Google claims '365 reasons' to use Gmail and Google Docs
Microsoft launch of Office 365 has Google feeling pressure to explain why businesses should use Gmail and Google Docs instead of Microsoft's cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office.
Google Apps is one of the top market forces pushing Microsoft into offering online-only versions of its major business productivity products, but Google hasn't significantly cut into Microsoft's office products market share.
FIERCE RIVALS: The 10 bloodiest battles Microsoft and Google fought in 2010
With Microsoft expected to make Office 365 generally available in an announcement Tuesday, Google Apps product manager Shan Sinha penned a blog post titled "365 reasons to consider Google Apps."
Sinha was the founder and CEO of DocVerse, whose technology was acquired by Google and replaced with Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which brings Google's online collaboration features to standard versions of the Microsoft product.
Coincidentally, Sinha also previously worked for Microsoft in SQL Server and SharePoint product strategy from 2004 to 2007. While Sinha wasn't able to list a full 365 reasons to consider Google Apps, he used his blog post to stress Google's completely browser-based approach to productivity software, which he believes is more conducive to collaboration.
While Office 365 lets customers host Exchange, SharePoint and Lync servers in Microsoft data centers, the browser-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint don't have all the capabilities of the on-premises version of Office.
"Office 365 is for individuals. Apps is for teams," Sinha writes. "Most of us no longer spend our days working on our own. We work with others: creating, collaborating, sharing. With Apps you can work with multiple people in the same document. ... You can see people type in real time, and share a file in just two clicks. Discussions bring people into your documents for rich conversations. You don't need to buy additional licenses to work with others, or hope people outside your company have upgraded to the same software. If you have a Google account, you can collaborate."
Sinha also published a chart showing a list of features Google offers that are either missing from Office 365 or require pricier plans.
While Google Apps costs $5 per user per month (or $50 per year), Office 365 starts at $2 per user per month for just basic email, moves up to $6 for a small business package and up to $27 per user per month for an enterprise option that includes all the online offerings plus the non-cloud Office Professional Plus.
Some of the Google features that aren't included in any version of Office 365, Sinha writes, are "data export capabilities to prevent lock-in" and multi-user editing of documents and spreadsheets for mobile users.
While Google offers email archiving for an extra $1 per user each month, Microsoft customers have to pay at least $24 per user per month for a plan that includes that feature, he writes. Sinha acknowledges that some features in Office 365 aren't available from Google, including unlimited email storage and hosted voicemail, and an on-premises PBX voice system.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Increasing Your Privacy Online With Encryption And VPN Technologies
For many people World wide web safety is not a quite huge issue nevertheless if you stop to assume about it you will recognize that this could be a mistaken viewpoint. Rising quantities of your private details are transferred or saved on the web and frequently this info is fairly easy for malicious varieties to faucet into and make use of to their gain and your detriment.
The very good news is that it does not have to be mainly challenging to insulate all by yourself from this sort of on line risk specially with some of the top quality, cost-free computer software technological know-how offered to us. Broadly talking encryption is the greatest privacy enhancer when it arrives to the online planet. Encryption arrives in quite a few distinctive forms but irrespective of the way it is applied it is an individual of the most important foundations on which a lot of privacy relevant measures are constructed.
If we look at Virtual Non-public Networks to increase the safety of our info as it really is getting transported across the World wide web we come across encryption in use to build the safe tunnel by means of which the knowledge passes on it is way to the VPN provider's servers. Searching cart and eCommerce computer software of all styles makes use of the Secure Sockets Layer encryption technology to guard our credit card knowledge when we invest in merchandise. Internet websites that necessitate the consumer to log in are ever more applying SSL technological innovation as perfectly.
In the data storage area we obtain encryption in use on USB flash drives as nicely as cloud storage technologies and in entire drive encryption equipment. This is all pretty useful for shoppers and end users of technological know-how in a entire world exactly where unrestricted accessibility to digital data can be dangerous to your personal and economic privacy.
You can very easily harness the strength of these technologies for your own benefit by signing up for a VPN support, downloading cost-free encryption computer software and learning much more about functional methods that will give you the finest return for your time put in. Signing up for a VPN and configuring your personal computer to use it is essentially pretty quick. If you aren't convinced what VPN supplier to decide on glimpse for evaluations of expert services from common, established VPN suppliers. Lots of deliver specific set up info in the help area of their websites and there are often how-to video clips that will demonstrate the steps you will need to get started.
If you are a frequent traveler a VPN is a will need to have assistance to connecting securely to the World-wide-web above normally insecure wireless networks. Yet another exceptional instrument for the traveler is total generate encryption software package which will enable you safeguard the contents of your laptop's very difficult generate even if it is stolen in any other case likely to be searched.
Whatever approaches you investigate to boost your privacy on the web just bear in mind that you are planning now so that in the foreseeable future you won't want you had completed it soon after a little something regrettable occurs to your critical knowledge.
The very good news is that it does not have to be mainly challenging to insulate all by yourself from this sort of on line risk specially with some of the top quality, cost-free computer software technological know-how offered to us. Broadly talking encryption is the greatest privacy enhancer when it arrives to the online planet. Encryption arrives in quite a few distinctive forms but irrespective of the way it is applied it is an individual of the most important foundations on which a lot of privacy relevant measures are constructed.
If we look at Virtual Non-public Networks to increase the safety of our info as it really is getting transported across the World wide web we come across encryption in use to build the safe tunnel by means of which the knowledge passes on it is way to the VPN provider's servers. Searching cart and eCommerce computer software of all styles makes use of the Secure Sockets Layer encryption technology to guard our credit card knowledge when we invest in merchandise. Internet websites that necessitate the consumer to log in are ever more applying SSL technological innovation as perfectly.
In the data storage area we obtain encryption in use on USB flash drives as nicely as cloud storage technologies and in entire drive encryption equipment. This is all pretty useful for shoppers and end users of technological know-how in a entire world exactly where unrestricted accessibility to digital data can be dangerous to your personal and economic privacy.
You can very easily harness the strength of these technologies for your own benefit by signing up for a VPN support, downloading cost-free encryption computer software and learning much more about functional methods that will give you the finest return for your time put in. Signing up for a VPN and configuring your personal computer to use it is essentially pretty quick. If you aren't convinced what VPN supplier to decide on glimpse for evaluations of expert services from common, established VPN suppliers. Lots of deliver specific set up info in the help area of their websites and there are often how-to video clips that will demonstrate the steps you will need to get started.
If you are a frequent traveler a VPN is a will need to have assistance to connecting securely to the World-wide-web above normally insecure wireless networks. Yet another exceptional instrument for the traveler is total generate encryption software package which will enable you safeguard the contents of your laptop's very difficult generate even if it is stolen in any other case likely to be searched.
Whatever approaches you investigate to boost your privacy on the web just bear in mind that you are planning now so that in the foreseeable future you won't want you had completed it soon after a little something regrettable occurs to your critical knowledge.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Report: Facebook Hits 750 Million Users
Although Facebook is allegedly experiencing a decline in the U.S., the service reportedly now has 750 million monthly active users.
The stat was first reported by TechCrunch, which cited a source close to Facebook. This comes nearly a year after the company announced it had reached 500 million users, which was double its 250 million user count from the prior year.
Officially, Facebook has not updated its current number of users since it reached 500 million and still lists that amount on its statistics page. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If the assertion that Facebook has hit 750 million is correct, Facebook will most likely not double its number of users in a year's time, as it did last year. At the end of May, Facebook statistics blog Socialbakers reported Facebook had nearly scored 700 million users. If Socialbakers and TechCrunch are both correct, that means Facebook gained 50 million users in less than a month.
Over the past few weeks, however, many industry analysts have been discussing Facebook's possible decline in the U.S., following a report by Inside Facebook that said the service lost around 6 million users in the U.S during May. According to the blog, Facebook's U.S. users dropped from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million by the end of the month. Data from comScore, however, says that total unique visitors to Facebook grew from about 154 million at the end of April to 157 million at the end of May.
When asked about the report earlier this month, a Facebook spokesman told PCMag that, "From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth."
Recently, data was published suggesting that Facebook is gaining ground in developing regions and countries late in adopting the California-bases service, including Mexico, India, Brazil, and Egypt, and reportedly is now the most popular social network in 119 out of 134 countries. So even if the number of users has dropped in the U.S., the adoption rate of other countries could be picking up the slack and increasing its total number of users.
The stat was first reported by TechCrunch, which cited a source close to Facebook. This comes nearly a year after the company announced it had reached 500 million users, which was double its 250 million user count from the prior year.
Officially, Facebook has not updated its current number of users since it reached 500 million and still lists that amount on its statistics page. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If the assertion that Facebook has hit 750 million is correct, Facebook will most likely not double its number of users in a year's time, as it did last year. At the end of May, Facebook statistics blog Socialbakers reported Facebook had nearly scored 700 million users. If Socialbakers and TechCrunch are both correct, that means Facebook gained 50 million users in less than a month.
Over the past few weeks, however, many industry analysts have been discussing Facebook's possible decline in the U.S., following a report by Inside Facebook that said the service lost around 6 million users in the U.S during May. According to the blog, Facebook's U.S. users dropped from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million by the end of the month. Data from comScore, however, says that total unique visitors to Facebook grew from about 154 million at the end of April to 157 million at the end of May.
When asked about the report earlier this month, a Facebook spokesman told PCMag that, "From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth."
Recently, data was published suggesting that Facebook is gaining ground in developing regions and countries late in adopting the California-bases service, including Mexico, India, Brazil, and Egypt, and reportedly is now the most popular social network in 119 out of 134 countries. So even if the number of users has dropped in the U.S., the adoption rate of other countries could be picking up the slack and increasing its total number of users.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Searching For Mars? Try Google!
With Microsoft tangled up in legal wires, most conspiracy theorists have turned their guns on search behemoth, Google, accusing it of attempting to control the world. Theories abound as to how the company is going to do this - from collecting users' personal information from the search engine and Google's beta services, to taking over one rival after another until the user has no alternative apart from the big G.. Well, one does not really know whether the folks at Google have their eyes on taking over Earth but they sure have plans for Mars
Along with the Virgin Group, Google has launched a venture called Virgle, which aims to establish a human settlement on the Red Planet. The company even has a 100 Year Plan, which can be accessed at http://www.google.com/virgle/plan_1.html (photo courtesy). Among the milestones are the first manned journey to the planet in 2016, the founding of the first city (Virgle City, obviously) in 2050, and well, the establishment of a self-sustaining civilisation by 2108! No, we don't know whether the plan includes placing a ring around the planet with the word ‘Google' on it or whether one will start getting plots on Mars instead of cash from AdSense, but ah...you never know. It might just happen!
With Microsoft tangled up in legal wires, most conspiracy theorists have turned their guns on search behemoth, Google, accusing it of attempting to control the world. Theories abound as to how the company is going to do this - from collecting users' personal information from the search engine and Google's beta services, to taking over one rival after another until the user has no alternative apart from the big G.. Well, one does not really know whether the folks at Google have their eyes on taking over Earth but they sure have plans for Mars.
Along with the Virgin Group, Google has launched a venture called Virgle, which aims to establish a human settlement on the Red Planet. The company even has a 100 Year Plan, which can be accessed at http://www.google.com/virgle/plan_1.html. Among the milestones are the first manned journey to the planet in 2016, the founding of the first city (Virgle City, obviously) in 2050, and well, the establishment of a self-sustaining civilisation by 2108! No, we don't know whether the plan includes placing a ring around the planet with the word ‘Google' on it or whether one will start getting plots on Mars instead of cash from AdSense, but ah...you never know. It might just happen!
Along with the Virgin Group, Google has launched a venture called Virgle, which aims to establish a human settlement on the Red Planet. The company even has a 100 Year Plan, which can be accessed at http://www.google.com/virgle/plan_1.html (photo courtesy). Among the milestones are the first manned journey to the planet in 2016, the founding of the first city (Virgle City, obviously) in 2050, and well, the establishment of a self-sustaining civilisation by 2108! No, we don't know whether the plan includes placing a ring around the planet with the word ‘Google' on it or whether one will start getting plots on Mars instead of cash from AdSense, but ah...you never know. It might just happen!
With Microsoft tangled up in legal wires, most conspiracy theorists have turned their guns on search behemoth, Google, accusing it of attempting to control the world. Theories abound as to how the company is going to do this - from collecting users' personal information from the search engine and Google's beta services, to taking over one rival after another until the user has no alternative apart from the big G.. Well, one does not really know whether the folks at Google have their eyes on taking over Earth but they sure have plans for Mars.
Along with the Virgin Group, Google has launched a venture called Virgle, which aims to establish a human settlement on the Red Planet. The company even has a 100 Year Plan, which can be accessed at http://www.google.com/virgle/plan_1.html. Among the milestones are the first manned journey to the planet in 2016, the founding of the first city (Virgle City, obviously) in 2050, and well, the establishment of a self-sustaining civilisation by 2108! No, we don't know whether the plan includes placing a ring around the planet with the word ‘Google' on it or whether one will start getting plots on Mars instead of cash from AdSense, but ah...you never know. It might just happen!
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Mozilla to Businesses: We're Not Interested
A key Mozilla executive thumbs his nose at business users who use Firefox.
A Mozilla executive has incurred the wrath of IT professionals with a somewhat callous comment made about Firefox and its focus on the enterprise.
The comment was in response to a blog posting by Firefox specialist and consultant Mike Kaply. Kaply was justifiably lamenting Firefox's rapid release scheduling and its negative impact on businesses. Case in point: Firefox 4 was only released in March. Now, three months later Firefox 5.0 is out in stable release. Hence, Mozilla has ceased supporting Firefox 4.
Kaply points out that this breakneck update schedule may "work for the average user" but "it doesn't fly in [a] corporate environment, especially places like banks". "Expecting a company to go through a full deployment cycle of their web browser every six week is simply ludicrous."
Others apparently are in agreement, as his post is now at 60-something comments and counting. Particularly vociferous posts are being made by IT people who support thousands of clients running Firefox:
"I have 500,000 corporate users on Firefox 3.6. We just completing a test cycle of Firefox 4 on many thousands of internal business web applications," one said.
The same poster addresses his concerns over the end of support: "By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won't go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?"
However, what really stoked the flame on that blog was Mozilla executive Asa Dotzler's response to Kaply:
"Mike, you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types, right? Your "big numbers" here are really just a drop in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base.
"Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours," Dotzler continued. "Until we run out of people who don't have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can't imagine why we'd focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about."
Dotzler's comment is both sneering and contemptuous of the businesses that have deployed Firefox in their organizations. And, sometimes, at their own peril, may I add. While Firefox is a wonderful browser with its own unique set of features, the frequent updating, occasional lack of good documentation, extension breaking whenever a new update comes out - it all makes it a dicey choice of browser for businesses.
Telling businesses that they are not "a focus" nor should be for Firefox developers is also potential profit suicide. Yes, Firefox makes a profit and a hefty one, with lucrative deals made with search engine companies. Mozilla raked in $104 million in profit in 2009, largely though a deal with Google.
Yet, Chrome has recently stalled Firefox adoption. Many are speculating how a potential decline in Firefox adoption could affect Mozilla's revenue. Especially because the advertising deal Mozilla has made with Google is slated to end this year. As Mozilla seeks to renew that deal with Google and shop for other advertising partners, a significant decline in the Firefox browser market could hurt Mozilla's chances of securing ad deals. According to Net Applications, Firefox has dropped from a 24.3 percent to a 21.9 percent market share from May 2010 to May 2011. During the same period, Google Chrome rose dramatically from 7 percent to 12.5 percent."
Dotzler's comment is also counter to what Mozilla and others in the open source community have been telling businesses for years: give open source a try. Yet, businesses have been reluctant to adopt open source en masse and this cavalier attitude shown by Dotzler proves why.
Business IT has had a healthy fear of open source, due to a perception of lack of support, issues surrounding licensing and other reasons. It's fine if you upgrade your home machine fervently with each new Firefox or Linux distro update. In a business, every update, especially major upgrades, must be tested to ensure they don't break anything in production environments. This is particularly critical in businesses that have custom, in-house, web-based applications.
Many businesses using Firefox use extensions for business processes. What happens when a mission-critical extension doesn't work, and Mozilla does not support that version of Firefox anymore? It's a risk most business IT execs won't and can't take.
I hardly believe Dotler's comments are representative of most of the open source community, nor of Mozilla's. We've reached out to Mozilla for comment and will update this post accordingly. However, now is certainly not the time for anyone at Mozilla to dismiss the enterprise, especially with Firefox's slowing adaption rate.
Update: Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla has responsed to a request for comment:
"The Web and Web browsers continue to evolve rapidly. Mozilla's focus is on providing users with the best Web experience possible, and Firefox needs to evolve at the pace the Web's users and developers expect. By releasing small, focused updates more often, we are able to deliver improved security and stability even as we introduce new features, which is better for our users, and for the Web."
"We recognize that this shift may not be compatible with a large organization's IT Policy and understand that it is challenging to organizations that have effort-intensive certification polices. However, our development process is geared toward delivering products that support the Web as it is today, while innovating and building future Web capabilities. Tying Firefox product development to an organizational process we do not control would make it difficult for us to continue to innovate for our users and the betterment of the Web."
A Mozilla executive has incurred the wrath of IT professionals with a somewhat callous comment made about Firefox and its focus on the enterprise.
The comment was in response to a blog posting by Firefox specialist and consultant Mike Kaply. Kaply was justifiably lamenting Firefox's rapid release scheduling and its negative impact on businesses. Case in point: Firefox 4 was only released in March. Now, three months later Firefox 5.0 is out in stable release. Hence, Mozilla has ceased supporting Firefox 4.
Kaply points out that this breakneck update schedule may "work for the average user" but "it doesn't fly in [a] corporate environment, especially places like banks". "Expecting a company to go through a full deployment cycle of their web browser every six week is simply ludicrous."
Others apparently are in agreement, as his post is now at 60-something comments and counting. Particularly vociferous posts are being made by IT people who support thousands of clients running Firefox:
"I have 500,000 corporate users on Firefox 3.6. We just completing a test cycle of Firefox 4 on many thousands of internal business web applications," one said.
The same poster addresses his concerns over the end of support: "By the time I validate Firefox 5, what guarantee would I have that Firefox 5 won't go EOL when Firefox 6 is released?"
However, what really stoked the flame on that blog was Mozilla executive Asa Dotzler's response to Kaply:
"Mike, you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types, right? Your "big numbers" here are really just a drop in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base.
"Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours," Dotzler continued. "Until we run out of people who don't have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can't imagine why we'd focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about."
Dotzler's comment is both sneering and contemptuous of the businesses that have deployed Firefox in their organizations. And, sometimes, at their own peril, may I add. While Firefox is a wonderful browser with its own unique set of features, the frequent updating, occasional lack of good documentation, extension breaking whenever a new update comes out - it all makes it a dicey choice of browser for businesses.
Telling businesses that they are not "a focus" nor should be for Firefox developers is also potential profit suicide. Yes, Firefox makes a profit and a hefty one, with lucrative deals made with search engine companies. Mozilla raked in $104 million in profit in 2009, largely though a deal with Google.
Yet, Chrome has recently stalled Firefox adoption. Many are speculating how a potential decline in Firefox adoption could affect Mozilla's revenue. Especially because the advertising deal Mozilla has made with Google is slated to end this year. As Mozilla seeks to renew that deal with Google and shop for other advertising partners, a significant decline in the Firefox browser market could hurt Mozilla's chances of securing ad deals. According to Net Applications, Firefox has dropped from a 24.3 percent to a 21.9 percent market share from May 2010 to May 2011. During the same period, Google Chrome rose dramatically from 7 percent to 12.5 percent."
Dotzler's comment is also counter to what Mozilla and others in the open source community have been telling businesses for years: give open source a try. Yet, businesses have been reluctant to adopt open source en masse and this cavalier attitude shown by Dotzler proves why.
Business IT has had a healthy fear of open source, due to a perception of lack of support, issues surrounding licensing and other reasons. It's fine if you upgrade your home machine fervently with each new Firefox or Linux distro update. In a business, every update, especially major upgrades, must be tested to ensure they don't break anything in production environments. This is particularly critical in businesses that have custom, in-house, web-based applications.
Many businesses using Firefox use extensions for business processes. What happens when a mission-critical extension doesn't work, and Mozilla does not support that version of Firefox anymore? It's a risk most business IT execs won't and can't take.
I hardly believe Dotler's comments are representative of most of the open source community, nor of Mozilla's. We've reached out to Mozilla for comment and will update this post accordingly. However, now is certainly not the time for anyone at Mozilla to dismiss the enterprise, especially with Firefox's slowing adaption rate.
Update: Kev Needham, Channel Manager at Mozilla has responsed to a request for comment:
"The Web and Web browsers continue to evolve rapidly. Mozilla's focus is on providing users with the best Web experience possible, and Firefox needs to evolve at the pace the Web's users and developers expect. By releasing small, focused updates more often, we are able to deliver improved security and stability even as we introduce new features, which is better for our users, and for the Web."
"We recognize that this shift may not be compatible with a large organization's IT Policy and understand that it is challenging to organizations that have effort-intensive certification polices. However, our development process is geared toward delivering products that support the Web as it is today, while innovating and building future Web capabilities. Tying Firefox product development to an organizational process we do not control would make it difficult for us to continue to innovate for our users and the betterment of the Web."
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Windows Embedded Standard 7 Versus 2009 � Componentization, Tools, and Building Images
Foreword -- Contributed by Robert Smith and the Windows Embedded team, this whitepaper describes some of the differences between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 with respect to componentization, tools, and image-building processes. It follows a previous whitepaper (also available on our site, here), that compared the two operating systems at a higher level.
Windows Embedded Standard 7 Versus Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Componentization, Tools, and Building Images
Introduction
This paper describes some of the differences between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 with respect to componentization, tools, and image-building processes. The goal is to provide customers with a high-level understanding of the differences between the two embedded products, as well as providing an understanding of some of the different behaviors in features, tools, and overall user experience in building and deploying embedded-device images.
Componentization Comparison
In this paper we will look at the following areas to compare some of the differences between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7:
* Component architecture
* Feature-set packages
* Driver packages
* Language packages
* Component dependencies
* Macro components versus templates
* Settings Management Infrastructure (SMI) settings versus configuration settings
* Embedded enabling features (EEFs)
* Support for customized components
Component Architecture
Both Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 have a similar componentization concept, namely a set of binaries (files, etc.), specified in a wrapper file together with other information such as registry keys, dependencies, and other resources. All of this data is installed in the run-time image as a group. However, beyond the componentization concept, the implementation and servicing of components is quite different in each product.
For Windows Embedded Standard 2009, the implementation of a component was created from scratch because the original binaries it inherits from Windows XP Pro are not componentized.
As a result, Windows Embedded Standard 2009 components will not be compatible with future versions of the operating system (OS), including Windows Embedded Standard 7. Also, these components were designed to be imported into the Windows Embedded Standard 2009 component database only, in development computers instead of in the embedded target devices. Servicing the devices requires OEM developers to rebuild an entire run-time image with the updated components.
For Windows Embedded Standard 7, the components are inherited from Windows 7, which are specified in component manifests. In addition to a few exceptions needed to satisfy certain embedded requirements, all of these Windows 7 manifests remain unchanged for Windows Embedded Standard 7. As a result, the design maintains complete compatibility between Windows Embedded Standard 7 and Windows 7. Servicing components is similar to that in Windows 7, requiring only the creation of an embedded-specific update package that can be imported to the Windows Embedded Standard 7 distribution share on OEM development computers, or installed directly on the embedded run-time images.
Another component design variation of Windows Embedded Standard 7 from Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is the concept of embedded core (or eCore). eCore consists of a set of fundamental OS components (kernel, networking, security, some drivers, etc.) that facilitate the booting up of an embedded device with system security and networking capabilities. eCore is the minimum image of an embedded device that allows OEM developers to add, on top of it, other feature sets, drivers, and language packages, which will be described later in this paper.
Feature Set Packages
For Windows Embedded Standard 2009, customers are required to choose feature set packages at the component level when building their device images. Even certain large features (for example, Windows Media Player, Windows Internet Explorer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol, etc.) are implemented as components because they are an aggregation of a large set of binaries. Thus, there is no clear distinction between a component and a feature. In addition, Windows Embedded Standard 2009 contains over 10,000 components, which makes it challenging for customers to choose the right components to build their images.
For Windows Embedded Standard 7, feature-set packages are created to aggregate relevant components (for example, Windows Media Player, Windows Internet Explorer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol, etc.); OEM developers are only required to select the feature sets they want to deploy. Because the number of feature-set packages is kept to a minimum (around 150 packages), the feature-selection process is simpler, making it easier to design and build device images.
Driver Packages
For Windows Embedded Standard 2009, each driver is implemented as a separate component. There are about 9,000 individual drivers, which can present a significant challenge to OEM developers when matching drivers to their hardware devices.
Similar to feature-set packages, drivers in Windows Embedded Standard 7 are also provided at the package level. However, to keep the footprint size small each driver is provided as a single package, with the exception of the USB drivers, which are also aggregated and implemented with an alternative USB Boot package. Essentially, these driver packages are similar to the individual driver components in Windows Embedded Standard 2009. By eliminating some of the legacy drivers in Windows 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7 contains approximately 400 individual driver packages. In addition, there is a list of about 100 drivers included in the embedded core (eCore) to facilitate basic needs such as system boot-up, network communication, etc.
Overall, drivers are provided in similar granularity between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7. However, Windows Embedded Standard 7 contains significantly fewer drivers. A list of drivers is included in the eCore.
Language Packages
Because Windows XP was not designed with language-neutral components, it does not include individual language packages to apply on top of the base-neutral OS. Each OS binary must be fully localized for different languages to meet the needs of different countries and regions. Such a design not only complicates bug fixing, testing, and servicing of OS components, it also significantly increases the OS footprint size for devices that require multiple languages on their images. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 inherits the same language design as Windows XP, with the exception of providing the non-English language resources in separate media, which gives customers a choice to build their device images with one or more languages; however, this does not eliminate the complication of fixing bugs, servicing OS components, and footprint size issue, as mentioned earlier.
Windows Embedded Standard 7 inherits the same language-neutral design model from Windows 7. Different language packages can be applied on top of the base-neutral OS. This approach makes it easier to fix bugs, provide service, and manage the size of the memory footprint in Windows XP and Windows Embedded Standard 2009. As with Windows 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7 provides up to 36 fully localized language packages (LPs). However, the number of available language-interface packages (LIPs) will depend on customer demand. Also, the language packages in Windows Embedded Standard 7 will only contain relevant language resources for their corresponding neutral components for each feature set and driver package (and eCore); therefore, their package sizes will be significantly smaller than those in Windows 7. Smaller language-package size should make it easier for OEM developers to deploy various language packages to their field devices, depending on the specific needs of each.
Component Dependency
Windows Embedded Standard 7 adopts a similar component-dependency concept as Windows Embedded Standard 2009. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard 2009, whose dependencies are expressed at the component level, dependencies in Windows Embedded Standard 7 are expressed at the feature-set package level. The types of dependencies are similar between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7, as shown in the following table.
No (but is covered bydirect or Zero or more)
Macro Components vs. Templates
In Windows Embedded Standard 2009, to satisfy the dependencies to install a certain feature or application, a macro component can be implemented and imported into the component database. The macro component can specify certain configuration settings, as well as any required and/or optional dependencies. A macro component is implemented much like a standard component, however, the former does not contain any file. As a result, OEM developers can use the embedded tool (for example, Target Designer) to change the configuration settings.
In Windows Embedded Standard 7, a similar concept is used. A template is defined to satisfy the installation of a given feature or application. A template specifies a list of feature-set packages that are necessary for the feature or application. However, a template is not implemented quite the same way as a standard feature-set package; it does not allow the specification of configuration settings that can be altered by using the embedded tool (for example, Image Configuration Editor, or ICE).
SMI Settings vs. Configuration Settings
In Windows Embedded Standard 2009, a component can specify configuration settings (for example, defining firewall ports, etc.) and let OEM developers set the desired values for these settings by using Target Designer. Such settings are implemented in the component wrapper file (or SLD) using HTML as the user interface. The settings can change the behavior of a particular feature (for example, enabling or disabling a firewall port).
In Windows Embedded Standard 7, the only settings that can be manipulated by OEM developers through ICE are the visible and mutable SMI settings in the components inherited from Windows 7. There is no additional setting implemented at the feature-set package level. As a result, certain behaviors of a feature that are invisible, or not defined as part of the component level SMI settings, cannot be altered (for example, setting a firewall port). This means the OEM development experience will be significantly different than that of Windows Embedded Standard 2009.
Windows Embedded Standard 7 Versus Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Componentization, Tools, and Building Images
Introduction
This paper describes some of the differences between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 with respect to componentization, tools, and image-building processes. The goal is to provide customers with a high-level understanding of the differences between the two embedded products, as well as providing an understanding of some of the different behaviors in features, tools, and overall user experience in building and deploying embedded-device images.
Componentization Comparison
In this paper we will look at the following areas to compare some of the differences between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7:
* Component architecture
* Feature-set packages
* Driver packages
* Language packages
* Component dependencies
* Macro components versus templates
* Settings Management Infrastructure (SMI) settings versus configuration settings
* Embedded enabling features (EEFs)
* Support for customized components
Component Architecture
Both Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 have a similar componentization concept, namely a set of binaries (files, etc.), specified in a wrapper file together with other information such as registry keys, dependencies, and other resources. All of this data is installed in the run-time image as a group. However, beyond the componentization concept, the implementation and servicing of components is quite different in each product.
For Windows Embedded Standard 2009, the implementation of a component was created from scratch because the original binaries it inherits from Windows XP Pro are not componentized.
As a result, Windows Embedded Standard 2009 components will not be compatible with future versions of the operating system (OS), including Windows Embedded Standard 7. Also, these components were designed to be imported into the Windows Embedded Standard 2009 component database only, in development computers instead of in the embedded target devices. Servicing the devices requires OEM developers to rebuild an entire run-time image with the updated components.
For Windows Embedded Standard 7, the components are inherited from Windows 7, which are specified in component manifests. In addition to a few exceptions needed to satisfy certain embedded requirements, all of these Windows 7 manifests remain unchanged for Windows Embedded Standard 7. As a result, the design maintains complete compatibility between Windows Embedded Standard 7 and Windows 7. Servicing components is similar to that in Windows 7, requiring only the creation of an embedded-specific update package that can be imported to the Windows Embedded Standard 7 distribution share on OEM development computers, or installed directly on the embedded run-time images.
Another component design variation of Windows Embedded Standard 7 from Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is the concept of embedded core (or eCore). eCore consists of a set of fundamental OS components (kernel, networking, security, some drivers, etc.) that facilitate the booting up of an embedded device with system security and networking capabilities. eCore is the minimum image of an embedded device that allows OEM developers to add, on top of it, other feature sets, drivers, and language packages, which will be described later in this paper.
Feature Set Packages
For Windows Embedded Standard 2009, customers are required to choose feature set packages at the component level when building their device images. Even certain large features (for example, Windows Media Player, Windows Internet Explorer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol, etc.) are implemented as components because they are an aggregation of a large set of binaries. Thus, there is no clear distinction between a component and a feature. In addition, Windows Embedded Standard 2009 contains over 10,000 components, which makes it challenging for customers to choose the right components to build their images.
For Windows Embedded Standard 7, feature-set packages are created to aggregate relevant components (for example, Windows Media Player, Windows Internet Explorer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol, etc.); OEM developers are only required to select the feature sets they want to deploy. Because the number of feature-set packages is kept to a minimum (around 150 packages), the feature-selection process is simpler, making it easier to design and build device images.
Driver Packages
For Windows Embedded Standard 2009, each driver is implemented as a separate component. There are about 9,000 individual drivers, which can present a significant challenge to OEM developers when matching drivers to their hardware devices.
Similar to feature-set packages, drivers in Windows Embedded Standard 7 are also provided at the package level. However, to keep the footprint size small each driver is provided as a single package, with the exception of the USB drivers, which are also aggregated and implemented with an alternative USB Boot package. Essentially, these driver packages are similar to the individual driver components in Windows Embedded Standard 2009. By eliminating some of the legacy drivers in Windows 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7 contains approximately 400 individual driver packages. In addition, there is a list of about 100 drivers included in the embedded core (eCore) to facilitate basic needs such as system boot-up, network communication, etc.
Overall, drivers are provided in similar granularity between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7. However, Windows Embedded Standard 7 contains significantly fewer drivers. A list of drivers is included in the eCore.
Language Packages
Because Windows XP was not designed with language-neutral components, it does not include individual language packages to apply on top of the base-neutral OS. Each OS binary must be fully localized for different languages to meet the needs of different countries and regions. Such a design not only complicates bug fixing, testing, and servicing of OS components, it also significantly increases the OS footprint size for devices that require multiple languages on their images. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 inherits the same language design as Windows XP, with the exception of providing the non-English language resources in separate media, which gives customers a choice to build their device images with one or more languages; however, this does not eliminate the complication of fixing bugs, servicing OS components, and footprint size issue, as mentioned earlier.
Windows Embedded Standard 7 inherits the same language-neutral design model from Windows 7. Different language packages can be applied on top of the base-neutral OS. This approach makes it easier to fix bugs, provide service, and manage the size of the memory footprint in Windows XP and Windows Embedded Standard 2009. As with Windows 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7 provides up to 36 fully localized language packages (LPs). However, the number of available language-interface packages (LIPs) will depend on customer demand. Also, the language packages in Windows Embedded Standard 7 will only contain relevant language resources for their corresponding neutral components for each feature set and driver package (and eCore); therefore, their package sizes will be significantly smaller than those in Windows 7. Smaller language-package size should make it easier for OEM developers to deploy various language packages to their field devices, depending on the specific needs of each.
Component Dependency
Windows Embedded Standard 7 adopts a similar component-dependency concept as Windows Embedded Standard 2009. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard 2009, whose dependencies are expressed at the component level, dependencies in Windows Embedded Standard 7 are expressed at the feature-set package level. The types of dependencies are similar between Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Windows Embedded Standard 7, as shown in the following table.
No (but is covered bydirect or Zero or more)
Macro Components vs. Templates
In Windows Embedded Standard 2009, to satisfy the dependencies to install a certain feature or application, a macro component can be implemented and imported into the component database. The macro component can specify certain configuration settings, as well as any required and/or optional dependencies. A macro component is implemented much like a standard component, however, the former does not contain any file. As a result, OEM developers can use the embedded tool (for example, Target Designer) to change the configuration settings.
In Windows Embedded Standard 7, a similar concept is used. A template is defined to satisfy the installation of a given feature or application. A template specifies a list of feature-set packages that are necessary for the feature or application. However, a template is not implemented quite the same way as a standard feature-set package; it does not allow the specification of configuration settings that can be altered by using the embedded tool (for example, Image Configuration Editor, or ICE).
SMI Settings vs. Configuration Settings
In Windows Embedded Standard 2009, a component can specify configuration settings (for example, defining firewall ports, etc.) and let OEM developers set the desired values for these settings by using Target Designer. Such settings are implemented in the component wrapper file (or SLD) using HTML as the user interface. The settings can change the behavior of a particular feature (for example, enabling or disabling a firewall port).
In Windows Embedded Standard 7, the only settings that can be manipulated by OEM developers through ICE are the visible and mutable SMI settings in the components inherited from Windows 7. There is no additional setting implemented at the feature-set package level. As a result, certain behaviors of a feature that are invisible, or not defined as part of the component level SMI settings, cannot be altered (for example, setting a firewall port). This means the OEM development experience will be significantly different than that of Windows Embedded Standard 2009.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Windows Phone 7 -- only seven percent share by 2016?
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system will have gained only seven percent market share by 2016, according to ABI Research. This paints a very different picture from rival research firm IDC, which recently claimed Microsoft would have 21 percent market share by 2015.
Google's Android operating system will rise to command 45 percent of smartphone market share worldwide by 2016, ABI Research said March 31.
The market researcher, which said Android accounted for 69 million of the 302 million smartphones shipped in 2010, said the phasing out of Nokia's Symbian OS over the next two years would leave a share vacuum.
Meanwhile Apple's iOS should command 19 percent market share in 2016, with Research in Motion's Blackberry falling from 16 percent share in 2010 to 14 percent for 2016.
This is owed less to falling Blackberry shipments and more to its relegation to niche status as an enterprise smartphone platform.
Interestingly, ABI also sees Samsung's Bada platform as more primed to take some of the Symbian share than Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, which has struggled in the early going with slow sales and misfiring updates, according to eWEEK's Microsoft Watch blog.
ABI analyst Michael Morgan noted that with 4 million units shipped in 2010, Bada has taken off "very well, very fast," and may reach 10 percent market share by 2016.
Conversely, Morgan said Windows Phone 7, which shipped two million handsets in last years fourth quarter, would have to "find incredible success through its Nokia channel to take more than seven percent of the market by 2016."
That's quite a different story from IDC's market forecast from March 29. Similar to ABI, IDC pegged Android at 45 percent share through 2015.
However, IDC said that Windows Phone 7 -- not Blackberry, iOS or Bada -- would take 21 percent market share to fill the void left by Symbian.
That's how strongly IDC believes in the Microsoft brand and the ensuing partnership to have Nokia build phones with WP7.
Overall, ABI said the smartphone market would see a huge upswing as lower-cost models land to help cost-conscious consumers replace their feature phones. ABI expects the market to grow at a 19 percent compound annual rate through 2016.
Google's Android operating system will rise to command 45 percent of smartphone market share worldwide by 2016, ABI Research said March 31.
The market researcher, which said Android accounted for 69 million of the 302 million smartphones shipped in 2010, said the phasing out of Nokia's Symbian OS over the next two years would leave a share vacuum.
Meanwhile Apple's iOS should command 19 percent market share in 2016, with Research in Motion's Blackberry falling from 16 percent share in 2010 to 14 percent for 2016.
This is owed less to falling Blackberry shipments and more to its relegation to niche status as an enterprise smartphone platform.
Interestingly, ABI also sees Samsung's Bada platform as more primed to take some of the Symbian share than Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, which has struggled in the early going with slow sales and misfiring updates, according to eWEEK's Microsoft Watch blog.
ABI analyst Michael Morgan noted that with 4 million units shipped in 2010, Bada has taken off "very well, very fast," and may reach 10 percent market share by 2016.
Conversely, Morgan said Windows Phone 7, which shipped two million handsets in last years fourth quarter, would have to "find incredible success through its Nokia channel to take more than seven percent of the market by 2016."
That's quite a different story from IDC's market forecast from March 29. Similar to ABI, IDC pegged Android at 45 percent share through 2015.
However, IDC said that Windows Phone 7 -- not Blackberry, iOS or Bada -- would take 21 percent market share to fill the void left by Symbian.
That's how strongly IDC believes in the Microsoft brand and the ensuing partnership to have Nokia build phones with WP7.
Overall, ABI said the smartphone market would see a huge upswing as lower-cost models land to help cost-conscious consumers replace their feature phones. ABI expects the market to grow at a 19 percent compound annual rate through 2016.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Microsoft updates Windows Phone 7 dev tools to reflect new features
Microsoft demonstrated its upcoming "Mango" Windows Phone 7 update to the media, showing off new features including multitasking, new unified communications capabilities, and improved "live tiles." Announcing that Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE are now planning Windows Phones, Redmond also released a freely downloadable Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta.
The "Mango" Windows Phone update, first promised in February by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, enables application multitasking for background processing, audio and file transfer, and fast application switching. Holding a phone's back button down will provide a card-like view (right) of all running applications.
Several weeks ago, Microsoft sent out invitations to a "VIP preview" of the operating system upgrade on May 24. That followed the initial unofficial revealing of Mango features by the Windows Phone Dev Podcast, plus additional disclosures last week via the official Windows Phone Blog.
At a press conference this morning (a replay of which is embedded below), Microsoft touted the fall release of the Windows Phone 7 upgrade it's still referring to only via its fruity code-name. (Various publications, ourselves included, have called it "Windows Phone 7.5, but this moniker remains unofficial.) It also released a Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta, with many new features but a modestly incremented 7.1 version number.
Microsoft shows off its upcoming Windows Phone 7 upgrade
(click to play)
Andy Lees, president of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, told his audience, "Seven months ago we started our mission to make smartphones smarter and easier for people to do more. With Mango, Windows Phone takes a major step forward in redefining how people communicate and use apps and the Internet, giving you better results with less effort."
According to Lees, Mango will include "hundreds of new features and improvements" organized around three key themes: easier communications, smarter apps, and the Internet. Microsoft listed the new communications features as follows:
* Threads -- Switch between text, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger within the same conversation
* Groups -- Group contacts into personalized Live Tiles to see the latest status updates right from the Start Screen and quickly send a text, email or IM to the whole group
* Deeper social network integration -- Twitter and LinkedIn feeds are now integrated into contact cards, and Mango includes built-in Facebook check-ins and new face detection software that makes it easier to quickly tag photos and post to the Web
* Linked inbox -- See multiple email accounts in one linked inbox, where conversations are organized to make it easy to stay on top of the latest mail
* Hands-free messaging -- Built-in voice-to-text and text-to-voice support enables hands-free texting or chatting
The new application features are said to include:
* App Connect -- By connecting apps to search results and deepening their integration with Windows Phone hubs, including Music and Video and Pictures, Mango allows apps to be surfaced when and where they make sense
* Improved Live Tiles -- Get real-time information from apps without having to open them; Live Tiles can be more dynamic and hold more information
* Multitasking -- Quickly switch between apps in use and allow apps to run in the background, helping to preserve battery life and performance
Internet-centric features are said to include not only the previously announced Internet Explorer 9 web browser, but also:
* Local Scout -- Provides hyperlocal search results and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping and activities in an easy-to-use guide.
* Bing on Windows Phone -- More ways to search the Web, including Bing Vision, Music Search and Voice so its easy to discover and decide
* Quick Cards -- When searching for a product, movie, event or place, see a quick summary of relevant information, including related apps
"Rather than providing blue-link answers, we bring the Internet in this innovative [way] called Quick Cards," Lees was quoted as explaining by eWEEK's Nicholas Kolakoswki. In essence, that means a Bing search for something in particular -- such as restaurants -- will lead the user not to a browser window, but a series of cards with images, access to related applications (in the case of restaurants, Yelps application is a good example), and other information.
According to Microsoft, Mango is "scheduled to ship on new phones beginning this fall," and will also be available as a free upgrade to existing Windows Phone 7 users. The company added that Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE will join those already producing compatible smartphones, while the online Windows Phone Marketplace will be available in 35 countries starting this fall.
In a May 24 posting on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, Matt Bencke (general manager of developer and marketplace for Windows Phone) adds that when Mango is released, there will be a web version of the Windows Phone Marketplace. Along with yet-to-be-disclosed "new features and capabilities," it will allow customers "to buy and download apps from any PC and send them directly to their phones," he adds.
Bencke's posting also summarizes features in the newly released Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta as follows:
* Access to calendar and contacts for apps
* Additional sensors; direct camera access, compass & gyro
* Background processing
* Deep linking into apps from notifications and Live Tiles
* Fast application switching
* IE9 web browser control
* Live Tile enhancements: use of back of tiles and ability to update Live Tiles locally
* Local SQL database for structured storage
* Networking / sockets for communications
* New profiler and emulator for testing
* Silverlight 4
* Use of Silverlight + XNA together
New features confirmed
Today's announcement confirmed Mango goodies that had been previously announced, or at least rumored. One of them is the integration of Microsoft's SkyDrive into the smartphone operating system's Office Hub (right).
Other enhancements target email. For example, users will be able to pin a selected email folder -- for a specific project, or containing messages from a specific person -- to the start screen for quick access.
Mango's inbox will allow viewing emails by conversation (below). In addition, smartphone users will be able to search connected email servers (e.g. Exchange Server) for older messages that are no longer stored locally, "giving you ready access to all of your email."
Mango's conversation view (left) and Lync capabilities (right)
Source: Microsoft
It's further said Mango will, via a downloadable app, provide unified communications capabilities in conjunction with Microsoft's Lync product. Users will gain instant messaging plus the ability to see the presence of their co-workers (above right)
Other Mango features confirm those discussed several weeks ago on the Windows Phone Dev Podcast, which, despite its official-sounding name, is produced by third parties -- Ryan Lowdermilk, a software consultant for Arxis Technology, and Travis Lowdermilk, a web/database developer for the Kaweah Delta Health Care District. The duo cited "screens we were given" (below) as indicating that the updated smartphone OS will include turn-by-turn navigation, texting via voice recognition, Bing searches via a phone's camera or microphone, plus improved SkyDrive and Windows Live Messenger integration.
Mango's turn by turn navigation (left) and podcast support (right)
(Click either to enlarge)
Some of the new features in Mango previously highlighted by the Windows Phone Dev podcast will merely bring the Microsoft smartphone operating system into parity with what is already offered by Google's Android. For example, a turn-by-turn navigation feature (above left) will provide voice guidance while driving, plus maps that can always face north or rotate with the direction of travel. In addition, it's said, Mango will feature on-device podcast support (above right).
The screens also depict use of Microsoft's TellMe voice recognition services for hands-free texting (note the "speak" icon in the image at left below). Additionally, they indicated that the operating system will include new Bing Audio and Bing Vision services (below right).
Hands-free texting (left) and audio-visual search (right)
(Click either to enlarge)
Bing Audio search will apparently operate similarly to an existing third-party service, Shazam. Users will be able to hold their phones up to a radio or other device playing recorded music, at which point the search engine will attempt to identify it.
Meanwhile, Bing Vision will apparently be a search service that uses a phone's camera. It's said users will be able to scan barcodes, Microsoft Tags, QR codes, CDs, DVDs, and (via optical character recognition), even text.
The IE9 browser in the Mango upgrade to Windows Phone 7 was shown beating the iPhone (left) and Android (far right) in this MIX11 demo
(click to play)
Further information
More information on the Mango release of Windows Phone 7 can be found on the Windows Phone Blog and on the Windows Phone Facebook page.
Microsoft's website offers downloads of both the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta and related release notes. (The latter warn that the tools are not compatible with being run in a Windows 7 virtual machine.)
The "Mango" Windows Phone update, first promised in February by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, enables application multitasking for background processing, audio and file transfer, and fast application switching. Holding a phone's back button down will provide a card-like view (right) of all running applications.
Several weeks ago, Microsoft sent out invitations to a "VIP preview" of the operating system upgrade on May 24. That followed the initial unofficial revealing of Mango features by the Windows Phone Dev Podcast, plus additional disclosures last week via the official Windows Phone Blog.
At a press conference this morning (a replay of which is embedded below), Microsoft touted the fall release of the Windows Phone 7 upgrade it's still referring to only via its fruity code-name. (Various publications, ourselves included, have called it "Windows Phone 7.5, but this moniker remains unofficial.) It also released a Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta, with many new features but a modestly incremented 7.1 version number.
Microsoft shows off its upcoming Windows Phone 7 upgrade
(click to play)
Andy Lees, president of the Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft, told his audience, "Seven months ago we started our mission to make smartphones smarter and easier for people to do more. With Mango, Windows Phone takes a major step forward in redefining how people communicate and use apps and the Internet, giving you better results with less effort."
According to Lees, Mango will include "hundreds of new features and improvements" organized around three key themes: easier communications, smarter apps, and the Internet. Microsoft listed the new communications features as follows:
* Threads -- Switch between text, Facebook chat and Windows Live Messenger within the same conversation
* Groups -- Group contacts into personalized Live Tiles to see the latest status updates right from the Start Screen and quickly send a text, email or IM to the whole group
* Deeper social network integration -- Twitter and LinkedIn feeds are now integrated into contact cards, and Mango includes built-in Facebook check-ins and new face detection software that makes it easier to quickly tag photos and post to the Web
* Linked inbox -- See multiple email accounts in one linked inbox, where conversations are organized to make it easy to stay on top of the latest mail
* Hands-free messaging -- Built-in voice-to-text and text-to-voice support enables hands-free texting or chatting
The new application features are said to include:
* App Connect -- By connecting apps to search results and deepening their integration with Windows Phone hubs, including Music and Video and Pictures, Mango allows apps to be surfaced when and where they make sense
* Improved Live Tiles -- Get real-time information from apps without having to open them; Live Tiles can be more dynamic and hold more information
* Multitasking -- Quickly switch between apps in use and allow apps to run in the background, helping to preserve battery life and performance
Internet-centric features are said to include not only the previously announced Internet Explorer 9 web browser, but also:
* Local Scout -- Provides hyperlocal search results and recommends nearby restaurants, shopping and activities in an easy-to-use guide.
* Bing on Windows Phone -- More ways to search the Web, including Bing Vision, Music Search and Voice so its easy to discover and decide
* Quick Cards -- When searching for a product, movie, event or place, see a quick summary of relevant information, including related apps
"Rather than providing blue-link answers, we bring the Internet in this innovative [way] called Quick Cards," Lees was quoted as explaining by eWEEK's Nicholas Kolakoswki. In essence, that means a Bing search for something in particular -- such as restaurants -- will lead the user not to a browser window, but a series of cards with images, access to related applications (in the case of restaurants, Yelps application is a good example), and other information.
According to Microsoft, Mango is "scheduled to ship on new phones beginning this fall," and will also be available as a free upgrade to existing Windows Phone 7 users. The company added that Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE will join those already producing compatible smartphones, while the online Windows Phone Marketplace will be available in 35 countries starting this fall.
In a May 24 posting on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, Matt Bencke (general manager of developer and marketplace for Windows Phone) adds that when Mango is released, there will be a web version of the Windows Phone Marketplace. Along with yet-to-be-disclosed "new features and capabilities," it will allow customers "to buy and download apps from any PC and send them directly to their phones," he adds.
Bencke's posting also summarizes features in the newly released Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta as follows:
* Access to calendar and contacts for apps
* Additional sensors; direct camera access, compass & gyro
* Background processing
* Deep linking into apps from notifications and Live Tiles
* Fast application switching
* IE9 web browser control
* Live Tile enhancements: use of back of tiles and ability to update Live Tiles locally
* Local SQL database for structured storage
* Networking / sockets for communications
* New profiler and emulator for testing
* Silverlight 4
* Use of Silverlight + XNA together
New features confirmed
Today's announcement confirmed Mango goodies that had been previously announced, or at least rumored. One of them is the integration of Microsoft's SkyDrive into the smartphone operating system's Office Hub (right).
Other enhancements target email. For example, users will be able to pin a selected email folder -- for a specific project, or containing messages from a specific person -- to the start screen for quick access.
Mango's inbox will allow viewing emails by conversation (below). In addition, smartphone users will be able to search connected email servers (e.g. Exchange Server) for older messages that are no longer stored locally, "giving you ready access to all of your email."
Mango's conversation view (left) and Lync capabilities (right)
Source: Microsoft
It's further said Mango will, via a downloadable app, provide unified communications capabilities in conjunction with Microsoft's Lync product. Users will gain instant messaging plus the ability to see the presence of their co-workers (above right)
Other Mango features confirm those discussed several weeks ago on the Windows Phone Dev Podcast, which, despite its official-sounding name, is produced by third parties -- Ryan Lowdermilk, a software consultant for Arxis Technology, and Travis Lowdermilk, a web/database developer for the Kaweah Delta Health Care District. The duo cited "screens we were given" (below) as indicating that the updated smartphone OS will include turn-by-turn navigation, texting via voice recognition, Bing searches via a phone's camera or microphone, plus improved SkyDrive and Windows Live Messenger integration.
Mango's turn by turn navigation (left) and podcast support (right)
(Click either to enlarge)
Some of the new features in Mango previously highlighted by the Windows Phone Dev podcast will merely bring the Microsoft smartphone operating system into parity with what is already offered by Google's Android. For example, a turn-by-turn navigation feature (above left) will provide voice guidance while driving, plus maps that can always face north or rotate with the direction of travel. In addition, it's said, Mango will feature on-device podcast support (above right).
The screens also depict use of Microsoft's TellMe voice recognition services for hands-free texting (note the "speak" icon in the image at left below). Additionally, they indicated that the operating system will include new Bing Audio and Bing Vision services (below right).
Hands-free texting (left) and audio-visual search (right)
(Click either to enlarge)
Bing Audio search will apparently operate similarly to an existing third-party service, Shazam. Users will be able to hold their phones up to a radio or other device playing recorded music, at which point the search engine will attempt to identify it.
Meanwhile, Bing Vision will apparently be a search service that uses a phone's camera. It's said users will be able to scan barcodes, Microsoft Tags, QR codes, CDs, DVDs, and (via optical character recognition), even text.
The IE9 browser in the Mango upgrade to Windows Phone 7 was shown beating the iPhone (left) and Android (far right) in this MIX11 demo
(click to play)
Further information
More information on the Mango release of Windows Phone 7 can be found on the Windows Phone Blog and on the Windows Phone Facebook page.
Microsoft's website offers downloads of both the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta and related release notes. (The latter warn that the tools are not compatible with being run in a Windows 7 virtual machine.)
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Want to stop cybercrime? Follow the money
FLIPSIDE: Cybercrime costs a business $3.8 million/year, study finds
In one example of how someone can profit off cybercrime with very little technical know-how, there is a business that pays people to abuse access to their employers' resources. For example, you might be instructed to insert a tiny piece of HTML code into your company's website in order to gain a commission for each person who is compromised by visiting the site. It's not your expertise that's important - it's your password to the Web server.
"You don't need to know anything," Savage said. "This is outsourcing taken to its logical conclusion."
Savage detailed a few of his team's projects that involved getting a bit more personal with the cybercrime underground. CCIED infiltrated the Storm botnet, which was going wild in 2007, with honeypots that "poisoned" 1% of the URLs being distributed inside the botnet.
"This potentially allows you to observe what is going on and influence their actions," Savage said. "We were able to measure delivery probability, click-through rate and conversion rate."
Through this type of work, they found that pharma scams need to send 12 million emails to gain one purchase, but can still earn millions of dollars a year.
The real question is, how do you stop all of this? One example related to CAPTCHA technology - the annoying thing that makes you type in a random string of letters and numbers - shows how economic research can make us safer on the Web.
It turns out that using character recognition software programs is less economically feasible than just paying humans to type in the letters and numbers, because companies that host websites periodically change their CAPTCHA system to fool the software. But humans don't even have to know English to solve CAPTCHAs. They just have to be able to recognize the characters.
You can pay for CAPTCHA entry the same way you pay for credit card and email credentials. But on the other end is a worker earning just $1 or even less for an eight-hour shift in which they enter 1,000 CAPTCHAs.
BROKEN: Researchers crack Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo, Digg audio captchas
Savage's team bought up lots of CAPTCHA recognition services to see how big the available capacity is. One provider had 400 or 500 people at work at any given time, with the whole industry solving millions of CAPTCHAs a day with cheap human labor.
This may make adding CAPTCHA technology to websites seem like a futile exercise. But it's just the opposite. Forcing criminal enterprises to pay for this service brings most of them to a tipping point where the whole enterprise is no longer economically feasible.
"If you don't have CAPTCHA, people with bad business plans can afford to exploit your resources," Savage said. "CAPTCHAs keep it to a small percentage of people who have good business models and can afford the cost."
By limiting the pool of criminals, this lets the computer defense industry put more resources into stopping a smaller amount of attacks.
But as anyone who has gotten a virus knows, it's not perfect.
In one example of how someone can profit off cybercrime with very little technical know-how, there is a business that pays people to abuse access to their employers' resources. For example, you might be instructed to insert a tiny piece of HTML code into your company's website in order to gain a commission for each person who is compromised by visiting the site. It's not your expertise that's important - it's your password to the Web server.
"You don't need to know anything," Savage said. "This is outsourcing taken to its logical conclusion."
Savage detailed a few of his team's projects that involved getting a bit more personal with the cybercrime underground. CCIED infiltrated the Storm botnet, which was going wild in 2007, with honeypots that "poisoned" 1% of the URLs being distributed inside the botnet.
"This potentially allows you to observe what is going on and influence their actions," Savage said. "We were able to measure delivery probability, click-through rate and conversion rate."
Through this type of work, they found that pharma scams need to send 12 million emails to gain one purchase, but can still earn millions of dollars a year.
The real question is, how do you stop all of this? One example related to CAPTCHA technology - the annoying thing that makes you type in a random string of letters and numbers - shows how economic research can make us safer on the Web.
It turns out that using character recognition software programs is less economically feasible than just paying humans to type in the letters and numbers, because companies that host websites periodically change their CAPTCHA system to fool the software. But humans don't even have to know English to solve CAPTCHAs. They just have to be able to recognize the characters.
You can pay for CAPTCHA entry the same way you pay for credit card and email credentials. But on the other end is a worker earning just $1 or even less for an eight-hour shift in which they enter 1,000 CAPTCHAs.
BROKEN: Researchers crack Microsoft, eBay, Yahoo, Digg audio captchas
Savage's team bought up lots of CAPTCHA recognition services to see how big the available capacity is. One provider had 400 or 500 people at work at any given time, with the whole industry solving millions of CAPTCHAs a day with cheap human labor.
This may make adding CAPTCHA technology to websites seem like a futile exercise. But it's just the opposite. Forcing criminal enterprises to pay for this service brings most of them to a tipping point where the whole enterprise is no longer economically feasible.
"If you don't have CAPTCHA, people with bad business plans can afford to exploit your resources," Savage said. "CAPTCHAs keep it to a small percentage of people who have good business models and can afford the cost."
By limiting the pool of criminals, this lets the computer defense industry put more resources into stopping a smaller amount of attacks.
But as anyone who has gotten a virus knows, it's not perfect.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Facebook Facial Recognition Draws EPIC Privacy Concern
EPIC and Congressman Edward Markey complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Facebook abused users' privacy rights with its new facial recognition feature for tagging photos.
Facebook is facing pressure from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, other consumer advocates and Congress members over its use of facial recognition software for its tag suggestions feature in its photo application.
When users upload new photos, Facebook scans them with facial recognition software to match new photos to other photos a user is tagged in. Similar photos are then grouped together, with Facebook suggesting the name of the friend in photos.
Facebook revealed plans to use facial recognition in its tag suggestions feature last December. The original launch was contained to the United States, but the company recently changed its privacy settings to enable the tag suggestions feature more broadly -- without explicitly warning users of its intentions.
However, tag suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested. Moreover, all suggestions can be ignored and if someone doesn't want their name to be suggested to their friends, they can disable the feature in their privacy settings.
Still, that wasn't enough to mollify privacy advocates. The European Union data protection agency opened a probe versus the social network over the feature, EPIC lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that Facebook's service was unfair and deceptive.
EPIC, along with Consumer Watchdog, Center for Digital Democracy and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, asked the FTC to force Facebook to suspend the program and require that automated identification based on user photos requires opt-in consent from the social network's users.
"Users could not reasonably have known that Facebook would use their photos to build a biometric database in order to implement a facial recognition technology under the control of Facebook," EPIC argued in its complaint.
EPIC also said it was concerned that, without FTC intervention, Facebook could expand the use of its facial recognition information store in ways that users may not be able to control across the 60 billion photos uploaded to the social network.
The grievance was supported by Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the bi-partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, who called for Facebook to make the service opt in instead of opt out.
"The Federal Trade Commission should investigate this important privacy matter, and I commend the consumer groups for their filing," Markey said June 13. "When it comes to users' privacy, Facebook's policy should be: "'Ask for permission, don't assume it.'"
Yet a Facebook spokesperson noted that the social network has been slowly rolling out tag suggestions to its millions of users since last December, after the company initially announced its intentions.
"This data, and the fact that we've had almost no user complaints, suggests people are enjoying the feature and are finding it useful," the spokesperson told eWEEK. "For those who don't, we made turning off tag suggestions easy and explained how to do so on our blog, in our help center, and within the interface."
This isn't the first run-in Facebook has had with EPIC or Markey. Markey and fellow Congressman Joe Barton wrote to Facebook in May 2011 inquiring about a security flaw on Facebook that provided advertisers and other third parties the capability to access Facebook users' accounts and personal information.
EPIC and fourteen other organizations in May 2010 filed a complaint with FTC, accusing Facebook of engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices by instituting social plugins and "Instant Personalization," and the use of cookies by Facebook to track users' internet activity, among other concerns.
Facebook has endured several privacy or user experience backlashes in the last few years. Its first (and worst) major gaffe was a failed ad campaign called Beacon that exposed users activities to their friends without permission.
Facebook is facing pressure from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, other consumer advocates and Congress members over its use of facial recognition software for its tag suggestions feature in its photo application.
When users upload new photos, Facebook scans them with facial recognition software to match new photos to other photos a user is tagged in. Similar photos are then grouped together, with Facebook suggesting the name of the friend in photos.
Facebook revealed plans to use facial recognition in its tag suggestions feature last December. The original launch was contained to the United States, but the company recently changed its privacy settings to enable the tag suggestions feature more broadly -- without explicitly warning users of its intentions.
However, tag suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested. Moreover, all suggestions can be ignored and if someone doesn't want their name to be suggested to their friends, they can disable the feature in their privacy settings.
Still, that wasn't enough to mollify privacy advocates. The European Union data protection agency opened a probe versus the social network over the feature, EPIC lodged a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that Facebook's service was unfair and deceptive.
EPIC, along with Consumer Watchdog, Center for Digital Democracy and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, asked the FTC to force Facebook to suspend the program and require that automated identification based on user photos requires opt-in consent from the social network's users.
"Users could not reasonably have known that Facebook would use their photos to build a biometric database in order to implement a facial recognition technology under the control of Facebook," EPIC argued in its complaint.
EPIC also said it was concerned that, without FTC intervention, Facebook could expand the use of its facial recognition information store in ways that users may not be able to control across the 60 billion photos uploaded to the social network.
The grievance was supported by Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-chairman of the bi-partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, who called for Facebook to make the service opt in instead of opt out.
"The Federal Trade Commission should investigate this important privacy matter, and I commend the consumer groups for their filing," Markey said June 13. "When it comes to users' privacy, Facebook's policy should be: "'Ask for permission, don't assume it.'"
Yet a Facebook spokesperson noted that the social network has been slowly rolling out tag suggestions to its millions of users since last December, after the company initially announced its intentions.
"This data, and the fact that we've had almost no user complaints, suggests people are enjoying the feature and are finding it useful," the spokesperson told eWEEK. "For those who don't, we made turning off tag suggestions easy and explained how to do so on our blog, in our help center, and within the interface."
This isn't the first run-in Facebook has had with EPIC or Markey. Markey and fellow Congressman Joe Barton wrote to Facebook in May 2011 inquiring about a security flaw on Facebook that provided advertisers and other third parties the capability to access Facebook users' accounts and personal information.
EPIC and fourteen other organizations in May 2010 filed a complaint with FTC, accusing Facebook of engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices by instituting social plugins and "Instant Personalization," and the use of cookies by Facebook to track users' internet activity, among other concerns.
Facebook has endured several privacy or user experience backlashes in the last few years. Its first (and worst) major gaffe was a failed ad campaign called Beacon that exposed users activities to their friends without permission.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Google Homepage Doodle Provides Lunar Eclipse Live Feed
Astronomy fans in the U.S. won't be able to catch a glimpse of Wednesday's total lunar eclipse, but Google just put up a homepage doodle that will allow people to follow along.
"Starting now, see the latest state of the lunar eclipse on our homepage - thanks @slooh for the imagery," Google tweeted.
Slooh.com provides crowdsourced access to live telescopes from around the world. Since its December 2003 launch, members have taken 1.3 million photos of 35,000 unique objects and events in the night sky. The Google doodle will include a live feed of the lunar eclipse from Slooh's Space Camera, which will update every two minutes throughout the event.
When you land on the doodle, a dial at the bottom of the image will move from left to right, going through the various stages of the eclipse, before settling on its current state. For a slower view, however, you can move the dial back and forth yourself.
Google Doodle Provides Lunar Eclipse Live Feed
Earlier today, Google announced that it would team up with Slooh to live stream the eclipse. There are several ways to watch: Slooh's live mission interface includes audio narrations from real-life astronomers and it also has an Android app; there's a live stream on the Google YouTube Channel; and there's an eclipse sky layer in Google Earth that's accessible via a special plug-in.
During a lunar eclipse, Earth comes between the sun and the moon so that all or part of the sun's light is blocked from the moon, according to NASA.
Wednesday's eclipse is also notable for how long it will last. "The total phase itself lasts 100 minutes. The last eclipse to exceed this duration was in July 2000," astrophysicist Fred Espenak wrote in NASA's eclipse guide for 2011.
The entire event will be visible from the eastern half of Africa, the Middle East, central Asia, and western Australia, Espenak said. Europe will miss the first part of the eclipse because it happens before moonrise, but—with the exception of northern Scotland and northern Scandinavia—Europeans will be able to see totality. Eastern Asia, eastern Australia, and New Zealand, meanwhile, will miss the last stages of eclipse because they occur after moonset.
In South America, observers in eastern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina will witness totality, but nothing will be viewable from North America. Those in the U.S. should be able to see the December eclipse, however.
If you're in an area where you can view the eclipse, see PCMag's 6 Tips for Better Moon Photos.
For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow below. The company's last popular doodle was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site.
"Starting now, see the latest state of the lunar eclipse on our homepage - thanks @slooh for the imagery," Google tweeted.
Slooh.com provides crowdsourced access to live telescopes from around the world. Since its December 2003 launch, members have taken 1.3 million photos of 35,000 unique objects and events in the night sky. The Google doodle will include a live feed of the lunar eclipse from Slooh's Space Camera, which will update every two minutes throughout the event.
When you land on the doodle, a dial at the bottom of the image will move from left to right, going through the various stages of the eclipse, before settling on its current state. For a slower view, however, you can move the dial back and forth yourself.
Google Doodle Provides Lunar Eclipse Live Feed
Earlier today, Google announced that it would team up with Slooh to live stream the eclipse. There are several ways to watch: Slooh's live mission interface includes audio narrations from real-life astronomers and it also has an Android app; there's a live stream on the Google YouTube Channel; and there's an eclipse sky layer in Google Earth that's accessible via a special plug-in.
During a lunar eclipse, Earth comes between the sun and the moon so that all or part of the sun's light is blocked from the moon, according to NASA.
Wednesday's eclipse is also notable for how long it will last. "The total phase itself lasts 100 minutes. The last eclipse to exceed this duration was in July 2000," astrophysicist Fred Espenak wrote in NASA's eclipse guide for 2011.
The entire event will be visible from the eastern half of Africa, the Middle East, central Asia, and western Australia, Espenak said. Europe will miss the first part of the eclipse because it happens before moonrise, but—with the exception of northern Scotland and northern Scandinavia—Europeans will be able to see totality. Eastern Asia, eastern Australia, and New Zealand, meanwhile, will miss the last stages of eclipse because they occur after moonset.
In South America, observers in eastern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina will witness totality, but nothing will be viewable from North America. Those in the U.S. should be able to see the December eclipse, however.
If you're in an area where you can view the eclipse, see PCMag's 6 Tips for Better Moon Photos.
For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow below. The company's last popular doodle was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
HP Pavilion DM3
An amazing bit of kit, that in some ways, takes its technology into a brand-new level, combining a lot of what is good into one neat compact unit.
The HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch laptop is an incredibly compact and good-looking laptop, having a brushed aluminium lid and shiny body. Its efficient lithium-ion battery can last for up to ten hours off just one charge, further enhancing its status like a great portable computer. However, it incorporates all the features you'd anticipate finding inside a larger laptop, including four high-speed USB ports, a 320 GB SATA hard drive and Altec Lansing speakers, which deliver incredible sound. The HP Pavilion DM3 performs tasks quickly, thanks to its 4GB memory and 1.2GHz Intel Celeron SU2300 processor.
Internet browsing is quick and easy either via an Ethernet connection or Wi-Fi network. Once online, pages look bright and detailed, as do videos, on the laptop's 13.3-inch HD LED BrightView screen. The HP DM3 comes with an external LightScribe SuperMulti drive. This versatile drive allows you to watch films on the move, as well as listen to CDs and burn multimedia content onto blanks discs. Additionally, the disc drive can laser etch your personal disc labels from right within the DVD drive.
The screen also works wonders when chatting to friends online. A built-in webcam (near the top of the screen) combines together with the integrated digital microphone so you're able to see 1 another and talk on the internet.When you are not chatting straight to your pals, you are able to upload your photos quickly to the HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch laptop, just for them to see what you've been up to. The laptop has a five-in-one card reader, which accepts SD cards, MultiMedia cards, xD cards, memory Sticks and Memory Stick Pro cards. HP MediaSmart software gives you access to your photos and other media at the touch of the button once it's uploaded. It enables you to view slide shows of your favourite holiday snaps, as well as edit all of them with one easy click. You can use HP MediaSmart to record and edit videos, then rate, tag and check them. The HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch laptop also comes pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium. Windows 7 includes a helpful features, so helping your laptop to sleep and resume efficiently, be less memory hungry and spot USB devices quickly. With this particular Photo printer, ink cartridge and paper, portable hard disk drive, and USB cable; your HP Pavilion DM3-1105EA laptop is set up and able to go with a build and quality and price that's hard to beat, it will leave you wondering how you managed without it before you had one. If its time to treat yourself to a new Laptop with truly amazing capabilities like the HP Pavilion DM3 then at we have all the HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch Laptops and so much more all under one roof representing great value for money too !!!
The HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch laptop is an incredibly compact and good-looking laptop, having a brushed aluminium lid and shiny body. Its efficient lithium-ion battery can last for up to ten hours off just one charge, further enhancing its status like a great portable computer. However, it incorporates all the features you'd anticipate finding inside a larger laptop, including four high-speed USB ports, a 320 GB SATA hard drive and Altec Lansing speakers, which deliver incredible sound. The HP Pavilion DM3 performs tasks quickly, thanks to its 4GB memory and 1.2GHz Intel Celeron SU2300 processor.
Internet browsing is quick and easy either via an Ethernet connection or Wi-Fi network. Once online, pages look bright and detailed, as do videos, on the laptop's 13.3-inch HD LED BrightView screen. The HP DM3 comes with an external LightScribe SuperMulti drive. This versatile drive allows you to watch films on the move, as well as listen to CDs and burn multimedia content onto blanks discs. Additionally, the disc drive can laser etch your personal disc labels from right within the DVD drive.
The screen also works wonders when chatting to friends online. A built-in webcam (near the top of the screen) combines together with the integrated digital microphone so you're able to see 1 another and talk on the internet.When you are not chatting straight to your pals, you are able to upload your photos quickly to the HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch laptop, just for them to see what you've been up to. The laptop has a five-in-one card reader, which accepts SD cards, MultiMedia cards, xD cards, memory Sticks and Memory Stick Pro cards. HP MediaSmart software gives you access to your photos and other media at the touch of the button once it's uploaded. It enables you to view slide shows of your favourite holiday snaps, as well as edit all of them with one easy click. You can use HP MediaSmart to record and edit videos, then rate, tag and check them. The HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch laptop also comes pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium. Windows 7 includes a helpful features, so helping your laptop to sleep and resume efficiently, be less memory hungry and spot USB devices quickly. With this particular Photo printer, ink cartridge and paper, portable hard disk drive, and USB cable; your HP Pavilion DM3-1105EA laptop is set up and able to go with a build and quality and price that's hard to beat, it will leave you wondering how you managed without it before you had one. If its time to treat yourself to a new Laptop with truly amazing capabilities like the HP Pavilion DM3 then at we have all the HP Pavilion DM3 13-inch Laptops and so much more all under one roof representing great value for money too !!!
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Google, Facebook promise new IPv6 services after successful trial
Google leaves IPv6 on for YouTube; Facebook adds IPv6 to developers' site; Yahoo sees 'minimal risk' to IPv6
Yahoo said it only had to make one minor adjustment to its website for traffic optimization as a result of World IPv6 Day.
"Yahoo is very excited about how smoothly World IPv6 Day went for everybody. It's a great testament to the preparation that went into this event," said Jason Fesler, an IPv6 architect at Yahoo. "The early data says there is minimal risk to pushing forward."
BACKGROUND: World IPv6 Day: Tech industry's most-watched event since Y2K
Akamai and Limelight also said they were stepping up their efforts toward full, commercial-grade support of IPv6 due to the success of World IPv6 Day.
"We're going to look at the data for IPv6 usage and use that to improve our services," said Andy Champagne, director of engineering at Akamai, which had 30 customers participate in World IPv6 Day using its beta IPv6 service. "Then we are going to work with our customers to roll out IPv6."
Tom Coffeen, director of global network architecture for Limelight, said it had IPv6-enabled every server on its network for World IPv6 Day and that it had encountered only minor issues that involved some routing policy changes.
"We were surprised and pleased to see no bugs. The few issues we did encounter were quickly resolved," Coffeen said. "We had many customers choosing to stay IPv6-enabled going forward. We're ready to move to an opt-out model for our customers, where they have to request no IPv6 availability."
Despite these successes, World IPv6 Day participants conceded that IPv6 still has a long way to go before it approaches the ubiquity of IPv4.
Colitti said Google estimates that only 0.3% of its users have adopted IPv6. He said it was too early to determine how many of its users suffered from broken IPv6 connections; estimates prior to World IPv6 Day put IPv6 brokenness at 0.03% to 0.05% of Internet users.
Similarly, Lee said that Facebook estimates that about 0.2% of its users were able to reach the website via IPv6.
"Once the world gets to about 1% adoption [of IPv6], then this will be for real," Lee said. "That's the initial mass that you need to have for global adoption."
MORE: What if IPv6 simply fails to catch on?
Content providers are migrating to IPv6 because the Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.
Yahoo said it only had to make one minor adjustment to its website for traffic optimization as a result of World IPv6 Day.
"Yahoo is very excited about how smoothly World IPv6 Day went for everybody. It's a great testament to the preparation that went into this event," said Jason Fesler, an IPv6 architect at Yahoo. "The early data says there is minimal risk to pushing forward."
BACKGROUND: World IPv6 Day: Tech industry's most-watched event since Y2K
Akamai and Limelight also said they were stepping up their efforts toward full, commercial-grade support of IPv6 due to the success of World IPv6 Day.
"We're going to look at the data for IPv6 usage and use that to improve our services," said Andy Champagne, director of engineering at Akamai, which had 30 customers participate in World IPv6 Day using its beta IPv6 service. "Then we are going to work with our customers to roll out IPv6."
Tom Coffeen, director of global network architecture for Limelight, said it had IPv6-enabled every server on its network for World IPv6 Day and that it had encountered only minor issues that involved some routing policy changes.
"We were surprised and pleased to see no bugs. The few issues we did encounter were quickly resolved," Coffeen said. "We had many customers choosing to stay IPv6-enabled going forward. We're ready to move to an opt-out model for our customers, where they have to request no IPv6 availability."
Despite these successes, World IPv6 Day participants conceded that IPv6 still has a long way to go before it approaches the ubiquity of IPv4.
Colitti said Google estimates that only 0.3% of its users have adopted IPv6. He said it was too early to determine how many of its users suffered from broken IPv6 connections; estimates prior to World IPv6 Day put IPv6 brokenness at 0.03% to 0.05% of Internet users.
Similarly, Lee said that Facebook estimates that about 0.2% of its users were able to reach the website via IPv6.
"Once the world gets to about 1% adoption [of IPv6], then this will be for real," Lee said. "That's the initial mass that you need to have for global adoption."
MORE: What if IPv6 simply fails to catch on?
Content providers are migrating to IPv6 because the Internet is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Microsoft Loses Appeal, Scrambles To Alter Word, Office
Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) will remove a "little-used feature" from copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007 after a U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals denied Microsoft's appeal of an injunction in a patent-infringement case against the software giant.
Microsoft said new copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007 would be ready for sale by Jan. 11 to meet the deadline imposed by an injunction handed down by the court.
"We have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products," Microsoft said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon after the court denied Microsoft's appeal of that injunction.
Microsoft was also careful to note that beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are now available for downloading, do not contain the disputed technology. Older versions of Word and Office also don't have the technology.
Earlier this year, i4i won a court case against Microsoft in which the Toronto-based software company charged that technology built into Word 2007 and Office 2007, used to customize XML code, violated a patent held by i4i. A jury agreed and awarded i4i $200 million in damages -- a figure that has since increased to $290 million with interest, post-verdict damages and fines added by the trial judge for "intentional infringement."
In August, the judge granted i4i's request for an injunction halting sales of Word 2007 and Office 2007, effective Jan. 11, 2010. Today's court decision denies Microsoft's efforts to get that injunction overturned, giving the software vendor less than three weeks to comply.
"We couldn't be more pleased with the ruling from the appeals court which upheld the lower court's decision in its entirety," said Loudon Owen, i4i chairman, in a statement issued by the company after Tuesday's ruling. "This is both a vindication for i4i and a war cry for talented inventors whose patents are infringed. The same guts and integrity that are needed to invent and go against the herd, are at the heart of success in patent litigation against a behemoth like Microsoft. MCTS Online Training
MCITP Online Training "
"We are moving quickly to comply with the injunction," Microsoft said in its statement. The company said it expects to have copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007, with the disputed feature removed, "available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date."
Microsoft said it is considering its legal options, including a possible request for a re-hearing by the Federal Court of Appeals or a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Microsoft said new copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007 would be ready for sale by Jan. 11 to meet the deadline imposed by an injunction handed down by the court.
"We have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products," Microsoft said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon after the court denied Microsoft's appeal of that injunction.
Microsoft was also careful to note that beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are now available for downloading, do not contain the disputed technology. Older versions of Word and Office also don't have the technology.
Earlier this year, i4i won a court case against Microsoft in which the Toronto-based software company charged that technology built into Word 2007 and Office 2007, used to customize XML code, violated a patent held by i4i. A jury agreed and awarded i4i $200 million in damages -- a figure that has since increased to $290 million with interest, post-verdict damages and fines added by the trial judge for "intentional infringement."
In August, the judge granted i4i's request for an injunction halting sales of Word 2007 and Office 2007, effective Jan. 11, 2010. Today's court decision denies Microsoft's efforts to get that injunction overturned, giving the software vendor less than three weeks to comply.
"We couldn't be more pleased with the ruling from the appeals court which upheld the lower court's decision in its entirety," said Loudon Owen, i4i chairman, in a statement issued by the company after Tuesday's ruling. "This is both a vindication for i4i and a war cry for talented inventors whose patents are infringed. The same guts and integrity that are needed to invent and go against the herd, are at the heart of success in patent litigation against a behemoth like Microsoft. MCTS Online Training
MCITP Online Training "
"We are moving quickly to comply with the injunction," Microsoft said in its statement. The company said it expects to have copies of Word 2007 and Office 2007, with the disputed feature removed, "available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date."
Microsoft said it is considering its legal options, including a possible request for a re-hearing by the Federal Court of Appeals or a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Architecture Modeling and Processes
Dear Architect,
Exploring our space—partly science, partly art—is always a fascinating and complex task. We could take the contextual approach and address a context-specific subject, as we did recently (BI, SOA, and so on), or we could take the introspective approach of analyzing the role that we play (how we communicate, how we negotiate, and so on). We covered our role two years ago, during the days of Simon Guest as editor. Yet we could take a third approach that is neither context-specific nor introspective, when we review what we produce.
This 23rd issue of The Architecture Journal is on Architecture Modeling and Processes. The articles that were selected for this occasion deal with aspects such as:
* Change-enabled architectures. Brandon Satrom and Paul Rayner advise us on how to keep architecture relevant, and not forgotten, after the solution has been implemented.
* Architecture verification. V. Gnanasekaran explains ways to confirm that a given approach meets specific criteria prior to going to the next level.
* Enterprise architecture. Sam Holcman details the four pillars of success.
* Adaptable solutions for different deployment contexts. Charlie Alfred identifies the implications and trade-offs, with illustrative examples.
* Unified Modeling Language (UML) vs. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). Lenny Fenster and Brooke Hamilton dive in to the pros and cons of both alternatives, and show that these can eventually be combined.
* Maturing architectures in agile processes. I wish that I had read articles like Alan Wills’s or Diego Fontdevila and MartÃn SalÃas’s before starting my first agile process last decade—when I couldn’t deal with the fact that the next release was in three weeks, and I felt unable to complete my architecture in less than two-and-a-half months.
The latest articles in this issue show specific examples that use the upcoming Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 suite. We are less than a month away from the launch of this Microsoft tool for .NET development, which—since its 2005 version—has been incorporating aspects of application life-cycle management (ALM) that span way beyond developer boundaries to include project managers, testers, user leads, and architects. For these latter stakeholders, the incorporation of UML support plus an extra layer diagram will serve later to avoid improper cross-layer references in code. The newly added Architecture Explorer allows matching architecture components easily with their respective implementation source code. It’s remarkable that our prime development tool has been consistently awarded as the best IDE for several years now MCTS Online Training - MCITP Online Training.
On that note, I’ll finish my intro by thanking my guest editor-in-chief for this occasion, Peter Provost, Microsoft Sr. Program Manager for Visual Studio 2010 Architect Edition. Peter helped me understand the IDE landscape and its crossovers with the architect’s job, in order to select for you the most relevant information about how much Microsoft addresses those issues in Visual Studio 2010. I must extend the acknowledgement to the editorial board that helped Peter and me review the papers during the authoring phases
Exploring our space—partly science, partly art—is always a fascinating and complex task. We could take the contextual approach and address a context-specific subject, as we did recently (BI, SOA, and so on), or we could take the introspective approach of analyzing the role that we play (how we communicate, how we negotiate, and so on). We covered our role two years ago, during the days of Simon Guest as editor. Yet we could take a third approach that is neither context-specific nor introspective, when we review what we produce.
This 23rd issue of The Architecture Journal is on Architecture Modeling and Processes. The articles that were selected for this occasion deal with aspects such as:
* Change-enabled architectures. Brandon Satrom and Paul Rayner advise us on how to keep architecture relevant, and not forgotten, after the solution has been implemented.
* Architecture verification. V. Gnanasekaran explains ways to confirm that a given approach meets specific criteria prior to going to the next level.
* Enterprise architecture. Sam Holcman details the four pillars of success.
* Adaptable solutions for different deployment contexts. Charlie Alfred identifies the implications and trade-offs, with illustrative examples.
* Unified Modeling Language (UML) vs. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). Lenny Fenster and Brooke Hamilton dive in to the pros and cons of both alternatives, and show that these can eventually be combined.
* Maturing architectures in agile processes. I wish that I had read articles like Alan Wills’s or Diego Fontdevila and MartÃn SalÃas’s before starting my first agile process last decade—when I couldn’t deal with the fact that the next release was in three weeks, and I felt unable to complete my architecture in less than two-and-a-half months.
The latest articles in this issue show specific examples that use the upcoming Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 suite. We are less than a month away from the launch of this Microsoft tool for .NET development, which—since its 2005 version—has been incorporating aspects of application life-cycle management (ALM) that span way beyond developer boundaries to include project managers, testers, user leads, and architects. For these latter stakeholders, the incorporation of UML support plus an extra layer diagram will serve later to avoid improper cross-layer references in code. The newly added Architecture Explorer allows matching architecture components easily with their respective implementation source code. It’s remarkable that our prime development tool has been consistently awarded as the best IDE for several years now MCTS Online Training - MCITP Online Training.
On that note, I’ll finish my intro by thanking my guest editor-in-chief for this occasion, Peter Provost, Microsoft Sr. Program Manager for Visual Studio 2010 Architect Edition. Peter helped me understand the IDE landscape and its crossovers with the architect’s job, in order to select for you the most relevant information about how much Microsoft addresses those issues in Visual Studio 2010. I must extend the acknowledgement to the editorial board that helped Peter and me review the papers during the authoring phases
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Microsoft announces record profits
First-quarter profit of $5.41 billion
Microsoft has announced record financial results, with Steve Ballmer announcing $16.20 billion in revenue for the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, with $5.41 billion in profit.
Ballmer and co. are citing Office 2010 and the sustained 'PC refresh cycle' as the key drivers behind these record financials, in addition to solid growth in the Xbox 360 gaming side of the business.
Microsoft is in the money
Microsoft notes that overall revenue is up 25 percent over the same quarter in 2009, with a concurrent 51 per cent gain in profit.
Most of the company's other divisions showed significant growth over the same quarter, with some particularly interesting results including:
* Revenue at Microsoft's Windows division rose to $4.8 billion from $2.9 billion, with a profit of $3.3 billion.
* Revenue at the company's business unit, which includes Microsoft Office, rose to $5.1 billion from $4.5 billion. Profit was $3.4 billion.
* Revenue at its Entertainment and Devices Division rose to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion. Profit was $382 million.
"This was an exceptional quarter, combining solid enterprise growth and continued strong consumer demand for Office 2010, Windows 7 and Xbox 360 consoles and games," Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said in a statement.
"Our ability to grow revenue while continuing to control costs allowed us to deliver another quarter of year-over-year margin expansion."
You can see all the details on Microsoft Q1 2010 earnings online Via Microsoft
Microsoft has announced record financial results, with Steve Ballmer announcing $16.20 billion in revenue for the first quarter of its 2011 fiscal year, with $5.41 billion in profit.
Ballmer and co. are citing Office 2010 and the sustained 'PC refresh cycle' as the key drivers behind these record financials, in addition to solid growth in the Xbox 360 gaming side of the business.
Microsoft is in the money
Microsoft notes that overall revenue is up 25 percent over the same quarter in 2009, with a concurrent 51 per cent gain in profit.
Most of the company's other divisions showed significant growth over the same quarter, with some particularly interesting results including:
* Revenue at Microsoft's Windows division rose to $4.8 billion from $2.9 billion, with a profit of $3.3 billion.
* Revenue at the company's business unit, which includes Microsoft Office, rose to $5.1 billion from $4.5 billion. Profit was $3.4 billion.
* Revenue at its Entertainment and Devices Division rose to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion. Profit was $382 million.
"This was an exceptional quarter, combining solid enterprise growth and continued strong consumer demand for Office 2010, Windows 7 and Xbox 360 consoles and games," Microsoft CFO Peter Klein said in a statement.
"Our ability to grow revenue while continuing to control costs allowed us to deliver another quarter of year-over-year margin expansion."
You can see all the details on Microsoft Q1 2010 earnings online Via Microsoft
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Hackers may try to disrupt World IPv6 Day II
Brzozowski says Comcast will be monitoring its network for signs of attack throughout the trial. "We're taking the necessary steps so that the Comcast infrastructure is protected," he adds.
Juniper says that if its website comes under DDoS or other attack on World IPv6 Day, it will simply switch back to IPv4. "We can revert back to IPv4 in about five minutes," says Alain Durand, director of software engineering at Juniper, which is using its own translator-in-a-cloud service to IPv6 enable its main website for the day.
Akamai, a content delivery network with 30 customers that are participating in World IPv6 Day, says it isn't too concerned about hacking or DDoS attacks during the IPv6 trial.
"All of our command and control systems are going to stay on IPv4," says Andy Champagne, vice president of engineering with Akamai, which is developing a commercial IPv6 service. "Absent some underlying exposure in the protocol that we don't know about ... we think we're OK. We've got enough IPv6 capacity ... I don't expect any trouble.''
Radware's Meyran says hackers may be so clever that they won't attack websites on World IPv6 Day but will instead wait until these sites turn IPv6 on permanently. "The hackers will be very happy to see this day go successfully and that sites are starting to deploy IPv6 because it opens up new areas of attack," he predicts.
That's why Meyran recommends network administrators who participate in World IPv6 Day follow up with an event focused on IPv6 security testing. "The next stage will be to ... run attack tools that simulate IPv6 attacks to make sure your firewalls are really seeing the network and that your intrusion protection systems can really do the deep packet inspection of IPv6 traffic," he says.
World IPv6 Day is a large-scale experiment sponsored by the Internet Society that is designed to discover problems with IPv6 before the new protocol is widely deployed.
DETAILS: What if IPv6 simply fails to catch on?
The Internet needs IPv6 because it is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.
One major stumbling block for IPv6 deployment is that it's not backward compatible with IPv4. That means website operators have to upgrade their network equipment and software to support IPv6 traffic.
Juniper says that if its website comes under DDoS or other attack on World IPv6 Day, it will simply switch back to IPv4. "We can revert back to IPv4 in about five minutes," says Alain Durand, director of software engineering at Juniper, which is using its own translator-in-a-cloud service to IPv6 enable its main website for the day.
Akamai, a content delivery network with 30 customers that are participating in World IPv6 Day, says it isn't too concerned about hacking or DDoS attacks during the IPv6 trial.
"All of our command and control systems are going to stay on IPv4," says Andy Champagne, vice president of engineering with Akamai, which is developing a commercial IPv6 service. "Absent some underlying exposure in the protocol that we don't know about ... we think we're OK. We've got enough IPv6 capacity ... I don't expect any trouble.''
Radware's Meyran says hackers may be so clever that they won't attack websites on World IPv6 Day but will instead wait until these sites turn IPv6 on permanently. "The hackers will be very happy to see this day go successfully and that sites are starting to deploy IPv6 because it opens up new areas of attack," he predicts.
That's why Meyran recommends network administrators who participate in World IPv6 Day follow up with an event focused on IPv6 security testing. "The next stage will be to ... run attack tools that simulate IPv6 attacks to make sure your firewalls are really seeing the network and that your intrusion protection systems can really do the deep packet inspection of IPv6 traffic," he says.
World IPv6 Day is a large-scale experiment sponsored by the Internet Society that is designed to discover problems with IPv6 before the new protocol is widely deployed.
DETAILS: What if IPv6 simply fails to catch on?
The Internet needs IPv6 because it is running out of addresses using IPv4. The free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses expired in February, and in April the Asia Pacific region ran out of all but a few IPv4 addresses being held in reserve for startups. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which doles out IP addresses to network operators in North America, says it will deplete its supply of IPv4 addresses this fall.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet, but IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and can connect up a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power. IPv6 offers the promise of faster, less-costly Internet services than the alternative, which is to extend the life of IPv4 using network address translation (NAT) devices.
One major stumbling block for IPv6 deployment is that it's not backward compatible with IPv4. That means website operators have to upgrade their network equipment and software to support IPv6 traffic.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Pick DS3 When Looking For the Best Partner
Many online business owners now are making use of the DS3 technology since it is quicker in comparison to the so-called T1 connection. The DS3 line is very efficient for online businesses that's the reason why many online businesses are already hooked up to this new and also exciting technology. I don't know concerning your real experience of employing this technology, but I'm certain you are content with the amazing efficiency of this modern technology. It's cheap hence a lot of the online entrepreneurs are given great chances to hook up to DS3 service. Right now, for individuals who haven't used the DS3 technology yet, you must check out this technology. Actually, there are numerous methods how you can have sufficient info from product reviews along with other good quality info on the internet from service providers.
The DS3 technology is now in the hands of plenty of product providers so that it is very common that you will see a lot of promotions and various offers from all these providers. It might seem hard for you to determine which of these companies can give you the very best efficiency. You only need to be clever enough to perform your own investigation regarding the DS3 technology. You can even contact your dearest friends who are currently connected with this technology. There may be various price brackets you can see from several providers but when you have opted the ideal one for your own organization, the price doesn't matter anymore.
The World Wide Web should be useful for finding good offers as well as quotes to aid you pick which DS3 provider to go for, when you choose properly. This enables customers to evaluate their options very carefully as there are many different options and manage to discover the exact type of service they will require and spare themselves the pain of having to face several salespersons pushing on you stressfully. There are tons of varied network providers these days. In the marketplace you can select from national to regional providers. But what
is widely employed nowadays is the DS3 line, among other related services. A DS3 Internet connection is more complicated but more robust, and you don't have to get the required tool or add more service to create a DS3 service. DS3 line is a lot faster than the so called T1 line because it offers 45Mbps of speed so it is about 30 times faster than the T1 service.
The DS3 technology is now in the hands of plenty of product providers so that it is very common that you will see a lot of promotions and various offers from all these providers. It might seem hard for you to determine which of these companies can give you the very best efficiency. You only need to be clever enough to perform your own investigation regarding the DS3 technology. You can even contact your dearest friends who are currently connected with this technology. There may be various price brackets you can see from several providers but when you have opted the ideal one for your own organization, the price doesn't matter anymore.
The World Wide Web should be useful for finding good offers as well as quotes to aid you pick which DS3 provider to go for, when you choose properly. This enables customers to evaluate their options very carefully as there are many different options and manage to discover the exact type of service they will require and spare themselves the pain of having to face several salespersons pushing on you stressfully. There are tons of varied network providers these days. In the marketplace you can select from national to regional providers. But what
is widely employed nowadays is the DS3 line, among other related services. A DS3 Internet connection is more complicated but more robust, and you don't have to get the required tool or add more service to create a DS3 service. DS3 line is a lot faster than the so called T1 line because it offers 45Mbps of speed so it is about 30 times faster than the T1 service.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Is your IT job indispensable? Then no vacation for you
In many IT organizations, there's a strict schedule for on-call duties. As with other professions that transcend the 9-to-5 world, someone must be available to answer the phone when it all goes pear shaped, and ideally that person isn't working on his or her fourth bourbon on a Friday night. In most shops, this is a simple weekday/weekend schedule that rotates people through a more-or-less regular cycle of availability and triage duties.
This sort of on-call schedule works quite well in many organizations. In others, it's a joke.
[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Read Paul Venezia's instant classic, "Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin." | Then, if you dare, join the debate about rebooting Unix-based systems. ]
At the center of most IT shops is a core group of admins or engineers. They probably had a hand in building the infrastructure, or at least a significant part of it, and are among the few people who can diagnose and address major problems as they occur. These aren't the folks that get called in to handle a partition filling up unexpectedly, mind you -- they're the ones who are alerted when nobody else has any idea where to even start looking for a fix to a problem.
In other words, these folks are on call 24/7/365, whether they like it or not.
If you're one of these people, you know as well as I do that you can forget about turning off your cellphone when on vacation. Every flight to Aruba or wherever comes with an unwelcome thought: When the plane goes wheels down and the phone is taken out of airplane mode, will your device explode with a series of increasingly desperate texts and emails describing a situation that has gone plaid while you were playing Angry Birds at 30,000 feet?
I know this feeling well, having lived it for years. It's ingrained in my psyche at this point, and I'm fairly sure that's not healthy.
But what's the solution? To maintain multiple people of equal skill levels and experience? Far too costly for most shops, even if it were truly possible to replicate years of in the field, not to mention the knowledge that comes with building the infrastructure. Vendor support? Hardly. Once you get through the first few tiers of responses, you find yourself repeating problem descriptions to folks on the phone who maintain a constant stream of "uh huh" and "I see" vocal pauses to lend the appearance of a trained mind formulating a successful solution -- when they're actually listening for keywords that will let them shift the call to another queue as soon as possible.
This sort of on-call schedule works quite well in many organizations. In others, it's a joke.
[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Read Paul Venezia's instant classic, "Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin." | Then, if you dare, join the debate about rebooting Unix-based systems. ]
At the center of most IT shops is a core group of admins or engineers. They probably had a hand in building the infrastructure, or at least a significant part of it, and are among the few people who can diagnose and address major problems as they occur. These aren't the folks that get called in to handle a partition filling up unexpectedly, mind you -- they're the ones who are alerted when nobody else has any idea where to even start looking for a fix to a problem.
In other words, these folks are on call 24/7/365, whether they like it or not.
If you're one of these people, you know as well as I do that you can forget about turning off your cellphone when on vacation. Every flight to Aruba or wherever comes with an unwelcome thought: When the plane goes wheels down and the phone is taken out of airplane mode, will your device explode with a series of increasingly desperate texts and emails describing a situation that has gone plaid while you were playing Angry Birds at 30,000 feet?
I know this feeling well, having lived it for years. It's ingrained in my psyche at this point, and I'm fairly sure that's not healthy.
But what's the solution? To maintain multiple people of equal skill levels and experience? Far too costly for most shops, even if it were truly possible to replicate years of in the field, not to mention the knowledge that comes with building the infrastructure. Vendor support? Hardly. Once you get through the first few tiers of responses, you find yourself repeating problem descriptions to folks on the phone who maintain a constant stream of "uh huh" and "I see" vocal pauses to lend the appearance of a trained mind formulating a successful solution -- when they're actually listening for keywords that will let them shift the call to another queue as soon as possible.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
8 security considerations for IPv6 deployment
* Large network segments are both good and bad. IPv6 introduces network segments that are significantly larger than those we see today. The current recommended prefix length for an IPv6 subnet is /64 (264), which can accommodate some 18 quintillion hosts on a single segment! While this enables virtually unlimited LAN growth, its size also presents challenges. For instance, it would take years to scan a single IPv6 /64 block for vulnerabilities, while a single /24 IPv4 subnet 28 would only take seconds. Since a comprehensive scan is impossible, a better approach may be to utilize only the first /118 (the same number of hosts as a /22 in IPv4) of addresses to narrow the range of IPs to scan, or perhaps allocate all addresses explicitly and deny all others implicitly. This will make careful IP management and monitoring even more crucial than it is today. One might also expect passive domain name system (DNS) analysis and other reconnaissance techniques to be employed by attackers in place of traditional scanning.
* Neighbor discovery and solicitation can expose networks to problems. Neighbor discovery (ND) in IPv6 utilizes five different types of Internet Control Message Protocol version 6 (ICMPv6) messages for several purposes, including to determine the link layer addresses of neighbors on the attached links, to purge cached values that become invalid, and to discover neighbors willing to forward packets on their behalf. While ND offers many useful functions -- including duplicate address detection (DAD) -- it can also present opportunities to attackers. ND attacks in IPv6 will quite likely replace their IPv4 counterparts such as ARP spoofing. In general, it's a good idea to keep ports disabled unless explicitly provisioned, implement link layer access control and security mechanisms, and be sure to disable IPv6 completely where it's not in use.
* Choking on large extension headers, firewalls and security gateways could fall prey to DDoS attacks. In IPv6, the IP options function has been removed from the main header and is instead implemented via a set of additional headers called extension headers (EH) that specify destination options, hop-by-hop options, authentication and an array of other options. These extension headers follow the IPv6 main header, which is fixed at 40 bytes, and are linked together to create an IPv6 packet (fixed header + extension headers + payload). IPv6 traffic with large numbers of extension headers could overwhelm firewalls and security gateways, or perhaps even introduce router forwarding performance degradation, and thus serve as a potential vector for DDoS and other attacks. Disabling "IPv6 source routing" on routers may be necessary to protect against DDoS threats, and explicitly codifying which extension headers are supported and checking network equipment for proper implementation is critical. In general, IPv6 adds many more components to be filtered or require scoped propagation, to include some extension headers, multicast addressing, and increased uses for ICMP.
* Neighbor discovery and solicitation can expose networks to problems. Neighbor discovery (ND) in IPv6 utilizes five different types of Internet Control Message Protocol version 6 (ICMPv6) messages for several purposes, including to determine the link layer addresses of neighbors on the attached links, to purge cached values that become invalid, and to discover neighbors willing to forward packets on their behalf. While ND offers many useful functions -- including duplicate address detection (DAD) -- it can also present opportunities to attackers. ND attacks in IPv6 will quite likely replace their IPv4 counterparts such as ARP spoofing. In general, it's a good idea to keep ports disabled unless explicitly provisioned, implement link layer access control and security mechanisms, and be sure to disable IPv6 completely where it's not in use.
* Choking on large extension headers, firewalls and security gateways could fall prey to DDoS attacks. In IPv6, the IP options function has been removed from the main header and is instead implemented via a set of additional headers called extension headers (EH) that specify destination options, hop-by-hop options, authentication and an array of other options. These extension headers follow the IPv6 main header, which is fixed at 40 bytes, and are linked together to create an IPv6 packet (fixed header + extension headers + payload). IPv6 traffic with large numbers of extension headers could overwhelm firewalls and security gateways, or perhaps even introduce router forwarding performance degradation, and thus serve as a potential vector for DDoS and other attacks. Disabling "IPv6 source routing" on routers may be necessary to protect against DDoS threats, and explicitly codifying which extension headers are supported and checking network equipment for proper implementation is critical. In general, IPv6 adds many more components to be filtered or require scoped propagation, to include some extension headers, multicast addressing, and increased uses for ICMP.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Microsoft MB2-868 Study Guide
Education in MB2-868 Exam Certification-Microsoft Expert the Certkingdom Content Development bygone era was curtailed an edifice which taught people how to maintain their daily existences using the tried and tested Certkingdom Content Development paths of experts and academicians. Be it the management, home science, arts or English, the Microsoft Certification Certified MB2-868 guidelines have always been clearly chalked out for thought and research.
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Microsoft MB2-868 is a burgeoning field which is brimming with possibilities in current times. Recession might have shown millions of employees the pink slip but it is courses like Microsoft that are adding value and helping them to cross the Microsoft hurdles of lay-offs and carve a niche for themselves. With Courses like MB2-868 which were practically nonexistent a couple of years back when parents could only hope to motivate a child to become a doctor or an engineer at the MB2-868 most and aim for in order to get himself a well paying job , a whole new set of alternate carriers have cropped up for the youth of today.
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Have you decided to get a Microsoft MB2-868 exam? If yes, Certkingdom is right here to help you achieve your goal. We provide you best quality MB2-868 braindumps,practice test,training and any other related materials to pass Microsoft MB2-868 exam and be a Microsoft certified professional.
Academics have taken a MB2-868 Exam new meaning altogether with the help of online and distance education. Courses like MB2-868 are an excellent example of how the archaic system of education has evolved to provide quality and student t friendly education. Microsoft While most educational institutes are notorious for treating students as customers, Certkingdom Development is focused on bringing about the delicate relationship between a mentor and a student. With such a formidable background and keen focus on an overall development of mind and body, study centers like Microsoft Expert are the perfect refuge to a goal centric person who is focused on excellence.
Microsoft MB2-868 is a burgeoning field which is brimming with possibilities in current times. Recession might have shown millions of employees the pink slip but it is courses like Microsoft that are adding value and helping them to cross the Microsoft hurdles of lay-offs and carve a niche for themselves. With Courses like MB2-868 which were practically nonexistent a couple of years back when parents could only hope to motivate a child to become a doctor or an engineer at the MB2-868 most and aim for in order to get himself a well paying job , a whole new set of alternate carriers have cropped up for the youth of today.
With increasing to the typical pre-sale coupled with post-sale solutions, all of us take the local foreign money check for the First Try Certify MB2-868 dump torrent to generate factor hassle-free to get all the people. Microsoft MB2-868 Study Guide is definitely unlike this Microsoft MB2-868 exam questions that would go though Microsoft MB2-868 test questions, you'll be ready for the particular queries with foundational information of the basics connected with Microsoft technological innovation through using it. Guessing answers to help Microsoft MB2-868 dumps that relieve by most of these central principles.
Your success is guaranteed in Microsoft MB2-868 Exam using our Study Guide because you always get the latest and most accurate Microsoft MB2-868 Study Guide for us. Try our Microsoft MB2-868 Study Guide today. Microsoft MB2-868 certificate are those engaged in IT industry dream. You need to choose the professional training by Certkingdom MB2-868. Certkingdom will be with you, and to ensure the successful wherever you may increase pursuit your career. Let Certkingdom take all your heart, let the dream to reality.
Have you decided to get a Microsoft MB2-868 exam? If yes, Certkingdom is right here to help you achieve your goal. We provide you best quality MB2-868 braindumps,practice test,training and any other related materials to pass Microsoft MB2-868 exam and be a Microsoft certified professional.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
The Most Reliable Rubber Products For All Industries
Almost every industry requires rubber moldings and rubber sheets for its machinery and plant parts. Large or small, whatever may be the size of rubber molding needed, it needs to be reliable. The relative hardness or softness, color, bonding etc all will impact the overall quality of the product. Even industries like those manufacturing underlays for carpets or hardwood floors need rubber sheeting for insulating moisture and to survive heavy traffic.
However, rubber components vary in the kind of service they do. Sometimes rubber moldings are required to mitigate wear and tear of parts that continually need to glide over each other. For noise reduction and reducing vibration rubber sheets can provide yeoman service. Standard products can be adapted to specific needs in case of rubber moldings which are required for large factory runs. On the other hand, rubber tracks for farming equipment and rubber sheeting for protection from moisture and damp have to be made to specifications.
Tractors and threshers are very heavy farming equipment. When run without proper rubber tracks they can do a lot of damage to the land surface over which they run. Rubber tracks for tractors, harvesters and threshers actually protect the environment by preventing/lessening soil damage. If you need to run heavy farm equipment over arable land, you can do your bit to protect the quality of the land by using rubber tracks.
When you choose to do business with a company which manufactures rubber moldings, rubber sheeting, rubber sheets and rubber tracks, remember to check their own track record. The number of years the company has been in operation, its ability to customize products, the kinds of payment options they offer are some of the issues you need to take a look at. Apart from that, find out what is their normal turnaround time for orders as well the kind of packaging options they give.
However, rubber components vary in the kind of service they do. Sometimes rubber moldings are required to mitigate wear and tear of parts that continually need to glide over each other. For noise reduction and reducing vibration rubber sheets can provide yeoman service. Standard products can be adapted to specific needs in case of rubber moldings which are required for large factory runs. On the other hand, rubber tracks for farming equipment and rubber sheeting for protection from moisture and damp have to be made to specifications.
Tractors and threshers are very heavy farming equipment. When run without proper rubber tracks they can do a lot of damage to the land surface over which they run. Rubber tracks for tractors, harvesters and threshers actually protect the environment by preventing/lessening soil damage. If you need to run heavy farm equipment over arable land, you can do your bit to protect the quality of the land by using rubber tracks.
When you choose to do business with a company which manufactures rubber moldings, rubber sheeting, rubber sheets and rubber tracks, remember to check their own track record. The number of years the company has been in operation, its ability to customize products, the kinds of payment options they offer are some of the issues you need to take a look at. Apart from that, find out what is their normal turnaround time for orders as well the kind of packaging options they give.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Microsoft 70-680 Exam Windows 7 Configuring
The TS: Windows 7, Configuring (70-680) is the primary exam that covers Microsoft MCTS Certification and is one of the required exams for the MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Administrator 7 and MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Support Technician 7 certifications. It also counts as the client requirements for MCTIP: Enterprise Administrator. For those who are seeking the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator, the 70-680 is usually the easiest of the required exams. Therefore, it is usually the first one taken.
The 70-680 exam covers installing, upgrading, and migrating Windows; deploying Windows; installing and troubleshooting drivers; troubleshooting compatibility problems with applications; configuring network settings including the Windows Firewall; managing disks; and recovering Windows in case of a failure or problem. While the 70-680 is a comprehensive exam, it tends to give a little bit more focus on newer technologies introduced or modified in Windows 7.
Exam Details
65 questions (Note: Microsoft does not publish this information and may change the number of exam questions without notice.)
Multiple choice
Passing score 700 out of 1000.
90 minutes
You can take the exam at Prometric.
The complete listing of exam objectives appears on page 2 of this article.
Before you take this MCTS: Windows 7, Configuration exam, you should have either taken or acquired the equivalent knowledge found on the CompTIA A+ and CompTIA Network+ exams. Both of these exams give you the background to understand, install, configure, and troubleshoot computer and network problems and allow you to get the most out of studying for your 70-680 exam.
Compared to the equivalent exams for Windows XP and Windows Vista, the 70-680 covering Windows 7 is a little bit more difficult. You need to understand the material that is covered and apply the knowledge in various scenarios.
For those who may think that they are experienced with Windows, you need to review the objectives to determine if you really know Windows 7. For example, most people who are trying to get a start in Information Technology have installed Windows 7 from the installation DVD, and many people have upgraded Windows Vista to Windows 7. However, unless you work in a corporate environment where you are responsible for
free Microsoft practice tests( deploying Windows 7, most people have not used system images or automatic installation with an answer file.
The 70-680 exam covers installing, upgrading, and migrating Windows; deploying Windows; installing and troubleshooting drivers; troubleshooting compatibility problems with applications; configuring network settings including the Windows Firewall; managing disks; and recovering Windows in case of a failure or problem. While the 70-680 is a comprehensive exam, it tends to give a little bit more focus on newer technologies introduced or modified in Windows 7.
Exam Details
65 questions (Note: Microsoft does not publish this information and may change the number of exam questions without notice.)
Multiple choice
Passing score 700 out of 1000.
90 minutes
You can take the exam at Prometric.
The complete listing of exam objectives appears on page 2 of this article.
Before you take this MCTS: Windows 7, Configuration exam, you should have either taken or acquired the equivalent knowledge found on the CompTIA A+ and CompTIA Network+ exams. Both of these exams give you the background to understand, install, configure, and troubleshoot computer and network problems and allow you to get the most out of studying for your 70-680 exam.
Compared to the equivalent exams for Windows XP and Windows Vista, the 70-680 covering Windows 7 is a little bit more difficult. You need to understand the material that is covered and apply the knowledge in various scenarios.
For those who may think that they are experienced with Windows, you need to review the objectives to determine if you really know Windows 7. For example, most people who are trying to get a start in Information Technology have installed Windows 7 from the installation DVD, and many people have upgraded Windows Vista to Windows 7. However, unless you work in a corporate environment where you are responsible for
free Microsoft practice tests( deploying Windows 7, most people have not used system images or automatic installation with an answer file.
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