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Apple is the biggest consumer electronics company in the world, without a doubt. No other company has captured the public’s fascination the way Apple has. Over the years it has transformed into more than just a company or corporation, but for many it has become a representation of a lifestyle or culture, and a status symbol complete with a larger fan base than most pop stars.


The company is known just as much for its veil of secrecy and ability to get the Internet buzzing with rumors, as it is for the actual products. You’re probably in on the gossip, but there are likely a few things you don’t know about Apple.

So read on for the origins of product names, factoids about the Apple logo, what Wozniak sold to finance the Apple I, and more wonders dug up from the archives of Apple’s past.


The First iPod Had A Secret Easter Egg

Apple’s first iPod came with a little secret, an Easter egg,  in the form of a game that could be accessed if you knew the right combination of buttons to press.

How to find the game is described in Nick Triano’s early 2002 Geek.com review of the iPod (memorable quote: “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it will change the way you listen to music”). “Go to the ‘About’ menu, hold down the center button for about three seconds, and you’ll get a Breakout (Pong) game to play while you listen.”

Breakout, the hidden game itself, is notable in Apple’s history as it was a product that both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked on together at Atari.


The Name “iPod” Was Inspired By 2001: A Space Odyssey

Clever copywriter Vinnie Chieco is credited with coming up with the iPod name as part of a team assembled by Jobs to create a consumer-friendly moniker for the new device.

The story goes that Jobs had already decided the MP3 player’s tag-line was to be “1,000 songs in your pocket,” which left naming options wide open since it wouldn’t have to explicitly refer something music related.

“As soon as I saw the white iPod, I thought 2001,” Chieco told Wired in 2006. “Open the pod bay door, Hal! Then it was just a matter of adding the ‘i’ prefix, as in ‘iMac.’”

Of course, Hal has another place in Apple history, in the sinister Y2K warning ad that Apple aired to advertise the fact that Macs would not implode with the whole 2000 switchover, unlike those pesky PCs people insisted on using.


Apple Made the First Mass-Market Color Digital Camera

Back in 1994, Apple actually launched the first mass-market color digital camera in the U.S. The Apple QuickTake 100 could snap an amazing eight photographs and connected to a Mac via a serial cable.

It cost $749, which is about the equivalent of $1,000 today, which seems ridiculous for a camera boasting less than one megapixel resolution and no digital display.

The QuickTake line expanded to two more models before Steve Jobs shut it down in 1997 when he returned to the helm at Apple and streamlined its product line.


The Name “Macintosh” Was Inspired by an Apple

It’s often cited that the Apple Lisa was named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, but where did the name “Macintosh” come from? Apple employee Jef Raskin is responsible for coining the machine after his favorite variety of apple, smartly tying the whole fruit theme together.

Macintosh was just a code-name, and Steve Jobs is said to have tried to change the project’s name to “Bicycle” while the McIntosh-loving staffer was out of office. But Raskin clearly knew a good name when he coined it, as Macintosh just had too much staying power and stuck right to the end of the product cycle.


Apple Invented the “Dogcow”


Ever heard of “Dogcow?” Early Apple users probably have, as she — yes she — was included in the Cairo font as part of the original Macintosh. After the Cairo font was discontinued, Dogcow lived on with LaserWriter Driver 4.0 and then became a sort of mascot for the Apple tech staff.

Designed by Susan Kare, Clarus — Dogcow’s given name — makes a “moof” sound and was found on all versions of the Mac operating system until OS X. In the late 1980s, she surged in popularity and started to be used by other developer groups — even Microsoft once used Dogcow in an advertisement.

As you could guess, Apple was none to fond of this, and the tech staff decided to write a Technical Note to stop the misuse. Later on, Technical Note #31 was included on the first Apple Developer CDs as an Easter egg, and Apple even registered trademarks for both Clarus the Dogcow, and her “moof” sound.


Wozniak Sold His Scientific Calculator to Raise Capital

In order to raise enough money to buy parts and build the first few orders of the Apple I, Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak, then an HP employee, sold his Hewlett-Packard 65 scientific calculator for$500.

Those born after 1990 might be surprised that a mere calculator would raise any kind of capital, but back in 1976, a scientific calculator cost as much as a laptop does today, and the HP-65 was in fact marketed as “the smallest programmable computer ever.”

Wozniak got a decent price considering it retailed for $795, and we imagine any calculator in his possession would have been more than fairly well used. We wonder if the buyer knew he was getting a piece of computing history — just imagine how much that calculator would fetch on eBay today.


The First Apple Logo Featured Isaac Newton


Although the now-retro rainbow logo is arguably Apple’s most well known, the very first Apple logo featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, with an apple about to hit his head. (Legend has it that he was literally hit on the head with an apple and that led to the concept of gravity.)

The Newton logo was designed by the lesser-known Apple founder Ronald Wayne (the guy who sold his stake — that today would be worth $22 billion — to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for $800 – ouch!) and was only used briefly in 1976, since its high level of detail didn’t really show up that well when shrunk down and stuck on a product.

The rainbow apple, designed by Rob Janoff, replaced Sir Isaac and remained the symbol of the company for many years until the simpler monochromatic apple logo was introduced in 1998.



Technology in movies is evolving at a rapid rate which can be seen in the movies like avatar, inception etc. Film makers also prefer to target tech audiences nowadays, so that they get most out of their films. Here is a list(Not Sorted) of 10 movies which made use of fantastic technology.



10. 2001: A Space Odyssey

After 5 years of development A Space Odyessy was released in 1968 but wasn’t a hit at that time. A few decades later, it is considered one of the most influential and important films in modern history.The movie shaped how computers and the overarching ideas of technology would be portrayed in cinema.It encapsulates the wonder of technology and raises questions about how machines intersect with our lives.
The film had a tremendous amount of influence on films like WALL-E and TRON: Legacy.



9. Minority Report

Even today, Minority Report continues to influence the technology we use and develop. What made Minority Report so striking in 2002 was its realistic and reasonable projection of how the world would look in 2054. From tablets with instantly changing/updating content, to touch- and motion-based UI controls, to stores that greet you by name and ask about your last purchase, seems unreasonable.
Filmmaker worked with technology innovators and researchers to create this film and design its interface. It’s impossible to deny the influence Minority Report has had on consumer electronics and industrial design in general.

8. Collapsus

Collapsus movie is an exploration of the imminent energy transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. What makes the film an the entire project is the way in which the material is created and brought together.

7. WALL-E

WALL-E is a story of a lonely, forgotten robot who loves Hello, Dolly! and manages to find love  and life. 
Its story is thought-provoking, especially in the context of how technology can make things easier, but also make living less of an experience. The visuals of the movie are very impressive indeed.

6. We Live in Public

In an award winning documentary, We Live in Public, profiles Josh Harris who was  a dot com millionaire from the Web 1.0. Harris, who the film bills as “the greatest Internet pioneer you have never heard of” was truly ahead of his time in his business plans for video and social communication over the Internet.
Harris was also ahead of his time when it came to living out his life in public. Long before Facebook, YouTube and Twitter made sharing personal photos, videos or missives commonplace, Harris was living out his life in avant-garde public displays and streaming that content online.
Harris also experienced the downside of living so publicly long before the privacy implications of Facebook became front page news.


5. Avatar

Not only is Avatar the most successful motion picture of all time, it is also one of the most technically impressive.
Using a 3D camera system, Avatar manages to toe the line between animation and live action in a way like never before. The visuals of the film, especially in 3D, go beyond what we can express in words. Avatar, like Star Wars before it, has set the tone for how technology will be used in film going forward.
 

4. Inception

We think Inception is one of the best films of the year. The film has many technical elements, but this is the sort of film that is more about the puzzle, rather than the gadgetry.
The visuals, the music and the overlying subject matter which the nature of the film necessitates, makes this one of the best science fiction thrillers to come out in years. 

3. Iron Man/Iron Man 2

One of the most impressive comic book films in recent years was Iron Man. It and its sequel Iron Man 2 manage to appeal to the die-hard comic book/tech geek, while still resonating with mainstream audiences.
In addition to that, Tony Stark and Stark Industries have some of the coolest gadgets around. In fact, aspects of the Stark character are purportedly based on a real tech titans.

2. The Social Network

When it was first announced that a “Facebook movie” was going into production, the world laughed out loud. When The Social Network was released, we stopped laughing.
Perhaps more than any other film to date, The Social Network effectively captures the experience of hacking code. The film is about much more than just the website Facebook, but by the same token, it still manages to effectively bring the online experience to the big screen in a way that accurately portrays the reality of the experience.

1. TRON: Legacy

When the original TRON was released in 1982, it was a breakthrough not only in how computers were portrayed on screen, but how computers and technology were used in the creation of motion picture.
Twenty-eight years later, the technical reception for TRON: Legacy is quite different. Combining not just a technical story, but also 3D visuals like Avatar and CGI motion-capture technology, this film is incredibly advanced.
It has been released on 17th Dec,2010.




 
 Facebook on Sunday introduced a redesign of its user profile pages in advance of an interview on the “60 Minutes” news show where CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the redesign.


The changes include a clustered listing of biographical information under the user name at the top of the page, including such details as the person’s job, hometown, relationship status, where they went to college, what languages they speak and birthdate. Beneath that will appear a set of the five most recent photos that a user allows to be posted at their profile page. A new sports category is listed under interests, where users can list their favorite sports, teams, and athletes.

Although in her taped interview with Zuckerberg, Lesley Stahl said that viewers of the show Sunday night were the first to see the redesign, the new look had actually debuted early Sunday morning in a promotional clip for the show at the CBS News website. The redesign was also announced later in the day at the Facebook blog by software engineer Josh Wiseman.

The TV interview focused much more on how Facebook came to be, its culture, issues related to users’ privacy, and its efforts to make inroads in the search market than on the redesign. Zuckerberg said that he and his Harvard University friends who created what became Facebook as a way to connect students there never imagined that their creation would “lead the whole Internet in this direction” of social networking. Stahl, who had interviewed him in the past, said that Zuckerberg is more relaxed now than he was then, even if he still seldom blinks.

A dozen designers worked on the redesign in a “war room” where a clock ticked down the time they had left to complete the update, according to the “60 Minutes” account, which showed the redesign using Zuckerberg’s page (he’s a Yankees fan, the new sports category reveals about his baseball interests).

The revamping of profile pages, which had been expected, is already being rolled out to any of the site’s 500 million users who are interested in changing the look of their Facebook pages now. Those who opt to wait will find their pages automatically revamped in the coming weeks, according to Facebook. Visually, the new design makes more use of photographs users have posted at their pages and displays those more prominently, including photos of friends.

Users will also now be able to “highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates,” the blog says. New groups of friends or the featuring of existing friends lists also is part of the redesign. Interests and activities also now have more focus on the profile pages and are more in evidence.

The redesign, as with all aspects of Facebook, is aimed in part at appealing to advertisers and marketers who mine information about users from the site. But it also is meant to make it easier for people to find information on friends and to provide “a more compelling visual experience.”
The site’s constantly controversial privacy settings have not been altered in the redesign. Stahl addressed privacy by raising with Zuckerberg that third-party applications share information about users. He insisted in response: “It’s against all of our policies for an application to ever share information about our users.” Stahl interrupted him to say, “but they do,” which prompted Zuckerberg to say that those third-party applications are shut down.

As always with any Facebook change, users were quick to express criticism and support. “Horrible design and against near every solid UI principle in web design,” writes user Shawn Hesketh, who on his Facebook page is identified as the owner of LeftLane Designs in Houston. Christopher Bradshaw of Liverpool, England, decries the changes as “not fair” because he uses Facebook for business purposes including paying for advertising at the site, and the changes alter layouts of those ads and promotions making some appear “tiny,” he wrote in response to Wiseman’s blog announcement.

But user Craig Gunnels of San Antonio, Texas, writes simply, “love the new profile page!” Others in response to Wiseman’s post note that some people simply don’t like change and will adjust to the new look with time.

Other users expressed confusion because their profile pages had not changed. Although on “60 Minutes,” Stahl said that the redesign would roll out on Monday, users were able to make the updates on Sunday. Those who want to change the look of their pages immediately can do so by going to a Facebook page that explains the changes and offers a link at the bottom to update now.


at 8:22 PM Article by Unknown 2 Comments


Are you frustrated with waiting for your system to boot up for long time? You probably don't want to wait so long to start working, specially when you are in a hurry! Now there are softwares that helps you analyze whats taking so much time to boot. And if the program is not essentially required by the Operating System, you can remove unnecessary programs that prolongs boot time using these softwares. One such software is Soluto.

Using a PC can be a deeply frustrating experience if its slow. Now you can analyze the pc booting sequence and reduce pc boot time significantly. Unless you’re a power-user, you probably don’t know what’s causing the frustrations, those moments where some mysterious process is hogging your PC’s resources. 

Even if you are a power-user, it can take quite some time to pin-point the causes. Soluto’s goal is to bring an end to the frustrations PC users encounter by :

Frustration detection : Our patent-pending low level driver technology detects when you’re frustrated by your PC and tells you which application is causing it.
Power of the crowd : Soluto harnesses the power of the crowd to learn which actions really eliminate frustrations and improve user experience, and leverages this user wisdom for the benefit of all PC users.  

Analyze Slow PC's Booting Sequence, Reduce Booting Time: Soluto

Does your PC take too long to boot up? With Soluto, you can trim that boot time and find out exactly what’s taking so long with Soluto.
Download this amazing software using this link.





5 years ago, the PC industry embraced the dual-core processors to address the growing demands of computing and to tackle the power consumption surge on the single core CPUs. Multi-core processors helps to complete a task faster and that too with lower power requirements. To realize how, we need to understand how processors work and how they consumer power.

 One of the most basic way of improving the processor performance is the to increase the operating frequency - Think about frequency as the number of instructions that can be executed per second. When you increase the operating frequency, you get more instructions executed in the same timeframe. But there is a basic problem. To increase the frequency, you need to supply more voltage. This increased power consumption has two drastic effects. First, it dissipates more heat. Second, it strains the power budget by consuming more power (in-case of batteries, it drains faster). To dissipate the additional heat generated, you need larger cooling solutions. The whole thing is leading to inefficiency. To tackle this the processor industry came up with the multi-core architecture where you have two or more CPUs working together to perform a task. Basically, the workload is shared and spread among more processors.
But you may ask, "If there are more than one processor, wouldn't the power consumption be higher than before?". In reality, the dual core processors consumer lower power than the single-core processor.

Let's take an example. If you have a single-core CPU operating at 1GHz and 1.1V and is 100% utilized and lets call the power consumption as P. When you deploy a dual-core processors (each operating at 550 MHz and 0.8V) to complete the same task, you have two cores that are 50% utilized. So, the overall power consumption works out to 0.6P. [Power consumption is proportionate to operating frequency and to the voltage square]. In effect, the dual-core processor completes the task at 40% lower power requirement! The figure below illustrates the concept well.

 

Mobile phones are following the same trajectory as that of PCs. Users are expecting more from their mobile devices. Mobile devices are used like PCs! These days you can play full-HD video, video and audio streaming (video calls), full-fledged internet browsing with complete support for javascript and flash, 3D Gaming, super-cool interfaces, video editing and multi-tasking..All these are placing a strain on the single-core CPUs and on the battery life of the mobile phones. To tackle this performance and power consumption problem, mobile phone industry NEEDS to go the route of multi-core processors!

We already have answers..NVidia Tegra2 is the world's first dual-core processor for mobile phones.This SoC is based on ARM Cortex A9 MPCore architecture. This multi-core architecture employs symmetric multiprocessing, out of order execution and superior branch prediction to delivery fast performance. All this enables a smooth browsing experience on mobile phone and super-smooth user interaction interfaces.
Tegra2 delivers five major benefits:
  • Faster Web page load times
  • Lower power consumption and higher performance per watt
  • Higher quality game play experience for advanced console
  • Highly responsive and smoother User Interfaces
  • Faster multitasking
NVidia has published a white paper on the benefits of multi-core processors for mobile phones. This is one of the easiest and insightful whitepapers. I would suggest to go through the whitepaper to understand how things work...! Worth your time..

And by the way, NVidia is already working on a quad-core processor for mobile phones :)

To quote Jen-sun Hang, CEO of Nvidia "Dual-core processors will be the standard in 2011, and quad-core is coming in the near future!" Hail Super phones :)




 It seems listening to something stores a lot of information in brain, than from reading the entire thing from a book. Most of us doesn't like reading, including me. We also have a practice of reading so many blog posts, articles, pdf's, word documents etc on computers. Now, this is more frustrating as many of us don't like reading on a computer, especially for those who have eye problems. What if the computer itself reads the document for you? Fantastic, isn't it?
Here is a software that can help you convert the text into an mp3 file. And you can download the file on to your hard disk too.

CarryoutText is an easy to use service that converts your text to a MP3 file for you take with you! It converts English text to a downloadable MP3 file that you can listen at the computer or with your MP3 player.
 


You can use your commute time or your time at the gym more productively by converting your blogs, news articles and any other text to an audio file that can be played on your IPod or your favorite MP3 player. 

Go to CarryoutText here and download.



Yahoo Answers is one of the best ways of finding answers to a question. A Yahoo user can login to his account using his Yahoo ID and start asking and answering. This is so simple. Yahoo provides a fantastic platform for its users to share their knowledge and also to clarify their doubts.

There are 3 parts as the tag line of Yahoo Answers suggest. Ask, Answer and Discover.
Ask- You can ask any question to the experts.
Answer- You can answer to any of the open questions that was asked by others.
Discover- You can find out answers for resolved questions.

How it works?
A Yahoo user can ask any question of his choice. Other Yahoo users and experts in that particular field try to give best answers. Of course, you can expect low quality answers from some users. But experts provide with exact answers and others might share their experiences. All you have to do is ask a question and describe the question if necessary. In the next step, you may want to categorize the question into pre-defined set of categories. Then your question will be up for answering. This question's validity will be upto some pre-defined number of days. You can always extend the validity if you are not satisfied with the answers and want to wait for some more. In the real time, if any user knows the answer, he can answer. He can also provide links to find more information in the 'Source' field. You can get multiple answers from different experts.


Points allocation:
When a user first login to Yahoo Answers with his Yahoo ID, he will be provided initially with 100 points. Depending on the number of points you gain, Yahoo categorizes you in different levels of expertise. More detailed points distribution is as follows:

Begin participating on Yahoo! Answers One Time: 100
Ask a question -5
Choose a best answer for your question 3
No Best Answer was selected by voters on your question Points Returned: 5
Answer a question 2
Deleting an answer -2
Log in to Yahoo! Answers Once daily: 1
Vote for an answer 1
Vote for No best answer 0
Have your answer selected as the best answer 10
Receive a "thumbs-up" rating on a best answer that you wrote (up to 50 thumbs-up are counted) 1 per "thumbs-up"


Level Points Questions Answers Comments Stars Ratings Votes
7 25,000+ * unlimited * 100 unlimited 200
6 10,000 - 24,999 * unlimited * 100 unlimited 150
5 5,000 - 9,999 * unlimited * 100 unlimited 125
4 2,500 - 4,999 20 80 40 100 unlimited 100
3 1,000 - 2,499 15 60 30 100 unlimited 75
2 250 - 999 10 40 20 100 unlimited 50
1 1 - 249 5 20 10 10 0 25
*All limitations are per day

You will have voting and other powers when you reach higher and higher levels. This point system makes the users more competitive and drag more attention towards quality answering.

You can start off answering here.


Android


Recently i’m walking through the a demo video by Dan Morrill who builds a simple application on the Android platform.He is a member of google developer program and explain the following thing in the first cut of making applications for android
It is very easy to builds applications for android
Application are developed using android sdk (Download the SDK )
How to make a simple application for android ?
  1. Go to SDK under the menu of file>project>android project.
  2. Decide the details of application like Package name /Activity name / Application name.
  3. After filling the details just “Finish” it.
  4. This will create a source directory in right side with the name of “src” menu (java directory)
In the similar way you can create lots of applications from simple to advance for example if you want to develop an application to dial a phone.
How to create an application to dial a phone with xml base file (layout) ?
  • Go to the source file of you hello code (described above) you may change the hello word into any thing for example name.
  • Copy this source into the xml editor and create different class (e.g Class.Activity)
  • Now in order to get access to data follow these logic commands
>import android.app.ListActivity;
>import android.database.Cursor;
>import android.os.Bundle;
>import android.provider.Contacts.People;
  • Now you will create mapping which tell us “which column map to which user interface element)
  • Go and map the person name to row activity
  • Map the data from data source to user interface that will display things
  • Decide the methods like “when user click on interface then particular activity occurs” e.g start activity
  • Make the options if user need permission to access the database
  • Make the options to request for permission using commands READ_CONTACTS and CALL_PHONE

Note: The main benefit of developing application on android is the ease of coding and size of codes



From the last few days we have been hearing rumours that Facebook is going to launch its new email service. That rumours are proved to be true as Facebook has now launched the next evolution of messages. This service can be used to talk to your friends via SMS, chat, email or messages. It means they will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them.


Now every user of Facebook can get his own @facebook.com email address while the employees of Facebook will get @fb.com email address.
According to a blog post on official Facebook blogTo be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.
You have to wait for a while to use this new service from Facebook as the new Facebook messages service is still invite only process.

Get Invitation for New Facebook Messages

You can apply for an invitation to new Facebook messages here. I’ve already applied for the invitation and I’m waiting for it. I’m so excited to try this new service from Facebook and I’m sure you are also excited. Aren't you ?

Meanwhile request for an invite to Facebook messages here – http://www.facebook.com/about/messages/






Worlds favorite social networking website, Facebook may announce its e-mail service on Monday, Nov 15. Media reported that the secret project, named as Project Titan, will offer @facebook.com email addresses for users. The reports also added that the Project Titan can be regarded as Gmail Killer.

The special November event of Facebook is expected to held at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The event will surface Project Titan, which will change Facebooks entire messaging system.Social media blog Mashable reported that Facebook will launch the e-mail service as the sites current users are unable to send messages outside of Facebook, and the system cant handle simple things like attachments and forwarding.

After a massive salary hike and increase in bonus for the employees, lets wait for the new reaction of internet giant Google for the new Gmail Killer.

Rivalry: 

Even though Google’s global web traffic stands at 9.3% compared to 7% of Facebook, Facebook’s page views have rapidly caught up in the past year to trail just behind Google.
Facebook and Google’s rivalry has become legendary. Google’s policy to focus on the user primarily as a source of data and Facebook’s philosophy of focusing on the user as a human, generating data and interactions (a social graph), are now at loggerheads with each other. There is a great debate over which approach will win in the long run.

To have an insight in to the current scenario lets concentrate on some recent facts and events.
Facebook’s 40,000 servers host 200 million users which is one fifth of all the internet users. On an average they spend 20 minutes on the site daily. Also on an average, they upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos every month. Status updates, news stories and other forms of communication on Facebook measure up to 4 billion instances of information monthly.
But the sheer amount of data is not the most attractive feature here. There are 2 features that set this data apart from all other kinds of user data. Firstly this data is treated as proprietary data which can be accessed only via Facebook, safeguarding it from Google’s outreach. Secondly, this data is very authentic. This is because people use their real names, provide genuine information about themselves and their tastes and link to real friends. This is different from other online portals/services where their behavior is far more impersonal.
Therefore the personalization that Google has been trying to provide by implementing complex search optimization algorithms can be achieved far more easily in Facebook. Facebook has recognized this advantage and introduced the Facebook Search feature last year. This allows users to search anyone’s feeds. Therefore it has become possible to get your friend’s opinion over something rather than accepting the opinions of the search results generated by a search engine.This trend has already begun to yield results. According to Hitwise, Facebook in 2009 sent more users than Google to Evite, video site Tagged.com, gossip mills Perez Hilton.com and Dlisted.
To capitalize further on this advantage, Facebook launched Connect, a network of more than 10,000 independent sites that lets users access their Facebook relationships without logging in to Facebook .com. For example one can go to Digg and see which stories their friends have recommended. Previously users had to visit the Facebook website to keep a tab on their friends. But after the tie ups, relevant information about your friends can be exported to external web sites, if preferred, for your use. Essentially Facebook is creating options to link up your entire web activity via your Facebook account.


But there is a very fine line between going open and losing privacy. Facebook has faced much flak in the past few days due to privacy violations. In short it is facing the ultimate dilemma of every social network which is that though it has a huge reserve of authentic data, every time it tries to capitalize on this data, it receives great opposition from the generators of that data.


Google is also aware of this critical advantage that Facebook has. In 2007 Google had attempted to acquire Facebook but eventually lost out to Microsoft( Facebook encourages users to use bing while searching the web via their accounts). Also in 2008, Google released Friend Connect the same day Facebook launched Connect which allows web sites to link to accounts on any of the major social networks—including MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, and Bebo. Even then success has eluded Google. Some rumors surfaced last year that Google was reconsidering initiating a deal with Facebook.
Facebook has a lot of potential but what is holding it back? Facebook has data but Google has size. In 2009 Google boasted a cash reserve of $24.5 billion while Facebook had begun to acquire cash reserves only towards the end of 2008. Also Facebook will truly be able to use its advantages only if it is able to convince its consumers to let out their personal, private information to vendors and advertisers. In the face of the recent controversies, this is proving to be extremely difficult.
As Google and Facebook race each other neck to neck, it is the users who hold the power button in this scenario. It is upon them to decide how they will allow the biggies to shape their experience on the internet.





If you want to pretend that you are a dangerous hacker with the ability to take down any PC then here is a way to show off your skills. I am not telling how to make a real virus, it’s just a fake one just for the sake of fun.


I will be using Notepad for this purpose. Here we go…..
Open up a Notepad window, paste in the following text, and then save it.

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Then you will almost instantly see a warning that you have created a virus, as long as you have got anti-virus installed and working. If you don’t see any warning, you should probably make sure your virus scanning software is properly enabled.


This is real fun and doesn't affect the system. Please do not misuse! You can use this to verify how stable your anti-virus program is.


Google Analytics is one of the best tool Google has ever produced. Google Analytics provides an overview of visitors to a website and also helps in increasing the traffic to the same. It is amazing to know how Analytics really keep track of visitors and their information in a systematic way.


What you need to do?
All you need to do is create an profile in Google Analytics with the help of your Google account.You need to specify the URL of your website. Google Analytics generates a script which you will place on your website or blog and you are done. Rest is done by Analytics!

What does it do?
Analytics actually records information about the users who visited a website. It provides a clean and crystal clear view about the visitors, their region, browser they used, from which website they crawled in, how long they stayed, how many pages did they visit, what keyword they used to find your website on a search engine, which page was visited the most, new visits and so on. The list is huge!

Features it provide:
At first, Analytics dashboard gives you a summary of all the basic details you need. A graphical representation of visits, number of visits, number of pageviews, average time on site, number of pages visited per visit, bounce rate, percentage of new visitors, visitors overview(graphical), map overlay, traffic sources overview and content overview. Bounce rate indicates the number of visitors who bounced out of the website by just visiting the page they landed in, usually reprted in percentage value. Map overlay displays which part of the world has visited the most, which moderate and so on.

Next is the Intelligence report. Although it is a Beta version, this feature can be used to analyze how your website can proceed further in terms of visitors. You can use daily, weekly and monthly alerts to alert you with a mail on this report. It shows your progress as well.

Next is the visitors overview. Technical stuff can be analyzed here. Browser through which the user came in, type of connection used, which operating system was he using etc. New visitors versus the returning visitors report can be used to know how popular your site is getting day by day. Visitor trends, his loyalty, his network properties, mobile device information(if it was used to browse your site) etc can be found here.

Traffic sources will be listed according to the number of referrers. Suppose your website was visited from Google more number of times, Google will top the list and other referring sites will follow. Direct traffic indicates how many users visited by typing the URL of the site directly. Referring sites may be Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon etc. Another fantastic facility that Analytics provides is Keywords report. It indicates which words the users are using to search your site on the search engine. Using this report you can use these words more frequently on any document to draw more visitors. Keywords are most important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization of the website. Adwords is another feature that can be used here to analyze what is the trend in which the search for a particular keyword is happening across the globe. Suppose you enter a word as 'Technology', the related keywords that are mostly being used by Googlers will be displayed. For the word 'Technology', the keywords listed may be like this. 'Latest technology', 'technology news', 'new technology', information technology' etc. Depending on the popularity of the words at any instant of time, we can choose the keywords suitably. Like I have chosen 'Latest Technology News, Updates, Trends........'.

Content management helps you to know how to optimize the landing pages of the website. Landing pages are the pages which can be found with permanent links from search engines. Landing page optimization means optimizing the page with more keywords and appropriate navigation rules. Navigation Analysis depicts in which pattern the visitors are navigating through the website. This path can be used to attract more visitors to the page by adding some exciting stuff and other advertisements.

Analytics is best when it comes to online business sites. More visitors, more customers and hence more trade. They can use this to know what the customers are looking for. They can adjust their trading suitably. Apart from business, others can also use this to increase their popularity on the net. On the whole, Google Analytics is a wonderful tool to analyze and think what has to be done. If you have a website or a blog, you wouldn't want to miss analyzing your site. And this is a place you should look for!

Once the analysis part is over, the owner of the website will be very clear as to what changes he needs to make for his website. When he knows what the customer needs, his job becomes simple. He just needs to execute. The result would be increase in pageviews and hence popularity of the website. The increase in pageviews results in increasing the pagerank of the website, which makes the website to be found on search engines in the first few pages. Pagerank of the website can be verified here.

 


People around the world keep on hearing the word “cloud computing”, but don’t really know what it really is. So we realize that it’s time to talk about exactly what this buzzword really means.

 

What is Cloud Computing?

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the definition for “Cloud Computing” is:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Which is utter piece of nonsense and really confusing. 
So what is the definition which is easier & understandable by common people?

Cloud Computing = Web Applications

If you’re using a web or internet-based application from a major provider like Google or Microsoft, you’re using cloud computing. That’s All!!! 
Every web application that you’ve ever used, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Hotmail, SalesForce, Dropbox, and Google Docs, are based on “cloud computing”, because when you connect to one of these services, you’re really connecting to a massive pool of servers somewhere out there on the internet. The client doesn’t need to be a web browser, but that’s the direction everything is heading.

Now the question arises, Why Cloud Computing?
We have already established that it’s a pointless term that simply describes web applications, which have been around for a very long time, but in order to get businesses to start switching to web applications instead of self-hosted servers, the marketing types invented a new buzzword.
The reason why they used the word “cloud” in the buzzword is simple: in network diagrams, the internet is usually represented with a cloud in the middle of the drawing.
So basically the term itself is just a way for consultants and companies to sell more services in a shiny new package.

How Can Cloud Computing Help Me?

Since businesses everywhere are moving their applications to the web and coming out with new and interesting features accessible through your web browser, you will soon be able to access virtually anything from any browser on any PC.
It will get even more interesting whenever Chrome OS is finally released, which is basically an entire operating system built around a web browser as the primary interface, with all of your applications as web applications instead of local—hopefully it will support web integration like IE9 does with the Windows 7 taskbar.

How Is Cloud Computing Different for Businesses?

If you’re in the IT world you’re probably scratching your head at this point and thinking that we are oversimplifying the idea behind cloud computing, so let’s explain the real difference from the more technical side of things.
In the past, every company would run all of their applications on all of their own servers, hosted at their own location or data center. This obviously requires a lot of maintenance and money to keep everything running, upgraded, and secure.
From a business perspective, businesses can now move much of their computing to cloud services, which provide the same applications that you would install on your own servers, but now they are accessible over the internet for any of their customers. Have you read about companies switching to Google Docs? That’s a perfect example of companies switching from hosting their own local servers to using cloud computing instead.
But what if your company provides a service to others? You can also take advantage of cloud computing by creating applications that don’t run on your own servers, but actually utilize server resources provided by one of the big providers like Google has App Engine, Microsoft has Windows Azure, and Amazon has their EC2 framework.
Most of these services operate on a pay-for-resources basis, so your application only gets charged for the amount of CPU and network use that it actually uses. When your application is small and doesn’t have a lot of users, you don’t get charged much, but the benefit is that it can scale up to 10,000 users without any trouble.



Over a decade has passed since the arrival of BitTorrent & it is continuing to evolve & remains one of the best file-sharing tools available. Read the full guide below if you really want to make your downloads faster & make it secure.


Some of you may find BitTorrent a bit old but that doesn’t mean BitTorrent doesn’t have a place in your routine. It’s still the more widespread.
We’ve divided the post into three sections:
  1. Increase Your Speed and Privacy with a Few Easy Settings
  2. Keep That Newfound Speed from Hijacking All Your Bandwidth
  3. Hide Your Traffic with External Solutions
For the purposes of this guide, we’re focusing on two BitTorrent clients: uTorrent for Windows and Transmission for Mac OS X. That doesn’t mean you can’t use other clients like Vuze (or KTorrent and Transmission for Linux, if you are of the Linux persuasion), but there are just too many clients out there for us to give specific instructions for each. uTorrent and Transmission are some of the most popular clients out there, so where appropriate, we’ll give you specific instructions for each client. Note that uTorrent for Mac is not nearly as mature as uTorrent for Windows, and may not have some of these features. So, in this particular case, when we reference uTorrent, we mean uTorrent for Windows.

1.Keep Your BitTorrent Speed & Privacy at the Max with a Few Simple Settings

BitTorrent clients have come a long way in the past few years, and where it used to be much more difficult to hide your BitTorrent activity, it’s now a matter of checking the right boxes. Here are a few settings every BitTorrent user should have enabled.

>Randomize and Forward Your Router Ports

If you’re connected to your internet through a router, it’s likely that many of your ports are closed, meaning your speeds will be much slower than you’d like. You’ll need to let your router know which ones you want open for BitTorrent traffic, which is known as port forwarding. Furthermore, many ISPs or organizations (say, if your neighborhood or leasing company provides your internet) will block popular BitTorrent ports, so you’ll want to switch up the port you use every once in a while to keep them guessing.



Both of these are extremely simple in uTorrent and Transmission. in uTorrent, just to go Options > Preferences and hit the connection tab. Make sure all four boxes under the “Listening Port” section are checked. Enable UPnP Port Mapping, Enable NAT-PMP Port Mapping, Randomize Port Each Start, and Add Windows Firewall Exception.



In Transmission, open up the app’s preferences and head to the Network pane. Check both the Randomize Port on Launch and Automatically Map Port boxes. If you see that the light next to the port’s number goes from red to green, then you’ve successfully opened your current port to BitTorrent traffic, and you should notice a good increase in speed.
Note: For best results, you’ll want to make sure your router is UPnP capable and has UPnP enabled. Most routers are UPnP ready, but if you find that you’re having trouble, you may need to look at your router’s manual and settings page to enable its use.

>Encrypt Your BitTorrent Traffic

Nowadays, many ISPs will throttle your bandwidth, prevent you from seeding, or do any other number of annoying things to try and stop you from torrenting. Apart from randomizing your ports, another thing you can do to try and keep them out is encrypt your traffic. It won’t necessarily work on every client, but we’ve found that it nearly doubled our download speeds, so it’s certainly worth a shot.



In uTorrent, go back to the preferences and hit up the BitTorrent section in the left sidebar. Under Protocol Encryption, open the dropdown menu labeled Outgoing. You have three options: Disabled, Enabled, and Forced. Try Enabled for a while, but if you don’t see a good speed increase, using the Forced setting might give you better results. Also note the Allow Incoming Legacy Connections checkbox If you have a specific torrent that doesn’t have a lot of people seeding, you might want to check this box temporarily, though we try to keep it unchecked whenever we can. This ensures that any peers you connect to will use encryption and that your ISP will be less likely to throttle you.



In Transmission, head over to the Peers pane of the app’s preferences and check the Encryption section. Definitely check the “Prefer Encrypted Peers” box, and we would highly recommend checking the “Ignore Unencrypted Peers” box, if you are noticing that there aren’t a lot of peers connecting for a specific torrent, try unchecking it to see if that helps your speeds.

>Block Peers that Might be Snooping

Even worse than throttling ISPs is the threat of the snooping RIAA, MPAA or other organization looking to take you down. Often, they’ll post fake torrents of copyrighted material (or just join in on real ones) and track those downloading, leading them right to an unprepared you. While there is no foolproof way to avoid them, a really great simple way is to use a peerblocker. Transmission has this feature built-in, while Windows users will need to use a separate program.



If you’re a Mac user, open up Transmission’s preferences and head back to the Peers pane. This time, check the box that reads “Prevent Known Bad Peers from Connecting” down under the Blocklist section. Hit the update button to make sure the list of bad peers is recent, and check the Automatically Update Weekly box to keep it up to date.



Windows users will need to download PeerBlock to block the bad boys from snooping. The first time you run it, it’ll take you through a setup wizard, in which you can decide who you want to blacklist. Check the box for anti-P2P organizations (as well as anything else you may want, though the P2P box is the only important one for BitTorrent) and schedule it to update as often as you want. You might as well update it every day as there is no reason to be stingy with your privacy here. Then, just make sure it runs when you use your BitTorrent client & it’ll keep you safe from those bad peers.
Download: PeerBlock

2.Automate Your Client & Free Up Bandwidth

These are some tricks that have been around for a while, but they are useful for keeping BitTorrent from overtaking your internet connection, especially if you’ve experienced some heavy speed increases from the above tips. Here are a few ways to automatically manage BitTorrent’s use of your bandwidth.

>Set Global Bandwidth Limits



BitTorrent downloads and uploads can hog a lot of your internet connection’s bandwidth, especially if you’re sharing popular content. The simplest way to keep BitTorrent from hogging your connection is to set global upload and download limits. In uTorrent, you can find them in the Connection section of the Preferences. The settings are fairly self-explanatory. You just have to set your max upload and download rates (in kB/s), or choose 0 to keep the rates unlimited.



In Transmission, it’s under the Bandwidth pane of the app’s preferences, just check the “Download Rate” and “Upload Rate” boxes and set your speeds however you want. You can also set a “Speed Limit” mode, if you want to switch between to different bandwidth limits, give it more bandwidth when your just checking email and the like, and cut the limits down when you need that bandwidth for streaming video or online gaming.

>Throttle Your BitTorrent Downloads on a Schedule

You could just quit your BitTorrent client (or manually turn on Speed Limit mode) whenever you want to conserve your bandwidth, but if you’re like us, you’ll forget to start it back up which means you’ll end up delaying your downloads (most likely until you want whatever was supposed to be downloading, at which point you will slap your forehead).



To remedy this situation, uTorrent and Transmission both come with simple Scheduler features that you can access through the Preferences. In uTorrent, go to Options > Preferences, then find Scheduler in the sidebar. Tick the box next to “Enable Scheduler” and you’ll see a grid of green boxes light up. The grid runs Monday through Sunday, midnight to midnight (or 0:00 to 23:59), one box per hour. Here’s how it works:
  • Dark green boxes indicate that uTorrent will download and upload at full speed (or whatever you’ve set as its full speed).
  • Light green boxes indicate limited download and upload rates.
  • White boxes indicate that uTorrent will not download or upload any content.
  • Pink boxes indicate that uTorrent will only seed, not download. I’m not exactly sure when one would be inclined to use this, but it’s there if you want it.
We have always got a little bandwidth to spare on our connection, but we certainly don’t want uTorrent hogging our bandwidth while we are working, so we set the Scheduler to limit speeds from 8am to midnight every day. In morning, when we very unlikely to be at our computer, we open the flood gates and give uTorrent unlimited upload/download speeds. Also, since we generally stay away from our computer on Saturday, we keep uTorrent at full throttle. See the screenshot above to see what this sort of schedule would look like. Like we said, our connection can handle a little bit of bandwidth bleeding all of the time, so when we are running at limited rates, we set our upload speed to 5 kB/s and our download speed to 15. 
 


In Transmission, it’s a bit more basic. Just open up Transmission’s Preferences and to to the Bandwidth tab. You only have two modes instead of three, your global bandwidth limits and Speed Limit mode. You can schedule the speed limit mode to turn on and off at a specific time either every day, on weekdays, weekends, or on a specific day of the week. It’s not quite as flexible as uTorrent’s scheduler, but works well enough. Generally people just limit its speed during the day, and let it tear up their connection when they are sleeping.

>Ensure a Good Share Ratio Without Wasting Extra Bandwidth

An important part of BitTorrent is sharing, and a good member of the BitTorrent community gives as much as he/she takes. In fact, many sites, especially private trackers, keep a close eye on your share ratio and may even ban you if you don’t keep your ratio above a certain point (i.e., if you are a “leecher”). This isn’t as widespread as it used to be, but it does still happen. We are in total agreement of the whole share-and-share-alike attitude, but once we have shared an equal part of what we have downloaded, we don’t want to waste too much extra bandwidth on that torrent.



Rather than constantly checking your torrent ratios, you can remove them as soon as they cross the 1.0 barrier. Just go to the Queuing section of uTorrent and find the “Seed While” section. There you can set a goal ratio for a file you’re sharing, then set how much bandwidth uTorrent will allocate to the torrent once that goal is reached (in the screenshot, for example, uTorrent will stop sharing the file after its share ratio reaches 150%). If you prefer, you can just limit the upload rate when uTorrent reaches its goal by checking the corresponding box at the bottom of the window.



In Transmission, head to the Transfers pane of the preferences and click on the Management tab. Check the box that says Stop Seeding at Ratio and set the ratio to whatever you want, like 1.50 (meaning when your ratio reaches 150%).

3.External Solutions for Hiding Your Traffic

We won’t go into too much detail here, but we thought some of the more extreme measures deserved mentions in this guide. Here are a few other ways to really keep others out of your business.

>Use a VPN

While there are a number of great solutions to hide your identity while downloading, using a VPN is usually a very cheap and popular way to do so. You can use any number of VPN services like ItsHidden, which will route your traffic through another server, keeping your IP address away from prying eyes.
Download: ItsHidden

>Set up a Proxy



One of the other popular methods of obscuring yourself is using a proxy, which works similarly to a VPN. You could roll your own SSH proxy or use something a bit easier like BTGuard. You very well may see a speed drop when using this method, though, so if speed is more important to you than privacy, this may not be the best route to go.


Google pagerank is an analysis algorithm that focus on linking, which is developed by Google Search Engine that measures the numerical weighting of the elements of hyperlinked set of documents. This reflects that Pagerank is an analysis that which counts the link to the website as a vote and measures it on the scale of 10. Thus, this Pagerank is analysis of strature of the Website which reflect number of people are voting to the website. Pagerank is patented Trademark to Stanford University.
The Page rank is measures on the strength of Incoming as well as Outgoing Links to a website, which ultimately gives us the exact Status of a website. In-order to analyze the Pagerank of a Website we need certain tools to helps us out. There are many tools existing all over the web for analyzing the Pagerank, but still everybody is in need of quality tools.

Do Visit
  1. Find Income, Stats and Other Details of any Website


So, Here is My list of 5 Best Sites for Checking Google Pagerank
#1. PR Checker
  • Page Rank Checker is a completely free service to check Google pagerank instantly using their online page rank check tool by passing the Captcha test and also it will generate the Pagerank button code which you can place it on your Website.
  • One of the Most popular website for checking the Pagerank. You can switch to this website to check your blog’s Pagerank here.
#2. Check Pagerank
  • Yet another Free Pagerank analysis tool, that gives us the correct Pagerank status of a blog or website. Here also you need to pass the Captcha test.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#3. Website Grader
  • Most reliable Pagerank checker tool, that which also gives the total rank of website/blog in the world.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#4. DigPagerank
  • The Most popular Pagerank checker tool for testing the Pagerank.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#5. Popuri
  • This website will give you the entire criteria about website from Pagerank, Alexa rank to number of backlinks etc.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.
#6. Check Website Stats
#7. My Pagerank
  • The fastest Pagerank Checker tool. No need to pass captcha or any other security orientation just enter the website address and click you are done.
  • You can switch to this website to check your website/blog’s Pagerank here.

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