Technical Herald

GOOGLE to IIT'ens

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 10:50:00 +0000

Google had recently offered IIT'ens freshers with a pre-placement package of Rs73Lakhs per annum. Though this was the start of the Biggies like Google, IIT placements had a phynominal growth of up to 15% this year. Despite the slow enonomy, hearing about this makes me feel awesome.

IIT has been the most prestigious and respectable Technology Institutions of India and I am sure they would be. Best of luck to all the fresh pass-outs in their endeavors.

Coming Back Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 10:32:00 +0000

It's been a long time that we at Technical Herald had posted anything for readers. Virasat is back again in action and coming up with some of the very interesting posts very soon...

Under Maintenance

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:43:00 +0000

This Site is under Maintenance......

Skype On IPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:57:00 +0000

Here’s a good news for Iphone owners across the world. Now it’s Apple’s turn, Skype’s compatible version already exists for Windows Mobile and Google’s mobile technology Android. Don’t worry Blackberry users as you will also get this software on your device very soon. Skype has decided to launch their Iphone compatible version. Now you can enjoy the cheap calling rates on your IPhone. Skype grew with a small VOIP application to a calling technology. It uses VOIP protocol which allows one skype user to call other free of cost, like today’s messengers do. They also introduced the landline calling facility in their service long back which has some charges which depends from the country to country. Very soon all the Nokia mobile will have skype as a built in application as last month they have signed a deal at Mobile World conference 2009.

This application is not only for Iphone users, even Ipod touch users can make use of this service connecting their headsets and mic. Skype has officially confirmed that they will release this application for Apple on Tuesday in a a press conference at the CTIA Wireless 2009 Trade show in Las Vegas.

Google’s News

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:16:00 +0000

Google an internet giant and a very efficient web search provider is in news from quite some time now. This is not new to us, but the news can be of competition with Microsoft, the FCC auction, the mobile services, the ads search and etc.. etc….

The news never stops, few of the items which flash lights on Google are..

Ad deal with yahoo

The justice department is still in a dilemma whether to give green signal for this deal or block it. But Google is campaigning hard for this deal. It was discussed to move forward with the partnership and to help assure that Yahoo would remain an independent company. The two companies also signed the ad partnership after merger talks with Microsoft failed. It has been 3 months now that this deal is on hold at the Justice department. But Google says they will go ahead with this deal on or around Oct 11 with or without the green signal of the justice department.

Google Chrome

Google’s new browser named Chrome will now support Add-Ons. Released earlier this month, Chrome saw a amazing downloads of about 2 million in its first week. After seeing this, Microsoft, Mozilla and others have started working on upgrading and adding new features to their browsers. Google Chrome has a new technique in which all the web pages are virtually separated which results in no magic in case of explorer crashes, like most of the today’s explorers does. There are lots more new features in Google Chrome which will be adapted by other explorers very soon. Download your copy of Chrome here.

T-mobile for Android

Very soon, T-Mobile and Google are expected to unveil a new smart phone which will be the first phone to run Google’s Android mobile operating system. The phone will be running on 3G network and will be in market probably by mid next month.

Sergey Brin’s Blog

It’s been more than 5 year now that Google has acquired Blogger and it’s now that the compay’s co-founder Sergey Brin started taking advantage of his service. He wrote his first post on his blog named TOO is his personal writing about his mother and her ills. This is very inspiring post in which he says that he has a better guess than anyone else for what ills would be his and he is all prepared for it.

Google Site Search

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:51:00 +0000

Google has enhanced it commercial site search traditionally known as Google Site Search. Google site search is a hosted search engine which can be hosted on your site to increase the loyalty of your visitors, this can be used to find information on your site instantly. This is so simple that you can design a search engine for your site in few minutes. This site search box falls into the same category in which Microsoft’s Fast search and Rival suites from stand-alone vendors Autonomy. Google site search provides ad-free search results, it is highly customizable, it is also for the developers who uses API and who are rather interested to peep into the raw code for a search result and it also provides the feature of reporting, the basic reporting structure allows you to check how often people search with your search engine and what are they looking for. Presently Google site search supports the following languagues, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian.

Below are the new features which has been recently updated by Google on this product.

Date Biasing: As per the older standards, all the recent product documents are given more weightage than the older ones, but now the site administrator can set the levels of influence of their sites under low, medium, high or maximum category.

Synonyms: You Google Site search box on your site has now got the intellengence to find the abbreviations. If you type in fd, you can get Flexible benefits, if you type in car, you can get the results of cars.

Enhanced Indexing: As per Google, they have enhanced their indexing when compared to their previous versions. It is now possible to search even the deeper products in your site.

Top Results Biasing: You can now target the top search results from a specific section of your site, in a way making a catalogue of your site search.

Tips for New IT Managers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:20:00 +0000

The new manager’s role is very challenging job in the early phases. You have to manage the growth from being a technical person to an expert manager. But as you get experienced and follow the rules, you will start loving it.

Communication: Regularly meeting with your team members and your boss, discussing work related issues, challenges and ways in which they can learn and develop is part of day to day job for a manager. Arrange outings, this will strengthen the working relationship within your team. Things have changed now, other people are relying on you. A good way to build trust is to do what you say you are going to do, it would be better if you keep the secrets with you rather than revealing then to your team members. A manager would definitely have good presentation skills and he/she undertakes training program. Have informers who can gives regular updates regarding the team to you. Always take suggestions even to enhance your skills. No, no I don’t mean you to take suggestions with your peers to enhance your communication skills. Learn the internal politics in your organization.

Management: Be conservative to your boss and open to your peers. This is a strategy of a clever manager. Take recurring issues and problems to your boss, but don’t take day to day problems to him\her. Don’t pull your staff member to save money. It’s very easy job to fill your project with extra staff as long as their salaries are included in the cost of implementing the project. You can find this more easy if you prepare the matrix reports of the work load on each member of the team.

Support: As you are the leader, you are the responsible person at the time of disaster. Design and follow your disaster recovery plan from the starting phase of your project. Have your staff members to work from a disaster recovery site once in 6 months. If you have a helpdesk kind of environment where the user put their queries and you find that you are getting lots and lots of them, then try various other options like making few more members part of the team who takes calls, or outsource this function if it is possible. But if you are doing so, then keep well defined SLA’s (Service Level Agreements)

Environment: Try to be very patiet. If you cannot be patient, try to act as if you are have patience. Listen to your employees very patiently. Provide your staff with clear objectives and help then to reach their goals. Arrange outings and some other recreation activities. If you control budget, you can manage this cost. Don’t always expect high standards from your team members. Praise and encourage your employees in their areas and provide training to them to improve in their weak areas. Never pass the heat to your employees, this will break their courage and the mutual understanding between you and him\her, approach towards the mistakes very friendly.

HTC Launches its 3G Microsoft Based Phone.

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:44:00 +0000

HTC (High Tech Computers) well known for its smart phones, which has sold nearly 3 million units since its launch last year, this smart phone has been upgraded to support 3G network, which was much awaited as the next IPhone feature. Touch diamond as it is called would hit European market early next month and would reach US markets by second half of this year.

The Touch Diamond offers a high speed internet access of 3.5G with the technology called as WCDMA (Wideband CDMA). Qualcomm is the manufacturer of the chipsets for HTC Touch Diamond. Thats not all, there are lot of other features in this new upgraded Touch smart phone from HTC. The TouchFlo software will provide 3D effect to screen images. The web browser has been upgraded, this has been built from Opera software but specifically designed for HTC. The turn around feature of IPhone has been added to touch. Just turn around your touch diamond and the image will automatically rotate. This device has a internal card slot to support SD cards, an additional business card scanner. It has a GPS system built into it, a customized application to watch Youtube videos and a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus would be some thing you would love. The battery has been rated for 4 hrs of talk time. It runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional.

I hope in the coming months, HTC will launch an upgradable model for this with the memory capacity competing with IPhone which would be 16 or 32 GB when compared to the 4GB memory that it has. With this new product, there comes a new website of this company, yes HTC has launched a new website www.htc.com

Yahoo Getting Closer to Google

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:03:00 +0000

Oh, it was a busy schedule. At last I found some time form my busy schedule to write a post on this blog. The Technical Herald team sincerely thank to all those visitors who visited this blog in last 40 days. Our log reveals that there were more than 5K. So 5 thousand thanks to all those Liable Visitors. We hope to work hard to take this blog to even more greater heights.

So coming to today's post. No No Do not thing that this post is all about what is listed in the title. But the title is part of what's the newz is. Its all about the deals over internet.

It’s a deal again, but this time it’s between Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL internet unit. Looks like this deal has been freezed at around $10 billion. Yahoo is really kind to Google, with this deal, Yahoo would outsource web search advertising operations to Google.

But Microsoft is never gonna stop. There were speculations that Microsoft in combination with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is looking to jointly bid for Yahoo. If this deal happens, then Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN and News Corp’s MySpace would come under same roof. But sources say that Yahoo has an alliance with News Corp’s MySpace. Ufff, Microsoft is really trying harder and harder to overcome the dominance of Google. Even after Yahoo’s board formally rejected the Microsoft Corp’s bid saying it undervalues the company.

Since then, Yahoo is also striving hard to come up in the market, alliance with Google Inc, News Corporation’s MySpace and Time Warner’s AOL, but what about Microsoft. There will be time, when Microsoft will be left all alone and all the other companies would form an alliance. If Yahoo joins hands with Google, it would be impossible for Microsoft to complete for all of its life span. Just kidding, Microsoft is also looking around them to find some fresh bones. Kidding again. But these talks turn out to be an advantage for stock market investors.

As of now, Yahoo is facing a three weeks deadline from Microsoft to reach a deal and Microsoft is eager to offer higher than what it has announced now.

Check for other big deals of the day at Guardian

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:43:00 +0000

The first Beta of the whole new Internet Explorer 8 is all set for download with its new features. There are many features which are enhanced in this version. The IE 8 can be installed on Vista SP1, XP SP2, Server 2003 SP2 and Server 2008. The first Beta can be downloaded from Microsoft site. The Zoom feature which was shipped in IE 7 has been enhanced and renamed as Zoom Version 2. Web developers can design their web pages in considerations with the Zoom API’s.

Now there is no need for administrative rights to install Active x controls, a subset of features present in Vista operating system has been built into this application. The new feature named Loosely coupled Internet Explorer is an effort to separate the dependences of the different components on one another. The Data Execution & Prevention (DEP) and No-Execute (NX) are the features which exists in IE 7 to prevent the buffer overflow attacks. These features are enabled in IE 8 by default. Managing Add-ons is more easier and user friendly in IE 8.

The link bar of IE 7 has been renamed to Favorites bar in IE 8 allowing users to easily access their favorite web contents like links, Feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. IE 8 has a build in Automatic Crash Recovery Feature to prevent the sudden process killers in case of uncertainty. The Phishing filter has been improved with a more comprehensive feature called Safety filter. Apart from blocking known phishing sites, safety filter also blocks sites known to contain malicious software that could harm your computer or steal your information. Don’t worry about your speed, Microsoft has also done some home work to make your browsing experience safely and quickly. This application is compatible with web designing tools and technologies like CSS, Expression Web, Visual Web Developer Express and many more.

IT Administrators will have access to block unsafe sites over the group policy in an Active Directory Domain.

Want to check IE 8, download the First Beta of IE 8 from Microsoft

Read more about this product at Microsoft Resources

Know the Weekness of this product. But don’t worry, this is the first Beta of this product. The real version is yet to come in which would be a bug free IE 8.

Time to Purchase your IPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:10:00 +0000

Yes the time to purchase your IPhone is very near. With the new updates released and also with the new 16GB model in market, the only thing we should wait is to check the price cut.

There are news that Apple will cut short its IPod and IPhone prices in next few months, this is definitely to create room for the upcoming 3G model to speed up your browsing experience. Apple is also expected to release its SDK which will help its customers a lot. There are also speculations that Apple is looking forward to get the support for the most popular web based voice call engine, “Skype”.

So your patience in purchasing your IPhone has proved to be fruitful. There would be a $100 cut in the present models, the 16GB IPhone would be around $399 when compare to the current price $499. With this, you can see the price of an 8GB IPhone to be $299, this also tips the price fall of the 32GB IPod touch from the present $499 within next few months.

With the recent software update of Jan 8, Apple has rectified many bugs and enhanced its features. Now you can re-arrange your home page icons. Movie rental have come to ITunes. With Wi-Fi or cell towers, you can get the best out of Google Maps. Create your own web clips and add them for one touch viewing. Send text message to a group. With this update, purchasing music is a touch away.

The reason for such a drastic price cut is due to the fall in Flash NAND based memories. According to sources, the price of a 4GB flash memory has declined over 73% since Aug 2007.

Read the guess about how the 3G IPhone would be with all the enhanced features.

$44.6 Billion is not a Fare Deal for Yahoo

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:41:00 +0000

Jerry Yang, the CEO and the co-founder of Yahoo revealed the reason for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to takeover Yahoo @ $44.6 Billion. According to him, this amount is too low, he also wrote that Yahoo has emerged as an independent player in Internet market, they are expecting a growth of almost 75 % till 2010. By then, Yahoo would be a $ 75 Billion company.

Yahoo is a recognized brand, said Jerry! They have about 500 million users accessing its free service across the globe every day. He also disclosed his partnership with some of the top players like Comcast and eBay

According to me, this is very good news for Google as they have already planned to oppose this bid on legal grounds. As internet is a free bird which Microsoft is trying to make a licensed availability. But no worry as both Microsoft & Yahoo even when together cannot defeat Google.

Microsoft to bid $44.6 billion to take over Yahoo

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 13:55:00 +0000

Microsoft in its ever made boldest bid of $ 44.6 Billion is aiming for Yahoo to beat their competitor Google. As I have mentioned earlier Google has attracted around 58% of the total search market in US, whereas both Microsoft and Yahoo could'nt go more than 40%.

Yahoo is the most visited site on the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang, Yahoo began as a hobby and has evolved into a leading global brand. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with a presence in more than 20 markets and regions around the globe. Even Yahoo has acquired many companies starting from Four 11 to recent Right Media's acquisition. There are also speculations that they are aiming at popular social networking site MySpace. The Q4 2007 results state that there was a 20% growth in marketing sector this fiscal year.

Yahoo in its official statement disclosed that they would take quiet a bit of time to review Microsoft’s agreement in which they would look Yahoo as an individual company.

Sony Vaoi X 505 or Apple MacBookAir

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:04:00 +0000

Yes, that’s the question which everyone is asking since the recent release of Apple's MacBook Air. Both are quality laptops, but hear is my view about them.

Sony claims that the battery life is 2.5 to 4 hrs, however Mobile tech review of Sony’s X 505 laptop reveals that the battery life is only 2.5 hrs on charge when using the built in power management. Sony X505 has 10 inch LCD display, where as MacBook Air has 13 inch LED display is the largest display in a 3 pound laptop and is just bright as the MacBook Pro’s 15 inch LED display. The processor used in X505 is Pentium M Processor with 1.1 GHz clock speed, where as Apple has a special kind of processor designed by Intel for its thinnest notebook computer, It is a Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 1.6 (upgradable to 1.8 GHz at an additional $ 300). This is 64 percent smaller than the normal Core 2 Duo processors. The most interesting feature about MacBook Air lies in its touchpad, which has a pinch of the feature of a Surface Computer, apart from pointer functionality, it also allows you to rotate, enlarge your photos. I know you all have something in your mind, that’s about the touchscreen feature, however the touch feature is limited only to the touchpad and not to the screen, if touchscreen feature is included, it would be a ground breaking news same as that of the IPhone news. Sony offers 512 MB DDR RAM however the Apple MacBook Air comes with 2GB DDR RAM. The hard disk in Sony’s X 505 notebook is 20 GB, however Air has 80 GB Hard disk with 4200 RPM (a bit slower than the normal hard disks used).

All the above features, definitely reveals that Air is the most affordable thinnest laptop. The only reason you will go for Sony’s X 505 is the price, if it is less than that of Air, you would go for Sony. If any of you are willing for, here’s one @ $1,000. I see one more advantage of going with Sony is the way of replacing the battery, its user-friendly process however you have to take you MacBook Air to Apple’s service center for the surgery.

Check the Crunch Gear for detailed comparison between X 505 and Air.

Apple MacBook Air

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:19:00 +0000

Apple has released its much awaited laptop earlier this week, which is named as MacBook Air. Yes you got it right, I am talking about the second thinnest laptop of the world after Sony's X505 which was launched in December 2003. Earlier this week, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs have surprised everybody at MacWorld Expo by taking a laptop out of an interoffice mailing envelope. Air is all set to come in market within two weeks and the estimated price of this thinnest notebook will be $ 1,799. Presently it is launched only in Silver color, but Apple would definitely have plans to launch this product in other different colors as Dell did a few months ago. It is just 0.16 inches at its thinnest point and weighs about 3 pounds. Considering the design, this notebook is outfitted with 80GB hard disk.

Other features like a flip down door on side with connectors like, USB 2.0, Micro-DVI for external display, head phone jack and MagSafe connector for power which comes with 45 watt power adaptor existed on other MacBook laptops. It also has an 802.11n based wireless network support and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. Apple estimates that the battery life of MacBook Air with Bluetooth enabled is 5hrs.

Perhaps the thinnest MacBook ever, it is encased in a 0.16 to 0.76 inch of aluminum case. At just 3.0 pounds, MacBook Air becomes the most conveniently portable notebook computer. A 13.3 inch widescreen LED display is same as the other MacBook laptops. The 1280 X 800 resolution give you a polished display with rich colors. A full sized keyboard is just like the one used in MacBook, the additional feature in MacBook Air is the backlit key illumination making it easy to work even at the time to power failures in your place. The track pad is much bigger than the other models.

Compromises

Apart from all the above stunning features, there are few things where Apple had to compromise with space, I will mention few of them here. There is no internal optical drives (CD or DVD drives), a USB based add-on SuperDrive will be supplied on extra $99 cost. But as always, Apple had come up with a new software for the users who do no opt to get that extra optical add-on SuperDrive. They have developed “Remote Disk” which enables you to use the optical drive of another Mac or PC which is on the same network as MacBook Air. The battery is so compact and tightly placed, that a novice user will not be able to replace it with a new one. You have to take the laptop to the service center to get the battery replaced. There is no RJ-45 port, that’s again a $29 for additional USB based RJ-45 port.

Processor

There is a special Core 2 Duo processor designed by Intel for this product, it is based on Merom technology with clock speed ranging from 1.6GHz to 2.2 GHz. It is a Low Voltage Merom based Core 2 Duo instead of the traditional Ultra Low Voltage Merom. The only reason why Apple went with Low Voltage against Ultra Low Voltage is because of the lower clock speed ranges of Ultra Low voltage, however the advantage of Ultra Low voltage Merom based processors is that they operate on even less voltage when compared with their Low voltage competitors. The present processor is the older version of the current Intel’s processor. Apple used a 65nm Merom based processor whereas Intel has just launched its much smaller 45nm Hafnium based processor Apple would definitely have a plan to use the current 45nm Hafnium based Core 2 Duo Intel processor in its MacBook Air. Check more about the processor used in MacBook Air. Let me also mention about the processors which MacBook has been using in past. The MacBook Pro first used Intel’s Core Duo processor, which were replaced with Intel Core 2 Duo processors in mid 2006. The Core 2 Duo was a 64 bit processor designed by Intel corp. for laptop computers. This was developed under the code name “Merom”, it had a FSB speed of 667 MHz and supports the Virtual interrupt technology called as “Vanderpool Virtualization Technology”. This processor was upgraded last year with a FSB speed of 800 MHz

Eco Friendly

There were lots of speculations about the Apple’s strategy towards the ecosystem. Infact last year, Apple was in crosshairs of the environment group Greenpeace. But MacBook Air is truly eco friendly, it has fully recyclable aluminum case, and is the first to have a mercury-free display, the display is LED but not LCD. Even while packaging, the retail packaging of MacBook Air uses 56 percent less material than other MacBook packaging.

Specifications

In the end, lets see the specifications once again.

3 lbs
0.16” - 0.76” x 12.8” x 8.94” (H x W x D)
Full Size keyboard from the MacBook
13.3” 1280 x 800 LED backlit screen
2GB DDR2-667
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB shared L2
80GB 1.8” 4200RPM HDD or optional 64GB SSD
802.11n/Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Starting at $1799

My next post will be a true comparison between the Sony X505 Ultraslim and MacBook Air Ultraportal notebooks.

Editor’s Note: For Our Readers

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 15:37:00 +0000

For next few weeks, I would be writing about the future of today’s high profiled companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo etc.., Truly speaking this would be my research about these companies, in which I would be answering few questions like How did they started? What are they doing?and What will they be in future? Offcourse, to make it more interesting, I would truly cover the technology part of these companies rather than their history, economics and blah blah blah….

We had a internal discussion about, Which company to start with? and after thorough study, we decided to start with the powerful search engine and the high profiled advertising company which is Google. So lets start off, I am sure, you would be loving this idea. However we would also continue to post the technology news and latest happennig in the world of internet.

Citrix The Software Of the Year

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:30:00 +0000

Citrix is definitely the software of the year 2007 and is growing bigger and bigger. Recently they have released a free utility called Power Smart, which contributes to the green revolution. This is the first version of this utility. Power Smart helps in power off the most idle presentation server in your citrix farm during off business hours. Once installed and configured, this utility monitors the users during off business hours using Citrix Presentation Server SDK and power off those serves which are not active or have disconnected users. Things can be back to normal when in business hours. More over, it gives the flexibility to run basic administrative scripts on the server.

This tool is designed for the organizations seeking to reduce the datacenter power consumption. HP is the first server vendor in this line, they have demonstrated support for Power Smart in combination with their own power management tools for HP ProLiant Server family.

Download this utility here

Download the user guid here

The best part of citrix comes now. The products from citrix such as Go To Meeting, Go To Webinar and Go To Assist has been rated as the Year’s best softwares by PC magazine. Go To Meeting is the online meeting service from Citrix online, which is a division of Citrix, the best of 2007. Citrix interaction solutions magazine recognized Citrix GoTo Webinar and Citrix Go To Assist remote support and online event service with two product of the year Awards. On the whole, GoTo Meeting is an easy to use meeting solution for conducting meetings or trainings. GoTo Webinar is a webinar solution to conduct events from your PC with nearly a 1,000 attendees. GoTo Assist is a remote assistance tool to view, control and troubleshoot client’s desktop

GoTo Assist . GoTo Meeting . GoTo Webinar

Latest… To Reduce Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:48:00 +0000

CNET reviews few of the latest happenings to reduce Global Warming and its effects. We have covered the Green Tech solutions by various vendors under this tag earlier. Electronics and computing can really help in reducing Global Warming and its effects up to some extents. Check this out on CNET’s one of the best post. The sports car, the energy plants, Solar panels, Massachusetts’s clean energy area and many more.

Click the below Image for more........

In our post about Global Warming, we have covered about the Virtualization vendors of which HP has come up with Blade Server to virtualize your Data Centers. There was also news about Google’s step in energy area last month. They will be funding esolar for their innovative energy plants. Just wondering, how you can contribute to reduce Global Warming, now worry, just efficiently utilize your power. You kow better than me.... :)

Dell has got its First Every Tablet PC

noreply@blogger.com (Virasat) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:01:00 +0000

Dell has introduced its first Tablet PC today. This tablet pc is believed to have a touch screen facility. Dell is not new to the touch screen business. This facility was also equipped in the recently launched entertainment computer from dell named XPS. This tablet PC would be named as Dell Latitude XT. The tablet weighs 3.6 pounds making it the lightest tablet pc available. It runs on Intel core 2 solo or Duo processor, the 12.1 inch display, the integrated ATI Radeon graphics card, comes with 1GB RAM which is upgradable to 2 or 3GB. The hard disks supported are 40GB to 120GB RPM drives and also comes with support for 32 to 64GB Solid State Disk drives. The present operating system’s supported are the Tablet version of XP i.e.. Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005. Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Ultimate both 32 as well as 64 bit versions are supported. The Dell wireless support and the Dell Bluetooth support are the added advantages. Dell has also introduced two different broadband compatibilities which are in co-ordination with Sprint, Telus and Verizon Broadband services. The device also offers up to 9hrs of battery life.

There is also a news for Toshiba supporters, Toshiba has released the Portege M700, which is the 2nd tablet pc from this company. Toshiba has been selling tablet pc’s from over an year now. When we compare the features of both these tablet pc’s, the only difference lies is with the price. Toshiba offers its tablet pc for a basic configuration of $1,699 where as Dell’s price tag starts with $2,499 when it starts shipping at the end of this year. Infact, when we enter into more details, Toshiba offers a more faster laptop with the processor’s clock speed of 2.2GHz where as Dell’s is 1.2GHz, it has 4MB L2 cache when compared to the 2MB L2 cache in Dell’s device. However the processor used by Toshiba is not the standard Intel’s Core 2 or Duo one, it is T7500 rather.There are also speculations that other companies who has licenses for Touch screen technologies have registered a defending case against Dell. In future, Dell has also plans to introduce multi touch facility like the Microsoft’s Surface computer and Apple’s IPhone and the recent IPod.

HP’s Software Side

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:34:00 +0000

Being in the hardware industry for quite some time now, HP (Hewlett packard) has also started improving its software side. Presently it has a software business of $ 42 billion which makes them the sixth largest software business holders in the world. This is really a great success for this second largest hardware manufacturer. Recent announcements from HP were the Data center Products and the IT task automation product.

The HP Automated Operation 1.0 is the set of products which was launched earlier this week. These products will be part of what HP calls as “Strategic Focus” group. These products will be aimed in streamlining the IT side of an organization and reducing the risk. Broadly speaking, they can be classified as IT Service Management, Business Service Management and Business Service Automation. Last year HP has purchased Mercury for $ 4.5 billion, mercury is a software maker under whose banner they have developed some very good hit products like Mercury Quick Test Professional and many more...

Earlier this year, HP has also announced their new strategy about the next generation Data center products. The Linux community will be closely working with HP in this area. They have a plan to Virtualizes the present Data centers with their powerful hardware and software. This would be the same concept which was covered earlier on Technical Herald. In July this year, HP had a very aggressive acquisition strategy. They acquired Opsware at an estimated cost of $ 1.6 billion. Opsware is the software maker, they have developed softwares for automating Data center administrative tasks. Another acquisition was of a thin client maker Neoware, this was based at $ 214 billion. Neoware also designs virtualization softwares to ease the desktop management in an organization. By reading this, you might got an idea as to how HP is growing and this simply implies us to think in other direction which is “The Hardware sales doesn’t matters for HP”. But still there are very dashing server products from HP like the Blade Server, which is basicly used to virtualize your data center with either VMware or other virtualization software products offered by HP under the above mentioned acquisition.

Remote Control Your Office PC when at Home

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:48:00 +0000

Most of the organizations today use their own VPN solution allowing their employee to access their office pc from home. This is generally limited to very few and eligible associates, but what about them who are not eligible. For our friends who do no have idea of VPN, let me give a brief introduction about this VPN. VPN is an abbreviation of Virtual Private Network. This is the network established between two computers over internet cloud. You may get a question, what is the difference between other computers connected over internet. The difference is that VPN is highly secured network, it establishes a tunnel between two computers so that other computers will not be able to interfere between this communication. This is highly secured and encrypted as most of the company data will flow over this tunnel. Generally a client is installed on your laptop to access office PC. But the new VPN technology called SSL is totally browser based and runs with some Active X controls installed on your laptop.

The above was a brief introduction to what is VPN. But our discussion today is about other methods of accessing your PC. Infact, using this software you can access any PC over internet. These two services are GotoMypc and LogMeinrescue, GotomyPC is a client based where, you need to install a client on the PC which you want to take control, whereas LogMein is browser based and works like a SSL VPN. I came to know about this services a year back but didn’t find time to review it on Technical Herald. Now I got the time, so doing the same, Lets see how you can use these services.

GotoMyPC

This is a direct remote control, a client should be installed and configured with an Access code on your office pc. For remote controlling your office PC, you can directly login to the site and click on connect button beside the name which you have given to your office PC. Let’s see step by step procedure to use this tool.

I would recommend you to enter the credit card details, so that the account will be renewed after 30 days of trial period. But there is also another way to get the free trial without entering the credit card details.

If you close the browser without entering the credit card information, you will get a pop up advertisement as below:

Just click yes and you are in for installing the client. Installing the client will take a few minutes based on your connection speed.

While installing gotmypc client, you will be asked to enter the email address which you have used for logging onto the site. One more thing is Access Code which must be 8 characters in length.

All the above steps makes your office PC ready to be connected from home. Follow the below steps to remote control your office PC.

You will see the name of your office PC in your account. Click on connect and you are in within few mins of installing ActiveX controls on your home pc.

You can also place a shortcut icon on your desktop so that you don’t have to login to the account while connecting your pc next time. For this, click on File and select create shortcut to “officepc” where officepc is the nick name given to the pc which you want to remote control

This is how you can use Gotomypc service. Please check the Demo of this service here

Logmein

Another service is logmein, As I have mentioned above, this is just like SSL VPN solution. There is no need to install any client on the PC which you want to remotely login. This is generally used for commercial purpose by home based system administrators wherein, the technician can remotely login to customer’s desktop over internet to resolve the issue reported by customer. So you can find this useful only if you are working for such organization. However a trial version of this service can also be used for remote controlling your office PC. But only disadvantage is that, some one should be available near your office PC to accept the connection initiated by you. Lets see step by step procedure for using this serice.

First and foremost, is creating an account on the site Logmeinrescue

After creating a trial account, a technician console will be installed on the pc form which you want to initiate the connection.

This is just an Active X kind of control which will be installed on your desktop. However the connection is through the web browser over internet.

Technician console contains links for starting a new session. Click on this button will get one popup which contains the secure token to establish communication. You can communicate the token key to the person sitting on your office PC or you can also use the free email service to mail the secure link to that person

Clicking that link will bring your pc in your control, but not fully.

Now you need to click on start remote control button present on the technician console. This will generate a popup window on your office pc, to allow or cancel the connection. When allowed, you are in

Security Concerns

Let me warn you, this is not the most secure way to remote control your office pc, hence most of the organizations might have already blocked these services from entering their network. The only security concern is that, as this whole connection is over internet, there is a possibility that your pc either office or home may be hacked by a bad guy. However in large scale organizations, this is protected by firewall system, but as you know bad guys can do what we cannot imagine. Both the organizations, Logmein and Gotomypc claims that this is very secure and that they do not store any official data that goes on during the communication over internet.

Apple fixes its Firewall Vulnerabilities

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:38:00 +0000

In my last post on Sunday I have updated about the vulnerable Firewall in Apple’s latest operating system Leopard. As always, Apple has released a fix for this vulnerability. Below are the details for some of the updates released by Apple this week.

One update was for Safari browser in tiger, Apple has released a update to get Safari to version 3.0 on earlier versions of its operating systems. Safari 3.0 is a default browser in Leopard. This is just like IE 7 update for windows xp which is a default browser in Vista. This update also fixes many vulnerabilities which could allow a bad guy over internet to execute malicious code on your machine. There are also updates released for earlier version Panther through a separate download link.

Firewall Fix
Yesterday there was also an update released for the firewall vulnerability in Apple’s latest OS Leopard. According to Apple, this update fixes the firewall vulnerability which was described in my Sunday’s post.

Apart from all the above updates, there was also an update for Safari which runs on windows platform. This is a fix for several cross-browser scripting vulnerabilities which exists in Safari, if used on Windows platform.

Read What Apple Has to Say

About the security content of the Mac OS X 10.5.1 Update (client and server)

About the security content of Mac OS X 10.4.11 and Security Update 2007-008

About the Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update

About the security content of Safari 3 Beta Update 3.0.4

Top 5 Best Practices for Exchange Server 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:21:00 +0000

If you are a system Administrator managing Exchange Server or interested to learn about this server, then this one is for you. Early this year when Microsoft released Exchange Server 2007, this was a boon for IT market. Infact this server is used even in non IT industry. Microsoft has put together many new services to make our office life easier and the project is still moving. They are also in process of integrating this service with the newly established era by Microsoft which is “Unified Communication”. For the readers who are not in this field, let me give an overview. Exchange Server is the name given to one of the server softwares by Microsoft which is used for e-mail communication by an organization. You see the mail ID’s like Virast.Khan@technicalherald.com that is because of a exchange server in which the email id (called as mailbox) is created which we can access to send and receive mails with the client software which is Microsoft Outlook and few others.

The best Practices of an Administrator managing Exchange Serve 2007 are as below:

Placing the exchange server in correct Network: As there will be many incoming and outgoing connections to this server, the network in which the server is placed really matter.

Use Security Configuration Wizard disable un-used connection ports as even a small security hole will be a major fallback.

Don’t Use Default certificates if you are using Microsoft’s firewall software ISA then you should know that there is no support for SNA (Subject Alternate name) in ISA 2004. To keep your support, you should upgrade to ISA 2006.

Disable HTTP connections if you have enabled web based access then make sure that encryption is on else snooping will be on.

Use client submission port. In Exchange 2007 you have different connectors for receiving and sending SMTP traffic.

Read indepth about each of the 5 above points at Microsoft Technet Center.

Android, the Future Phone’s OS.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:56:00 +0000

Google has entered the mobile market and this is not new to us. Google has been in news for all that they are trying to do to develop mobile market. Now it looks like the days are not very far away when we can see all the mobile phones running on Google’s software like presently all the desktops run on Microsoft’s windows softwares. With the announcement of GPhone (Gnome-e-Phone), Google has made us realize that they are not going to sit back in this market. Now Google has joined hands with some other firms to develop a open source software for mobiles, they want to develop a software which can run on any mobile phone. This Alliance is named as Open Handset Alliance. If this comes in, Google will definitely revolutionaries the mobile market as Microsoft did for PC market. Google has released the SDK for this OS Yesterday, which gave a push to the developers to start coding for this product which is due to start shipping in 2008

This open source software is presently termed as Android. This will be based on Linux operating system. Android was a small firm which was overtaken by Google in early 2005. Some of the major firms which have joined hands with Google in this race are HTC (High Tech Computers), Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobiles and the list is still growing. The work is on its peek and Google has declared to release this phone early next year. The Alliance is spending nearly $10 million to develop this software. There are also speculations that the present hardware used is 32 MB RAM, 32 MB Flash and 200 MHz of processor however the alliance is working to get this numbers down. Andy Rubin, the director for Mobile platform at Google said that there are about 34 companies in this Alliance and every one has contributed their own share for the development of this operating system. When asked about the IPhone, he said that it is a different business, he also appreciated Apple’s effort in building high quality consumer products. By this we can also think of Apple joining the race with Google. I don’t think so, because Apple has revolutionaries the mobile industry with its IPhone and Google with GPhone. They both can be great competitors but not partners. Read a review about this software at CNet

Get the latest from this development at Android

Leopard's Firewall is Vulnerable

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:54:00 +0000

After releasing its latest operating system named Leopard, Apple is suffering from a very bad security vulnerability. This is about the type of firewall used in Leopard. There were reports that this firewall doesn’t blocks all the programs which are marked under block category. Infact, it doesn’t work even if it is set to block all incoming connections. If you are new to Apple’s range of operating systems, please do not get confused by these names. Tiger was the name of previous version of Mac OS X and Leopard is the one which was released last month ie. Oct 26th. Tiger was named as Mac OS X 10.4 and Leopard as Mac OS X10.5 and here we are talking about Leopard.

There are speculations that the firewall program automatically turns off while installing this operating system or while upgrading from the previous version. The major flaw is that, even if the user selects the option to block all incoming connections, an attacker can enter the computer easily just by injecting a small code via worm. This will lead to giving full control of your PC to the attacker. However if you have the extra security built into your router or you are using your Mac in an organization which has a hard core firewall solution, then you don’t have to worry at all.

Rich Mogull a security analyst’s research about the firewall revealed the following outcomes. According to him, Leopard firewall has 3 options, one to block all incoming connections, second to allow all incoming connections and final to allow users to select the application level blocking facility. Another facility allows user to enable stealth mode, in which the system will be on high security area wherein, the attacker cannot even see the machine when he/she scans the internet for a victim. But Mogull’s study revealed that none of these settings behave in their normal fashion. Even the high secure stealth mode works partially and if the user sets the application level settings, the applications starts behaving abnormally. Some of which are Skype service which gets killed automatically. Some games are not running as they do on other operating systems, Adobe creative suite users have also complained about the performance issue. The Photoshop issue which is not running properly or crashing at the time of launch. Some wireless network problems the bandwidth getting chocked while browsing.

So, don’t be in a confusion that your Leopard’s new sandboxing feature will protect your PC. I am sure Apple must be more worried than us, and very soon you will see a security patch to overcome this hurdle.