JitNik's Tech World

Nokia N97 comes equipped with 434 MHz processor and 128 MB Ram while Apple iPhone 3G S comes with 600MHz processor and 256MB RAM. While comparing this hardware configuration, Apple iPhone 3G S stands ahead.

But main advantage of N97 comes when we take the operating system. N97 comes preloaded with Symbian 5th edition S60 while iphone 3G S comes with latest iPhone OS 3.0. But main advantage of N97 is that almost all applications for all purpose ia available for Symbian OS. Though the N97 has some touch gestures and the accelerometer, we have to admit that touch features on the iPhone remain iconic despite all efforts by Nokia and Windows Mobile.

Other noticable thing is battery life Nokia N97 provides more battery life than iPhone 3G S with its 1,500 mAh Li-Ion battery.

Also while we consider the storage part N97 has 32GB inbuilt memory and has a microSD card slot to expand ths storage capacity while iPhone 3G S, which has 16GB internal memory.

While coming to design part, nokia N97 has a 3.5 inch touch display and QWERTY keyboard while iPhone 3G S has touch screen display only.



In multimedia features also , N97 makes a step ahead of Apple iPhone 3G S. The main features is camera- N97 comes equipped with a 5 megapixel camera while iPhone 3G S has a 3.2 megapixel camera.

N97 also comes with the best speakers than the Apple iPhone 3G S and while on ear phones also Nokia n97 is able to compete with Apple iPhone 3G S.

Features such as handwriting recognition, Bluetooth file transfers, FM radio and video recording on the N97 clearly makes it a head over iPhone 3G S.



The Nokia N97 is expected to available at a price of Rs 36,119 in India while the 8GB iPhone 3G S is expected for about Rs 29,000. As per all the features are considered, the Nokia N97 is better than Apple iPhone 3G S .

iPhone fever was hot in May, at least based on the number of people who frequented Apple's Web site.
The Mac maker's Apple.com last month hosted 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released on Monday by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of second-ranked Hewlett-Packard, which drew in 21.9 million people.



May visitors to Apple's Web site spent an average of an hour and 14 minutes on it, perhaps in anticipation of the pending release of the new iPhone 3GS, Nielsen said.

Traffic to Dell's site came in third place, with 16.8 million unique visits in May. Overall, Web site visits to hardware manufacturers followed by Nielsen grew 22 percent year over year, from 57.3 million in May 2008 to 70.1 million last month.
Buzz about Apple was also in full swing among bloggers in May. Blog mentions of the iPhone 3GS shot up 1,226 percent on June 8, the day the new phone was announced, from the prior week. Blog talk dipped after that but then doubled on June 19, when the 3GS hit the shelves.

Mozilla's much awaited Firefox 3.5 is slated for release on Tuesday, a company representative has said. The updated version is being touted as a browser that will feature high speed.

Other key features include TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which boosts performance and stability, as well as a Private Browsing Model for control of private data. The Private Browsing Model does not retain visited pages, form and search bar entries, passwords, cookies, temporary or cached Internet files and so forth. Firefox 3.5 has similar features as that of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

Around a week back we blogged that HTC will soon launch Google Android based phones in India and here they are, HTC is launching HTC magic in India today in strategic partnership with Airtel. HTC magic will be priced between 26,000 and 28,000 and will not be locked to any operator unlike Apple Iphone thus making it a go-go for users with any operator.

HTC Magic have a huge list of features making it a compelling buy for the users opting for a smart phones, giving stiff competition to Nokia N97, Blackberry and Iphones.

All Google services like Gmail, Google Search, Street view etc comes inbuilt with G2.
Smart Dialer with on screen touch keyboard making it easy to type.
Microsoft exchange server integration making it lucrative even for business users.
Wifi Connectivity so that one can use WiFi connection while in office,home. G2 also provides easy network switching capability, so that users can switch from Operator provided network to office/home WIFI in a click of a button giving them better speed and saving some pennies .

Though the price tag may look little bit on the heavier side but it may be able to pick up cashing on the Googlemania . Users will be happier with their Gmail, Calendar, contacts all syncing up regularly.
SPECIFICATIONS:-
Processor:Qualcomm® MSM7200A™, 528 MHz
Operating System:Android
Memory ROM:512 MB
RAM:288 MB
Display:3.2-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 320x480 HVGA resolution
Network:HSDPA/WCDMA:900/2100 MHz
Up to 2 Mbps up-link and 7.2 Mbps down-link speeds
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE:
850/900/1800/1900 MHz
Device Control Trackball with Enter button
GPS:Internal GPS antenna
Connectivity:Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets
Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g
HTC ExtUSB™:(11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio jack in one)
Camera:3.2 megapixel color camera with auto focus
Talk time:
Up to 400 minutes for WCDMA
Up to 450 minutes for GSM
Standby time:
Up to 660 hours for WCDMA
Up to 420 hours for GSM
Expansion Slot microSD™ memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
AC Adapter:Voltage range/frequency: 100 ~ 240V AC, 47/63 Hz
DC output: 5V and 1A
Special Features:
G-sensor
Digital Compass

Before getting into the actual process, let’s look at a couple of real-world situations that explain why you may want to turn your home computer into a web server.

Situation #1. Say you have music MP3s, documents and other important files on the hard drive of your home computer. If you turn this home computer into a web server, you will be able to access all these files from office or any other Internet connected machine including your mobile phone.

Situation #2. You have some personal photographs that you want to share with other family members. You can either upload these pictures online to a site like Flickr or better still, just convert the computer into a web server. Now you can connect the camera to the computer, transfer the digital pictures to some designated folder and they’ll instantly become available to your friends and family anywhere in the world.

Situation #3. You want to host a website on the internet but the web hosting jargon like FTP, DNS, etc. is way too complex for you. The workaround therefore is that you setup a web server on your home computer (it’s easy) and then host a website in seconds without spending a single penny on external web hosting services.

Now if any of the above reasons look convincing enough, here’s how you can convert your Windows, Mac or Linux PC into a web server in less than two minutes - no technical knowledge required.

Go to labs.opera.com, download the Opera Unite software and install it. Congratulations, you are now running a web server on your machine and just need another minute to configure local file folders that you want to share with others over the internet.

Here’s an illustrated screenshot of the configuration panel - nothing technical here again.

Start the Opera Web browser (yes, that’s also you web server now) and enable the Opera Unite service from the lower left corner. Now double click the File Sharing link and select the folder whose content you want to share on the web. Any file or folder inside this folder can now be accessed over the internet - you can either use a public URL or specify a password for private sharing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-omonwFkkrY

The following screencast video has more detailed instructions on how to get started with Opera Unite or you may refer to the User Guide if you get stuck somewhere.
Opera Unite looks pretty useful but there are other services around that can also do pretty similar stuff. For instance, both PurpleNova and Dekoh Dekstop enable users share content on the Internet directly from the hard drive without having to upload it anywhere.

Update: It’s important to note that your computer must be in running state and also connected to the Internet for others to download files and web pages since Opera Unite streams content directly from your machine - it doesn’t upload or caches anything to its own servers.

While there are dozens of online services and software tools out there that help you download videos from YouTube for offline watching, you don’t need their help anymore for downloading your own videos from YouTube.

That’s because Google now allows all video publishers to export their own video clips out of YouTube in MPEG-4 (MP4) format - you can directly play these downloaded in iPod or other video players without conversion.

To download any of your own videos from YouTube, go to My Videos -> Uploaded Videos and look for the "Download as MP4" button next to your video clips as shown in the above screenshot.

This is useful for offline backup of your video or even if you are planning to copy (or even move) videos from YouTube to another video hosting service but don’t have access to the source video files.

The only downside is that these video clips have a 480×270 resolution so they won’t match the quality of your original 720p HD videos.

Android is a mobile phone operating system developed by Google. Android is unique because Google is actively developing the platform but giving it away for free to hardware manufacturers and phone carriers who want to use Android on their devices.

Open Handset Alliance:

Google formed a group of hardware, software, and telecommunication companies called the Open Handset Alliance with the goal of contributing to Android development. Most members also have the goal of making money from Android, either by selling phones, phone service, or mobile applications.

Android Market Place:

Anyone can download the SDK (software development kit) and write applications for Android phones. Google doesn't screen developers or applications. Google doesn't even take part of the profits.
These apps can be downloaded from the Android Market Place.

Service Providers:

The iPhone has been very popular for AT&T, but unless you void your warranty to unlock it, you can only use an iPhone with AT&T. Android is an open platform, so many carriers can potentially offer Android-powered phones. That doesn't mean individual carriers won't lock the specific phone they sell you to their service, but even that may change as more companies offer Android phones.

Data Plan:

To use Android, you need a data plan on top of your voice plan. You can't even activate an Android phone without a data plan enabled.

Google Services:

Because Google developed Android, it comes with a lot of Google services installed right out of the box. Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Web search are all pre-installed, and Google is also the default Web page for the Web browser.

Touchscreen:

Android supports a touch screen. However, it does not include "multi-touch," which is an Apple patented technology for iPhones. This means you can use a single finger to move items around or select them, but you cannot re-size by pinching or spreading gestures with two fingers.

Keyboard:

The initial release of Android requires a separate keyboard. However, the next major release, code named "Cupcake," will feature an on-screen keyboard. Dialing numbers and using non-text portions of applications can all be done without the keyboard.

The Bottom Line:

Android is an exciting platform for consumers and developers. It is the philosophical opposite of the iPhone in many ways. Where the iPhone tries to create the best user experience by restricting hardware and software standards, Android tries to insure it by opening up as much of the operating system as possible

The organization behind Wikipedia is close to launching an editable online video encyclopedia to enhance the current textual one. The hope is to revolutionize the popular reference site and goad content providers--from public broadcasters to the music industry--into allowing more video to enter the public domain.


Later,Wikipedia plans to offer ways for users to search the entire Web for importable videos, and plans to provide tools to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips within the Wikipedia website, just as is now done with text.

"To have people be able to go in and annotate your video, edit your video, and improve upon it--in the same way people have been doing to your text posts--is pretty outstanding, and will create an audio-visual representation of our world that will rapidly become as definitive and collaborative as Wikipedia is in the textual world," says Peter Kaufman, executive producer atIntelligent Television, a documentary production company in New York City that works with cultural and educational institutions, helping them bring their works online. "That may just be the holy grail."

Key to Wikipedia's video effort--funded partly by the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the open-source Firefox browser--is Wikipedia's insistence that any video passing into its pages be based on open-source formats. In the future, the offerings behind the "Add Media" button will include a search function for scouring the Web for video content. The hope is that this requirement will force content holders--motivated by the desire for exposure on Wikipedia--to put their material into the public domain. "Once people see how open-source video will get much more visibility on the open Web, it will motivate the content providers to jump on board--or miss the ship," says Michael Dale, a software engineer from Kaltura, a video startup based in New York City that is collaborating with Wikimedia on the effort.

Bad news seems to be flowing in for Yahoo users constantly. Yahoo recently shut down many services like Yahoo 360, Yahoo Geocities and Yahoo Jumpcut and now its time for Yahoo Gallery.

Yahoo Gallery is scheduled to be butchered on 14 July 2009. This service was used to showcase applications that were using Yahoo technologies like Yahoo OpenId service,Yahoo search,delicious etc. Yahoo Gallery was still in Beta stage and it never jumped into the market with the alpha version.



With the recent butchering of many services in beta stage, meaning of the term “beta” seems changing. Beta Software generally means that it is not a full production version and is still in development phase having some bugs. Beta stage is changing to somewhat like “The service provider may not have enough confidence on the service , they may also shut down the service without a decent notice as they are not sure how to monetize the service or don’t have enough funds to keep the service running”.

The recent closure of beta services brings another alarming question in mind “Most of Google services are in Beta, can they shut them down” . Google has already shut down many services which were in beta stage in early 2009. Can users live without Gmail,Google reader,Google docs is a big question as a downtime of only 18 minutes affected 5% of the internet how will discontinuation of services like Gmail, Google reader affect the world.

Why are providers like Yahoo, Google killing services:

Providers like Yahoo and Google are shutting down services one after another , How can one trust whether services which are now part and parcel of one’s life will survive long enough:

I can think of couple of reasons which led to shutdown of various services:

Recession - Everybody has to cut costs so they need to shut some things down.
Bad decision to start the service in the first place - Providers were not able to judge the market and requirements clearly and there was no clear path how the services will monetize hence they were killed as they never lead to any profits.
Whatever may be the reason of shutdown, one thing is clear providers need to think deeply before starting a service in the first place otherwise they will keep loosing confidence of the users denting their reputation in the long term.

Microsoft Corp in a quest to provide complete security to its OS users would soon be launching its own antivirus app Code named-‘Morro’. Microsoft also informed that the early version of the product is currently tested by its employees and would soon make a beta product available online before going for a launch at the end of 2009

Anti-virus app ‘Morro’ would provide full–time protection from several types of malicious software including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans .Although many are terming it as stripped down version of earlier shelved Live OneCare.



This news assumes significance as this antivirus would be completely free and would provide higher level of security due to close knit approach with Windows OS.Microsoft may be able to provide a great solution due to control over anonymous usage statistics of millions of PC’s.

This has sound alarms for commercial Anti-virus companies like Symantec,kaspersky and McAfee, earning majority of their revenues by protecting Windows PCs all these years. These companies also has significant presence in enterprise security market and attracts huge revenues from it.

Microsoft through this initiative is trying to ramp up confidence amongst its customers, at the same time opening up a new revenue stream in future.The move may be late timed but indeed serve great purpose for users craving about better anti-virus integration in windows OS.

The standard Google Translation service is pretty good for translating documents that exist on the web but if you ever need to translate Word files that reside on your local hard drive, the translator toolkit will come in handy.

It’s an online service where you can upload Word Documents or text files and translate them from one language to another instantly.
The document formatting is more or less preserved and you can download the translated files to your desktop in their original format like Word, OpenOffice or HTML. Unlike regular Google Translation which is read-only, here you also have the option to edit the translated version of the document in the browser itself.

The only condition is that the size of these individual documents, that you intend to upload for translation, should not exceed 1 MB.

http://translate.google.com/toolkit/docupload

Nokia's 8 MP N86 announced at the MWC at Barcelona earlier this year has started shipping globally.

"People demand mobile cameras that take excellent pictures in all light conditions," says Juha-Pekka Sipponen, Director, Nokia Nseries. "That's why the aperture of the Nokia N86 8MP is comparable to that of a high-quality, stand-alone digital camera. Whether it's running with the bulls in Pamplona or capturing the panoramic beauty of a sunrise over Sydney, the Nokia N86 8MP will take brilliantly clear, wide-angle images that are instantly geotagged to be uploaded onto sites like Ovi Share or Flickr."

The Nokia N86 8MP camera includes a wide-angle Carl Zeiss Tessar lens for panoramic pictures, shorter latencies and variable aperture for super sharp photos in challenging bright and low light conditions. A fast mechanical shutter will help ensure pictures with less motion blur. What could be construed as a disappointment would be the presence of a dual LED camera flash instead of a Xenon.

"When it comes to taking the best digital photos, it's the quality of the lens and the sensor that count, not just the quantity of pixels. The Nokia N86 8MP is the first mobile device with variable aperture, adding to the Carl Zeiss Tessar lens for excellent results. It has never been easier to capture special moments in such a great quality," says Helmut Heier of Carl Zeiss.

The handset features -

* 2.6 inch OLED, scratch resistant hardened glass display with a 240 x 320 pixel resolution
* Dual Slider
* 8GB of internal memory (microSD card support)
* HSDPA, Wi-Fi, EDGE
* Bluetooth with A2DP, USB 2.0 (micro)
* GPS with A-GPS support (Nokia Maps)
* FM radio with RDS and FM transmitter feature
* 3.5mm AV socket
* Rear kickstand

The Nokia N86 8MP estimated retail price of Rs. 23, 331 (EUR 375), before taxes and subsidies.

Western Digital Corp. today(June 9),released its biggest consumer external hard-disk drive targeted at Mac users with a whopping 4TB of capacity.

The drive's $650 price tag may turn some off, but if you need space to fit 1,540 DVD movies, 800,000 digital photos or one million MP3 music files, then this may be the drive you.

The My Book Studio Edition II drive comes in 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities and is designed with WD's GreenPower Technology, so the system uses about 30% less energy than standard WD drive systems and runs quietly because it doesn't need a fan.
The drive comes with a four ports, ultra-fast eSATA and FireWire 800, and FireWire 400 and USB 2.0, along with the accompanying cables.

It is compatible with Apple's Time Machine and includes software and instructions for reformatting to Windows operating systems. The system supports Mac OS X 10.4.10+, 10.5.2+ Windows 2000/XP/Vista: The 4TB version works with Windows Vista only because Windows XP does not support hard drives with capacities above 2TB.

The new My Book Studio Edition II two internal drives can be configured for RAID 0, which affords users the full 4 TB of capacity, or RAID 1, which mirrors the two drives to protect data in case of a drive failure but reduces storage capacity by half.

The new drive comes with a 5-year limited warranty.

Brilliant computer scientist who was crucial to the development of the Google search engine

Motwani was best known for mentoring Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their student days at Stanford University in California, where he was professor of computer science. As their search engine took shape, Motwani became their technical adviser and guided several other computer-based companies including PayPal, in which he was an early investor. A shrewd businessman as well as an acclaimed computer scientist, he also owned an undisclosed amount of stock in Google.

At Stanford University, where Motwani was one of the youngest professors, he started the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), a group that helped develop data-management concepts. The author of several papers in esoteric subjects like randomised algorithms and data streaming, his research spanned many areas in computer science, including databases and data privacy, web search and information retrieval, robotics, computational drug design, and theoretical computer science.

Asked to explain how Google's technology works, Motwani offered a typical illustration. "Let us say that you wanted information on 'bread yeast' and put those two words in Google. Then it not only sees which documents have these as words mentioned but also whether these documents are linked to other documents. An important page for 'bread yeast' must be having all other pages on the Web dealing in any way with 'bread yeast' also linking to it.
"In our example there may be a Bakers' Association of America, which is hyperlinked by most documents containing 'bread yeast', then it implies that most people involved with 'bread' and 'yeast' think that the Bakers Association's web site is an important source of information. So Google will rate that web site very high and put it on top of its list. Irrelevant documents which just mention 'bread' and 'yeast' will not be given any priority in the results.

In spite of his achievements, Motwani cheerfully conceded that the Google search engine did no more than a humble librarian – and was less intelligent. But he also pointed out that automatic software trumped the old technology in coping with the exponential rise in information.
Rajeev Motwani was born in New Delhi, India, on March 26 1962. His father was in the Indian Army and he spent a nomadic childhood following his father's postings to various parts of India. Young Rajeev wanted to be a mathematician, like his hero Carl Friedrich Gauss. "This was partly shaped by the books I had at home. My parents for some reason had a lot of these books – 10 great scientists or five famous mathematicians – their life story and so on. As a child, whatever heroes you read about you want to become."

He left St Columba's school in Delhi still hoping to be a mathematician, but his parents were sceptical about his prospects of making a living. Instead he joined Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, which had just started an undergraduate programme in computer science. He obtained his bachelor's degree in computer science there in 1983 and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988.
He wrote two books, Randomized Algorithms, published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, and an undergraduate textbook published in 2001. A kind, approachable man, Motwani was still active as a professor and was teaching a couple of classes as recently as last year, despite his financial success with his internet start-ups.
His awards include the Godel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in theoretical computer science, the Okawa Foundation Research Award and the Arthur Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, and an IBM Faculty Award.


Rajeev Motwani, who was found dead in his swimming pool on June 5, was a non-swimmer and had been considering taking lessons. He had apparently drowned after a party to celebrate the end of the academic year.

Nokia today unveiled the N97 phone in Bangalore; the latest addition to Nokia’s popular N-series lineup. At the press conference today addressed by Regional General Manager-South, Nokia India, TS Sridhar and Head of Design, Nokia N-series, Axel Meyer, the focus was on the new Nokia’s ‘personalized home screen.’ This essentially means that users can choose from a number of widgets that will rest on the home screen and keep users updated thanks to constant online feeds.

Another feature highlighted during the press conference was the N97’s integration with the Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to Apple’s app store, and according to a press release, “a full catalog of applications, games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, and web and location-based services.” Also, Nokia claims that the N97 will be optimized for social networking since Facebook, Twitter and MySpace widgets are also available.

Features of the phone include a 3.5-inch screen that supports 16:9 widescreen display, a slide-out QWERTY keypad, 32GB of in-built storage, expandable to 48GB. Nokia claims that the phone boasts of a battery life of 1.5 days during constant music playback. The imaging features include a 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a dual LED flash. Plus the phone is 3G ready and supports HSDPA and Wi-Fi.

Although Nokia was unwilling to give us the exact pricing, we did manage to get a Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 35,000 estimate. Expect this new Nokia in stores within two weeks.

Apple has unveiled the Mac OS X Snow Leopard, a refined version of the Mac OS X Leopard, and will ship as an upgrade in September 2009 for $29.



"We've built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before."

To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers refined 90 percent of the projects in Mac OS X - so users will now notice a more responsive Finder; Mail that loads messages 85 percent faster and conducts searches up to 90 percent faster; Time Machine with up to 50 percent faster initial backup; a Dock with Exposé integration; a 64-bit version of Safari 4 that boosts the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent and is resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins.

Snow Leopard also includes an all new QuickTime X, with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video to YouTube, MobileMe or iTunes. It is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 6GB of drive space once installed.

System applications including Finder, Mail, iCal, iChat and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard's support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance, and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications.

Snow Leopard builds support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 right into Mac OS X Mail, Address Book and iCal. Exchange information works seamlessly within Snow Leopard so users can take advantage of OS X only features such as fast Spotlight searches and Quick Look previews.

It features Apple's Multi-Touch trackpad integrated with the VoiceOver screen reader so users can hear and navigate different parts of a window or the desktop by moving a single finger around the trackpad as if it were the screen. Snow Leopard also introduces built-in support for wireless bluetooth braille displays and the connection of multiple braille displays simultaneously to one Mac.

Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard in September 2009 through the Apple Store (www.apple.com), Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

The Snow Leopard single user license will be available for a suggested retail price of $29 (US) and the Snow Leopard Family Pack, a single household, five-user license, will be available for a suggested price of $49 (US).

For Tiger users with an Intel-based Mac, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 (US) and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229 (US).

The Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller between June 8, 2009 and the end of the program on December 26, 2009, for a product plus shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US).

Suppose you are sitting in a public place like a cafeteria or in the airport and working on your laptop. You feel like having a cup of coffee. What do you do? You will be away only for a few seconds so you don’t want to carry it along. But then, could you leave your laptop lying around and hope that it would still be there when you return back with your coffee? This is a very common but difficult situation.

However, there is one tool that could help you in situations like these. Laptop Alarm.



Laptop Alarm is a free software tool that monitors unusual behavior when you’re away, setting off an alarm whenever it detects a possible theft. Laptop Alarm sounds an alarm whenever your laptop’s power cable is unplugged, the mouse is moved, or the laptop is shut down. This can be enough to deter a thief from running off with your laptop

Download Here:-

http://www.syfer.nl

/

It seems that the worst international financial crisis in decades has not affected everyone. While many US companies struggle to survive, some technology companies have plenty of cash piles. Still, how are they planning to use them? Let us see some of these rich tech companies:

Cisco Systems Inc is the most cash-rich tech company with $29.5 billion in hand, putting it just behind Exxon Mobil Corp’s $31.4 billion, despite having a market value less than one-quarter of the oil giant’s. Bankers and analysts think it may make a move on virtualization software maker VMware Inc.



Another tech company with some of the largest cash piles includes Apple Inc with $25.6 billion. In spite of spending about $2bn a year on R&D and capital investment, Apple’s $26bn in cash has left it with the biggest cash pile in the technology world. The company’s stock price too has rebounded from its low of $78.20 in the week when Steve Jobs announced his leave. The fact that Apple’s cash can be a big strength during recession has quieted critics, who in the past have called on the company to buy back shares or offer a dividend.



Microsoft Corp too sits on a huge cash pile of $20.7 billion. The rich software giant, however, announced rather disappointing quarterly results recently, unlike IBM. Microsoft recently announced that its 2009 first quarter profit sank from $4.71bn a year ago to $4.17bn, a loss of 12 percent. Total revenue was $16.63bn, a 2 per cent rise from year before. This was only possible thanks to higher server, tools and entertainment sales.



The search giant Google Inc too sits very well with a cash reserve of $15.9 billion. The Mountain View, California-based company had almost $16 billion in cash at the end of the recent-announced fourth quarter. According to Google CFO, Patrick Pichette, the cash reserves provided Google with sufficient flexibility “for the right deal at the right price.”



International Business Machines Corp too has a huge cash pile. In January, the company disclosed its full-year financial results for 2008: record revenue of $103.6 billion; record pre-tax profit of $16.7 billion; record earnings per share of $8.93; and record free cash flow of $14.3 billion, up $1.9 billion, excluding global financing receivables. IBM also announced an earnings’ forecast for this year at $9.20 a share, well above Wall Street’s $8.75 call.



The enterprise software giant Oracle too sits on a $7.4 billion pile of cash. Little doubt that the Redwood Shores-based company is quietly going on a shopping spree. Recently, the company bought mValent Inc, a small software company that helps configure other software. The deals put Oracle in amongst the cash-rich companies. Oracle made sales of $22.4 billion in fiscal 2008.



Sun Microsystems might be a little bit affected by the recession. However, the high-end computer and software maker remains among the companies with a relatively large amount of cash, even if its stock has been faced considerable hammering in the past few months further accentuated by fears of weakening global tech spending. The company carries a cash balance of $2.6 billion and a market cap of $3.8 billion.

Intel has announced the successor to Intel Core 2 Quad (codename Yorkfield) to be Intel Core i7 (codename Nehalem).Intel Core i7 is the successor to Core 2 architecture. All the newly available chips have 4 cores inside. Core i7 microprocessor represents a major advance in computing to enable chips to handle more data



Difference between Intel Core i7 and Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors

Intel Core i7

Codenamed: Bloomfield - Nehalem
Fabrication: 45 nm
Instruction set: X86, X86-64, MMX, SSE 4.2
Socket: LGA 1366
Bus: Quick Path Interconnect
RAM: DDR3
Chipset Support: X58


Intel Core 2 Duo

Codenamed: Conroe, Allendale, Wolfdale - Core 2
Fabrication: 65 nm / 45 nm
Instruction set: X86, X86-64, MMX, SSE 4.1
Socket: LGA 775
Bus: 1333 MHz FSB
RAM: DDR2
Chipset Support: 965, P3x, G3x, P45, X48

Explanation:Difference between Intel Core i7 and Core 2 Duo

The Core i7 is a completely new architecture which is much faster and more efficient than the Core 2 Duo. Currently only the Core i7 920, 945 and 965 XE versions are available. Of that the Core i7 920 is available at just $284 which makes it a great buy. It offers better performance than almost all Core 2 Duo processors.

Native Quad Core, More Cache and Hyper Threading:

All the Core i7 processors are Native Quad cores (4 cores), which means that they actually have 4 cores on a single die, while the older Core 2 Duo processors like the Q6600 (2×2 = 4 cores) had two cores on a single die, and two such dies merged together. This increases the processing speed greatly. They also have 256 KB L2 cache per core and a shared 8 MB L3 cache which has proven to be much better than any cache configuration in Core 2 Duo.

It also has HyperThreading support which means that each of the 4 cores can process 2 threads simultaneously, so you get 8 virtual cores. This helps in running many applications parallely and also in gaming.

Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) and On Die Memory Controller:

The Core i7 processors sport the new Quick Path Interconnect technology which replaces the FSB (Front Side Bus) to connect the various components in a computer. QPI is much faster than FSB and hence improves the overall performance. It is even faster than AMD’s similar HyperTransport 3.0 standard.

The Core i7 have an On Die Memory Controller which means that it can access memory much faster than the Core 2 Duo processors which had an external memory controller. Intel has borrowed this feature from AMD. All the four cores, memory controller, cache are on the same die which improves the speed and performance greatly.

This world map shows a list of countries that are considered least affected by the global economic crisis



Australia takes the top spot followed by China with India and Singapore in equal third place. Qatar is the only gulf nation that figures in this "relatively" recession-proof list.

The data is based on the results of a business confidence survey that was done on international business people of 24 nations to identify which countries they believe are surviving the crisis the best.

The countries perceived to be surviving the economic crisis the best, as voted by international businesspeople are:

1. Use the full version of Bing

If you are using Bing outside North America, chances are that you seeing a localized version of Bing that may be missing some features. For instance, the Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history and the image on the Bing home page here is not interactive as in the US version.

To explore the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English - US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.

2. Track Companies from the IE Favorites Bar

If you search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), Bing will automatically create a web slice for that company which you may then add to IE 8 and track the performance directly from the favorites bar. You need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.




3. Watch Preview of Hulu Videos outside US

Hulu hosts some popular popular TV shows but the problem is that you can only watch these videos if your computer has US based IP address.

However, Bing lets you watch shot previews of Hulu video even outside US. Just search for any TV show episode on Bing Videos (see example) and hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnail to watch a short clip.

4. Save and Email search results

With Bing, you can save your search history on to a local folder inside Bing or to your Windows Skydrive account. Alternatively, you may send your search queries to a friend via email or publish them on your Facebook wall via Bing. You’ll need Silverlight to share queries in Bing.

5. RSS Feeds of Search Results

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

This RSS feature is not available for Image or Video search in Bing.

6. Find Pages That Link to MP3 Files or Documents

Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.

For instance, a search like susan boyle contains:mp3 will show pages that are about the British singer and that also link to MP3 files. Replace mp3 with doc to search pages that contain links to Word Documents.

http://www.bing.com

Adobe BrowserLab is a new online service that will help you test the layout of your web pages across a variety of web browsers and operating systems.

Comparing web design in Firefox 3.0 & IE 7.0



You can use the Browser Lab service to view the design of your site in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on both Mac and Windows. BrowserLab works by taking screen shots of your web pages in different browsers on different platforms and then displays these screenshot images side by side for easy comparison.

Though the service doesn’t support Chrome, Opera and some Linux specific browsers, the advantage is that there’s no waiting time and it also offers skinning so you can place renderings one over the other to quickly spot the differences.

Skinning superimposes one screen shot over another



BrowserLab can integrate with Dreamweaver CS4 so you can test web page designs from within the WYSIWYG HTML editor without having to publish pages on to an external web server

https://browserlab.adobe.com/

There are numerous url shortening services like for example tinyurl.com, that help us convert long urls into short and manageable urls. But one of the problems with a shortened url is that, when you come across one either in your mail, or a website or in a forum, there is no way of knowing where that link is headed to without actually following the url by clicking on it.

The other problem is that, some of the url shortening services are blocked in some countries though the original url is not blocked.

Untiny is a free service that addresses the above problems. With Untiny you can find out the original url behind the tiny url without having to visit the link. That way you can know which domain the url is headed to. You can then decide whether you want to follow it or not. Also, if the shortened url is blocked in your country, you can use Untiny to extract the original url which may not be blocked.

Untiny currently supports over 75 url shortening services.

http://www.untiny.com

Most of you would be aware of the usual places to look for programs that are auto-starting – such as the Startup folder itself and the Run and RunOnce registry keys. Using MSCONFIG.EXE we can examine the components that execute from these locations.

However, there are numerous other components and locations to be aware of, including:

IE Browser Helper Objects
Scheduled Tasks
Sidebar Gadgets (Windows Vista)
Services and Drivers
Print Monitors



This is where Autoruns becomes almost indispensable. Autoruns is a free XP and Vista toll developed by Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft). The beauty of Autoruns is that it shows you absolutely everything that’s loaded a startup, including services, drivers, applications and more. Using the tabs, you can view items in individual segments, or you can view all entries in one list under the Everything tab.

Each entry details the publisher name along with a brief description of what its function is. If you’re still not sure what and entry relates to, right-click it, select Search Online and a browser window will appear complete with web search results relating to that specific entry.

For example, if you’ve installed Apple iTunes, you’ll see a service called Apple Mobile Device that has a Startup Type of Automatic. However, if you don’t have an iPod or other Apple-based portable media player, this service isn’t required. To find out a little more about the service, right-click it and select Search Online. Now right-click the service and select the Process Explorer option. The Process Explorer utility will load and you’ll be taken to the Apple Mobile Device properties window. Under Physical Memory, the WS Private entry (this details how much memory the service is hogging) shows it’s only using 872KB, but if you want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your PC, it’s worth turning it off.

You can disable the service in Autoruns by removing the tick from the box next to it, or use the Window’s Services utility to change the Startup Type to Disabled. If later you buy an iPod, do remember to return this setting to Automatic.

Since Autoruns is designed to highlight those items that are run as soon as you boot into Windows, it won’t display those services that have Startup Type of Manual, even if they’re running. To view all services, you’ll need to use the Windows Services utility, which is accessible under Administrative Tools within Control Panel. Each service is listed, along with its Startup Type, status and a brief description. By right-clicking a service you can change its status and, by selecting Properties (or double-clicking an entry), change its Startup Type.

All said and done, knowing which services can safely have their Startup Type altered isn’t always easy, and if you’re not sure about one, it’s best to simply leave it alone.

http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Autoruns.zip