would introduce a 3G iPhone within the next 3 to 6 months.

The upcoming annual Apple developers conference, scheduled to begin in San Francisco on June 9, could be an opportune time for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to unveil the device.

Jobs said battery life issues prevented the company from releasing a 3G model from the outset but he has indicated he would like to build in 3G support when the time is right.

In November last year, Randall Stephenson, the chief executive of AT&T, Apple's exclusive iPhone carrier partner in the US, confirmed a 3G iPhone would land some time this year.

IDC has forecast that Australian iPhone shipments would commence in the third quarter of this calendar year, but predicted the device would comprise only 3.5 per cent of the Australian mobile phone market.

Apple stores across the US are experiencing iPhone shortages, and some have interpreted that to mean Apple is running down its existing stock to prepare for the launch of a new model.

Jaffray said of all possible explanations there was an "80 per cent chance that a new version of the iPhone is coming earlier than anticipated".

But some say the shortage is simply due to stellar demand for the device, particularly from countries where the iPhone has yet to launch. Many, Australians included, have imported the device and, using various unauthorised yet easy to perform hacks, unlocked it for use on their local networks.

Telstra was widely rumoured to be Apple's iPhone carrier partner in Australia until January when Optus emerged as the dark horse.

Thailand's largest mobile operator, Advanced Info Service (AIS), said it was negotiating a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Asia.

The telco's chief marketing officer, Sanchai Thiewprasertkul , told the Bangkok Post that AIS was collaborating with Singapore Telecom (SingTel) and Optus to launch the iPhone throughout the region.

Optus is a wholly owned subsidiary of SingTel, and SingTel owns 21.4 per cent of AIS.

Yet even before the local iPhone launch is announced, Telstra's Sensis is already gearing up to create mobile applications specifically for the device. It has advertised for a business analyst to create iPhone search applications.

A new model for iPhone soon?

2008-04-03T19:27:00.000+11:00

SAN FRANCISCO: Apple's iPhone is in short supply at many of its US stores, which could indicate a component shortage or a clearing of shelves for a new model, analysts said.

Bernstein Research said its iPhone supply checks showed that the multifunction device appeared to be out of stock at Apple's US stores and its online store, which could lead to lost sales of up to 40,000 units a week in the event of a prolonged shortage.

Sacconaghi said the impact so far was limited, estimating the average Apple store was out of stock for only a few days during the March quarter, and that supplies appeared to be fine at stores of wireless carrier partner AT&T Inc.

"In our view, the most likely explanation for this unusual situation is a production shortfall, possibly due to a component shortage," analyst Toni Sacconaghi wrote in a note.

Apple declined to confirm if there was an iPhone shortage, but spokesman Steve Dowling said, "We are working to replenish iPhone supplies as quickly as we can and our stores continue to receive shipments almost every day."

Recent reports of iPhone shortages have fuelled speculation that Apple is readying a new version of the device that will run on faster 3G wireless networks.

Apple could introduce a new iPhone in June or July, about three months earlier than previously expected, said American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, citing checks with unidentified supply chain sources.

"What gives us higher conviction in the accelerated timetable is that iPhone inventory levels appear fairly lean, which is consistent with Apple's tendency to wind down inventory ahead of an update," Wu wrote in a note.

Wu forecast Apple would sell 11 million phones by the end of 2008, 10 per cent more than the company's stated goal, thanks to a new model, wider adoption among businesses, and price cuts.

UFO Photos Draw National Attention

2008-04-02T15:48:00.003+11:00

Someone using the name Raji claims to have taken this photo on May 16 in Capitola, Calif. "I have no clue what this thing is so I'm putting it out there to see if anyone else saw it," he wrote when he posted it online. Soonafter Raji vanished and closed his e-mail account.

The tiny beach town of Capitola, Calif., is buzzing about a mysterious object that appears to have been photographed on May 16 of last year. Someone using the name Raji posted images on the Web site Craigslist, answered a few questions from UFO hunters around the world, and then just disappeared into cyberspace.

As news spread about the unidentified object, others came forward on the Web to say they had also seen it. Videos and other images of what soon became known as the “California Drone” were published on the Internet.

Then came a call in January to private detective, T.K. Davis, a former Santa Clara County sheriff deputy. An unidentified woman from Open Minds Forum, a group specializing in “UFOology,” was willing to pay him $100 an hour to investigate the sighting.

Davis doesn’t believe in UFOs, but he took the woman seriously and has been on the case with a partner, Frankie Dixon, ever since. What does Davis think now? For one, he believes the object in the photo is too intricate to be the work of a Photoshop scam artist. He’s searched high and low to determine what it may be, and talked with many doubters, but has yet to find a logical answer.

Davis has even talked to the local power company to try to determine where the telephone pole in the photograph is located. Before vanishing, the person who claimed to take the photograph e-mailed the woman from the Open Minds Forum saying the image was shot outside his fiancee’s parents home. If Davis can find the telephone pole, he believes, he can find the person who took the photo.

An article published in the Los Angeles Times about the photographs last week has sparked more interest in the UFO sighting, but Davis says he still doesn’t have any solid evidence on whether or not the photographs are real. “The more research we’ve done, I’m leading towards believing,” he told the San Jose Mercury News. “I’m not a skeptic anymore.”

Many bloggers on UFO sites have called the images a hoax, claiming they have been digitally altered. Others have contacted Davis saying they had seen a UFO in Capitola several years ago. One person, a man named Isaac that Davis found through the Mutual UFO Network, claims the strange object bears a similarity to crafts that were built as part of a U.S. government project he worked on in Palo Alto in the 1980s.

Davis has investigated this too, but can’t confirm the project ever existed. Speculation continues to run rampant, but until Davis speaks with Raji, the person who took the photos, he says it will remain a mystery.

From Technicism point of view - We will ultimately be able to control the entirety of existence using technology, But how ? Who Knows? :)