Tech Zombie...

1. Download iCoolsoft Blu-ray Video Converter and install it. 2. Click "Load Blu-ray" button to load Blu-ray playlist or Blu-ray file. Tip: If what you have loaded is Blu-ray playlist, then you can find a "Blu-ray File" button next to "Properties" button. Click that and the loaded file will be changed to Blu-ray file mode. Vice versa, if what you have loaded is Blu-ray file, then you will find a "Blu-ray Playlist" button next to "Properties" button. Click that and the loaded file will be changed to Blu-ray Playlist mode. 3. You can preview the Blu-ray file in the preview pane. If you like some scene of the movie very much and want to save it, you can click the "Camera" button to take snapshot of it. Click the button next to the "Camera" button and you can find the picture snapped. 4. The converter provides us some edit functions as well. If you only need a part of the entire file, you can use the "Trim...

How a few youngsters’ dream and determination to prove themselves gave rise to one of the most respected Indian I.T companies. Timeline: In 1981, IBM in US launches its first PC which uses Microsoft Software MS DOS and the term INTERNET first mentioned and in Pune July1981, on a day between monsoon and winter 7 youngsters came together with just 10,000 rupees to give shape to an idea that in 28 years became one of the most respected I.T companies in world. They were N.R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, N.S. Raghavan, Kris Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora. “Seven of us met in 1981 to start something new in India and we were looking out for the global opportunities. We came together because we were sold on the idea and were passionate about the it” says Kris Gopalakrishnan. This was by no means N.R. Narayana Murthy’s first entrepreneurial venture. The first attempt was a company called Softronics, an IT consulting firm in 1976. The lacks of response by the d...

IBM says they have made a significant leap forward in the viability of "Racetrack memory," a new technology design which has the potential to exponentially increase computing power. This new tech could give devices the ability to store as much as 100 times more information than they do now, which would be accessed at far greater speeds while utilizing "much less" energy than today's designs. In the future, a single portable device might be able to hold as much memory as today's business-class servers and run on a single battery charge for weeks at a time. Racetrack memory works by storing data as magnetic regions (also called domains), which would be transported along nanowire "racetracks." Instead of forcing a computer to seek out the data it needs, as traditional computing systems do, the information would automatically slide along the racetrack to where it could be used."

Microsoft’s Kinect add-on to the Xbox 360 certainly provides a new twist to traditional gaming. In case you’re unfamiliar, Kinect enables gamers to control on-screen action by using their bodies. Kinect works via 3D motion sensing technology which can detect an array of gestures and even facial features - and now comes word that similar gesture-recognition technology will be hitting the iPad, though not directly from Apple. MobileMag reports that Elliptic Labs will reveal their Touchless Gesture User Interface technology at CES 2011. Elliptic Labs sprung forth from the signal processing environment at the University of Oslo and what they’ve come up with is an iPod dock which creates a “touchless zone” that extends out about 1 foot in front and to the sides of the iPad screen. Users can then initiate a number of gestures to manipulate onscreen content. As an example, users can swipe their hands in the air to scroll threw icons or various pages on an app. Another supported gesture is the...

Julian Assange has signed a major book deal for his autobiography worth more than one million pounds (1.2 million euros, 1.5 million dollars). Assange told Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that the money would help him defend himself against allegations of sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. 'I don't want to write this book, but I have to,' he said. 'I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.' The Australian said he would receive 800,000 dollars (600,000 euros) from Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher, and a British deal with Canongate is worth 325,000 pounds (380,000 euros, 500,000 dollars). Money from other markets and serialisation is expected to raise the total to 1.1 million pounds, he said. Assange is currently out on £240,000 bail under what his lawyer refers to as not so much 'house arrest' as 'manor arrest', fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning.

The development of an Android client for VLC has been going on for months now, but it has been slowed down by the fact that Android's multimedia output libraries are in Java. VLC itself is based on C and so translating them to Java is difficult and takes time. With the newer Android NDK, however, using native codes for Android apps has been becoming easier. So, the VLC developers have developed two basic modules for audio and video output based on the new NDK and most of the VLC libraries have been ported to Android.

AOL wants to be a cool content company. It recently  purchased TechCrunch  and  Unblab , and today  announced  its newest acquisition:  About.me , a site that lets users create a single, non-interactive profile page that serves as a Web introduction to who they are.  The pages usually contain a name, paragraph about the person, links to    social networks  and services, email, and that’s about it. The company also provides some decent analytics about the behavior of those who visit your profile. Read More>>

The website-attacking group 'Anonymous' tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.... Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. 'We don't have enough forces,' they tweeted. Read More>>

While Google has made it clear that Cr-48 is nothing more than a test prototype, it was interesting to see the machine Google used to demonstrate Chrome OS. Out of the box, the Cr-48 conjures images of the Black Apple MacBook, from the plain, rubberized chassis to what looks like the same chiclet-style keyboard. The 12-inch notebook weighs about 3.8lbs and comes with a clickpad which recognizes one finger as a left click, while a two-finger tap triggers a right-click function. The laptop obviously contains a hard drive for storing backup data, but the capacity is unknown. The notebook comes with a lone USB port on the right side, which has limited functionaly. For now, thumb drives, hard drives, cameras, printers and other USB peripherals do not work with Cr-48. Google is working on getting its Chrome OS to recognize storage drives, but it's a work in progress. Once Chrome OS does recognize storage drives, users can probably install other OSes on Cr-48 for fun. Video ...

Apple last week rolled out a major update for its mobile operating system iOS 4, and among the new features is a nifty free tool: Find My iPhone. As its name suggests, Find My iPhone is a tracking feature to locate a missing iPhone 4, iPad or fourth-generation iPod Touch. (Only the latest models get the free feature.) If you've dropped your iDevice in a cab, or if someone's stolen it, you can hop on a computer to follow the GPS coordinates of the iPhone on a Google map. Or, if you're just absent-minded like me and you misplace your iPhone as often as you lose your keys, you can use your computer to trigger a beeping sound to help you find it. It should be loud enough to hear from under a couch cushion. (You'll never have to bug a friend to call your phone again.) If you do indeed think your iPhone is in the hands of a thief, you can use Find My iPhone to remotely lock the device or wipe the data. Do note, however, that if you wipe the device, you won't be able...

If you are anything like me you have gone past the "lets get wasted everyday" stage in your life, usually from ages 21 to 24, and have made it to the "lets have a glass of _______ with dinner, after work" stage. This stage is great...except for the fact that good wines come in small bottles and tend to be a lot harder on your wallet than beer and liquor. What to do... what to do. I know, you can make your own tasty (and quite potent) wine...or, errrr wine-esque drink. The entire process is painless and takes about two days, and the minimal effort pays off greatly. The first step to the (pointing at you) '''"Set it and Forget it"''' method is to get your materials. you will need *64 oz bottle of Juice (choice of juice must have at least 32g of sugar per serving for best results) *Airlock (readily available on Amazon.com for about $2) *Drilled Rubber stopper (also readily available on Amazon.com for less than a dollar) *...

Wintel' is the term that for years defined Windows-based computers running Intel chips. Now a similar expression is emerging for smartphones: 'Quadroid,' a term that refers to the Qualcomm chips used inside smartphones running the Android mobile operating system. The term, recently coined in a report by the PRTM consultancy, could catch on, largely because Qualcomm provides 77% of the chips in phones running Google's Android, which is expected to take the No. 2 slot in 2010. And the Quadroid alliance is expected to grow. Like Wintel has for PCs, Quadroid could push down profit margins for smartphone manufacturers, some analysts say. That might seem like a good thing to consumers, but may not be so good for many phone makers.

A new format that YouTube has been testing for a while officially launched today. YouTube is launching TrueView, a new ad format that lets users skip over ads they aren't interested in — and advertisers are actually okay with it. When a TrueView ad unit begins playing, you'll notice a five second countdown timer — as soon as that's up, you'll see an arrow that will let you skip the remainder of the ad and get back to the content you wanted to see, or you can choose to keep on watching the ad.

From the internet, a popular quote goes like this:   "Of course, while it is true that the ++ operator gives the C++ language its name, it also led to the first joke about the language. C++ haters point out that even the name of the language contains a bug: 'After all, it should really be called ... ++C, because we only want to use a language after it has been improved.' " We will now see why this joke is so absolutely hilarious.   int main() { int x = 40; int y = ++x + 1; std::cout << x << '\n' << y; } Output:  x = 41, y = 42. The pre-increment operator first increments the value of   x  (the ++) and then stores it in the variable. Hence, when the code is executed, x becomes 41 AFTER being assigned to   y  . The post-increment works the other way, the value is first stored in the lvalue before being assigned to the rvalue of the variable being incremented.   int main() { int x = 40; int y = x++ + 1; std...

A Lego Mindstorms robotics kit controlled by an HTC Nexus One smartphone successfully untangled a Rubik's Cube puzzle in 12.5 seconds at this weeks ARM technical conference in Silicon Valley. The current 3x3x3 cube-solvers's 15-second average represents a substantial improvement over the 25-second solutions of an earlier version, which was powered by a circa-2006 Nokia N95 smartphone, thanks to a faster (1GHz) CPU, more RAM, and revamped cube-solving algorithms. ARM Engineer David Gilday, who created the robotic cube-solver, claims the current version's algorithms can handle cube complexities up to 100x100x100, assuming he build the mechanics. In terms of racing humans, Gilday says the Lego robotics kits can only manage around 1.5 moves per second, whereas human players can make between 5 and 6 moves per second, amazingly enough.

As if there weren't already enough patent suits related to smartphone technologies, Motorola just announced its widely anticipated countersuit against Microsoft. Its subsidiary Motorola Mobility filed complaints with two US District Courts (Southern District of Florida and Western District of Wisconsin). Motorola already litigates with Apple in those and other courts. According to Motorola, the patents relate to technologies in the fields of operating systems, video codecs, email, instant messaging, object-oriented software architectures, WiFi, and graphical passwords. Motorola claims Windows, the Live messenger, Windows Phone, Outlook and other Microsoft products infringe. Motorola's action is no surprise given that all of the companies sued over patent infringement by Android — with the exception of Google — have already countersued.

Microsoft Research has made it possible for a mother to surf the web while nursing her newborn, thanks to its newly-patented 'foot-based user interface' (FUI?). 'In addition to causing health problems,' explains Microsoft in the patent, 'the traditional keyboard and mouse interface can be simply inconvenient in certain situations as well. In one instance, a mother with a baby in her arms is unable to easily perform simple tasks, such as checking email, on a computer.' Users of the 'Foot-Based Interface for Interacting With a Computer,' however, will be able to move their feet and step on the floor a la DDR to execute various commands, such as deleting email or scrolling down the screen. Due to the usual foot-dragging on the part of the USPTO, the patent — filed for in 2006 — was essentially obsolete by the time it was issued on Tuesday, a week after Microsoft's Kinect launch.

Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues. Read More>>

last month's news that AOL (American Online) and various private equity firms were exploring the possiblity of buying Yahoo . While talks between the companies have not officially gone much deeper, AOL has now hired financial advisers to analyze their options . Still, Kara Swisher writes at All Things Digital that the complexity of a deal between the two companies will be the biggest obstacle they have to overcome.

Cybercrooks continue to abuse the Web, boosting their ability to produce what's called search engine optimization poisoning so that individuals making use of search engines such as Google's increasingly are ending up with choices that are dangerous malware-laden URL links. Some 22.4% of Google searches done since June produced malicious URLs, typically leading to fake antivirus sites or malware-laden downloads as part of the top 100 search results, according to the Websense 2010 Threat Report published Tuesday. That's in comparison to 13.7% of Google searches having that outcome in the latter half of 2009, says Patrik Runald, Websense senior manager of security research. Read More>>

A kind of war has been going on recently between Facebook and Google over a contact export issue. First, Google blocked Facebook access to the Gmail contacts API. To this, Facebook responded back with a new method to get Gmail contacts of a user (the download contacts option). And now Google has slapped back again at Facebook and asks users indirectly to file a data protectionism complaint against Facebook. When a Facebook user clicks on the Download Your Contacts button on the 'Facebook import contact via Gmail' page, the user is then redirected to a new page on Google's server, which looks something like this ...

Here’s a head scratcher, at first glance at least: Lamebook , a hilarious advertising-supported site that lets Facebook users submit funny status updates, pictures and “other gems” originating from the social network, is apparently suing Facebook over trademark infringement. Read More>>

According to the Register, Oracle is going to make two tiers of Java Virtual Machine — a free one and a premium paid one. 'Adam Messinger, Oracle vice president of development, told QCon that Oracle plans to offer a "premium" edition of the JDK in addition to the open-source JDK. Both, it seems, will be based on a converged JRockit VM and the Hotspot JVM from Sun Microsystems. The converged JVM will be released under the OpenJDK project. ... Messinger didn't explain how the premium JVM would differ to the free version, but the premium edition will likely see performance tuning and tie-ins to Oracle's middleware.

According to recent reports, a Google-branded Chrome OS notebook will be launched by Inventec later this month . Acer and HP will be launching theirs a month later, in December. This report is also backed by a source close to Google stating that the company is still on track to launch its Chrome OS by the end of the year, as well as its Chrome app store.

The W3C posted results for their latest HTML5 compatibility tests and have found that, so far, IE 9 has the best overall results. 'The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes," "audio," "video," "canvas," "getElementsByClassName," "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5." The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec. Not do they cover CSS or other standards that have nothing to do with HTML5 but are somehow lumped under HTML5 by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft

Don Syme has announced the release of the F# compiler source code as a code drop under Apache 2.0. He wrote, 'The F# PowerPack now includes libraries, tools and the compiler/library source code drops. I'd like to take a moment to explain the F# team's approach to this. Firstly, the source for the F# compiler in our MSI/CTP releases has been available for some time, in the releases themselves, so in that sense there's not much new in this release. Secondly, we've always made sure we have a free download binary release of F# available, and will continue to do that, and that should still be the main way you "get" a release of F#. However, we've long discussed making compiler+library source available in a different way. After some discussion, we've decided to do this via a "code drop" model, where we make available versions of the compiler+library code logically matching each release of the F# language itself. Links: http://ww...

Cryptography is the study of hiding information. Cryptology is kind of synonym for encryption i.e. the conversion of certain information from readable state to a nonsense state. The information encrypted can be decrypted with (i.e. changing the nonsense information into a sensible information) a key which is set by the person during time of encryption. Basic terms of cryptography: Plain-text and Cipher-text The plaintext is a input data to the encryption algorithm and encrypted using cipher. The text after processing than gets converted to a ciphertext which can be decrypted using cipher (or cypher are the pair of algorithms which help in encryption and decryption)  for it. The ciphertext cananot be read by a human or computer unless the the cipher is available with them to decrypt it. Decryption It is a process by which the ciphertext is made to covert to a plaintext. Cryptanalysis It is the method of studying the encrypted nonsense data such that the cipher...

In this modern world of technology we keep hearing frequently the word CLOUD COMPUTING which is difficult for a layman to understand...so next time you can refer the layman about this article on CLOUD COMPUTING.... >1. What is Cloud Computing? -A. Let’s take a simple example to understand it in a practical manner. We access various email services on the internet such as Yahoo mail, Gmail, Hotmail for sending or receiving mails. For using all these services we don't require any software (except the browser) and nor a server. The only thing we require is an internet connection. Now the cloud in this is the Server which is at the company's place providing the service and the email management software is installed at that server only. So we are enjoying all the services and benefits with a click of a button. So this is how we can phrase the above example as "If you only need milk, would you buy a cow?” Therefore, the Cloud Computing can be explained as the user only needs...

Earlier this month, there was a news that Motorola had sued Apple, alleging infringement of 18 patents involving the iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. In response, Apple has now launched a pair of lawsuits alleging that Motorola is the infringing party, pointing to a number of patents involving touchscreen displays and multi-touch technology, and also methods for interacting with settings and data on a device. Apple wants the court to award them damages and prevent Motorola from continuing to sell the offending devices, which include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, BackFlip, Devour i1, Devour A555, Cliq, and Cliq XT. Read More>>

It's what every mountaineer wants when they reach the summit of Mount Everest: a 3G high-speed communication. Those who have trekked to the top will soon able to call their mates, go on Facebook or Twitter, and boast that they got there thanks to TeliaSonera and its subsidiary in Nepal, Ncell, which have brought 3G to the Mount Everest area. Climbers who reached Everest's 8,848-meter-high peak previously depended on expensive and erratic satellite phone coverage and a voice-only network set up by China Mobile in 2007 on the Chinese side of the mountain. Read More>>

Zynga , the creators of the popular hit FaceBook game FarmVille should be happy today as the company’s worth has passed that of EA (Electronic Arts). BusinessWeek reports that the net worth of the privately hed company Zynga is worth 5.51 Billion versus the video game giant EA’s worth of 5.22 Billion. Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron, Andrew Trader, and Steve Schoettle with a starting venture capital of $29 million. Zynga also employs around 1300 employess to date. In Zynga’s network of games there is a total of approximately 220 million players which contribute to the companies continued growth. Zynga creates their income from in-game payments for items across most of their games and partnerships with businesses. We will have to see how much further the company can grow in the next couple of years, so far it has been astonishing.

MySpace has unveiled an overhauled website and logo as it attempts to recapture the magic that led it to top the social-networking sphere. According to the report 'MySpace is positioning itself for the so-called Gen Y crowd, or those roughly between 10 and 30 years old.' A beta version of the new website will start rolling out Wednesday and is slated to be accessible to users globally by the end of November. Plans are for the site to focus on entertainment with the home page constantly updating items about music, movies and television shows that are most discussed on the site at any one time.

On Wednesday, Oracle amended the lawsuit it filed against Google in August, saying that 'approximately one third of Android's Application Programmer Interface (API) packages' are 'derivative of Oracle's copyrighted Java API packages' and related documents. In particular, 'the infringed elements of Oracle America's copyrighted work include Java method and class names, definitions, organization, and parameters; the structure, organization and content of Java class libraries; and the content and organization of Java's documentation,' Oracle says. 'In at least several instances, Android computer program code also was directly copied from copyrighted Oracle America code,' Oracle alleges. Links: http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/125618/oracle-google-directly-copied-our-java-code

Until now, computer security has been reactive. 'Our defenses improve only after they have been successfully penetrated,' says security expert Fred Schneider. But now Dr. Dobb's reports that researchers at Cornell are developing a programming platform called 'Fabric,' an extension to the Java language that builds security into a program as it is written. Fabric is designed to create secure systems for distributed computing, where many interconnected nodes — not all of them necessarily trustworthy — are involved, as in systems that move money around or maintain medical records. Everything in Fabric is an 'object' labeled with a set of policies on how and by whom data can be accessed and what operations can be performed on it. Even blocks of program code have built-in policies about when and where they can be run. The compiler enforces the security policies and will not allow the programmer to write insecure code (PDF). The initial release of Fabric is now ava...

1994:  Wired.com, then known as HotWired, invents the web banner ad. Go ahead, blame us. The  Mosaic browser  was just morphing into Netscape  in 1994. And if you think ads slow down page loads now, readers had to download the first banner ads over thin dial-up connections. Despite those handicaps, the gaudy banner ad took over the web, 468 pixels wide by 60 deep.  HotWired launched  with banner ads from 14 companies including MCI, Volvo, Club Med, 1-800-Collect and Zima, but legend has it that the first HotWired banner ad was from AT&T, prophetically asking “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against LimeWire for copyright infringement and unfair competition. A notice on the LimeWire home page says "THIS IS AN OFFICIAL NOTICE THAT LIMEWIRE IS UNDER A COURT-ORDERED INJUNCTION TO STOP DISTRIBUTING AND SUPPORTING ITS FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE. DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL." Related Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Microsoft has been very secretive about the next version of its Windows operating system . After the success of  Windows 7 , everyone is very interested in the next iteration – Windows 8. A few leaks have been the only source of news about Windows 8 till now. A couple of months back we had told you about  next generation Windows 8 Prototype computers from Microsoft. However, a slip up from Microsoft Netherlands have put the release date in October 2010. Microsoft Netherlands published an article to mark the one year anniversary of the Windows 7launch. The article deals with, well, Windows 7. However, in the last paragraph, this was mentioned: " Furthermore, Microsoft is of course the next version of Windows. But it will take about two years before “Windows 8 ‘on the market."

Microsoft warned today that it is witnessing a huge spike in the exploitation of Java vulnerabilities on the Windows platform, and that attacks on Java security holes now far outpace the exploitation of Adobe PDF bugs. The Microsoft announcement cites research by blogger Brian Krebs, who has been warning for several months that Java vulnerabilities are showing up as the top moneymakers for those peddling commercial crimeware exploitation kits, such as Eleonore , Crimepack and SEO Sploit Pack ." Several days ago, Oracle released a patch that fixed 29 Java security flaws Read More>>> http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2010/10/18/have-you-checked-the-java.aspx

St. Vincent Euphrasia elementary school in Meaford, Ont. is the latest Canadian school to decide to save its students from the harmful effects of Wi-Fi by banning it. Schools from universities on down have a history of banning Wi-Fi in Ontario. As usual, health officials and know-it-all scientists have called the move ridiculous. Health Canada has released a statement saying, "Wi-Fi is the second most prevalent form of wireless technology next to cell phones. It is widely used across Canada in schools, offices, coffee shops, personal dwellings, as well as countless other locations. Health Canada continues to reassure Canadians that the radiofrequency energy emitted from Wi-Fi equipment is extremely low and is not associated with any health problems.

For all Facebook addicts .....To Activate follow these simple steps.... 1. Open your Facebook account and go to account setting present in the Account drop down Box on the right. Now, Click on the mobile tag under account setting. 2. After this Click register for Facebook Text Messages and choose your mobile carrier. Then after this you will be asked to message F on the Facebook number 9232232665. After messaging you will receive a confirmation Code on your mobile phone than after clicking next on your Facebook page you will be asked to enter the sent confirmation code. 3. After Entering the confirmation code your  Facebook mobile will be activated now, you can do the settings the way you want. To start posting status on your wall you can message Text you want to post on 9232232665. 4. Now in future if you want to close the service through your mobile you can just type 'stop' and sent it to 9232232665. 5. By the help of ...

Adobe will finally release the new version of its Reader software — which will include the much-anticipated Protected Mode security feature — next month. Adobe Reader X will include a number of other new features in addition to the sandbox feature. Adobe officials have been discussing Protected Mode for several months now and said early on that it would be included in the next version of Reader, but had never set a time line for the release of Reader X. Now, the company says the new version will be available in November, although no specific date was announced.