Technology Today

An overview of continuous data protection

2008-03-18T00:39:00.000-07:00

IT organizations have been caught between a rock and a hard place. Charged with protecting their company's information, IT organizations have established aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) that impact the manner in which they implement data protection by setting recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Organizations struggle with shrinking or non-existent backup windows, the need to recover quickly, often to a specific point in time, and even meeting compliance or regulatory guidelines. Backing up to tape is no longer adequate; not only is it difficult to administer for backups and recoveries, but it lacks the speed, reliability, flexibility and simplicity IT needs to meet stringent SLAs. Backing up to disk using virtual tape emulation or virtual tape libraries also falls short as the administration of the solution is tape-centric and schedule driven. Add in the explosion of data, along with the challenge of protecting remote offices, and you have the challenge facing many of today's business--with IT sitting on the front lines of aligning business needs with today's technology.

As a result, a growing number of IT organizations are augmenting their traditional backup and recovery strategies with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. CDP dramatically improves RPOs and RTOs while eliminating backup windows. What's more, CDP not only reduces the need for tape in the backup and recovery process but it also makes recovery easy enough that users can often recover their own files, without help from IT.

What is CDP?

CDP is a process that lets organizations continuously capture or track data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from specific points in the past. CDP systems may be block, file-, or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points in time.

CDP reduces the complexity of the data protection system and eliminates the classic challenge of theing backup window because it eliminates the need for full, incremental, or differential backups by protecting data immediately and then continuously backing it up to disk. CDP is not a complete replacement for traditional backup but rather an important component of a well-rounded backup and recovery strategy.

Can CDP be leveraged for backing up and recovering email? As the predominant form of communication for business transactions, email is an application that is mission-critical to organizations of all sizes. It generates a huge amount of information that must be immediately available and protected. The loss of a single message may generate hours of unnecessary and frustrating labor for administrators and/or users and can lower productivity or affect business operations. And with the introduction of Exchange 2007, organizations need protective solutions that can support the latest offering from Microsoft.

Not surprisingly, the amount of email data requiring protection and availability is growing exponentially. IT, in turn, is faced with the challenge of backing up this critical data within the existing backup window and recovering it quickly. Moreover, they must not only be able to back up and recover whole email databases but they also require a system which enables recovery of individual mailboxes or emails. However, if administrators want to back up email databases for complete disaster recovery purposes and be able to recover individual email, folders, or mailboxes, they typically have had to do separate backups.

New granular recovery technologies have emerged that enable mail messages, mailboxes, and folders to be restored individually without having to restore an entire email database, and without separate and redundant mailbox backups. In an Exchange environment, for example, only a single-pass full or incremental backup of Exchange is required, which dramatically decreases the time required to protect all mailboxes while also reducing the backup storage requirement.

iPhone the Ultimate Blogging Device

2008-03-18T00:26:00.000-07:00

Kiltak at Geeks are Sexy points to this iPhone advertisement and asks if the iPhone is the ultimate blogging tool. The girl in the video explains that the iPhone can be used to take pictures and blog them directly from the phone:

But is it the ultimate blogging device? No.

The Palm Treo is a better device for the hardcore blogger. Take a look at the dancer's situation to understand why.

If she had a Treo, she could take much higher resolution photos using a typical point & shoot camera like the Canon SD line, then swap her SD card into the Treo to share a much higher resolution photo of an event. This would also allow her to take better low-light photos than the iPhone could handle. I have a hard time believing she captures great photos of ballet considering the light conditions and speed involves.

She could also use the point & shoot camera to take video clips of dancing rather than just stills. The clips could be blogged by emailing them to Blip.tv and posted directly to her blog from Blip. The iPhone can't do video, and it wouldn't be as high of resolution as what you could get from the point & shoot.

The Treo, on Sprint or Verizon, has faster data speeds than the iPhone which makes it possible to upload large photos in relatively tolerable times.

The keyboard on Treos makes it easier to type more descriptive blog posts to accompany your photos or videos in less time than one could type on an iPhone.

Will this always be the case? Probably not. Networks will get faster, future iPhones will have better cameras, and they'll surely add video support at some point. But for now, I don't think the iPhone is the ultimate blogging device.

Decide for yourself. Here are links to two ballet related posts I found on Kristin's blog in the past 5 months. Capturing indoor photos of people moving would be nearly imp

Three Tips For Handling PDF Conversions

2008-03-18T00:08:00.000-07:00

1. Zamzar launches a pretty nifty file conversion service

I wanted to scrape a graphic from a PDF file and I was searching online for my options. Normally one looks for a packaged option, downloadable, and I was sorting through the free and not so free, the working and not so working and I came across this little gem called Zamzar. It’s a service, rather than software, and they do one or two of the niftiest things going. First, they translate my PDF files into just about any file format I could wish for. This was what I wanted in the first place, but they also offered to do little other things that were neat, like send me a file that they can scrape off Youtube! I like that. Let me go aside for a paragraph and then back to Zamzar.

I pulled Paul Tobey’s Music Box Dancer, which is a jazzed up version of the classic off and now I can listen to it on my PDA when I don’t have internet access. One of the comments said it best for me: “I like both versions. These guys are just having a great jam session having fun with a tune that lends itself to such things.” Over 22,000 views can’t be wrong! Paul is an interesting guy. I met him at one of his Internet Marketing Courses, and after about three hours, realized that he wasn’t just teaching me how to do Search Engine Optimization, but he was also teaching me about copy writing, etiquette, strategy, how to close sales, and just plain Internet business sense. His Music Box dancer is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmqgNKB1uog and you can look over his internet marketing course at http://www.trainingbusinesspros.com/. But that’s not why I’m writing this. Through Paul, I found a great practical use for Zamzar and this is how it fits usefully into my life.

Zamzar is a pretty neat converter. It's free. You go to www.zamzar.com and simply upload your file. Shortly afterwards, Zamzar emails you a link back. You follow that link and download the converted file. It's free, and pretty easy!

Zamzar does the following conversions to PFD and back. The entire list, which includes images, audio and video!

• convert PDF to doc - Microsoft Word Document
• convert PDF to html - Hypertext Markup Language
• convert PDF to odt - OpenDocument Text Document
• convert PDF to pcx - Paintbrush Bitmap Image
• convert PDF to png - Portable Network Graphic
• convert PDF to ps - Postscript document
• convert PDF to rtf - Rich Text Format
• convert PDF to txt - Text document
and

• convert csv to PDF Comma Separated Values
• convert doc to PDF Microsoft Word Document
• convert docx to PDF Microsoft Word 2007 Document
• convert odp to PDF OpenDocument presentation
• convert ods to PDF OpenDocument spreadsheet
• convert odt to PDF OpenDocument Text Document
• convert ppt to PDF Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation
• convert pptx to PDF Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Presentation
• convert ps to PDF Postscript document
• convert rtf to PDF Rich Text Format
• convert wpd to PDF WordPerfect Document
• convert wps to PDF Microsoft Works Document
• convert xls to PDF Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet
• convert xlsx to PDF Microsoft Excel 2007 Spreadsheet

The thing that I really like about Zamzar is that they are new and coming up with new stuff all the time. It also seems to convert WordPerfect documents into Word documents and Word documents into WordPerfect Documents which can be very handy if you are in a WordPerfect shop.

I'll use Zamzar occasionally. However, I'm not sure I want to ship my corporate or personal information to Zamzar or off into some unknown place in the Interweb, but I sure like it for what it does. I'll stick to MyPDFCreator for the business critical and personal stuff, but Zamzar is a great tool in the toolbox!

2. PDF Etiquette: It's the right thing!

Just because you have PDF doesn't mean you have to use it! When should one use PDF and when should one stick to POT (Plain old Text)

PDF is great when you want to send an uneditable document. Examples include quotations, invoices, legal documents, and ebooks PDF is also outstanding for sending documents for which the presentation layout is crucial, like annual reports.

However, anytime that you email an attachment, it requires extra clicks to open it, and people tend not to do extra clicks. They miss the attachment, or they don't want to open attachments for fear of viruses, or, if they are on an old computer, opening up large PDF or other files can slow down and stop a computer. If you are sending a birthday party initiation or something casual, put it in the email. Don't use any attachment at all.

3. In Software, "Feature Rich" can be a "Bloated Pig"!

Make sure that the software you are using isn't loaded down with options you'll never use. If you buy, for example, Adobe Professional for $449.00 you are getting the most complete feature rich, product available. This is great when you want to "Design forms to collect and aggregate data through e-mail or on the web" for example. But if 100% you are going to do falls in the realm of "create a Word Document or a PowerPoint show and convert it to PDF and back" then you don't need to spend most of the $449.00 and you don't need to have to struggle through the myriad of options that the "Feature Rich" software offers you, and you don't need to go on a three day training course. Buy the bacon, not the whole hog!

Protecting Children Online With Internet Parental Controls

2008-03-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

The World Wide Web is a fascinating place. It has obliterated geography in terms of education and business. It facilitates learning by allowing kids to see things and experiences aspects of different places they may never get the chance to see in the non-virtual world. The Internet can bring people together who otherwise would never know each other and create a virtual universe that is totally cohesive, with every kind of information imaginable literally available at your fingertips. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, the Internet has a dark side. It is full of material that is inappropriate for children and all kinds of predators. Leaving your kids alone to fend for themselves on the Web is exactly as dangerous at leaving them in a crowed airport or shopping mall. You don’t know where they’re going or who with. The news is filled with horror stories about kids who have been taken advantage of on the Internet, but you don’t want yours to miss out on all the positive aspects of the technology. The first line of defense in keeping your kids save on the Web is to teach them how to use it safely.

A lot of online dangers can be dodged simply by reminding kids of one of their earliest learned lessons: don’t talk to strangers. The kinds of people who want to harm kids have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves. They may try to lull your child into a false sense of security by pretending to be someone she knows. Make sure your child understands that it isn’t a good idea to give out personal information such as their address, phone number or the name of their school. The less information a potential predator has, the harder it will be for him to actually locate a victim. It might be a good idea to establish a secret password and share it only with friends and family so your kid has a way to identify people who are safe to chat with.

Chat interfaces and instant messaging are great tools for keeping in touch with friends and conduct business, but they are also direct connections between your child and possible pedophiles and other predators. Most instant messengers have settings that will only allow people on a pre-approved list to approach your child. That way you can let the kids chat with family and friends while keeping the bad guys out. You can visit http://www.internet-parental-control.org to find more information on online child safety measures.

You can’t watch your kids every minute they are online, and you can’t always count on them to do what you have taught them to do. Parental control software is a great back up. Most browsers will allow you to customize age-appropriate settings for each child in your house. You can choose what kinds of Web sites you want your kids to access and block them out of the ones you don’t. It’s a great way to provide a virtual safety net for your family. If the parental controls supplied by your Internet Service Provider, check into installing additional software that will evaluate each site your child attempts to access. You set criteria by which the software judges each Web page and assigns a rating, much like a movie rating. Your kids will only be able to look at sites with ratings you have deemed appropriate.

How To Troubleshoot Your Computer Hardware

2008-03-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

There could be many reasons why you’d want to troubleshoot your computer, well, one actually and that’s because something is not working right. The process of troubleshooting is something you learn after working for a long time with computers. Often enough when there’s a problem, nothing is going to explicitly tell you what is causing the problem and how you can fix it. By taking logical steps and walking through the process of troubleshooting you should be able to solve almost any computer problem, software or hardware related. It involves identifying the problem(s), finding the cause of that problem, determining the solution, executing that solution, and testing and checking that solution to see if it solves your problem.

As an example let’s say one day while using your computer the screen suddenly turns all black and you can’t see anything. We found a problem now what would be the first step to take to fix it? First check to see if the monitor is on and is receiving power, most monitors when they have power, but no connection or connection problems with the computer will display a message that says this monitor is working, but make sure you check your cables. So the next logical step to take would be to check the cable to make sure it is properly connected and secured to the VGA slot behind your computer case and to make sure the monitor cable is plugged into the monitor. Now, here’s where you have to decide what would be the next best course of action to take. you could either swap out your monitor with another monitor that you know is working to see if the problem is the monitor itself and nothing else or you can try to see if the problem is your graphics card. If your replacement monitor works, good, then you know your culprit is a bad monitor and you’ll most likely have to get a new one, because monitors are dangerous and too costly service. If the replacement monitor you used shows up a black screen as well, the next thing you’d do is check to make sure the graphics card is properly seated in the motherboard, if it is and the display is still not showing up, then swap out the graphics card to see if your problem is fixed.

Generally there are only so many steps you can take before you solve the problem and everything is back in order. Make sure that before you start testing and swapping out parts that the problem wasn’t caused by you changing a software setting in Windows or some ambiguous option in the motherboard’s BIOS that causes your problem.

Motherboard

The motherboard is the heart of the computer, every part of the computer relies on the motherboard to function correctly. It maintains connection between every PC component and ensures that things are operating smoothly between them. Many signs of motherboard failure is that the computer won't boot up, not reaching the POST test, erratic system behavior, different combinations of components not working. Because everything is connected to the motherboard certain parts may or may not work correctly if the motherboard is faulty so be sure to test those parts before thinking they're dead and getting new ones.

Be sure to do a visual inspection of the motherboard to make sure all cables are seated properly, the fans are spinning, and that the CMOS battery is in it's proper place.

Also check for any broken or leaking capacitors, those can immediately render a motherboard dead.

Make sure that all of the jumpers are set correctly as well, you should be able to find jumper information in your motherboard's manual, and if you don't have the manual you should be able to find the manual on the Internet at the motherboard manufacturer's website.

Many of the problems caused by a bad motherboard is also similar to problems caused by a faulty or dying power supply, so be sure to check if the power supply is faulty or swap it out for another to see if your problem is fixed. If you have a spare motherboard you can try swapping out the motherboard to see if that solves your problem, if that's the case then the motherboard is most likely faulty. If you think the motherboard is faulty and it is still in warranty you should be able to send it back to the manufacturer for a new one with no hassle, sometimes they might even pay for the shipping & handling if it is a big problem that is happening with a certain line of motherboards. Make sure that when you open a motherboard you keep all of the packaging and the box, and if there are any stickers that will void the warranty if removed make sure you do NOT remove them, so that way it is easier to send back.

Power Supply

If you suspect your power supply is giving you trouble, make sure you check it out fast, because power supplies can make trouble with the rest of your system as well. Irregular voltages sent from the power supply can short circuit and overheat your components thus frying them and making them unusable. Some faulty power supplies have even caught on fire, but if you’re lucky it might just smoke a little and start to smell. A few signals that your power supply is bad or is going bad would be erratic and seemingly random system behavior like system hangs and crashes, and burning smells along with smoke.

If you recently upgraded your system or added new hard drives, disk drives, a graphics card or anything for that matter, be sure to check if your power supply is being overloaded with hardware. A good way to check is to use a power supply calculator. One time when I upgraded my system with a new fancy PCI Express 16x Graphics card, well it was fancy back then, I had problems with the graphics card performing while in 3d games, it was all due to my power supply being unable give it enough juice on the 12v rails so it performed poorly and didn’t act as it should have, I even swapped out the graphics card for another one believing it was bad, after checking the manufacturer’s forums it seemed like a lot of people were having problems with faulty cards, so I figured mine must have been faulty too. After getting the new card it seemed like it performed better for a little bit longer, which could’ve just been some optimizations they did to circuit board. Seeing how they sent me an upgraded version of the same card, but it wasn’t until I checked my power supply wattages that I found the real culprit.

The first thing to do to diagnose your power supply is check the power supply connectors, make sure everything is plugged into the motherboard and the power cable is plugged into the power supply, you wouldn’t believe how many people forget to plug in their computer. Many power supplies also have a power switch on them so check to make sure that no one accidentally or purposefully switched it off maybe for a prank. Check the fan to see if it is spinning at the correct speed and if it’s dusty vacuum it out. Determine if the power supply cables are giving out the right amount of voltage, if you computer will let you boot you should be able to check them in the BIOS menu to see if the correct voltages are being given. Normal power supplies give +3.3 volts DC, +5 volts DC, -5 volts DC, +12 volts DC, and -12 volts DC.

Memory

Faulty RAM can have many adverse effects on your system. Constant lockups, computer rebooting, memory error message (duh), system crashes, and sometimes refusing to boot up are all signs of memory errors. Though, these are also signs for motherboard, hard drive, and power supply problems too. Luckily for you if you think your memory is subject to causing a disruption in your system there are programs that can check the memory for it's performance and to see if it is generating any errors.

Memtest86+ is an amazing memory diagnostic program. It is based off of the original Memtest86 that has been around since 1994 and is used by system-builders, average joes, and professionals in the IT world. It's a standalone memory check test which means it can be easily run without a bootable operating system, that's good if you can't just seem to get your PC started and want to rule out your memory as quickly as possible.

How To Use Memtest86 With Your Floppy Drive To Test Your Memory

First go their website at www.memtest.org and select the most appropriate version to download. You can download the bootable iso or the Pre-compiled floppy drive depending on whether you want burn a CD or use your floppy drive. We're going to go into details on floppy method.

Open up the .zip and extract the files to a folder, then click on install.bat, you will be asked to “Enter target diskette drive:”. Type A and hit enter then it will ask you to insert a formatted diskette into drive A: and press -Enter-: after you hit enter it will write some files to your floppy so you can boot your computer with the floppy to test for errors.

After the floppy has been formatted with Memtest86+, leave the floppy in your floppy drive and reboot your computer. Remember to set your floppy drive as the first boot device in your BIOS menu.

The program will automatically load and perform the memory diagnostic tests on your computer. During the testing if there any errors they will show up and at the end of the test it will tell you how many errors you've had.

After testing your memory if you receive any errors you should make sure that your memory is okay either by swapping it out and seeing the problems still occur or try your memory in another system. If the memory passes the tests then you proceed to troubleshoot something else with good faith that your memory is fine.

Hard Drive

The hard drive is that ultimate safe to everything important on your computer. It keeps all of your information, files and folders, music, videos, favorite websites, and programs. With a bad hard drive there's no reason to have a computer. In terms of fixing a computer if the hard drive isn't salvageable then most people don't even want to bother with the rest, because their computer is probably a piece of junk that has been handed down from time to time. Generally when a hard drive is about to fail it's usually years down the road from first acquiring the computer. So the next best option rather than replacing the drive is to just buy a new computer, or build a new one, because your old one sure is probably not running as fast as it used to.

Luckily before your hard drive kicks the bucket there is usually a few warning signs:

Abnormally slow file transfers

Problems with booting, especially when Windows is being loaded

Corrupted files

Disappearing files or folders

Loud hard drive noise is a good sign that there is a mechanical problem going on inside

If your hard drive exhibits any of these signs be sure to transfer all of your files to another source immediately, and do not continue to do day-to-day activities with that hard drive. If it doesn't show any of these tell-tale signs, however you have a gut feeling that your hard drive is on the brink of destruction you can try using many different drive testing utilities available on the internet. The hard drive manufacturer usually has at least one qualified tool that you can download from their website and run. Other ways to check the health of your hard drive involves running the Windows Error Checking tool by right clicking on your hard drive in 'My Computer' then selecting 'Properties' and going to the 'Tool' and clicking on “Check Now”, or checking the SMART status located in your motherboard's BIOS. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Most motherboards nowadays has this technology. It should be automatically enabled in your BIOS, if it's not then your hard drive won't get checked. What it does is on boot up it will perform quick tests on your hard drive to ensure it is running correctly and it will continue to monitor it for any errors or abnormal problems that may occur as long as the computer is turned on.

Monitor

Watching movies, videos, playing games, and looking at NSFW material are all amazing things we can do on our computers. Yet there may come a day where you just want to get on your computer and relax in your computer room looking at all that NSFW material you have bookmarked under the “Special Sites” category, but you can’t because your monitor won’t turn on. No, you don’t frump and punch holes in the walls to look for an outlet for your rage. You troubleshoot it, and hope to god that your monitor isn’t broken!

When diagnosing a screen problem, half the time it’s usually something very easy, like a cable coming loose, or the monitor getting unplugged accidentally; unfortunately the other half the time it’s probably a problem that’s related to your monitor being old, or a problem that’s related to your graphics card instead. So you may have to diagnose both items at the same time to see which solves your problem.

First, check all your cables, I know this is probably getting a little old with the checking connections and everything, but so many computer problems can be avoided if people just remember that their computer isn’t always going to stay the same way they left it. A foot could kick out a cable, a dog or a cat that got to curious, or almost anything can render half your hardware useless.

After checking all your cables, make sure your screen has power, if it has power and shows a message such as “This monitor is working correctly please check your cable” and shows bars of color on the screen, that means that your monitor is not getting a signal from your computer. Try swapping out the monitor for another one to see if it still says that message. If it does then that means the problem is most likely something to do with your graphics card not seated in the motherboard, or just isn’t working properly, you may want to try swapping out another graphics card to see if that solves your problem.

Generally monitors don’t have that many diagnosable problems. Either they work and they work well, or they don’t work and you have to replace them. When working on a monitor you should never open them, they aren’t meant to be serviced and contain high charged capacitors that hold lethal doses of electricity. We wouldn’t want to read about a computer guy in the obituaries now would we?

Graphics Card

The glorious graphics card, it’s an amazing thing really. It makes all those pretty HDR (High Dynamic Range) pictures look just that good, it keeps your games running smoothly, and your videos in HD. Yet these things can be pains when they’re just not working right, because if something is wrong there’s not a strict hardware or software solution, you have to analyze the current situation to see what’s up.

First and foremost if you’re having any problems with your graphics card, probably the best thing to try to do first is see if there an updated driver for it at the manufacturer’s website that may solve the problem, or if there isn’t an update try uninstalling your graphics drivers and reinstalling them this little action can solve so many problems.

If there’s little jaggies or weird colorful mishaps known as artifacts appearing on your screen you may want to check the temperature of your graphics and make sure is getting enough cooling, and that the fan is working properly. If the cooling checks out okay you may also want to check your power supply ratings to see if it is giving enough juice to your graphics card. Nowadays most graphics cards need a lot of power on the 12v rails, make sure your power supply can give you that power that the graphics card needs.

Sound Card

Some of the typical problems people have with sound cards is either A) no sound or B) no sound. Sounds card typically aren't very expensive so having to replace one if the current one isn't working is no big deal. However, if you're one of those audiophile types who expect 100% original recording quality with your $300 sound card replacing one of those is as expected a lot more harder to do.

Sound Card Troubleshooting

Check speaker cables make sure they're all connected and plugged into the right spot on your sound card. Also check the speaker's power cables.

Make sure windows volume is turned up and the volume is not muted, also make sure that you have all the wave and playback volume turned up and not muted. If you have 'Digital Output Only' checked in your Advanced Controls for Playback Controls, try unchecking it to see if that solves your non-sound problem. I found that if I have that checked my sound card won't give me any sound.

Try reinstalling your sound card drivers, also try checking on the internet at the manufacturer's website for any updated drivers that may be available. They increase your sound card's compatibility with your system.

If the previous tips didn't help, then you may just have to replace your sound card, or atleast swap it out for another one to see if it might be a problem related to your sound card's connection to the motherboard instead.

Processor

The processor is the actual thinking part of the brain of the computer. It does all the calculations needed to make a computer run, and does them all in split second timing. It determines how fast your computer generally runs, and most of the time is a bottle neck for systems that have had everything upgraded except the CPU.

If your processor’s not working, it’s not the end of the world, generally most processors that work correctly for a few weeks, should work correctly for the rest of it’s lifespan, which varies from 5-10 years or so. As long as you’re not overclocking the processor or letting it overheat too badly your processor should be fine, and it could just be a BIOS setting that’s messed up, or a jumper setting, but for kicks just check to make the processor is seated properly and the heat sink is attached to the processor and the motherboard. The heat sink should be attached tightly to the motherboard and not have room to move about, you should be able to pick up your motherboard by grabbing onto the heat sink without any problems. Check in your motherboard manual to make sure all the jumpers are set correctly for your type of processor. Any jumpers set incorrectly can cause the processor to not work, or function correctly or at it’s optimal speed. Also check the heat sink to see if it is cooling off the processor, if it’s not doing a very good job you may want to look into investing in a better one that gets the job done.

Web Accessibility a Universal Goal!

2008-03-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

Over the last decay, an increase number of research were conducted to determine ways Information Technology can assist in meeting special needs to ensure universal accessibility. Findings to date suggest that by being more knowledgeable about accessibility issues, Web designers and developers are able to accommodate end users with special needs.

As we enter the knowledge age, it is no longer acceptable that people with limited or no vision are on their own when it comes to accessing the web, nor those with mobility problems are on their own when it comes to use a hardware. To ignore

website accessibility raises moral, business, and legal issues. It is morally wrong to discriminate

against disabled people on the web simply through lack of thought, consideration, or awareness. Many business web sites designed without considering accessibility issues result in loss of revenue. Some countries, such as the US, UK, and Australia has introduced legislation that requires organizations to adhere to accessibility issues.

In June 1999, the Disability Discrimination Act (1999) has been used to fight for access rights in

Australia. The 2000 Olympic Site Games, jointly developed by Sydney Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (SOCOG) and IBM was found inaccessible to the blind users, and SOCOG was fined A$ 20,000 [1].

The purpose of this paper is raising awareness among web designers and developers, to achieve universal web accessibility goal. The paper looks at the disability issues and the existing assistive technologies or methods used by disabled users to assist them in accessing the web.

Afterwards, the paper reviews guidelines for good web site design, and provides analysis for designing an accessible website. Furthermore, the paper highlights on the challenges and gaps in the web accessibility area.

Literature Review:

Two years ago, a Conference was held in ‘London’ and attended by representatives of commerce, industry, government, and the IT Sector aiming to raise awareness of the potential benefits of assistive technology to disabled users. The outstanding number of speakers highlighted through number of cases how technology can transfer lives. ‘Sue Bassoon’ a Business Development Manager at IBM said: “IBM’s goal is to have a speech recognition system as good as the human ear by 2010” [2].

The objectives of this literature is two folds: (1) explain how a particular disability (e.g.

visual impairment, mobility restriction, hearing impairment) can impede the use of the web, and what can be done to accommodate special needs; and (2) show how web designers and developers can construct accessible web sites to end users with disabilities, such as visual or hearing impairment.

(1) Disability Issues

The section begins with a descriptive part concerning disabled user functional limitation

and dependence on assistive technologies.

A- Vision Issues:

A web user who has no sight (totally blind) is likely to use the screen reader technology to reads a load the content of the web page. Other web users, with partial or poor sight need to be able to enlarge the text on web page using a screen magnifier.

B- Mobility Issues:

A web user may have mobility problems as a result of an accident or disease such as:(loss of limb, Injury, or aging process). The technologies used by users with mobility problems are:

- Sticky Keys: For users with one finger typing.

- Filter Keys: Ignores repeated strokes for people with hand tremors.

- Mouse Keys: Permits moving pointer with numeric keypad.

- Serial Key: Permits access to alternatives for mouse and keyboard functions such as Foot Mouse.

- Eye gaze: A video camera that racks eye movement as the user look at an on screen keyboard. It is customizable as how long a key must be looked at to be recorded. When system has identified the key looked at the symbol appears and the user look at next key.

C- Hearing Issues:

A web user may be deaf or experiencing problems with hearing due to the natural aging process. To assist those users the audio or video need to be translated to the ASL (American Sign Language) language of the deaf, in which certain signs represent words.

(2) Design for Accessibility

In the above section, the paper provided readers with a general knowledge about disability issues, disabled users, and the existing assistive technologies. This section is intended for web designers and developers, because it provides them with tips and guidelines on ways to design a good and accessible website. There are two main aspects

to take into account:

I- Look and Feel

Web designers need to present a user friendly interface that addresses specific ability needs. The designer should be able to describe ways disabled users interact with a website, and how they move through the pages and how they achieve their goals. Below, are helpful tips that designers need to consider when designing an accessible website.

- Web Designers & Developers; should follow the four principles of visual organization in the process of designing a website which are: Proximity, Alignment, Consistency, and Contrast.

- Web Designers & Developers; must avoid using HTML tables to control the layout, instead use style sheets.

- Web Designers & Developers; should use legible fonts, and font size to allow disabled users to easily change them from the browser interface.

- Avoid poor color contrast in your design, and do not use color for meaningful description.

- Avoid the use of animation, and flash which may affect users with photosensitive epilepsy.

- Avoid using Frames because it can pose problems for technology used by some disabled users.

- Try not to use graphics for menu and button forms.

- Avoid hiding menu items (using DHTML or applets)

II- Content

Web designers should organize content in a way that can provide ease of use and simplicity. Below, are helpful tips that designers need to consider when designing an accessible website:

- Use a clear language, and write short sentences.

For example, a web page should provide blind users with a short summary of what they can find. A Search Functionality is important because a blind person can’t scan the page, and will generally trust first result he/she receives.

- Add Accessible tags and attributes by using rich set of tags to enhance accessibility. For instance, an ALT tag is used to provide a text equivalent for images within a website. The

ALT text description is what the screen reader or talking browser will read to the blind users .

- Use clear link descriptions, and include links that a user can click to skip repetitive regions of the page.

- Ensure the pages are usable when scripts, applets, or style sheets are turned off or not

supported.

- All audio and video content should contain captions, transcription, and descriptive information.

Analysis:

It is estimated that 20% of the population has some kind of disability. The internet opens

a new window of opportunity and independence to disabled users from reading news to banking to conducting business. For example, by using the screen reader technology a blind user can listen to the latest newspaper published electronically. Similarly, a user with mobility problem who can not go out shopping to buy a newspaper, nor use a

keyboard or mouse independently, can rather use the eye tracking software that allow people to use a computer with nothing more than eye movement.

Nowadays, organizations are asking designers to make their web sites accessible and for

good reasons. First of all, the more people who can use a site, the more potential it can

generate. Online stores, in particular have a great deal to gain, since many people with

functional limitation problems, find it much easier to shop online. Most Web designers

are not personally opposed to the concept of making web sites accessible to people with

disabilities. In fact most accessibility errors on web sites are the result of ignorance. A large proportion of web designers and developers have simply never thought about accessibility issues. A small proportion of web designers (4%) do not understand the needs of users with disabilities; another (46%) understand some of the needs of users with disabilities. While only (26%) of designers understand most of the needs of users

with disabilities and can accommodate them [3].

The Challenges and Gaps of Web Accessibility:

In this section, we highlight the challenges and the requirements posed by user needs, to

access the web. We argue the need for a new approach to address accessibility issues, and

include it in each and every web project life cycle.We recognize that the vast majority of disabled users face challenges when accessing the web. Why is this? Is it the lack of technical solutions to meet their needs – absolutely not! You will hear today that there are new technological solutions to address even most extreme form of disability. Is it cost?

Again it is not! Some technical solutions, cost nothing at all, and already exist in software. So, What then? Is it that web applications are being developed that present challenges to accessible design? Is it lack of knowledge and skills to meet their needs?

There does seem a general lack of awareness of web accessibility issues. Web Designers and Developers, need to have a better approach to tackle the problem in each phase of the web development process. For example, during the requirement analysis phase a web developer must define the target audience of the site, and should take into account people with a combination of disabilities. In addition to this, during prototyping phase a web designer must have the knowledge to accommodate end users with special needs, and also the skills to meet their expectations.

Moreover, testing the web site using different

technologies is critical for a successful web site, to ensure it meets the accessibility

standards and user requirements [4].

Therefore, in each phase of the web development process, accessibility plays an important role. Accessibility and Usability should be completely embedded in web design and development cycles from beginning to end.

The future looks bright for web accessibility. It promises to educate web designers and developers about accessibility issues, through training courses offered at universities.

Conclusion:

The Internet offers independence and freedom. But, this independence and freedom is limited to certain users. Many websites are not created with accessibility issues in mind.

Whether it is the Web Designer lack of knowledge or ignorance, they exclude a segment of users that in many ways benefit from the internet [5].

In short, designing accessible websites does not require an enormous effort or time. It simply, requires commitment, and accountability, to achieve a universal goal.

The Benefits Of CRM Software

2008-03-17T23:48:00.001-07:00

CRM software, often called customer relationship management software, is becoming much more popular today than it was in years past. One reason for this is that more people understand what the software is and are deciding to use it. Another reason is that the software is getting better and easier to use. It has more features and benefits than it did in the past, and it is also becoming more user-friendly, which is very important. More people today are using the Internet for their businesses. As this trend continues to grow, there will be a larger need for CRM software, but only if it is found to be useful and compatible with the needs that a business owner or manager has.

There are a lot of benefits to CRM software, as well. Managers can use this software to keep track of their customers and vendors and organize them in many different ways. It is unfortunate that so many people only think of CRM software as being a datebook or contact-recording type of software. It does handle these functions, but it does a great deal more than that, which is something that many business people fail to realize today when they are presented with CRM software. This CRM software can be used to record names and dates. However, it also keeps track of sales, returns, important dates such as birthdays and anniversaries. In addition, it can help to remind salespeople of their prior commitments. This keeps them from missing deadlines, meetings, the returning of phone calls, or anything else that will affect the perception of them that their clients have.

Naturally, not missing deadlines is vital to a good business relationship. In addition, the CRM software can help a client feel as though he or she matters to a business. When a client feels important and valued, repeat business is much more likely than it would otherwise be. This is great for the business, but it is also good for the clients, because everyone in the relationship benefits from the efficiency that CRM software helps to create. Without CRM software, there is a good chance that there will be more problems in the interactions that are needed between clients and businesspeople. This is not to say that CRM software eliminates all chance of problems, but it does reduce them.

Those who use CRM software can also be more organized, because it is easier for them to find what they need when it comes to their customers, their vendors, and anything else that they need to keep close track of. It allows them to return calls more promptly, send out birthday cards, and keep customer information stored in a database where it can easily be retrieved by anyone who has authorized access to it. The main benefit to customers is that almost anyone in the company can help them, at least to some degree, because they can get to their information. This benefit of CRM software is the most important one because of the ability to let customers know that they are important to the company.

The Benefits Of CRM Software

2008-03-17T23:48:00.000-07:00

The great Internet search engine

2008-03-13T21:03:00.000-07:00

Few Web sites generated as much media buzz in 2005 as Wikipedia, the collectively authored online encyclopedia. The attention is well deserved because there is no more compelling example of the Web's collaborative potential. What makes Wikipedia interesting is how it gets made: Ordinary people submit entries for different topics and then revise them over time. That is a truly radical break from the traditional closed-door, credentialed method of producing Encyclopædia Britannica and its ilk. While there have been substantive critiques of Wikipedia's accuracy and comprehensiveness, the idea that a free encyclopedia written entirely by volunteers could give the venerable Britannica a run for its money would have sounded preposterous even 10 years ago. Now it is a fact.

But the Wikipedia miracle is a story of means, not ends. And I worry that we've lost sight of the ends by focusing so much on the idea of collective authorship. The end products created by all those swarming amateurs are encyclopedia entries, supplemented by hyperlinks—no different from what you would find on any of the traditional online encyclopedias, including Britannica. The information presented by Wikipedia can be more timely—hurricane Katrina had an entry before the storm swept through New Orleans—but the form that information takes is a throwback to dead-tree media.

Luckily, there are innovative alternatives to the encyclopedia model out there. They are not the highest profile sites online. But as vehicles for conveying complex information, they may well make up one of the most successful species in the entire Web ecosystem.

A few years ago, I began researching a project about cholera in the 19th century, and I stumbled across a Web site (www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html) devoted to the legendary doctor and epidemiologist John Snow. When cholera spread through London's Soho district in 1854, Snow plotted a map of the deadly outbreak and found that everyone who fell ill had used water from a centrally placed public well that was contaminated by nearby sewers and cesspools. The discovery not only helped prevent the further spread of the disease but also constituted a major medical breakthrough—until then the scientific establishment had wrongly assumed that cholera was transmitted by air, not water. Snow's cartographic detective work made him a founding figure in several fields of research: epidemiology, public health, even information design.

The easiest way to describe the John Snow site is by starting with what it is not. It is not an encyclopedia entry; it is not a biography or a biographical article; it is not a collection of links. The traditional scholarly word that might be used to describe it is archive. The site is a potpourri of useful material: audio files telling the story of Snow's investigations; an exhaustive collection of Snow's original writing; a vast library of articles written about Snow's legacy; annotated maps of London, including Snow's famous map of the Soho outbreak; short biographies of the major figures in Snow's life; excerpts from books that mention him; dozens of photographs, including images of Snow and landmarks in London related to his life; modern-day scientific explanations of the cholera bacteria; and much more.

The Snow site is hosted by the department of epidemiology at UCLA's School of Public Health. It was the brainchild of a professor there named Ralph Frerichs, who began putting the site together in the late 1990s, mostly as a hobby. "When we talk about notable figures in any field, you have to bring in a little more information about who they are, their character," he says. "In public health, we didn't have that many notable individuals who had been brought out to the general public. I figured I could write an article about Snow, but it's hard to get wide circulation for an article that appears in a newspaper or magazine that comes and goes. The Web opened up the opportunity for having something out there for much longer."

Frerichs could have summarized some of the information on the site had he chosen to showcase the life and work of John Snow through an encyclopedia entry. Or he could have captured Snow's life in more of a narrative form had he chosen to write a traditional biography. But neither of those forms would have produced the same open-ended, exploratory wonder that the Web site conjures. "It's a little like a library," Frerichs says. "Someone can come there and they can just wander through it, in whatever direction they want to take."

Unlike a traditional library, the site is open for anyone to explore at any hour of the day or night. A typical visitor might find her way there via a Google search on "epidemiology" or "cholera" and then sample various versions of the outbreak map that Snow tinkered with over the years, or download a handful of PDF files that offer a comprehensive account of his public-health legacy. Someone interested in urban history might spend more time on the larger annotated map of 1859 London that Frerichs digitized. Or a browser interested in Snow the person could spend an entire afternoon sifting through the biographical materials.

There's nothing technically innovative about Frerichs's archival tribute to Snow—no state-of-the-art user forums, no recommendation algorithms, no blogging whatsoever, as shocking as that might sound. Indeed, the site reminds me most of a great, unfinished study of 19th-century urbanism called Passagenwerk, an elaborate collection of photos, quotes, advertisements, clippings, and short aphorisms compiled by the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin during the 1930s. Benjamin's premise was that an archive of connected documents could convey the riches of a subject more powerfully than a traditional linear book; it was an idea about 50 years ahead of its time.

In some ways, the Snow site is also a throwback to the early days of multimedia when CD-ROMs—and not Web pages—were the primary vehicles of interactivity. Its structure brings to mind a number of early influential projects from the early 1990s: the multimedia CDs published by the Voyager Company, an annotated archive of the writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced by the University of Virginia, and an early Web portrait of 19th-century British culture called the Victorian Web, created at Brown University.

What I find most surprising is that the Snow site is something of a rarity these days. Pretty much every university department on the planet has its own page on the Web, with course listings, faculty bios, and recent publications listed in endless detail.

But few academics go to the trouble of creating public archives. It's true that most people who use the Internet for research end up bouncing from site to site with Google as their guide, collecting quotes and images and documents as they explore the wider Web. What's lost in the process is the individual, expert wisdom of intelligent curators, assembling the crucial materials that Google might overlook.

Frerichs designed the Snow site as a way of sharing the character and wisdom of a great man, but what I sense more than anything as I move through the space is the animating presence of Frerichs himself. I trust him as a guide, and even more so after listening to him talk about the site with the sort of fondness someone might use to describe a garden he's been cultivating for years. "Oh, I've been ignoring the site a little recently because I'm working on a book," he says. "But when any new Snow item comes out—a new article, say—I'm usually pretty fast about getting it up. It's kind of therapeutic, actually. When I get tired of other things, it's always fun to go back to."

Quantum Leap

2008-03-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

In February, D-Wave Systems of Vancouver, British Columbia, launched the Orion, what they call “the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer.” Whereas digital computers confine bits of information to either 1 or 0, quantum computers harness the strange laws of quantum physics to achieve “qubits” of information. Unlike bits, qubits can represent more than one number at a time. Computer scientists realized decades ago that representing multiple values simultaneously could cut certain number-crunching problems from years to minutes. But no one had ever managed to assemble more than a handful of qubits at a time.

D-Wave claims to have solved that problem. It cools circuits made of the rare metal niobium to five-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Each of these 16 superconducting circuits serves as a qubit, and the company has plans for expansion. By the end of next year, it hopes to unveil a vastly more powerful 1,000-qubit machine. D-Wave hasn’t yet released data on Orion’s early test runs, but some experts are expressing guarded optimism about the machine that could herald the end of the beginning of quantum computing. “I think that this current piece of work is potentially solid,” says Seth Lloyd, a mechanical engineer at MIT.

Others are more dubious. Qubits must function in a single collective quantum state, so that any action performed on one simultaneously affects all the others. Achieving that kind of coherence isn’t easy. “Understanding their basic fabrication process and talking with D-Wave people, I know that any quantum coherence in their system is very minimal,” says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. But Geordie Rose, D-Wave’s founder, seems unconcerned. “What we’re going to do is build them and see whether they’re behaving as quantum computers should.”

IBM Debuts Web 2.0, Collaborative Technologies

2008-03-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

IBM has unveiled several new collaboration tools and Web 2.0 technologies, including IBM Lotus Mashups, a forthcoming commercial mashup maker designed to allow "non-technical users to easily create enterprise mashups." At the Lotusphere conference in Florida last Wednesday, the company also introduced new versions of Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, a rich collaboration tool.

IBM Lotus Mashups, which is expected to be released later this year (although no firm date has been set), provides a browser-based tool for assembling mashups blending enterprise and Web-based data. It includes a set of pre-defined widgets, a "catalog" for locating usable widgets and mashups, and a tool that allows users to build widgets that access enterprise data.

IBM also said it plans to release Lotus Connections 2.0 in the first half of this year. Lotus Connections 2.0 is the next version of IBM's social networking tool that includes several new features, including a new homepage that filters Lotus Connections services, aggregates content, and provides support for drag and drop widgets. The software's community component is also expected to receive an overhaul in the areas of discussion forums, unified communications via integration with Lotus Sametime, and linking to wiki services through Lotus Quickr, SocialText, and Atlassian.

Finally, IBM also announced a planned update to Lotus Quickr, a Web- and desktop-based collaboration environment. The next release, version 8.1, will include "content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and other connectors that make sharing information easier," according to IBM. The company said it also plans to add features to Quickr that will allow it to integrate with IBM FileNet P8 and IBM Content Manager. It will also launch a companion application, Lotus Quickr Entry, that will include personal file sharing capabilities.

Lotus Quickr 8.1 is expected to be released in March.

New Technique Nails Down the Amp

2008-03-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

If there’s one thing physicists can’t abide, it’s ambiguity. Precision is everything. But the definition of one fundamental physical quantity—the ampere, the unit of electric current—falls somewhat short of that ideal. One ampere is “that constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10-7 newton per meter of length,” according to the International System of Units.

The days of ambiguous amperes, however, may be numbered, according to a paper published last April in Nature Physics by Mark Blumenthal, a physicist at the University of Cambridge. Blumenthal’s team etched germanium-gallium-arsenic nanowires a hundred times thinner than a human hair in a semiconductor. Across those wires, at regular intervals, Blumenthal and his colleagues laid three even thinner gold strips. The gold strips act as gates: A voltage applied to them stops or starts the flow of electrons through the main nanowire with an unprecedented combination of speed and precision.

The new technique still isn’t quite accurate enough to form the basis of a new definition of the ampere, says Blumenthal, who now loses or gains about one electron in 10,000. “For a new standard, you need current to be accurate to 1 part in a million, so that for every million electrons you move through in a second, you’ve got a million, not 1,000,001 or 999,999.”

Nanoparticles Pop Up Everywhere

2008-03-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

The idea of manipulating molecules to create microscopic machines or materials with unusual new properties has been around for years, but 2003 saw a flurry of breakthroughs. IBM developed a technique for making carbon nanotubes emit light, paving the way for new fiber optics; Harvard scientists figured out how to deposit tiny wires on glass or plastic, opening the door for the development of supercheap computers; and at the University of Central Florida, neuroscientist Beverly Rzigalinski discovered a nanomolecular fountain of youth effect: When Rzigalinski applied cerium oxide nanoparticles to rat neurons in a petri dish, the particles seemed to strip out the free radicals that make tissues age and kept the neurons alive and functioning up to six times their normal life span.

Meanwhile, nanomaterials are rapidly infiltrating everyday life. Wilson, the sporting goods manufacturer, has nanoengineered layers of clay to double the playing life of its Double Core tennis balls; L’Oréal uses nanoscale particles and capsules in their cosmetic creams that allow replenishing ingredients to penetrate deep into the skin; and the Australian company Advanced Powder Technology has created Zinclear, a translucent zinc oxide sunblock composed of nanoparticles as small as the tiniest known viruses. “You’ve got all the protection but with no white lines on your nose and face,” says Hugh Dawkins, head of product development for the firm.

But are nanoparticles safe? This year scientists began to question openly whether nanotech firms are careering toward an asbestoslike fiasco. Nanoparticles are known to behave in strange and unpredictable ways partly because at the nanoscale, quantum physics can take over, and the Newtonian physics of everyday life becomes less dominant. “Particles of that size can go anywhere they please,” says Pat Mooney, executive director of the technology policy group ETC, which released a report warning about nanotoxins this spring. “They pass the entire immune system. They can pass the blood-brain barrier; they can go into the spinal cord.”

Recently, NASA scientist Chiu-Wing Lam spritzed carbon nanotubes into the lungs of mice and found that they caused granulomas, nodules that are symptoms of toxicity. At Rice University in Houston, researchers found that nanosize buckyballs—60 carbon atoms bound together in the shape of a soccer ball—can bond to pollutants such as naphthalene, slowing the pace at which the pollutants are naturally neutralized and greatly expanding the distance over which environmental toxins can spread.

Although more than $1 billion was spent on nanotechnology research this year, less than 1 percent went to investigating potential toxic effects. “We need to get out ahead of it all, so it’s not like Freon or dry-cleaning chemicals,” says Rice environmental engineer Mason Tomson.

—Clive Thompson

Cell Phones Rival Alcohol as Driving Hazard

You may be coordinated and have a hands-free phone in your car, but recent studies at the University of Utah suggest that it isn’t the dialing or the arm waving that makes driving while talking on a cell phone dangerous. It’s the yakking itself—or more precisely, the yakking to someone who isn’t present. David Strayer, a Utah psychologist, says, “Your driving performance while talking on a cell phone is impaired at levels comparable to, or worse than, driving with a blood alcohol level of .08,” which is the legal limit in most states.

Using a driver-training simulator, Strayer and a team of Utah researchers compared the attention levels and response times of 110 motorists in various situations. In dense traffic, cell phone users were about 20 percent slower to respond to sudden hazards than other drivers, and they were about twice as likely to rear-end a braking car in front of them. “Cell phone drivers are extracting less than 50 percent of the visual information that non-cell drivers are getting,” says Strayer. “Looking and seeing are not one and the same.” By contrast, the researchers found that listening to the radio or conversing with passengers is not as hazardous. “When a dangerous situation arises, the driver and passenger put their conversation on pause,” Strayer says.

Whether talking with a passenger or someone on a cell phone, however, people are less able to recall the details of a conversation carried on while driving, adds psychologist Frank Drews, a coauthor of the study. “So it might not be good for your economic health to discuss investment strategies with your broker while either of you is driving.”

—Michael W. Robbins

Battery made of Paper

2008-03-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

Imagine a battery as flexible as paper—because it is made of paper. In August, a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York unveiled a small sheet of black paper that can store and discharge electricity. In addition to being light and flexible, it can extract electrical energy from human blood and sweat, making the device potentially usable as a power source for tiny medical devices inside the human body.

The RPI team made the paper battery by first growing an array of carbon nanotubes on a silicon surface and then covering the array in dissolved cellulose (the main constituent of paper). The cellulose forms a flexible sheet studded with embedded nanotubes that can be peeled away from the substrate. The nanotubes make the sheet as black as coal, but only a small quantity is needed. “Ninety percent of the device is still normal paper you buy at the store,” says Pulickel Ajayan, one of the lead researchers and a materials scientist. “The best part about this is its versatility,” he continues. “It’s paper. We can wrap a device in paper that also works as the device’s power source. Or we can slide it into a tiny crevice—anywhere, really. It is vastly superior to a conventional battery. If you cut a normal battery in half, you break it; it’s useless. If you cut a paper battery in half, you just make two batteries that have half the power of the original.” Want more power? Stack sheets of the paper together. “It’s not just a paper battery; it’s the ultimate battery,” Ajayan says.

The Year in Science: Technology

2008-03-13T20:19:00.001-07:00

Carbon Nanotubes Burst Out of the Lab

Fourteen years after the discovery of the pencil-shaped molecules called carbon nanotubes, scientists are finally learning to exploit their remarkable properties. Nanotubes are nine times as strong as steel and can transmit 1,000 times as much electrical current as copper, but they are difficult to manipulate because each tube is just 1/350,000 as wide as the period at the end of this sentence.

Carbon nanotubes seeded this clump of bone-forming mineral, a technique that could help heal broken bones.

In August Ray Baughman at the University of Texas in Dallas and his colleagues reported a way to weave nanotubes into usefully large material. With the help of Australian wool spinners, researchers had already developed a method to twist the tubes into long fibers. Expanding on that work, the Texas group created sheets of nanotubes so thin that an acre of the material weighs just a quarter of a pound. The sheets are good electrical conductors; they can also withstand more than 34,000 pounds per square inch of force without tearing and can endure temperatures as high as 840 degrees Fahrenheit without losing strength or conductivity. The Department of Defense, along with manufacturers of helicopter blades, solar electric cells, and robotics, has expressed interest. Baughman has made a sheet 33 feet long, and he is hard at work expanding his process.

Meanwhile, two teams are developing medical applications of nanotubes, taking advantage of the human body's ability to absorb carbon. Stanford University chemists have fabricated cancer-killing nanotubes that sneak inside tumor cells, and researchers at the University of California at Riverside are using nanotubes to speed the healing of broken bones. Materials scientist Robert Haddon has demonstrated that the bone-forming mineral hydroxyapatite will grow around a nanotube scaffold, replacing the collagen fibrils that grow naturally. "Bone needs to be strong but a little bit flexible," he says. "It's hard to imagine a better material than a carbon nanotube." —Zach Zorich

Tissue Engineers Cook Up Plan for Lab-Grown Meat

Most of us avoid thinking too hard about the origins of our dinners. We happily eat chicken nuggets, willfully forgetting that they are a meat product derived from formerly living birds. Now science is prepared to make our cognitive dissonance complete. Last June, in a paper published in the journal Tissue Engineering, an international team of researchers proposed a new kind of food handmade for sensitive carnivores (and maybe even vegetarians): meat that comes from a laboratory instead of a farm.

Clinical research scientists routinely grow muscle cells in the lab. And NASA-funded experiments have succeeded in culturing turkey muscle cells and goldfish cells as a potential way to feed astronauts on long space missions. Jason Matheny, a graduate student in agricultural economics and public health at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues turned this scheme earthward, proposing two methods for growing meat in bulk. One would culture thin sheets of meat, seeded by cells from a living animal, on a reusable polymer scaffold; the other would grow meat on small edible beads that stretch with changes in temperature.

Currently the process is far too expensive to bring lab-grown meat to the supermarket. A tasty fake steak is an even more distant dream: To have the structure of filet mignon, muscle tissue needs blood vessels, a major challenge to tissue engineers. Still, Matheny says that within several years, lab meat could be used in Spam, sausage, and even chicken nuggets. Europe has taken an interest. The Dutch government has invested $2.4 million in a project that would cultivate pork from stem cells.

But will people eat it? Matheny thinks so. "There's nothing natural about a chicken that's given growth promoters and raised in a shed with 10,000 others," he says. "As consumers become educated, a product like this would gain appeal." —Sarah Webb

Humanoid Robots Walk Tall
Most of the joints belonging to a three-foot-tall Cornell University humanoid are not powered like those in traditional robots. Instead, they swing freely in a surprisingly human-like manner.

In 2005 a new generation of robots revolutionized the way humanoids walk, one of the greatest challenges in engineering. They followed Honda's ASIMO, which wowed a cheering audience last winter by breaking into a two-mile-per-hour trot. ASIMO is based on technology that is much like that of a shuffling windup toy. Every maneuver is part of a programmed pattern, each posture a frozen moment in time, and an enormous amount of energy is needed to keep the body plugging along in a stiff-looking gait. By contrast, a nameless robot unveiled by engineers at Cornell University in February is modeled after antique toy figurines that make their way down a slope, depending only on gravity. The Cornell robot is the first to use principles of passive-dynamic walking to stroll on level ground, employing electrical energy equivalent to the metabolic energy a human would use. Most of the joints swing freely, naturally shifting mass like a pendulum. Another robot, named Rabbit, designed at the University of Michigan and the University of Nantes in France, may be the first to run in strides that look human. Its creators have made it dynamic, balancing on two points—it has no feet—and with the ability to adjust to obstacles and changes in terrain. Unlike ASIMO, which cannot balance in a fluid way, Rabbit can be shoved violently and regain its stability. —Susan Kruglinski

Laser Transistor Makes Its Debut

Just when experts were beginning to fear that the conventional transistor would become as outmoded as the eight-track tape, legendary semiconductor guru Nick Holonyak and his colleagues have recast it—literally—in a whole new light.

Holonyak's team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign devised a transistor that is also an ultratiny laser, producing a narrow beam of light simultaneously with electrical current. "An ordinary transistor has only two signals: an electrical input and an electrical output," says coinventor Milton Feng. "The transistor laser has those plus a third output—a coherent photon beam," which can be transmitted by fiber-optic line for speed-of-light processing. "It is conceivable that connections on a circuit board can be made exponentially faster than is possible with conventional electronics alone."

Transistors typically consist of a sandwich of specially "doped" semiconductor materials: two chemically similar pieces called the emitter and the collector, separated by a thin layer of a different sort of substance called the base. Applying a voltage to the base permits the flow of current from emitter to collector. Some of that current is lost, however, as moving electrons from the emitter drop into "holes"—places in the base where electrons are missing—releasing energy in the process. "For years, people were just throwing away that base current, and it was dissipated as heat," says Holonyak, who invented the first practical light-emitting diode 44 years ago. "Milton kept saying that there was a lot of current density [in the base] to use" to power a laser. "I thought he was nuts. But it turns out he's right."

The researchers engineered their transistor's base with microscopic pockets called quantum wells, which trap the electrons and release them as laser light. In September they reported that the prototype could run at room temperature with a clock speed of three gigahertz—the same as a top-of-the-line PC chip. But they're confident that it will easily operate 10 or perhaps even 100 times faster. —Curt Suplee

High-tech gadgets make it possible for people to travel through time . . . well, sort of. To leap forward 40 to 50 years in physical abilities, merely talk on a cell phone while cruising down the road. Research at the University of Utah shows that when drivers between 18 and 25 chat on a cell phone, they cannot react to a braking situation any better than a 65- to 74-year-old. Employing a driving simulator to measure reaction times, psychologist David Strayer found teenagers have the greatest trouble combining driving and talking, but the problem affects all generations. "We see that accident rates, if you're using a cell phone, are about four times greater than if you're not using a cell phone," he says. "Cell phones seem to be a distraction across the age range." —Kurt Repanshek

Science Technology Fiction- 20 things you don't know

2008-03-13T20:01:00.000-07:00

1 Arguably the inspiration for much science fiction traces back to classical mythology. Think of it—Earthlings abducted by beings from the sky, humans morphing into strange creatures, and events that defy the laws of nature.

2 Birth of the (un)cool: In 1926 writer Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first true science-fiction magazine.
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3 Gernsback loved greenbacks. He tried to trademark the term science fiction, and he paid writers so little that H. P. Lovecraft later nicknamed him “Hugo the Rat.”

4 Rat’s revenge: The most famous sci-fi writing award is called the Hugo.

5 Writers for the early pulp magazines would often write under multiple pseudonyms so they could have more than one article per issue. Ray Bradbury—taking this practice to another level—used six different pen names.

6 Serious science-fiction heads say sci-fi carries schlocky, B-movie connotations. Many prefer the abbreviation SF.

7 Prominent physicists and space travel pioneers have (often secretly) contributed to SF lit. German rocket genius Wernher Von Braun wrote space fiction and was an adviser to sci-fi movies such as Conquest of Space.

8 During the 1960s, James Tiptree Jr. penned sci-fi classics like Houston, Houston, Do You Read? but was so secretive that people suspected he was a covert government operative.

9 At age 61, Tiptree was outed—not as a spy but as outspoken feminist Alice B. Sheldon.

10 One of the more famous works in the growing field of gay sci-fi is Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, about a woman who bolts from her overbearing Jewish family to the mystical all-lesbian city of New Chelm.

11 Irony alert: Ray Bradbury, one of the world’s most influential SF writers, studiously avoids computers and ATMs and claims he has never driven a car.

12 Not to be outdone, sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov wrote about interstellar spaceflight but refused to board an airplane.

13 Neal Stephenson’s acclaimed 1992 novel Snow Crash has inspired two major online creations: Second Life (derived from Stephenson’s virtual Metaverse) and Google Earth (from the panoptic Earth application).

14 Meanwhile, in the humble brick-and-mortar world: Sci-fi author Gene Wolfe helped develop the machine that cooks Pringles, while Robert Heinlein conceived the first modern water bed.

15 Sexual liberation plays a big role in Heinlein’s books, which really puts the water-bed thing into perspective.

16 In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, the HAL 9000 computer discusses its feelings and Pan Am flies passenger shuttles to the moon. After the book’s release, Pan Am announced a real-life list of passengers waiting to go to the moon; Walter Cronkite, Ronald Reagan, and 80,000 others signed up.

17 Forty years later, computers can’t discuss printer drivers, let alone emotions, and Pan Am has been dead for 17 years.

18 When sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick inadvertently re-created a Bible scene in his book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, he became convinced that the spirit of the prophet Elijah had overcome him, kicking off a long bout of schizophrenia.

19 After Dick’s death, fans built an android likeness of him that mimicked his mannerisms and quoted his writings.

20 In 2005, the Dickbot was misplaced by a baggage handler. It remains at large.

The Latest Weapon Against Global Warming: Your Fridge

2008-03-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

Is your refrigerator the solution for greener energy? Not entirely, but giving your fridge the ability to think for itself is an excellent first step when it comes to preventing future power blackouts, according to results from a pilot project led by the Department of Energy and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

In the project, called GridWise, everyday appliances like washers and dryers were equipped with small electronic circuit boards and installed in more than 200 homes in Washington and Oregon. These circuit boards are programmed to detect changes in the alternating-current frequency coming into the appliance. When the device senses a lower frequency, signaling less available electricity on the grid, it reacts by turning off certain functions of the appliance: a dryer might keep tumbling clothes but switch the heating coil off; a fridge light could stay on while the cooling motor took a break. These responses happen in less than half a second, last for only around 10 seconds, and are nearly undetectable by homeowners.

The autonomous appliance reaction lowers the demand on the grid system for about 5 minutes, allowing secondary response systems to kick in. “Think of your fridge or stove as an initial shock absorber,” says Rob Pratt program manager for the GridWise program.
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While powering down the appliances in one home would not do much, if every home in New York or Los Angeles were equipped with the GridWise system, it could be enough prevent serious blackouts like the one in 2003 that paralyzed the Northeast, says Pratt. The key is that the circuit board can react to conditions on the grid instantaneously—something humans cannot do.

Along with clever appliances, some homes in the GridWise project received computer systems to monitor the real-time price of power and limit consumption when the price spiked. Pratt describes the system as a mini energy marketplace in the home that works as a second buffer when the grid is overloaded. When demand for energy is high, he notes, so is the price. Homeowners can program their thermostats, for instance, to automatically take a break if the price of energy skyrockets. The real-time price of electricity is updated and processed in homes every five minutes.

In the case of an impending blackout, a dryer and refrigerator respond first, quickly shutting off and temporarily decreasing power consumption. Then the second-tier price-driven system kicks in. That allows time for power suppliers to react to the overload by turning on backup generators or redistributing power throughout the grid—the final step in the process.

Fewer blackouts and money savings aside, equipping homes with smart energy systems could allow electric companies to switch to using more energy from renewable sources like wind and solar. Today, wind and solar power are considered too unreliable to be used on a mass scale, unable to supply energy when the sun sets or the wind stops. In a price-responsive system, however, rainy days could mean slightly higher energy prices, which could cause homeowners to scale back on energy consumption, says Ron Ambrosio of IBM *Research, a branch of the company researching new energy strategies

There are no technical hurdles; Ambrosio says policy and market acceptance are the biggest roadblocks to adoption of smart appliances. His estimation for widespread use of this type of energy system: 10 to 15 years, if manufacturers, consumers, and governments get behind the idea.

*Correction February 20, 2008: this originally stated IBM Energy.

Using X-Rays To Do Cruelty-Free Dissection

2008-03-13T19:45:00.000-07:00

For such a small, dainty fish, a sea horse eats like a high-powered Hoover, sucking up water through its snout, its head expanding in less than one-hundredth of a second to accommodate the influx. To probe this specialized feeding system, Dominique Adriaens, director of the Evolutionary Morphology of Vertebrates group at Ghent University in Belgium, turned to a technology that a growing number of researchers are taking advantage of—high-resolution X-ray computed tomography. This “virtual dissection” machine works like a hospital CAT scan, but instead of the equipment’s taking tens to thousands of X-rays from different vantage points as it rotates around a still patient, the X-ray beam is still and the specimen is rotated in front of it. Just like many CAT scans, the multiple two-dimensional images are assembled to create a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, sliced, and put back together—with up to 1,000 times the detail of a typical hospital CAT scan.

Virtual dissection has been used to find air bubbles trapped in concrete, to spot grains of gold locked in rock, to identify writing on crusty rolls of papyrus, and to dissect the Kennewick man. And the demand for this technology is on the rise. Scientists with objects too precious or difficult to cut apart are waiting weeks for time with the scanners at the handful of universities that have the million-dollar machines.

Emerging Technology

2008-03-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

Some technological revolutions arrive as revelation. You hear a human voice wafting out from a rotating plastic disk or see a moving train projected onto a screen, and you sense instantly that the world has changed. For many of us, our first encounter with the World Wide Web a decade ago was one of those transformative experiences: You clicked on a word on the screen, and instantly you were transported to some other page that was served up from a computer located somewhere else, across the planet perhaps. After you followed that first hyperlink, you knew the universe of information would never be the same.

Other revolutions creep up with more subtlety, built of tweaks and minor advances, not radical breakthroughs. E-mail took decades to gestate, but now many of us can’t imagine life without it. There’s a comparable quiet revolution under way right now, one that is likely to fundamentally transform the way we use the Web in the coming years. The changes are technical and involve thousands of individual programmers, dozens of start-ups, and a few of the largest software companies in the world. The result is the equivalent of a massive software upgrade for the entire Web, what some commentators have taken to calling Web 2.0. Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.

Part of the beauty and power of the original Web lay in its simplicity: Web sites were made up of pages, each of which could contain text and images. Those pages were able to connect to other information on the Web through links. If you were maintaining a Web site about poodles and stumbled across a promising breeder’s home page, you could link to the information on that page by inserting a few simple lines of code. From that point on, your site was connected to that other page, and subsequent visitors to your site could follow that connection with a single mouse click. In some basic sense, those two pages of data were interacting with each other, but the exchange between them was rudimentary.
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Now consider how a group of poodle experts might use the Web 2.0. One of them subscribes to a virtual clipping service offered by Google News; she instructs the service to scan thousands of news outlets for any articles that mention the word poodle and to send her an e-mail alert when one of them comes down the wire. One morning, she finds a link to a review of a new book about miniature poodles in her in-box. She follows the link to the original article, and using a standard blogging tool like TypePad or Blogger, she posts a quick summary of the review and links to the Amazon page for the book from her blog.

Within a few hours of her publishing the note about the new book, a service called Technorati scans her Web site and notices that she has added a link to a book listed on Amazon. You can think of Technorati as the Google of the blog world, constantly analyzing the latest blog posts for interesting new developments. One of the features it offers is a frequently updated list of the most talked-about books in the blog world. If Technorati stumbles across another handful of links to that same poodle book within a few hours, the poodle book itself might show up on the hot books list.

After our poodle expert posts her blog entry, she takes another few seconds to categorize it, using an ingenious service called del.icio.us, which tags it with her content-specific title, like “miniature poodles,” or “dog breeding.” She does this for her own personal use—del.icio.us lets her see in a glance all the pages she has classified with a specific tag—but the service also has a broader social function; tags are visible to other users as well. Our poodle expert can also see all the pages that other users have associated with dog breeding. It’s a little like creating a manila folder for a particular topic, and every time you pick it up, you find new articles supplied by strangers all across the Web.

Del.icio.us’s creators call the program a social bookmarking service, and one of its key functions is to connect people as readily as it connects data. When our poodle lover checks in on the dog-breeding tag, she notices that another del.icio.us user has been adding interesting links to the category over the past few months. She drops him an e-mail and invites him to join a small community of poodle lovers using Yahoo’s My Web service. From that point on, anytime she discovers a new poodle-related page, he’ll immediately receive a notification about it, along with the rest of her poodle community, either via e-mail or instant message.

Now stop and think about how different this chain of events is from the traditional Web mode of following simple links between static pages. One small piece of new information—a review of a book about poodles—flows through an entire system of reuse and appropriation within hours. The initial information value of the review remains: It’s an assessment of a new book, no different from the reviews that appear in traditional publications. But as it ventures through the food chain of the new Web, it takes on new forms of value: One service uses it to help evaluate the books with the most buzz; another uses it to build a classification schema for the entire Web; another uses it as a way of forming new communities of like-minded people. Some of this information exchange happens on traditional Web pages, but it also leaks out into other applications: e-mail clients, instant-messenger programs.

The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate. Those plants pass on enough energy to sustain a limited number of insects, which in turn supply food for the occasional reptile or bird, all of which ultimately feed the bacteria. But most of the energy is lost.

A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.

Think of information as the energy of the Web’s ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun’s rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.

This is good news whether we love poodles or not, but it’s also good news economically because the diversity of the ecosystem makes it a fertile environment for small players. You don’t have to dominate the food chain to get by in the Web world; you can find a productive niche and thrive, partially because you’re building on the information value created by the rest of the Web. Technorati and del.icio.us both began as small projects created by single programmers. They don’t need huge staffs because they’re capturing the information supplied by the countless number of surfers who use their services, and they’re building on other tools created by other people, whether they work in a home office or in a vast international corporation like Google. All of which makes this the most exciting time to be on the Web since the glory days in the mid-1990s. And the revelations aren’t about to stop. As we figure out new ways to expand the complex information food chains of Web 2.0, we will see even more innovation in the coming years. Welcome to the jungle.

BT calls for action on net speeds

2008-03-13T03:23:00.000-07:00

The UK's largest broadband supplier has called for the industry to be clearer about how it advertises net speeds.

BT Wholesale, which supplies eight million people, said many customers were disappointed by the mismatch between advertised and actual speeds.

An independent survey found that 15% of people who bought eight megabit per second packages actually got the speed.

The firm said regulators needed to agree rules about how broadband speeds could be sold to the public.

"The reality is we are all trying to push the technology," Guy Bradshaw of BT Wholesale told BBC News.

"The industry needs to join together with Ofcom to agree a set of principles as to how these messages should be communicated and advertised so that the understanding with the consumer is as accurate as it can be."

Traffic problems

BT said that, while its DSL Max product offers a range of speeds up to eight megabits per second (mbps), it tells its customers - the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - that actual speeds will vary from user to user.

Cameron Rejali, Managing Director of Products at BT Wholesale, said it is up to the ISPs how they market broadband, "but if they are marketing it badly, the market will punish them."

BT said users need to know that there is a difference between the line speed - what the line between their home and the exchange can support - and what it describes as "throughput", a measure of the data coming down the line during an activity such as the downloading of a video.

Only 35% of BT's DSL Max customers are achieving an eight mbps line speed - the rest will see their speed cut by factors such as distance from the exchange, poor equipment, and interference from electrical appliances.

But none of these five million users will achieve eight mbps "throughput" because of internet congestion and other network issues.

"The reality is if you are very far from an exchange or there are environmental factors then your speed will come down and there is not much we can do in the short-term to address that problem," said Mr Bradshaw.

Ofcom is currently reviewing the way broadband is marketed to consumers.

A spokeswoman said: "Whilst there are technical reasons why a consumer may not get the full speed of the package to which they have signed up the key point is that consumers should be able to make an informed decision about what broadband package is best for them at the point of purchase.

iPhones For Freshmen At ACU

2008-03-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

iPhones or iPod Touches will be issued to incoming freshmen at Abilene Christian University (ACU) this fall. The intent is to provide what amounts to a "campus lifeline" that lets students check on every aspect of their campus life with a single, pocket-sized device.

According to ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts, more than 15 web applications have already been developed. See this ACU iPhone application video for more details.

(iPhones at ACU video)

The video is really an interesting piece of near-future science fiction itsef; it shows how a fully deployed mobile learning environment might look like. However, everything in the video is easily doable with an iPhone or iPod Touch:
Receive podcasts with class lectures
Find classes on map application
Visual walk-through of campus
Change class section or drop classes
Text messages from profs re classes
More pilot projects like this are being done with Apple's participation; more projects like this one are expected at universities like Harvard, MIT and Stanford.

Frankly, they'd better hurry up. The enormous number of unlocked iPhones has created a robust application development group; they are going to have all the necessary apps written by fall, at the rate they're going.

The iPhone used in this way reminds me very strongly of multi-function pocket-sized devices like the pocket computer from Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye or the joymaker from Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot.

See part two of the ACU iPhones on campus video. Via MacRumors. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

Mars Phoenix Lander On Wide World Of Mars

2008-03-13T03:19:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid growing up in the 1960's, one of the most amazing things to me was the live coverage from multiple cameras of world events, like the Winter Olympics. When they talked about "spanning the globe" to bring you a "Wide World of Sports," they weren't kidding around.

NASA's Phoenix Lander is going to get a similar treatment from the many correspondents on Mars. Correspondents on Mars? That's right - the three orbiters, NASA's Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Europe's Mars Express are all getting themselves into position.

Even better, NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been helping out by simulating transmissions from Phoenix to rehearse the orbiters' operations.

Phoenix will enter the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 20,519 kph.

On that day, Odyssey will turn its robotic eyes from the heavens to point an ultrahigh- frequency antenna towards the descending Phoenix. A high-gain antenna will stream information back to Earth as Odyssey watches Phoenix slow itself through heat-shield friction, a parachute, and then firing descent rockets. That allows the lander to hit the Martian surface on three legs at just 5.4 miles per hour (2.4 m/s).

MRO and Mars Express will start recording Phoenix transmissions as backup data "about 10 minutes before landing," according to Ben Jai, mission manager at JPL for MRO.

Sooner or later, the world's planetary explorers will realize that we need a rock-solid, high-capacity data network for the solar system. George O. Smith, an engineer by trade and sf writer by avocation, wrote about this idea in an excellent set of stories in the early 1940's.

The Venus Equilateral Relay Station was a modern miracle of engineering if you liked to believe the books. Actually, Venus Equilateral was an asteroid that had been shoved into its orbit about the Sun, forming a practical demonstration of he equilateral triangle solution of the Three Moving Bodies. It was a long cylinder, about three miles in length by about a mile in diameter...

This was the center of Interplanetary Communications. This was the main office. It was the heart of the Solar System's communication line, and as such, it was well manned. Orders for everything emanated from Venus Equilateral.
(Read more about the Venus Equilateral Relay Station)

Via Mars Orbiters Prepare to Watch Phoenix Landing. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

Nokia Morph Cell Phone Concept

2008-03-13T03:13:00.000-07:00

The Nokia Morph cell phone concept is currently featured in The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition.

(Nokia Morph cell phone concept)

Nokia is thinking at least a decade ahead, as far as consumer offerings are concerned - according to Nokia. According to the marketplace, that might be too long, because some of these features are already available.

For example, in terms of "morphing," Nokia engineers imagine that the cell phone could start out with a normal phone factor, but then unfold into a larger screen.

Check out these pictures of the Readius cell phone with a five-inch foldable display. They don't call it "morphing," but it's pretty cool.

Any way, as far as cell phone "concepts" are concerned, I've always liked some of the early sf descriptions, like the pocket phone from Heinlein's 1953 novella Assignment in Eternity, and the polycarbon phone screen from Gibson's 1986 novel Count Zero.

Via Nokia Morph concept - this futuristic gadget is all you’ll need; thanks to Moira for the tip. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

ReadyBot Robot Ready To Clean Your Kitchen

2008-03-13T03:03:00.001-07:00

Trik untuk meningkatkan kecepatan internet
March 17th, 2007

Secara default Windows (Win XP Pro dan 2000) sebenarnya juga mengurangi bandtwith kita sebesar 20%, 20% ini digunakan window untuk mendownload update untuk window. Berikut langkah untuk menghilangkan pengurangan bandwidth tersebut :

Klik Start->Run->ketik"gpedit.msc" (tanpa tanda ") Ini akan memunculkan tampilan "Windows Policy". Kemudian masuk ke : Local Computer Policy–>Computer Configuration–>Administrative Templates–>Network–>QOS Packet Scheduler kemudian di tampilan kanan pilih "Limit Reservable Bandwidth", disitu tertulis "Not Configured" -> doubel klik (ada tampilan baru, "Limit reservable bandwidth Properties").

Jika ingin tahu keterangannya buka di bagian "Explain". Di situ tertulis keterangan windows secara default menggunakan 20% bandwidth kita. Kembali ke "Setting" dan pilih "Enabled" lalu ganti 20 % menjadi 0%.

Matsushita Mechanorg-New Porter Robot

2008-03-13T03:00:00.000-07:00

Matsushita is demonstrating it's porter robot; at 130 cm in height and 60 cm wide, it is able to carry about 20 kilograms of cargo.
The cool thing about this robot is that the user carries a small transponder that tells the porter robot where its user is at all times. The porter robot lets you place your baggage on its shelf, and then will follow you where ever you go.

Here's the research abstract:
;We are considering safe and reliable life-assist robots to coexist with human. First of all, we decided to develop a tool type robot that carry out a single task, and call it "Mechanorg" that is a coined word of "Mechanical" and "Organism". And we developed "Porter Robot" as one of the Mechanorg concept robots. It can carry baggage with following its user and avoiding obstacles safely at the airports...

The robot detects user's position by the supersonic wave, and knows the shape and distance of obstacle by infrared ray sensor and supersonic wave sensor. The robot calculates the best motion in environment, so the robot can follow safely without losing sight of user.

The porter robot has an omnidirectional camera and other sensors for measuring range, determining the best way around obstacles, and collision avoidance. The nickel hydride batter provides about an hour of use.

Regular technovelgy readers know of my fascination with the autoporter robot from John Brunner's wonderful 1975 novel Shockwave Rider. It won't be long before you'll be able to rent something like this at any airport.

Matsushita has some competition; check these bots out:
- TMSUK Robot Carries Your Bags
- Porter 'Robots' For Baggage, If Not People
- Russian Robot Suitcase
- RoboPorter Carries Your Baggage, Guides You

Via RobotWatch; the site also has some videos you can download showing the porter robot in action. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

China May Issue A Billion RFID-Based ID Cards

2008-03-13T02:58:00.000-07:00

At RFID World last month, a speaker representing China's radio frequency identification (RFID) initiative said he expected China to issue over a billion identification cards - one to every citizen. An example ID badge from Intermec Technologies, currently used for expedited border crossings between the U.S. and Candada, is shown below.

Rocky Shih, representing the government of China, also stated that three million handheld RFID scanners would be issued, one for every police officer in China. When Mr. Shih was asked if perhaps this might bring up concerns about RFID and privacy, he said that the government does not need to respond to such concerns.

An example of a concern that might be raised about such devices: suppose all citizens were required to produce an identification card on demand (as is the case when you are driving a car, for instance, in the U.S.). If you carried an active RFID tag with you at all times, you could be monitored by any organization or business with an appropriate detector. Every time you entered a mall, or passed through a turnstile, or drove past a toll booth your presence could be monitored and recorded.

Apparently, Walmart's plan to have an RFID device in most consumer items within the next year or two was of less concern to the Chinese government, despite the fact that many of the goods sold by Walmart are produced there.

SF writer John Brunner explored the issues surrounding the privacy of the individual in an age of universal computer access and cradle-to-grave monitoring in his classic 1975 novel Shockwave Rider. Brunner coined the term computer tapeworm in this novel.

See RFID in Colorado and China; thanks to Future Now for the story. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

VeriChip RFID Tag Patient Implant Badges Now FDA Approved

2008-03-13T02:57:00.000-07:00

The Food and Drug Administration has given final approval to Applied Digital Solutions to sell their VeriChip RFID tags for implantation into patients in hospitals. The intent is to provide immediate positive identification of patients both in hospitals and in emergencies. Doctors, emergency-room personnel and ambulance crews could get immediate identification without resorting to looking for wallets and purses for ID. If, for example, you had a pre-existing medical condition or allergy, this could be taken into account immediately.

The Federal Drug Administration has approved a final review process to determine whether hospitals can use VeriChip RFID tags to identify patients. The 11-millimeter RFID tags will be implanted in the fatty tissue of the upper arm. The estimated life of the tags is twenty years.

(From VeriChip)

The VeriChip is a radio frequency identification (RFID) device that is injected just below the skin; the subdermal RFID tag location is invisible to the naked eye. A unique verification number is transmitted to a suitable reader when the person is within range.

The FDA ruling is not to allow implantation in humans; this has already been established. The purpose of the review is to examine privacy issues.

Kevin Wiley, CEO of VeriChip Corporation, stated:
"We continue to market and sell VeriChip internationally primarily for the security application. As evidenced by the recent chipping of Mexico's Attorney General and his staff, the VeriChip technology provides first-of-a-kind tamper-proof and secure applications. These applications can also occur with medical records and medical device information. We look forward to the de novo process and the ultimate conclusion of the regulatory process."
(Medical Use of VeriChip)

SF fans may recall that in the world of The Computer Connection, written by Alfred Bester in 1974, most people have chips called skull bugs for identification and monitoring implanted at birth.

About one thousand of VeriChip RFID tags have been inserted into humans so far; most of the sales have been outside the U.S. See Baja Beach Club Implants VeriChip In Customers for more about implantation in humans; read more about this story at RFID tags may be implanted in patient's arms. (This story was originally posted on Aug-15-2004). Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

Veripay Credit-Card Implant

2008-03-13T02:46:00.000-07:00

Advanced Digital Solutions intends to use its implanted RFID (radio frequency identification) VeriChips as a method of payment at the upcoming ID World 2003 in Paris, France. ADS claims that Veripay could end problems of identity theft and make it impossible to lose your credit card.

The technology has two parts; a small chip the size of a rice grain that is surgically implanted in the user, and a radio frequency reader device that activates and provides power to the implanted device. These devices have been in use for almost a decade in a variety of devices; ADS is the first to announce the use of implanted chips to make financial payments.

Of course, science fiction readers are aware that the use of these chips as credit card devices was proposed by Neal Stephenson in his 1995 novel The Diamond Age; see implanted credit card.

Privacy advocates are skeptical (at best) of the proposed use of this technology in human beings. Beth Given, of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (San Diego, CA) stated

"If we establish a robust credit card network based on RFID chips implanted under the skin, we are also creating the infra-structure for potential government surveillance."
Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

Electronic Number Plate RFID Keeps Tabs On Vehicles

2008-03-13T02:44:00.000-07:00

A South African RFID design firm now offers Electronic Number Plate RFID technology. iPico Holdings says this technology is now being used in a pilot project in South America. (See What is RFID? to find out more about radio-frequency identification.)

(From RFID Journal)

The technology is being considered for electronic vehicle licensing, traffic and speed control, cross-border traffic control and other applications. The tags can be read at ordinary vehicle speeds.

This is a passive RFID tag, meaning that it does not need to carry batteries (and therefore will likely last for the life of the vehicle). The tag is attached to the windshield during the manufacturing process; any attempt to alter or remove the tag will damage it.

Science fiction fans may recall the Camden speedster, a car that not only went underwater, but would also alter it's license tag while in motion, in order to fool traffic control devices. Not a bad prediction for 1958, when Methuselah's Children was published (read the quote for traffic control camera). See the original story at Passive Tags Track Cars.

For another look at how people and objects can be tracked with RFID, see China May Issue A Billion RFID-Based ID Cards. Scroll down for more stories in the same category.

Chumby and the Ambient Web

2008-03-13T02:41:00.000-07:00

Feeling overwhelmed by information overload? Wait, there's more coming. A lot more.

Chumby is a pretty goofy device with a silly name and a weird shape. And nobody needs one. But it's worth checking out because we're going to be seeing a lot more devices like this, smart little machines constantly fetching information from the Internet, spreading the Web beyond the realm of PCs.

"We're already living in a Blade Runner world, where we're surrounded by connected information screens," says Stephen L. Tomlin, chief executive and cofounder of Chumby Industries in San Diego, Calif.

Sci-fi movies never anticipated that the future would be so, well, cute. Chumby weighs 13 ounces and looks like a little leather beanbag with a screen. Plug it in, let it find your Wi-Fi network and, boom, you're on the Chumby Network, pulling weather, music, news, photos and trivia from the Web.

You can choose from more than 400 streaming widgets on the Chumby Web site. Keep track of your friends on MySpace and Facebook, see photos from Flickr, check in on your Ebay bids, read right-wing blogs or left-wing newspapers, watch sports videos or a videoclip of David Letterman's Top Ten List, listen to podcasts or check out your daily horoscope. If your friend has a Chumby you can become online "chums" and send widgets to each other over the Chumby Network.

Chumby has a virtual keyboard that pops up in some applications--for example, when you search for music on Shoutcast--but this isn't a device for typing and sending messages. It's for reading and viewing. The touch screen handles mostly simple commands like "play" and "stop" for music streams. You might think of Chumby as a souped-up clock radio and digital photo screen with a toylike exterior hiding a full-blown (albeit tiny) computer running the Linux operating system on a chip typically used in portable devices.

You pay $180 for the device, and there's no subscription fee for the data streams. Chumby hopes to make money from ads injected into the stream. Tomlin describes his target customers as "people with rich Internet lives," meaning people who can't bear to be untethered. I have to admit I'm one of these people. The idea of having a Chumby sitting on my desk sending me news feeds and Chuck Norris jokes while I'm working makes perfect sense to me.

Apparently I'm not alone, because these so-called ambient Internet devices are springing up everywhere. A firm with that very name, Ambient (otcbb: ABTG.OB - news - people ) Devices, sells wireless desktop baseball and football tickers ($125 each), a seven-day weather forecaster ($200), a stock market ticker ($125) and an umbrella with a handle that pulses with blue light if rain or snow is in the forecast ($125). Another company sells a cute plastic bunny called Nabaztag ($165), which, like Chumby, picks up the Internet from your Wi-Fi router and feeds you a wealth of information, with the added (and superannoying) feature of being able to speak.

My Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) N800 tablet computer mostly serves as a fancy touch-screen remote control for a music server but also feeds me news headlines, runs photo slide shows and plays Internet radio. (I also use it to Web-browse, e-mail and make phone calls via Skype. That's a lot of gadget goodness for under $300.) In my living room another ambient device, Logitech's Squeezebox music player, pulls music from the Internet and scrolls news feeds.

The biggest ambient device may end up being the digital picture frame. These things were a hit over the holidays with sales up fivefold from the year before, according to NPD Group. While most frames just display pictures stored on memory cards, some high-end models now can connect to the Internet. Currently all most of them do is zip photos back and forth, but once this thing can attach to the Net why not add all the fun stuff that you can get on a Chumby?

In fact, that's Phase 2 of Tomlin's master plan. He aims to let people attach non-Chumby devices like picture frames and Net-connected LCD TVs to the Chumby Network. He's trying to persuade hardware makers to use the Chumby Network rather than build their own online services.

One way or another, Chumby-like streams will soon be coursing through things all around us: our TVs, photo frames, clock radios, portable music players, GPS navigation screens in the car. One of China's hottest advertising plays is Focus Media (nasdaq: FMCN - news - people ), which has 140,000 networked LCD billboards and TV screens throughout the teeming country. Information overload is about to go into overdrive.

Tasers: the next generation

2008-03-13T02:40:00.000-07:00

Andrew Chung
Staff Reporter

The Taser is going wireless.

Until now, the electric-shock gun consisted of two barbed darts attached to wires that shoot out and strike the victim, immobilizing the person with 50,000 volts of electricity, causing severe pain and intense muscle contraction.

But the wires could only extend a few metres. With the new "extended range electronic projectile," or XREP, the Taser has been turned into a kind of self-contained shotgun shell and can be fired, wire-free, from a standard shotgun, which police typically have in their arsenal already.

The first electrode hooks on to the target, the second electrode falls and makes contact elsewhere on the body, completing the circuit and activating the shock. It can blast someone as far as 30 metres away, and, unlike the current stun guns, whose shock lasts five seconds, the XREP lasts 20 seconds, enough time to "take the offender into custody without risking injury to officers."

Taser International spokesperson Steve Tuttle says the XREP would be perfect in a standoff. "Here's someone you just don't want to get anywhere near," he says.

The XREP is one of two major new applications the Scottsdale, Ariz., company is preparing to field test, a prospect that makes Taser's critics anxious. They say more study is needed of the old products, let alone the new.

Tasers are sparking all sorts of questions and concerns these days.

Like death after Tasing. Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski died after the RCMP Tased him when he'd become agitated after spending 10 hours inside the secure area at the Vancouver airport.

Or questionable Tasing. University of Florida student Andrew Meyer was Tased even though a handful of officers had already piled on top of him after he refused to stop asking former presidential candidate John Kerry questions at the microphone. (He's the one who uttered that now infamous plea that has spawned bumper stickers and T-shirts: "Don't Tase me, bro!")

Tasers are now used by more than 11,000 law enforcement agencies in 44 countries. There are more than 428,000 Tasers in the field, not to mention the tens of thousands of Tasers that have been sold to civilians.

And the innovations keep coming.

Besides the XREP, the company has developed a device meant to keep someone from approaching a certain area – a tactic called "area denial." "What if you could drop everyone in a given area to the ground with the simple push of a button?" asks a dramatic promotional video for the "Shockwave."

Taser has turned its weapon into a connected series of six darts arranged in an arc. The company says the device can be extended in a chain or stacked "like Lego," depending on the needs of the user.

So an army platoon, for instance, could use it to prevent unwanted people from approaching their camp, and not have to risk getting close to their targets.

Amnesty International, which has raised concerns for years, says the Shockwave poses serious risks of inappropriate use. When you target an entire area, or a crowd, you can't distinguish between the individuals you're trying to restrain, says Hilary Homes, a security and human rights campaigner for Amnesty International Canada.

"It targets everybody to the same intensity or effect," Homes says. "With materials like that, you worry about ...arbitrary and indiscriminate use."

Tuttle says the technology will be used for military applications, "not for a riot in Toronto."

Amnesty says that between 2001 and Sept. 30, 2007, there were more than 290 deaths of individuals struck by police Tasers in North America, including 16 in Canada. It reports that only 25 of those electroshocked were armed, and none with firearms. It's calling for a moratorium on their use by police until a full, independent inquiry is held.

Homes says the new shotgun-style Taser doesn't pose any risks that aren't already there with the older weapon, except that "this allows more things to be done from a greater distance."

Mostly, it's the concern over the expansion of this technology even as there is heated debate over the devices' safety. "We'd prefer there weren't new variations until a study of the central technology was done," she says.

The safety concerns revolve around the growing number of deaths following Tasering and the increasing use of the term "excited delirium" by the company and other experts to explain the deaths, while denying the weapon any culpability.

Excited delirium is a catchall phrase to describe symptoms of extreme stress, such as disorientation, profuse sweating, paranoia, and superhuman strength.

When someone is in such a condition – heart racing, blood pressure bursting, fight-or-flight hormones like adrenalin coursing through their body – wouldn't a giant electrical jolt just make things worse?

"Show me the medical and mechanical reasons why it would make it worse when doctors are telling us, when someone is in that situation you should treat it as a medical emergency and get that person to a medical trauma centre in the quickest way," Tuttle says. "With no Taser, he's impervious to pain, agitated, slippery with sweat – you won't get control in five seconds. Maybe you'll use batons, which won't work, pepper spray, which is much more stressful, a bean-bag round, maybe deadly force because the situation spins out of control?"

Dr. David Evans, the Toronto regional supervising coroner for investigations, says that while there's no proof to say the shock could make things worse, "I agree potentially it could." But, he adds, "why aren't they dropping dead immediately?"

Evans says that it doesn't seem to make sense that the Taser is at fault in the deaths, because the deaths have not been instantaneous. "Normally you'd expect that if someone was going to die from electrocution related to electrical discharge, they'd die right there and then, within a few seconds," he says.

Tasering doesn't cause changes in the heart rhythm, or arrhythmia, which leads to death, he says.

It's a view that Ontario's deputy coroner, Dr. Jim Cairns, has used to help shape the Toronto Police Services Board policy toward allowing Toronto police to use Tasers. Cairns also spoke at a Taser tactical conference in Chicago last July about excited delirium.

Taser points out that the weapon has not been implicated in any of the deaths in Canada. "We're just repeating what the medical examiners are saying," says Tuttle. "The vast majority of those cases have been excited delirium or (drug) overdose."

Even though "excited delirium" isn't an accepted medical diagnosis, it may be listed as a "contributory factor" in police-custody deaths, Evans says, but not as the primary cause.

Taser isn't the only company developing electrical stun weapons. Indiana-based Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems has, in a prototype phase, a futuristic weapon that sends out a streak of lightning, apparently by projecting an ionized gas or ionizing the air itself with a laser, which conducts the electricity forward. The technology could potentially also be used to disable vehicles and, in the future, to help militaries neutralize incoming rocket propelled grenades.

Taser expects its new products to be available by mid-2008.

Information Technology Ecosystem Health and Performance

2008-03-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

An IT ecosystem is "the network of organizations that drives the creation and delivery of information technology products and services." To understand the health and well being of the IT industry in the context of an ecosystem, the authors looked at three crucial IT ecosystem metrics: productivity, robustness, and innovation. Key concepts include:
The IT ecosystem is strong in all three of the most important sectors of hardware, software, and services.
Since the recession and retrenchment several years ago, the IT ecosystem has regained its health, competitiveness, and productivity.
There are currently significant levels of innovation from both new market entrants as well as incumbent market leaders.

Low-Cost Laptops Begin Mass Production

2008-03-13T02:29:00.000-07:00

Laptop Per Child Program, which hopes to spread sub-$200 computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, has reached a milestone with the start of mass production.

The nonprofit spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said assembly lines for its "XO" laptops were fired up Tuesday at a Chinese factory run by manufacturer Quanta Computer Inc.

That means children should begin getting the green-and-white computers this month.

• Click here for FOXNews.com's Personal Technology Center.

One Laptop Per Child did not specify how many computers will be made or how many orders it has received from international buyers.

The program's founder, Nicholas Negroponte, said in September that Quanta would build about 250,000 XOs this year, ramping to 1 million a month in 2008.

Negroponte originally expected mass production of several million XOs to have begun by now. But he scaled back that goal after encountering reluctance from potential buyers.

The computers were dreamed up as $100 laptops but for now cost $188, and buyers are expected to let children keep the computers and tinker with them at home.

The initial recipients will be children in Uruguay, Peru and Mongolia. Also, beginning Monday, people in North America will be able to buy one for themselves and donate the other to a child overseas through http://www.laptopgiving.org.

Even with mass production beginning later than expected, One Laptop Per Child can claim success on several fronts.

The small yet rugged XOs require low power and can be recharged by hand, have a screen that can be read in full sunlight and boast a user interface designed specially for children.

And the impending emergence of the XOs awakened other companies to the potential of a low-cost educational market, greatly expanding the choices that international buyers now have.

FOXNews.com is owned and operated by News Corporation, which is a backer of the One Laptop per Child project.

Astronauts to Work on Giant Robot

2008-03-13T02:26:00.000-07:00

HOUSTON -

After linking up with the international space station, Endeavour's astronauts got right to work Thursday unloading the parts they'll need to build a giant robot that will help maintain the orbiting outpost.

Astronauts Robert Behnken and Gregory Johnson were using the station's robotic arm to pull a pallet containing the Canadian robot, named Dextre, from Endeavour's cargo bay and install it temporarily on a station girder.

Dextre - short for dexterous and pronounced like Dexter - is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and, ultimately, to take over some of their dangerous outdoor work.

Spacewalkers Richard Linnehan and Garrett Reisman will begin assembling the robot late Thursday night during the first of five outings planned for Endeavour's busy 16-day mission.

Before pulling up to the space station, Endeavour's commander, Dominic Gorie, guided the shuttle through a 360-degree backflip to allow for full photographic surveillance.

It's one of the many safety-related procedures put in place following the Columbia tragedy in 2003.

The space station crew used cameras with high-powered zoom lenses to photograph Endeavour from nose to tail, especially all the thermal tiles on its belly. The pictures - as many as 300 - will be scrutinized by engineers on the ground to see whether the shuttle suffered any damage during Tuesday's launch and ascent.

The crew had already used a 100-foot laser-tipped boom to inspect Endeavour's wings and nose, and flight director Mike Moses said engineers haven't spotted any problems.

"Everything looked really good," he said.

In fact, he said, engineers were able to determine that whatever appeared to have struck Endeavour's nose nine or 10 seconds after liftoff actually missed the ship.

It will take several days for NASA to analyze all the data and determine whether Endeavour will be able to re-enter safely at the end of its 16-day flight, the longest space station mission ever by a shuttle.

The shuttle's seven astronauts exchanged hugs and handshakes with space station commander Peggy Whitson and her two-man crew after the hatches between the two ships were opened.

"You guys look marvelous," Mission Control radioed the joint crew, as Gorie and Whitson hugged.

After a quick safety briefing, the crew got right to work unloading Dextre and preparing for the upcoming spacewalk.

Reisman also formally exchanged spacecraft seats with Leopold Eyharts, making him an official member of the space station crew. Eyharts will return to Earth aboard Endeavour after spending a little over a month on the station. Reisman is set to return to Earth in June.

In addition to the Canadian robot, Endeavour also delivered the first piece of Japan's new space station lab, Kibo, which is Japanese for "hope." The storage compartment will be attached to the orbiting complex on Friday; it's a temporary location until the lab arrives in May.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Download Full Length Movies For Free

2008-03-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

It might sound too good to be true, but you actually can download full length movies for free from the Internet. But you have to be a little persistent and determined to find them. After all, you will want good quality prints, good technical support and a good database to choose from.

Of course, the statement that you can download full length movies for free prompts an obvious question. Why do so many people still pay good money for DVDs, if they can get movies for free online? After all, DVD shops still do brisk business.

This is because you have to search to find these sites, and not everyone knows about the alternative. There are two options, and you can choose according to your requirement. The first is P2P file sharing networks, where you can download and share whole movies. The second option is completely legal, though rather more difficult to find. There are websites that let you download full length movies for free and legally. The catch is that the choice is very limited. If the movie you are looking for is not a classic, you will not find it in these sites.

People prefer the P2P file sharing networks because this is the only option for watching new movies and the latest blockbusters completely free of charge. The trouble is that the quality will very often be quite poor, and there is the added chance of getting incomplete movies and infected files. Also, the legal status of these networks is disputed. You could choose the second option, but not if you want any new movies.

These are the only truly free options. There might be a lot of other sites that claim to provide whole movies for free, but they never do. Take a look at the terms and conditions. Some of them will mention payment; some others will wait till you have downloaded your movie before asking for payment in order for you to proceed.

The catch is that though the actual movies might be free, you will need to download some software that you can only get from these sites to be able to download these movies. And, of course, you will have to pay for this. The other possibility is that you might have to pay a certain sum as monthly subscription fee, after which you can download movies. And sometimes you are asked to pay additionally, if you want to transfer your movies to a disk.

But you might have to make some sort of a compromise even if you want to download full length movies for free. Some of these paid sites will charge only a one time fee, and will give you access to good quality prints of a huge collection of movies. This fee is never too high, and when you consider the alternative - buying DVDs - you will see that this is worth it. So, you can download full length movies for free - well, almost.

Find out from my entertainment blog where movie enthusiasts are going to download full length movies for free or rather for peanuts.
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Crackdown On Illegal Downloads-Broadband

2008-03-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

Since the introduction of file-sharing and peer-to-peer networking, there have been constantly reported high profile legal struggles between the music industry and internet providers.

And now internet providers face potential changes to procedure due to a government green paper which would require them to take action over users who access pirated material.

It is estimated that around six million UK broadband users downloaded files illegally last year, with music and film industries claiming that such practices cost billions of pounds in lost revenue.

And with the government coming under increased pressure from those in the music and film industries to penalise piracy, users could find themselves paying the price for free downloads.

Negotiations between some of the biggest ISPs and some of Hollywood's biggest studios regarding a voluntary scheme for policing illegal downloads have been in progress for several years, however no deal has yet been reached.

Users suspected of illegally downloading music and films face the prospect of a 'three strikes and you're out' system, which could ultimately lead to the disconnection of their broadband service if no steps are taken to cease illegal activity.

However there is growing concern about how disputed allegations would be policed. With an increasing number of cases of 'piggybacking' and 'wi-fi hijacking' as the numbers of wireless broadband networks around the UK continues to grow, there could be difficulties in determining blame in some cases.

The green paper also outlines plans for schemes that would promote creative arts in the UK in a bid to encourage children to visit galleries and museums, attend theatre productions and take up study of a musical instrument.
Looking for better broadband? Perform a broadband speed test and compare broadband providers to find a deal that suits you.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Collins

The Advantages of A Satellite Broadband Service

2008-03-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

Satellite Broadband is another form of wireless broadband that is most useful for remote areas. It is available anywhere even those areas where cable internet and DSL are not available. It is available worldwide which includes ships at sea and always on the go mobile land automobiles. This kind of broadband, offers connectivity to the home, office, business or even government agency. Satellites are not just there orbiting earth for telephone and television service - they also provide links for broadband.

The following factors affect broadband through satellite means: provider and service package purchased, consumer's line of sight to the orbiting satellite and the weather. The speed may be slower than that of a DSL or cable modem, but download speed is much faster about 10 times faster. Of course, this can change depending on the weather conditions.

So the advantages of using satellite broadband are faster surfing, downloads and instant email access All these without tying up the phone line. No need to dial or wait for internet access, satellite broadband give an instant online connection.

At this moment, satellite broadband has already partnered with phone companies to keep it alive since they are no match for the cable companies now. That would mean a troubled future if they can't increase their patrons. However, even if it has limited market for now, investments today could lead to improvements that may keep satellite services existing in the future. Satellite companies will reintroduce broadband services this summer. Their target consumers are rural customers that are being ignored by cable and DSL providers.

Satellite Broadband still has a long way to go to be at par with cable and DSL pioneers. With their plan to start in areas where there are no competitors specifically the rural market, they still have a chance to survive and to be able to succeed in the broadband business.
Russell Clark owns and operates the popular website BroadBandGuru.net

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Russel_Clark

Routers And Wireless Access, Network Hell

2008-03-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

I would like to start of by saying I am sorry for not posting as much as I should have last week. I have been going through a few headaches this past week that have diverted my thoughts away from putting up anything that would mean anything meaningful to anyone. If your interested here is a highlight.

I have been going through a little of network hell in the past 2 to 3 days. You see I have always had a wired network for my computers but my wife and I decided to get a refrigerator this week that has a wireless access point to upload pictures. But come to find out every time I configure the refrig to my netword my router got blown away. Which blew away my whole home network.

Next I went to program my XBOX 360 system with wireless access. Come to find out that I did not have my media server configured on my system. I still have not figured out how to do that. So, thinking that my router was not able to handle the broadband needed to connect to the refrig and my XBOX I went out today to purchase another router. I almost purchased the same router as I had before. Come to find out, the router that I had, which was on sale the cheapoo guy in me, was not a very good router. If your in the market for a new router I would not recommend the Linksys WRT54G model. For a wired network it is great. But, for a wireless network it has issues. I switched over to the Linksys WRT54Gs. I have not had any problems as of yet. My wife has hooked up the refrig already and when the kids go to bed I will hook up the XBOX. I still need to figure out the media center junk. Vista headache next..

Anyways, I wish I could show you all the other linksys devices that I have gone through in the last 4 years. In front of me now I have the linksys router BEFSR41. This tropper last for a while. I was able to get 3 years out of that one. But it finally burned out on last year. Then there is the wireless b router BEFW11S4. This baby did not work out of the box. I never got any time on this one. Last but not least the Wireless G router WRT54G. It still works but has a sucky wireless network. It is also on sale at this present time at bestbuy. Don't get it... Spend a little more money and get a better router that will last a little longer than that one.
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kenneth_Elliott

Internet Speed Test

2008-03-12T21:22:00.000-07:00

The Internet has changed our life entirely. This new technology has become a major element which influences all that we do at work and at home. Hence we can say that our entire activity depends on the Internet speed, because according to this we can spend more or less time to accomplish what we intended to do. Since we live in a speedy century, we all are looking for a very high Internet speed, but this is not always an easy deal.

The first step is to learn how to find out what your Internet speed is. The Internet speed is determined by 2 components: the download rate and the upload rate of data which are usually measured in Kilobits per second. The download speed is the most important because we usually transfer files from Internet to our computer, but there are cases when we need a high upload speed.

We may test our internet speed in the manual way, by calculating the time our computer needs to transfer a file of a known size, but this is the old method.

The new way to determine our internet speed is to access a service that allows us to run a test through their servers by sending our computer an information packet which our computer will send it back to them. In this way the site measures the time our computer needed to download and upload the information packet and informs us the internet speed of our bandwidth.

By this test we measure the actual speed of the Internet and in the same time the real internet speedof our access to the internet. The actual speed limit is the amount of useful data that your internet connection can transmit and receive in a second. On the other side, the real internet speed includes also non-significant information. But when we make the test, only the actual speed is measured, the real internet speed is not important in this calculation.

Now that we know what our internet speed is, let's see what we can do to improve it. The first solution is to install optimization software. If you have a Dial-Up connection and use Windows 98 or Me, click Start, Settings, and then Control Panel. Right click on the Modems icon and from Properties tab choose the General tab. Use the Maximum Speed Drop-Down menu to select 115200. If this setting causes your Modem to no longer connect, change it to 57600. Windows XP users should click Start, Control Panel and switch to classic view. Double-click the Phone and Modem options and choose the Modem tab. Change the maximum settings port speed to 115200 and if the Modem responds badly or not at all, change the speed to 57600.

Broadband users should think of using a tweak utility such as TCP Optimizer. After downloading the software we must run it and make a backup of our current settings. Save the backup, and follow the instructions in the software to optimize our broadband speed. Don't forget to click apply changes and click Yes if the software ask you to re-boot the computer.Now our computer should run faster. If the new settings do not satisfy you, return to the program and restore your back up settings. If you failed to make a backup, restore Windows default settings.

And the last solution would be to change your internet provider with a better and reliable one. We may choose from a large scale of opportunities. There is no reason to waste our time with a lazy internet speed when we can spend our precious time with a high-speed internet connection.
Article by Mary Prysler, visit his web site on internet speed test for more information on internet services, internet speed test, broadband internet and other high speed internet services http://theinternetspeed.blogspot.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Prysler

Usage & Technology-Broadband

2008-03-12T21:17:00.000-07:00

According to statistics released by the BBC during the summer of last year, nine out of ten users connect to the internet using a broadband connection.

The simple reason for this is that over the year's broadband has gotten cheaper and faster. Exactly how fast and how cheap your broadband package will be is influenced by a number of factors.

Availability and how exactly the broadband reaches your home will play a large role, with ADSL and cable being the most established methods of connection within the UK.

ADSL has proven considerably popular for home users and small businesses as it allows for far faster download speeds when compared to traditional dial-up services; ADSL is also "always on", meaning users don't need to dial in.

As its popularity has grown, so has the demand for faster download speeds, in response to this various new technologies are emerging such as ADSL2 and ADSL2+. These technological advancements will allow providers to offer download speeds of up to 24Mbps.

The other gripe users have with ADSL is the slow uploading speed, which is where SDSL comes in; as this allows for much faster upload speeds. This is particularly useful for businesses or those hosting websites; however, it does require a separate line.

The second major broadband technology is cable, with an estimated 45% of broadband users connecting to the internet this way. Its popularity is likely to be linked with its convenience, as providers often bundle broadband, TV and telephone services into one package.

The difference with cable is that it does not make use of your telephone line, but a cable and modem that is provided as part of package. Also, availability depends on whether or not a provider has cabled your street.
For the more remote user requiring broadband access, there is satellite broadband This broadband technology however, often works out considerably more expensive than ADSL and cable.

The Digital Utility

2008-03-12T19:29:00.001-07:00

In the end, as the story of the emperor's new clothes reminds us, somebody has to break the spell. In May 2003, Nicholas Carr cast himself in the naysayer's role by publishing an article titled "IT Doesn't Matter" in the Harvard Business Review. In 2004 he followed that with a book, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. Thereby, he aroused the ire of the good and the great in Silicon Valley and Redmond, WA.

For that, he won a little fame. Now he has a new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which will almost certainly influence a large audience. Carr persuasively argues that we're moving from the era of the personal computer to an age of utility computing--by which he means the expansion of grid computing, the distribution of computing and storage over the Internet, until it accounts for the bulk of what the human race does digitally. And he nicely marshals his historical analogies, detailing how electricity delivered over a grid supplanted the various power sources used during most of the 19th century. Many readers may find his conclusions unconvincingly dark. I think he could have borne in mind the old joke: predicting is hard, especially about the future. That said, I also suspect he's right to suggest that in a decade or so, many things we now believe permanent will have disappeared.

Given that Carr's conclusions are controversial, it's helpful to trace his thesis in full. In "IT Doesn't Matter," he argued that as industries mature, the products or services they supply become commodities that compete on price alone. The information technology industry, he continued, had arrived at that phase: for most companies that did not themselves develop and sell IT, information technology offered no competitive advantage and was just another cost of doing business. It wasn't hard to find evidence for Carr's contention. A business school truism since Clayton Christensen's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail is that you can tell a sector has been commodified when competition has created a "performance oversupply," where almost any product differentiation is unwanted. And indeed, by sometime before the 20th century's end, the vast majority of PCs had far more processing and storage capacity than their users needed for the most common tasks: e-mail, Web browsing, word processing. In fact, Carr pointed out, 70 percent of a typical Windows network's storage capacity went unused.

By 2000, Carr claimed, close to 50 percent of American companies' annual capital expenditures went to IT: every year, U.S. businesses acquired more than 100 million new PCs. The biggest IT-associated business risk that companies faced, he concluded, was overspending. It was time for businesses to "explore cheaper solutions, including open-source applications and bare-bones network PCs," he argued. "If a company needs evidence of the kind of money that might be saved, it need only look at Microsoft's profit margin."

The Digital Utility

2008-03-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

Probabilistic Chips

2008-03-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

Krishna Palem is a heretic. In the world of microchips, precision and perfection have always been imperative. Every step of the fabrication process involves testing and retesting and is aimed at ensuring that every chip calculates the exact answer every time. But Palem, a professor of computing at Rice University, believes that a little error can be a good thing.

Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. His concept carries the daunting moniker "probabilistic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology"--PCMOS for short. Palem's premise is that for many applications--in particular those like audio or video processing, where the final result isn't a number--maximum precision is unnecessary. Instead, chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

Every calculation done by a microchip depends on its transistors' registering either a 1 or a 0 as electrons flow through them in response to an applied voltage. But electrons move constantly, producing electrical "noise." In order to overcome noise and ensure that their transistors register the correct values, most chips run at a relatively high voltage. Palem's idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip--specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits, such as the 3 in the number 21,693. The resulting decrease in signal-to-noise ratio means those circuits would occasionally arrive at the wrong answer, but engineers can calculate the probability of getting the right answer for any specific voltage. "Relaxing the probability of correctness even a little bit can produce significant savings in energy," Palem says.

Within a few years, chips using such designs could boost battery life in mobile devices such as music players and cell phones. But in a decade or so, Palem's ideas could have a much larger impact. By then, silicon transistors will be so small that engineers won't be able to precisely control their behavior: the transistors will be inherently probabilistic. Palem's techniques could then become important to the continuation of Moore's Law, the exponential increase in transistor density--and thus in computing power--that has persisted for four decades.

When Palem began working on the idea around 2002, skepticism about the principles behind PCMOS was "pretty universal," he says. That changed in 2006. He and his students simulated a PCMOS circuit that would be part of a chip for processing video, such as streaming video in a cell phone, and compared it with the performance of existing chips. They presented the work at a technical conference, and in a show of hands, much of the audience couldn't discern any difference in picture quality.

Tiny Etch-a-Sketch

2008-03-12T19:21:00.001-07:00

It may be the world's tiniest Etch-a-Sketch. Researchers have demonstrated a new technique that could be used to create rewritable logic circuits and denser computer memory. Using an atomic force microscope (AFM), the researchers were able to draw nano-sized wires and dots that could be repeatedly erased and written.

Led by Jeremy Levy of the University of Pittsburgh, the researchers used an AFM tip like a pencil, drawing electrically conductive paths--which act like metallic wires--on a special material. The lines were as thin as three nanometers, making them considerably narrower than the lines that can be drawn using electron beam lithography--one of the most precise techniques for etching devices out of silicon.

The researchers used a two-layer material developed by Jochen Mannhart's group at the University of Ausberg, in Germany. The base is made of a strontium titanate crystal, with a thin layer of lanthanum aluminate on top. The interface between the two materials can be switched from insulating to conducting by applying a voltage across the interface.

Levy and Mannhart's groups collaborated on a project to draw fine conductive lines at the interface by probing the surface of the material with an AFM, which has a nanoscale tip that can apply a voltage across a small area. The lines the groups drew were both fine and long; their length was limited only by how far the AFM tip would scan.

Levy and his colleagues showed that reversing the voltage and dragging the AFM tip across a wire severed it, breaking the conduction. By measuring how far they had to drag the tip to sever the wire, they were able to estimate the wire's breadth. Exposing the material to blue light also erased all the wires drawn in the material.

"The fact that it is rewritable is very important," says Harold Hwang of the University of Tokyo, in Japan, who was not involved in the new study. "In a conventional semiconductor device, once you fabricate the device, that's it."

Being able to draw these conductive patterns could allow researchers to create circuits that can be reconfigured on the fly, Levy says. The researchers also showed that the wires might be able to work as transistors. Although it's hard to imagine them competing head-on with the well-developed techniques for silicon chips, Levy says, the technique could be used for high-density memory.

By sending a voltage pulse through the AFM tip, "we could write isolated islands at very small scales, on the order of a couple nanometers," Levy says. "It's about 100 times higher density than what you can do with magnetic materials," the basis for today's data storage.

Levy finds it "exciting" that the material can form conductive wires and transistors, and potentially store information. "Usually, these things are done with different materials, completely different platforms. But here, it's all in the same material." Also, researchers have had some success growing strontium titanate on top of silicon, Levy says, so it could be possible to integrate the new material with existing silicon chips.

The study, which was recently published in Nature Materials, found that the wires and dots stayed in their state for at least 24 hours. Levy thinks that they will last much longer and is currently testing this theory.

"The sort of things they're doing with the scanning probes in this paper are relatively straightforward," says Stephen Streiffer of Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois. He adds that researchers should be able to use arrays of AFM tips on these materials to draw multiple wires and dots at once.

Adaptable Polymer Inspired by Sea Cucumbers

2008-03-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Scientists at Case Western University have made a biopolymer that switches rapidly between rigid and flexible states, using material inspired by sea cucumbers. The new material softens in the presence of a water-based solvent, and it stiffens back up as the solvent evaporates. Christoph Weder, lead researcher and professor of macromolecular science and engineering, says that such a material may be useful in the design of implantable electrodes able to record brain activity over long stretches of time, with minimal scarring compared with conventional electrodes.

One of the challenges facing researchers developing neural implants to help paralyzed patients is that the electrodes are typically made of metal. Such brittle and stiff material can cause tissue damage over time. (See "Stretchable Electronic Skin.") Indeed, over a couple of months, the electrode's hard exterior rubs against soft brain matter, causing scar tissue to form and significantly decreasing the electrode's recording ability. "We need a new generation of electrodes that are different than the usual metal electrodes that produce all sorts of damage after a while and don't work anymore," says MIT Institute Professor Emilio Bizzi, who was not involved in the study.

To overcome this problem, Weder and his colleagues looked for biocompatible materials that could transform from rigid to flexible states, and they found an ideal model in the sea cucumber. As a sea cucumber maneuvers its way across the ocean floor, its pliable structure makes it easy to worm through cracks and crevices. At the first sign of danger, its skin stiffens, forming a rigid armor against likely predators. Researchers have found that the sea cucumber's skin is composed of an ultrafine network of cellulose fibers, or "whiskers." In defensive mode, surrounding cells release molecules that cause the whiskers to bind together, forming a rigid shield. In a relaxed state, other cells release plasticizing proteins, loosening fibers and making the skin pliable.

Weder's team isolated stiff cellulose fibers from the mantles of tunicates, sea creatures with skin similar to that of sea cucumbers. The researchers then combined the fibers with a rubbery polymer mixture. The fibers formed a uniform matrix throughout, reinforcing the softer polymer material. These intersecting points hold the network together, creating an inflexible material. "It's like a three-dimensional web in which these nanofibers overlap at certain points, and wherever they overlap, they stick to each other," says Weder.

He says that cellulose fibers are particularly good at binding with each other because they contain many hydroxyl groups on their surface. In the absence of any other hydrogen-containing molecule, these hydroxyl groups stick together, forming a fibrous web. In order to break the fiber bonds and loosen the web, Weder's team injected a water-based solvent into the material that contained competitive hydrogen groups. In response, cellulose fibers decoupled as their hydrogen groups combined with the water solution. Alternately, as water evaporated from the mixture, fibers reconnected, becoming stiff again.

Offline Web Applications

2008-03-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

Web-based computer programs, unlike their desktop counterparts, are always up to date and are instantly available, no matter where the user is or what operating system she's running. That's why cloud computing--so called because it involves software that resides in the "clouds" of the Internet--has caused a "tidal shift in how people are actually creating software," says Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe Systems. (For a review of Nicholas Carr's new book on cloud computing, see "The Digital Utility.") But cloud computing has drawbacks: users give up the ability to save data to their own hard drives, to drag and drop items between applications, and to receive notifications, such as appointment reminders, when the browser window is closed.

So while many companies have rushed to send users to the clouds, Lynch and his team have been planning the return trip. With the system they're developing, the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), programmers can use Web technologies to build desktop applications that people can run online or off.

The project is rooted in Lynch's recognition of both the benefits and the limitations of the move from desktop to Web. He envisioned hybrid applications that would allow users to take simultaneous advantage of the Internet and their own machines' capabilities. Lynch's team started work on the concept in 2002 and launched AIR in beta last June.

AIR is a "runtime environment," an extra layer of software that allows the same program to run on different operating systems and hardware. (Java is another example.) With AIR, developers can use Web technologies such as HTML and Flash to write software for the desktop. Users won't have to seek out AIR to enjoy its benefits; they'll be prompted to download it along with the first AIR applications they want to use.

The Adobe team chose to base the system on HTML and Flash for several reasons, Lynch says. First, it makes it easy for desktop applications to swap content with websites: for example, information from a website can be pulled into an AIR application with its formatting intact. Second, it should simplify development, encouraging a broader range of applications. Programmers can easily rebuild existing Web applications to work on the desktop. And in the same way that Web-based applications can be built once and will then run on any device with a browser, an application built on AIR will run on any machine that has AIR installed. (Adobe currently offers versions for Windows and Macintosh and is developing versions for Linux and mobile devices.)

Adobe is already working with partners to demonstrate AIR's capabilities. One example: the popular auction site eBay has released a beta AIR-based application called eBay Desktop. Designed to improve the customer's bidding experience, the application itself retrieves and displays content about eBay auctions rather than relying on a browser. It also takes advantage of the processing power of the user's computer to provide search tools more powerful than those on the website. For example, it can scan search results for related keywords--a process that product manager Alan Lewis says works better on the desktop because the application can store and quickly access lots of relevant information on the user's computer. The program also uses desktop alerts to notify users when someone bids on auctions they are following. AIR enabled the company to create a customized user interface, without constraints imposed by the browser's design and controls.

Lynch says that AIR was a response to the Web's evolution into a more interactive medium. The browser, he notes, was created for "the Web of pages"; while developers have stretched what can be done with it, Lynch sees the need for an interface more appropriate to the Web of software that people use today. AIR, he hopes, will be just that.

The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 Technology Review presents its annual list of the 10 most exciting technologies.

2008-03-12T03:24:00.000-07:00

Each year, Technology Review publishes its list of 10 emerging technologies that its editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, and more. Two of the technologies--cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers--are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five--surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications--represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three--graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power--are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new.

Dual Card Ponsel Micxon

2008-03-12T03:23:00.000-07:00

Produsen ponsel asal Singapura, Micxon Mobile Communication, baru saja merilis tiga ponsel berfitur kartu ganda (dual card) pertamanya di Indonesia. Pasar kelas menengah pun jadi sasaran utamanya.

"Alasan kami membidik segmen menengah karena di level itulah ceruk pasar pengguna ponsel yang paling besar berada," tutur Associate Director Micxon Mobile, Wijaya Dinata Kurnia, usai peluncuran tiga seri ponsel Micxon di Front Row Senayan, Jakarta, Rabu (12/3/2008).

Bekerjasama dengan distributor ponsel Telesindo, Micxon mulai akhir Februari 2008 lalu mulai memasarkan tiga ponselnya di pasaran dengan harga berkisar Rp 1,5 juta hingga Rp 2 juta. Seluruh ponsel yang dirilis memiliki fitur kartu SIM ganda yang bisa aktif secara bersamaan.

Wijaya enggan menuturkan target penjualan yang dipatok untuk ketiga seri ponsel tersebut. Namun, ia mengaku optimistis produknya dapat diterima pasar dengan baik karena beragam fitur yang ditawarkan.

Tiga seri ponsel yang telah diluncurkan Micxon ialah MTV-800, M-88, dan S-600. Ketiga ponsel tersebut hadir dengan desain konsep candybar stylish dan sporty. MTV-800 dan S-600 berteknologi dual card GSM+GSM (dual on), dan khusus MTV-800 memiliki TV tuner. Sedangkan M-88 berteknologi dual card GSM+CDMA, yang juga aktif bersamaan.

Download DVD Movies Online

2008-03-12T03:18:00.001-07:00

Are you one of the thousands of people that are trying to find a way to save money when it comes to buying movies? There is good news, there are now places that will allow you to download dvd movies online. Not only can you download movies but you are also able to burn them to a disk and play them not only on your computer but any DVD player as well.

There are many ways to get dvd quality movies online...however, like with anything else that you download there are certain things that you need to keep in mind when choosing a movie download site. Here are the top three things to look for when looking for a great dvd download site.

1. Content - Does the site that your looking at have a large amount of content? Do they offer all of the new releases? The site you choose is only as good as its content. There are many sites online to get your movie downloads from but, few of them constantly update their database to include all of the newly released titles.

2. Legal - Is the site operating under the letter of the law? This is always an important factor to consider when downloading any type of media from the internet. While you might think that it doesn't matter, there are organizations that keep track of who is downloading what. If you are not careful you very well could end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit.

3. Virus Free - Listen, if the site even mentions the word TORRENT downloads...run, and run fast. It has been my experience that these sites are notorious for having more files infected with malicious code than anything that I've ever seen. If you have ever gotten a virus before you know exactly what I am talking about...hours of trying to clean your PC and lots of money out the window on the latest anti-virus software.

I have found it is a safe practice to download from sites that contain "contact us" information as well as a detailed frequently asked questions section. If they are willing to give you the information to contact them should there be any problems chances are they are legitimate. The same goes with the FAQ. It is very easy to find a great site to download dvd movies online from if you are careful when you make your selection and pay attention to the three things that I've outlines above.
Click the link for a complete list of the absolute best sites that I have found to DOWNLOAD MOVIES ONLINE

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The Secret of Apple Design The inside (sort of) story of why Apple's industrial-design machine has been so successful.

2008-03-12T03:17:00.001-07:00

Apple, Inc. has made an art of not talking about its products. Fans, journalists, and rumormongers who love it or love to hate it have long had to practice a sort of Kremlinology to gather the merest hints as to what is coming next out of Cupertino.

A case in point is this story, which was to be about the iPhone--about how an innovative and gorgeous piece of technology was conceived, designed, and produced by the vaunted industrial-design team at Apple. Along the way, it would address the larger question of how one company can so consistently excel at making products that become icons, win design awards, and inspire customers.

But the omerta that prevails at Apple proved too strong. Company representatives declined to speak with me, and sources only tangentially engaged with the industrial-design process said that they could not talk either. When I asked Paul Kunkel, author of the 1997 book AppleDesign, for tips on obtaining interviews, he laughed and said, "Go sit outside the design-group offices with a pizza." What follows is as clear a picture of the Apple design process as we could get.

Designers tend to speak about the "genetic code" of products and companies. Pontiacs and BMWs, for example, can be recognized but also distinguished from each other by their split grilles. In some products, such distinctive characteristics serve mainly to aid brand recognition. But in complex objects such as computers, they can also signal operational familiarity: a customer who knows how to use product A will be able to use product B.

To whatever degree Apple can be said to make products with a distinctive genetic code, they can also be said to have inherited most of their traits from a single parent: founder Steve Jobs. Jobs left the company in 1985 and didn't return until 1997. Nonetheless, according to many who have worked at Apple, sometimes in close proximity to Jobs, it was largely he who established the company's emphasis on industrial design. Indeed, some would say that he made design a higher priority than technology.

Mark Rolston bears the title of senior vice president of creative at Frog Design, a product-design and strategic-branding firm that worked closely with Apple from 1982 to 1988. (Rolston did not work directly on any projects with Apple.) The company's projects have ranged widely: retail display systems for Victoria's Secret; websites for Microsoft, Dell, and Yahoo; webcams for Logitech. In publicity pictures, Rolston sports a T-shirt and an indie-rock mop of shaggy blond hair that bespeak his years in Austin, TX.

Even in the early 1980s, Rolston says, "Jobs wanted to elevate Apple by using design." Jobs, he says, not only cared personally about design but saw that it could be a way to differentiate his company's products from the PCs of the day, which often looked little evolved from hobbyist boxes. Ken Campbell, a codesigner of the Apple Lisa, was quoted in Kunkel's AppleDesign as saying that Jobs wanted Apple to be what Olivetti was in the 1970s: "an undisputed leader in industrial design."

Through much of 1982 and into early 1983, Jobs searched for a sympathetic design partner; he finally found one in Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design. Together, the two companies developed the "Snow White" design language that was meant to give Apple's products a coherent visual vocabulary, the appearance of being related.

Free Ipod Video - Learn To Download And Load Free Ipod Videos

2008-03-12T03:15:00.000-07:00

To Ipod owners the ipod is one of the greatest creations known to technology. It plays videos, music, games and so much more. With one single ipod you are able to hold more videos than you more than likely own in your whole DVD collection. So whats the point in having one if you cant fill it up right? Well, that gets alot easier when you are able to find Free Ipod Videos. Believe it or not there are plenty of resources available to you. Its important that you are careful when choosing how to get Ipod media though.

I for one scoured the net to find a place to download ipod media and was disappointed and tortured along the way. I would find just the Movie I wanted to download to my ipod only to find that the file was infected with a virus and there I would be running my ipod to best buy to be serviced. My favorite was when I would find the file I was looking for and after downloading it I would find out it was a file that someone uploaded with one name when it reality it was a south park skit or something along those lines.

Always beware of the sites that you download from. There is more than one site or network out there that is putting virus infected files to be downloaded on purpose. For whatever reason there are many malicious individuals on the net with the sole purpose of spreading viruses. So, while you want to download Free Ipod Videos it is always wise to use a site that is recommended to you. Let somebody elses ipod find out weather the site is reliable or not.

Many sites out there will charge you a per download fee or maybe even force you to pay a monthly membership fee to access their files. To me this is not a good option because either way you are still spending your hard earned money on loading your ipod. The amount of money that families around the world spent over the past couple years to load their ipods is surely a staggering number.

What if there was a better option to download Free Ipod Videos? What if there was a couple sites out there that would allow you to download an unlimited amount of content? What if they guarenteed that all of their content was virus free and that you could download to your hearts content? If there were a couple of sites like this more than likely they would take you hours to find and you would be spending countess hours searching the net for a needle in a haystack right?

Lucky for you and everyone else I've done the grunt work for you. After many failed attempt at downloading free ipod videos I have found a couple sites which are 100% virus free and have the best content available to download ipod files on the internet. Not only do these sites let you download music but they also provide all of the software and instructions that you will need to get the content to your ipod so you can rock your heart out. If videos are not enough for you they also have an unlimited amount of all types of ipod media.

To read updated reviews and to get other information about Free Ipod Videos click this link for indepth information IPOD DOWNLOAD SITES
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Try Before Your Buy - Computer Laptop Rental Option

2008-03-12T03:13:00.000-07:00

Even Grandmothers Can Do It!

There may still be a few of you out there who are apprehensive of purchasing a laptop computer either because of cost or lack of knowledge. But with today's laptop computer being more affordable and the technology making them easier to use, you need not be. In just a minimal amount of time, with the all the new user-friendly prompts, one could become another computer geek. There is even a computer laptop rental option for those who don't want to spend the money until they have tried to navigate around a computer on their own. Being a grandmother, with my children and grandchildren living and traveling to various parts of the world, I found it necessary to overcome my fear.

The hardest part of my introduction to the laptop computer was to learn how to hook up and manipulate an external mouse, punch a few buttons on the keyboard, and basically, to just turn the machine on. It's hard for some folks to believe, but the computers of this generation almost run themselves! Read on to discover for yourself just how little computer knowledge most of these machines actually require.

Even being completely new to the computer I was able to use it without even knowing what the mouse was for or how to use it. I went the computer laptop rental route prior to the purchase a computer. I found one that was set up to operate on voice command. Voice command software allows users to tell a computer what to do and the computer responds by fulfilling the user's commands. Although it's pretty new and still under development, voice directed technology has already infiltrated consumer service related systems.

Have you ever paid a bill by phone? Instead of speaking to a human being, chances are that you spoke to a computer that not only responded to what you said and followed the commands that you gave it, it also asked you for more information such as your full name or credit card number. In this case, a person (such as myself) operated a computer without even knowing it!

Does the computer novice still need more incentive to sit down with a laptop computer without knowing how to use one? Imagine a computer that is set up to operate on touch command. Actually, one does not have to imagine, it is already available and has been for several years. Touch command software allows users to literally touch objects on a monitor with their finger to tell the computer what to do. Known as "kiosks," these programs are already in use world wide at ATM machines, employment centers, and in health monitoring systems. Most people have used the ones at department stores when checking out wedding or baby gift registries. Neither a mouse or a keyboard is required. A computer user only needs to touch various boxes on a screen to input information onto the computer. The programming behind such technology is extensive and advanced, but to the end user, it makes the use of a laptop computer less intimidating and just plain easy. With a little research you may find a computer laptop rental available with this technology.

These illustrations are just a couple of example of how far computer technology has grown, and how far we have pushed "user-friendliness" to its limit. So much of today's software is designed to accommodate the new laptop computer user. Anyone can get connected to the Internet wirelessly, send an email message, and download an MP3 file within the first few hours of purchasing a personal PC or possibly using a computer laptop rental. Don't be afraid to take the plunge, even a grandmother like me is able to go online, access her e-mail and print photos!
Find the latest information on laptops visit Cheapest Laptop as well as Computer Laptop Rental.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Swanson

How To Make Your Computer Faster

2008-03-12T03:09:00.000-07:00

It's kind of a law of nature: your computer slows down over time even though nothing seems to have changed.

So how to make your computer faster again without buying a new machine?

Firstly, check how much memory your machine has. Windows always has liked to use lots of memory and modern operating systems like XP and Vista are especially greedy. If your machine has less than 2Gb of RAM memory, it's time to treat it and you to more.

Upgrading your memory to this level will make near enough everything on your computer run faster. If Windows doesn't have enough memory to work with, it will use space on your hard disk as an alternative. But hard disks are lots, lots slower than regular memory.

A memory upgrade is simple enough to do yourself - there are plenty of tutorials online to show you how - or your local computer store will be happy to help you for a small fee. The whole operation should be over quickly - it will probably take you longer to unscrew the screws on the case than it will to upgrade the RAM.

If it's only print jobs that are running slow, do the same treatment for your printer if it's possible. Color lasers especially will appreciate any extra memory you give them and will allow Windows to pass them across more of the printing job, freeing up your machine for other tasks.

If that still doesn't do enough to make your computer faster, there are other things you can try as well.
Find out more ways to make your computer faster including simple software adjustments that should speed up your computer.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Trevor_Johnson

How To Save Time Online

2008-03-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest problems anyone faces online involves too much to do and not enough time to get it done! I'm not talking about the casual Internet user who jumps online as a form of entertainment to check email, use Skype, or watch YouTube videos. I'm referring to the ever-growing number of people who use the Internet for much of their business activities. If you fall into that category, the following tips will easily help you save considerable time online.

Filter Email - Filtering email rates #1 on your time-saving list. In virtually every survey ever done on the subject, email wins hands-down as the #1 most time-consuming activity. To save time, you should separate your personal and business email with separate accounts and check the personal account once a day (saves 10 minutes per day). You should also use a commercial spam filter such as Spamarrest.com to cut down on the spam you must wade through to find messages that do need your attention (saves 15 to 30 minutes per day).

Password Organizers - Using a password manager like Roboform.com or KeePass.info (free) cuts down on time spent searching your desk or email program looking for usernames and passwords for accounts you don't use very often. Secure and immediate access to all your passwords will save you at least 10 to 15 minutes per day.

Unsubscribe - Get off the lists of publications you either don't read or don't get maximum value for time spent. Casual skimming of even one email newsletter or ezine eats up several minutes of your day each time you do it. Drop off 3 email lists and you'll save yourself at least 15 minutes per day.

Track Your Time - Flitting from task to task like a rabbit with ADD robs you of any real chance to get things done. Increase your focus on specific tasks by using an egg timer to get yourself 100% focused for a specific chunk of time. Google the phrase "free egg timer software" to find a timer that runs on your desktop. While the egg timer ticks, nothing else but the current task at hand matters. This technique will net you at least 30 extra minutes of wasted time saved each day.

Pen and Paper - Always operate with a list of prioritized tasks so you know what you should work on at any given moment. A simple, prioritized list on a piece of "real" paper will reclaim at least 10 minutes per day in wasted time.

Just Say "No" - Distractions abound on the Internet. New products, new services, new videos, new jokes, new distractions come at us on a minute-by-minute basis. Yet those distractions rob us of the precious time we desperately need to accomplish our own objectives. If something new comes along, let it sit for a day, or even just an hour, and then make a decision whether or not to give it your time. This will easily save you at least 15 to 20 minutes a day in lost time.

My best advice involves operating with a strong purpose when doing anything online. I've shown you simple strategies here to save massive amounts of time every day. If you operate with a strong purpose, you'll save even more. Why? Because a strong purpose helps you filter out any time-wasting activities that won't get you where you want to go.
Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr^e articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website, affiliate links, or blogs... Need MORE TRAFFIC to your website or affiliate links? "Turn Words Into Traffic" reveals the secrets for driving Thousands of NEW visitors to your website or affiliate links... without spending a dime on advertising! Click Here> http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.com

Copyright (c) 2008 Jim Edwards

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The HD DVD War Is Over - Blue-Ray Prevails

2008-03-12T03:06:00.000-07:00

The high definition DVD war is over. The challenger has thrown in the towel and the victors arm is held aloft.

The announcement by Toshiba that its HD DVD format was to be abandoned has confirmed expectations that Sony's more expensive BLUE ray solution would prevail.

The two rival systems have been battling for two years now, initially racing neck and neck. The rot set in when Warner Brothers backed Blu-ray and said it would only issue films in that format in future.

One by one other content providers and retailers have added their vote for the Sony option.

The final nail in the HD DVD coffin appears to have been Wal-Marts decision to phase it out of their stores, announced earlier this month.

One hey reason for Sony getting the edge has been its development of Blu-Ray in its own Playstation 3, which means it had many more drives installed and working that its rivals.

As it makes its way to the failed formats Museums, to line up along-side that most famous exhibit, Betamax, those who have harvested in their own HD DVD player are left high and dry.

The one million people who bought one in good faith will have good reason to be miffed. Although prices came down from an initial almost £500 to £150, even that is a lot of money to have tied up in a player for which very few DVDs will now arrive on the shelves.

The key question today concerns plans for HD DVD units sitting in warehouses and on retail shelves. Will they be written off, or will they be advertised as bargains as sold to unsuspecting buyers? It should be the former, for they became obsolete last week - 25 February 2008.
David is an IT Consultant and Website Designer Birmingham providing computer Tips and Tricks, in addition, for all your Website Designer's Services please may i invite you to visit my website Veritas Webdesigns for further information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Cant

5 Easy Tips To Keep Your Computer Running Smooth And Safe

2008-03-12T03:05:00.000-07:00

There are various ways to streamline computer performance and functionality. I will show you five very helpful methods that I have learned in the field to help keep your computer running great. Some are free but there are some which will require a small investment which is well worth the cost. I have provided some links at the bottom of this article to help you decide what tools to invest in. This article is for Windows 2000/XP users only.

1. Cleanup your startup menu- This is perhaps the fastest way to improve overall performance and startup speed. To do this, go to the run command line in the start menu and type in msconfig. Please ONLY use the startup tab at the top!! Go through the list of startup programs and disable messengers, updaters, and applications that are not used at all times ie. (quick time task, winzip, Ituneshelper). The rule of thumb here is disable what you know you don't need and don't touch anything you do not understand or recognize, they are most likely drivers and system files.

2. Run a disk defragment- If you notice that your applications are taking a long time to load or are not running as smooth as your used to run a disk defragment. This will basically organize your hard drive to run more efficiently. To run, go to your start menu, program files, accessories, system tools, Disk Defragmenter. Click the analyze button to see if you need to defragment and if you do, click the defragment button. Please note, while running this utility you should not make any system changes including saving and deleting files, installing and/or uninstalling programs or moving files on your hard drive. It is best to just start it and let it run. It can take up to 5 hours depending on the size of the drive and the amount of fragmentation in the volume. This is easiest to start before you go to bed.

3. Use anti-virus- I can't stress this enough, if you are on the internet you need anti-virus. Not only will it protect you from attacks but it will actively scan any files you open and will stop most viruses BEFORE they infect you computer. You will have to purchase this for your computer and I have provided some helpful links to good anti-virus programs. These should be set to be running at all times through the settings of the anti-virus program and updated weekly if not daily.

4. Run spy-bot scans regularly- Spy bots are not the same as viruses. A virus is aimed to infect and deter your computer from running correctly. Spy bots can steal your information, passwords, logins, and are typically malicious in intent. I consider these more dangerous than viruses because they can literally steal your identity without you knowing it and open the door to automatically download viruses to your computer. I have also provided links for effective spy bot removal tools. These should be run twice a month.

5. Registry Cleaners- A little known tool for making a huge performance increase to your computer is running a registry cleaner regularly. Basically what these do is remove any unnecessary piece of your registry left behind from either updating your software, removing a program or deleting program directories. By doing this it will help your computer find the correct paths it needs to run the commands given to it and help avoid "confusion" by removing "broken pieces" in the registry.
Branden DiLorenzo