However, no matter how vastly different our lives may be, we all run into the same problems when dealing with organization, and thats KEEPING organized. need to develop a system that helps your PC remain free of clutter and organized.  Granted, this task doesnt come easy at first, but all it takes is a few extra steps each day, done consistently, that will maximize your results in the long run.

So, lets say you have disorganized files all over your hard drive that you have difficulty finding when you need them.  Your PC keeps catching viruses out of the blue.  You dont know what to do with all your spam mail.  You have extra programs and freeware on your PC that you dont know anything about, and even if you did, wouldnt know what to do with them.  Here are a few steps to help you get started in the right direction

1.             Get rid of any unnecessary files or programs that are on your hard drive.  This requires a little homework on your part.  Youll need to set aside the time to sit down and actually take a look at all of the files on your PC and delete what you dont need.  A few things to do periodically for optimal performance is to run a disk cleanup, use your system file checker, and defragment your hard drive.

2.             Organize all of your files and folders.  Once youve deleted everything you dont need, take a look at whats left.  Is there some way you could organize these in nice categorical folders, so that its easier to retrieve them later on  For example, you could create a few folders underneath your My Documents folder, and give then names such as My Journal, My TV Shows, My Videos, My Business, My Songs, My JobFind, etc.  You could then place all respective files underneath these neatly organized folders.  You can also take advantage of many of the folders already supplied to you by Microsoft Windows, such as My Pictures and My Music.

3.             Install adware and spyware programs.  I dont think I need to stress how important it is to run antivirus and spyware software.  I personally like McAffee because of its wide range of protection services, but Norton AntiVirus works great as well.

4.             Delete unnecessary shareware and freeware files.  Its very important to keep your hard drive as clean and organized as possible.  Remember that shareware and freeware can potentially be harmful to your computer viruses, depending upon which source you received your shareware from.

5.             Delete unnecessary emails and take control of spam.    By now, you know to have antivirus software installed on your PC.  Thats a must, and will protect you if you should happen to open emails that have viruses attached to them.  Before you open any of your emails, check to be sure you know the sender, and that there are no .zip or .exe attachments.  Be very careful about opening files with attachments, especially from senders you dont know.

Hope many of these tips will you help you move toward the right direction in decluttering your PC, now and for good.

overtook desktop sales for the first time in history. These days the pricing of low end PCs, both laptop and desktops are similar and so it has become worth wondering whether to buy a desktop at all. In a few months I will purchase my first notebook computer and being fifteen, I am not able to buy a 17 inch widescreen Dell XPS or the Savrow line of laptops. Instead I look through the budget, the low price, and the beginner laptops for one that will catch my eye.

These days the features and specifications of cheap laptops surprise me several laptops around the 500 mark include DVD burners and integrated WiFi receivers, which at the beginning of the year were only in the 1200 laptops that would not be within the reach of the first time buyer. Of course there are some such as the Lenovo IBM ThinkPad R50e which does retail for 505 and only have 256MB of RAM and no DVD burner and no integrated WiFi. I should not be disappointed. One year ago, those would be acceptable specifications for a mid range laptop and today they are unacceptable for a bargain computer such as the Dell Inspiron 2200. How things have changed.

Recently Apple upgraded their iBook range, which starts at 700, and the laptops now include Bluetooth and WiFi as well as 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive. The 12inch iBook is pricey, at 200 more than two of its Windows competitors, the Acer 3502WLMi and the Dell Inspiron 2200. Both the Acer and the Dell have slightly faster processors, DVD burners which Apple calls the SuperDrive and the worlds favourite operating system. I love Apple computers, but I cannot buy an iBook and feel that I have made the best decision. Even the expensive PowerBook lines are bad value when compared with the Sony Vaios, IBM ThinkPads and Dell Precision lines.

The reason that the Windows laptops are better is the processor, the number of features and the fact that Apples care and attention to detail is not worth 200 to a person like me. I appreciate their efforts but when they lose out on the first time buyers, they may set a trend. The buyer brings home their brand new Windows laptop and all the feelings of euphoria are now attached to a Windows laptop, and not the iBook. Apple cannot afford to continue doing this and hopefully the Intel switch will bring down prices or save money, letting them add features such as the SuperDrive.

Dell makes laptops in every segment of the market. Their high end laptops are well made and have some quirky touches like the lights on the XPS. Of course when a company sets out to make budget laptops, cost cutting is an integral part of the mix. Dell immediately threw out build quality and attention to detail. They added the DVD burner and the WiFi which I appreciate but if my laptop creaks as I open it, as a yearold Inspiron 1000 does, I will feel quite disappointed. The Dell does only have a 40GB hard drive which is adequate for now but 60 or 80GB is better.

IBM does put the effort in to make quality laptops. This means their ThinkPad R50e does not have the same features, no DVD burner and no WiFi but the excellent keyboard and the pointing device, are better than Dells cutprice keyboard and the slippery trackpad. I am a person who values the extra features, the DVD burner is very important and Acers Aspire 3502WLMi has a duallayer burner which means almost 10GB of data on one disk. Since I dont want to skimp on the quality so I cannot see myself buying the poorly made but inexpensive Dell Inspiron 2200.

Asus is a relatively unknown computer company who, like IBM , value quality but unlike IBM dont price it highly. Their laptops are made out of metal and have a small form factor while maintaining a long list of features. However, they only have 256MB RAM in the A3L5001H which is a beautiful machine, more attractive than any other Windows laptop in this price range. It has Windows XP Professional which is far superior to Windows XP Home Edition, a comparison on Microsofts website shows how significant the gap is between the two versions. However, there is no DVD burner. WiFi is included. The best thing is that Asus offers 1GB of RAM for only 90. This upgrade usually costs around 250400 in most laptops. A Celeron M 370 and a 60GB hard drive are just icing on the cake.

The lack of a DVD burner is offset by Windows XP Professional and the fantastic amount of RAM does mean the price is higher than I would normally pay. 640 is tantalisingly close to an iBook, but the iBook has 20GB less space and 512MB less RAM. RAM is so important that spending a little more on it is worth every penny. So all the big names are beaten by an unknown manufacturer. Seems like a bad decision but knowing that my machine looks and feels expensive while having 1GB of RAM and Windows XP Professional are more than enough to make up for it.

The other option is Acers Aspire 3002LMi, with 512MB RAM, 60GB, Windows XP Home Edition and a dual layer DVD burner, WiFi but an AMD processor. Acers Aspire 3502WLMi has 20GB less, an Intel Celeron M 360 and costs the same. The Aspire 3002LMi can be bought for 501 which is unbelievably cheap. When compared with the Asus, the upsides are 210, a DVD burner and a widescreen display. The downsides are Windows XP Home Edition, half the RAM and the aforementioned build quality.

Of course if you are in the market to buy a new laptop and need one now, then consider these options. Otherwise, wait for Windows Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2006 and laptops with more RAM, larger hard drives, bigger screens and DVD burners and WiFi as standard.

The article explains how to reconstruct the Volume Boot Record and will touch briefly on multiplepartition drives. This information will help solve some very common problems encountered in a computer service department. This article is designed to work with a system that has a single drive using a FAT 16 structure all DOS and older Windows systems, some Windows NT, and no drive overlay.

A common problem with hard drives is the error message MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM.

Typically what this means is that critical data is missing or damaged in two possible locations. The first is the Master Boot Record MBR. This data area contains error messages and pointer information that specifies the location of the second critical data area, the Volume Boot Record VBR. The VBR contains the operating system specific data for the format of that particular partition on the drive. If either of these two critical data areas is damaged, by a virus, controller failure, etc., then the drive will not be accessible through the operating system.

The normal response to this error message is to boot to a floppy disk and to repartition the drive probably using FDISK and thereby totally removing any possibility for recovery of the data on that drive, except by dedicated data recovery software or a data recovery facility. If applicable, the following technique will help save time, money, and frustration.

The first step to data recovery covered in great detail in the first article of this series is to verify the location of the existing partition information. For the purposes of this article, it will be assumed that the FAT structure and the root directory are intact, there is only one partition, and that only the MBR and the VBR were damaged. Using MicroScope, enter the Fixed Disk Editor menu and select the fixed disk that is being repaired. Using the Find menu option, locate all the sectors that contain the string 55 AA see Step Four of the first article in this series, and then verify that the FAT structures are intact see Step Seven. Note on a scratch paper the values in Cylinder, Head, Sector format where this string appears. These values will be used later in the reconstruction process.

Rebuilding the MBR

Using the Fixed Disk Editor in MicroScope, locate and read Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1. This should be the location of the corrupt Master Boot Record. Press M to modify the sector and enter 0s for the entire sector, effectively wiping all the data from this sector. Press ESC, then W to write the data, and Y to confirm the write operation. Then exit the Fixed Disk Editor and select the Rebuild Master Boot Record menu option. Press Y to confirm this operation. The fixed drive now has a completely corruptionfree MBR available for use during the reconstruction of the VBR.

Rebuilding the VBR

There is a simple method for rebuilding the VBR. Copy the data from a like fixed disk or a similarsized fixed disk with the identical operating system the versions must be the same. There are two approaches for obtaining this data. The first is to install the second drive in the system, reboot MicroScope, and copy the sectors directly from the healthy drive to the drive being reconstructed. The second method is to copy the sectors from the healthy drive to a floppy diskette and transfer that diskette to the machine containing the drive being reconstructed. The data can be copied to any sector on the floppy disk. Just note where this data is stored on the floppy disk so that it may be easily retrieved when copying it back to the drive being reconstructed. In either case, the VBR is located at Cylinder 0, Head 1, Sector 1 on the healthy drive. Copy this data to the same location on the damaged drive. Exit the Fixed Disk Editor.

The drive now has a clean MBR and VBR, and with a few modifications to the values stored in these data areas, the drive will be fully reconstructed.

Access the VBR in the Partition Editor. Some of the values in this area will remain the same. These are Bytes Per Sector, Reserved Sectors, Number of Copies of FAT, Max of Root Dir. Entries, Media Description Byte, and Volume Boot Signature. Sectors Per Cluster may or may not need to be changed. Put the cursor over this value and press F1 for a formula that will help determine the proper value. Use this same F1 procedure for determining the Total Number of Sectors. This value should be the same as the value for Number of Sectors in the partition table.

The Sectors per FAT value equals the number of sectors from the beginning of the first FAT to the beginning of the second FAT as described in the first article in this series. The values for Sectors per Track and Number of Hidden Sectors should be identical to the values in the MBR. The Number of Heads is either the same as the value in the MBR or the same as the value of the Number of Heads in the partition table plus one refer to the first article in the series for more information on this topic. After completing this information, the drive should either be bootable or accessible via a bootable diskette. If this is not the case, email the Technical Support department for further verification of the problem.

Reconstructing Multiple Partition Volumes

In some cases, the drive may have been partitioned into smaller, logical partitions. If this is the case, the chance of this data being corrupt is slim, and correct Head and Sector values are readily available from these areas. To find the second partition on the drive, use the Fixed Disk Editor in MicroScope to view the sector containing the 55 AA string. This sector should appear after the first VBR, so dont confuse the two. The second MBR should start on Head 0, Sector 1 of a given cylinder. Accordingly, the second VBR will appear on Head 1, Sector 1, and the FAT on Head 1, Sector 2, etc. By adjusting the first MBR in MicroScope so that the value for Starting Cylinder, Head and Sector is equal to the location of the second MBR, the VBR is now accessible through the MicroScope partition editor. Use these values to reconstruct the second MBR. The only value that will need recalculating is the Start Absolute Sector in the second MBR.

As outlined in the first article in the series, the Start Absolute Sector is the same as the value for Ending Sector. This is not the case with a second partition. The Start Absolute Sector is the number of sectors prior to the VBR. The formula for the Start Absolute Sector is as follows Number of Sectors the Start Absolute Sector of the previous partition Sectors per Track. This formula will work for any additional logical partitions.

What do you want to use the laptop for Word Processing Internet Browsing Use at Work and at Home Online Shopping Database Applications Personal Finance and Online Banking The reason for assessing what you applications you need are that most refurbished laptops often only include the Operating System OS. Some dont even have an OS installed so make sure you know what youre buying before you spend your money.

Once you establish your computing needs, you need to determine your budget. Refurbished laptops dont always come with an operational battery. If you need a battery, shop around to figure the cost to replace one. You should know that older laptop batteries dont last more than an hour or two, and even purchasing a new battery for the purpose of longer battery life may not be worth the expense. You should also stick with name brand battery manufacturers like IBM, Dell, Toshiba and CompaqHP.

Once you have your refurbished laptop, you may not know what to do next. If you are new to computers and you want to browse the World Wide Web, you will need to obtain the services of an ISP Internet Service Provider. There are basically two types of Internet access options broadband cable modem, DSL, satellite and dial up. Broadband is the preferred type since download speeds can range from 128kbs to 6000kbs faster is better. But, if your budget is tight, dialup access will work fine for typical browsing and email usage.

If you bought your used laptop for gaming, you definitely need a reliable broadband connection. Gaming over a dial up connection will be frustrating and on some cases even impossible. That is why its critical that you check out the minimum systems requirement for the games you like before buying the laptop. You want to make sure the CPU speed and the RAM and graphic chip requirements will support your needs.

Finally, where do you buy your used or refurbished laptops Some people choose to search at www.ebay.com. If you be sure to check out the seller to be sure you will have a smooth transaction.

Many dont want the hassle of bidding, so will use their favorite search engine

How do you choose once you have a list 1. Look for online reviews 2. Make sure they have a BBB Online Insignia 3. Make sure their service is up to you standard. Most of the vendors have 800 numbers, so it wont cost anything to call.

4. What do their prices look like If all the above seems like too much of a hassle, then buy a new computer. It will cost around 800 but will come with a new battery and a one year warranty although some new ones seem to have only 90 day warranties. It will also have the latest Windows XP system and an 800 number to call the vendor, should there be a problem.

are a valuable addition to any PC and they greatly increase interactivity and communication levels. You can use a microphone for performing various tasks, both business and fun related. For example, you can hold a conference with your business partners, over the Internet, or you can chat with your friends online, instead of doing that on the phone. Of course, in order to enjoy accurate and high quality communication, you have to choose a good PC microphone. There is a huge variety of models on the market, ranging from microphones that you can buy for a few dollars and going all the way to expensive, high tech desktop microphones. So which PC microphone is right for you

Price Vs Quality

You can pay 5 for a microphone, or you can pay 50. So wheres the difference, apart from the price Well, cheap microphones have low prices for some good reasons they offer average to low quality sound, they break down more easily and you cant use them successfully in all applications that support a microphone. The materials they are manufactured from have to be cheap, which eliminates the idea of high quality, so the end product is of lower reliability. And at this price, you can be sure bulk manufacturing is present and quality tests are quick and far from rigorous. Microphones that come for a higher price have, in most cases, better sound quality and more features. Such microphones will have noise canceling filters, which help diminish background noise. Distortion filters and integrated circuits also help keep voice sounds clear and accurate. The materials used for more expensive microphones also last longer plastic doesnt crack so easily and if you drop it on the floor you know that the internal components are well protected.

Choosing the right computer microphone

Determining what price range you are in and what model to purchase depends heavily on the purpose you have in mind for the microphone. Are you going to use it just to chat with friends online In that case, spending a lot of money on a professional computer microphone is not justified. Do you plan to hold business conferences over the Internet Then maybe you should get a better microphone that will allow the discussion to be continuous and clear, without noise distortion. Giving vocal commands to your computer or dictating to word processing software with speech recognition

capabilities is another use for desktop microphones. Quality should be first here speech recognition software

is very sensitive and demands a high quality microphone and sound card. Recording your voice and inserting it into music tracks is possible, but a high quality microphone is absolutely essential in this case.

Oh, if it were that simple. If things were really that easy or simple when buying a cheap computer, life would be much easier, but just like every other thing, its not that simple.

Barebones computers

have become extremely popular, and for good reason. Getting a barebones computer which does not include a monitor and comes with the bear minimum of parts makes them an upgradable, practical and cheap computer.

But not all things are rosy in barebones computer land...

1. Missing parts

Although barebones computers do come with the essential pieces, most people need at least one or two extras for their day to day barebones system. This is simply due to different applications people use them for. Dont get caught missing that extra part from your barebones system that you then need to get later. You still need to do some homework and research to find out what you really need from your barebones system.

2. Super cheap computer deals

Beware, many corners can be cut to get those sub 200 dollar barebones systems. They can be great, but not always, carefully analyse the components of the package. Also remember that a barebones system couldnt possibly include a monitor for that price, which adds a lot to the price.

3. Mismatched parts

This could become a problem if building your own computer, but it even happens in preassembled barebones computer deals. There is a chance that you get something that doesnt fit with the barebones system. There are lots of different connections and speed ratings between parts. Make sure the ones you get match up to the other parts and your needs. Although not common, incompatibilities between parts are not unheard of.

4. Outdated components

To get supercheap deals older parts are sometimes used in cheap computers. Although this can be a great costsaver and some old parts are fantastic, there is nearly no chance of an upgrade without putting a major amount of money into your barebones computer again, perhaps as much if not probably more than you paid for your great deal.

5. Defective parts

Although this is another one that has gotten better as the competition has gotten stronger, there is a chance of defects in cheaper products. Your motherboard could be faulty, your power supply might give up after a month or two. These may not be intentional problems, but come hand in hand with cheap computer stuff.

6.Refurbished computer parts

Refurbished computer parts are a great way to save some money. Not always the biggest saver, but there can be problems with the updates to these computers in much the way as mismatches happen in barebones systems. Often the computer is slightly updated to meet needs, but is really quite an old model, just with upgrades. Can be fine, but the parts they replace might be replaced with something newer but inferior.

7. Claims of great warranty

To try and entice you into feeling safe, offers of long warranties are made. Most of the parts in the computer could have past their warranty dates, so the warranties are purely from the company that put the computer together. They can be hard to contact and take their time to get replacements to you as well as expect you to mail the computer to them so that they can do the repairs.

Barebones computers can be a great way to put together a second computer, build a computer

for simple purposes, like writing documents and casual web surfing. Barebones fit perfectly as a second computer. Just keep these things in mind and you wont get bitten by the bargain bin monster.

I would say that there probably is a store near you right now that has cheap laptop computers. In fact, many stores already have them. The reason being, like any other new product, laptops were once considered the cream of the crop in the computer world which made them very expensive. However, all that has changed now. Laptops are a dime a dozen The hand held digital assistants, Bluetooth cell phones and tablet pads are the new rage making laptop computers cheap.

Now, dont get me wrong, this does not mean that they are cheaply made. Thanks to the wonders of the technological cycle, laptop computers are decreasing in price as their capabilities rise. Of course, there are the latest and greatest monsters out there that are made for gaming or high powered multimedia applications and these babies still cost a pretty penny.

But for the average user, you can find cheap laptop computers that provide all the power you need and then some. Every major manufacturer out there, like Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway, and IBM have their lower end and intermediate models that come with more than enough speed and usability.

Now here is the key to finding the right cheap computer laptop for you, and that is to figure out exactly what you need it for.

Are you going to use it mainly for surfing the web or word processing Do you need it to work from home or mainly to save your MP3s and digital pictures

Ok, so now you have an idea of what you want to use your laptop for. Now lets go out shopping and compare. You can visit any of the top manufacturers websites or visit your local store and find their low end or intermediate models that may suit your needs. The three top components of a computer you want to look for is the hard drive size, memory, and processor speeds and take notes of each model you find on each component and model.

The hard drive, you can consider this the brain of your computer, this is where all your files, applications and folders are stored. If you plan on using your computer for MP3s and digital pictures your hard drive should be large since these files are usually very large. I personally would look at 80gb as minimum.

Next would be the memory, memory can be considered the thought processes of your computer. As a minimum I would look at 512mb but if you plan on using your laptop for gaming of course this should be much larger, in the area of 1 to 2gb. Now memory is used whenever a program or application is running. So the more memory you have the faster your computer can process the program.

And finally your processor, now your processor is just that it processes all the inner workings of how each program runs. The faster the processor is, the faster the program instructions are processed. Again if your looking for a laptop for gaming uses you want your processor with high speeds 2ghz or more. For other uses you can go less.

Other parts of the computer to also consider are the ports involved that can connect your computer to your digital camera or your mp3 player for example. You also want to check that your laptop has wireless and broadband connectivity. Many cheap computer laptops today already come with this but you want to make sure or you will have to pay additional, for example, a wireless card to install in your laptop to have this capability.

PC to TV Converters

Now, regardless of the availability of an analog output on your PC which most computers dont have you can still project your desktop onto a television set. This requires a little understanding about what hardware you are working with on both ends. Lets start with the PC.

Most PCs have either a VGA or DVI output. This can get confusing VGA is analog and DVI can either be analog or digital although it is increasingly more common these days for DVI to be used in a digital environment.

Now look at the input available on your television set. If you have a HDTV you probably have some form of digital input. If you dont have a highdefinition TV you will probably want to find component inputs aka RCA. These are the red, white and yellow inputs available on most television sets. Another alternative is SVideo.

VGA out to Component

This is the most popular type of PC to TV Converter. Simply plug it into your VGA output on your video card or motherboard and plug the other end into your TV the image should show up within a minute. Higher quality adapters do a much better job of converting the image for TV and make a big difference. This is especially important for screens larger than 30 inches. A very similar adapter that supports HDTV is a better option for screens larger than 30 inches.

VGA out to DVI

Most DVI television sets support digital input only though some older ones do support an analog signal. In this case you have two options adding a digital video card or using a VGA to DVI conversion box.

A VGA to DVI conversion box is typically more expensive because it actually takes the analog signal and converts it to a pure digital signal. As a result the quality is usually very good with these adapters. Addin cards with DVI produce pure digital signals, also, but the resolution depends on the quality of the card. Most DVI video cards support highdefinition resolutions and much higher, so they work well in these scenarios.

DVI out to Component

Some DVI video cards actually support videoout through the DVI port an analog signal. If you have such a video card then a DVI to component cable should do the trick. Be careful with this one, however, since many DVI video cards only support an analog signal.

Wireless PC to TV

If you are trying to find a Wireless PC to TV Converter they are now available. This works with any television set with a componentin option and a VGA out on the PC. These run on the 2.4 GHz band, so they may interfere with some common home devices though this is rare since they hunt for open channels.

The technology to adapt your PC experience to the living room is getting better everyday. Whether you are looking to stream video to your TV from your PC or you just want to do some email on the bigscreen you now have plenty of options.

Since the inception of dualcore processors a little while back the race has been on to see who can get the better chip with this dualcore processor technology.

During the final days of the singlecore battles, there was a stalemate between AMD and Intel. Intels clocked higher but were unable to match the speeds that the AMD managed at lower clock speeds.

The oldest difference between them has been their suitability for specific tasks. AMD have had the gaming sector in the bag, especially in terms of the value for money possible with their lower clocked chips, which could be overclocked to the same speeds as their top models. Intel has the crown for general performance. When it comes to office related tasks, Intel processors are able to outperform AMD chips in these areas.

As the ability to clock the chips any higher became more and more difficult technically, the next step was to just add another core, theoretically allowing twice as much number crunching in a dualcore processor. This is not exactly how it works however.

Modern operating systems and programs have not been designed with multiplecore or dualcore processors in mind. They were designed to make use of one core on one processor. The major expense that went with multiple processor computers was the circuitry needed to split tasks up amongst the processors and sharing cache.

Dualcore processors simply act like two places for tasks to go. Instead of single tasks getting split up and performed in two different places, as is the case with traditional single core processors, single threads get split up amongst the cores. This essentially means that each program gets assigned to a core.

Because of this there is absolutely no increase in speed for gaming from dualcore processor chips. Only once the games themselves have been programmed to take advantage of dualcore processors will there be a difference. This is due to the intensive nature of games and the number crunching needed for intense graphics, which for now cannot be split over multiple cores in dualcore processors.

So back to the battlefield.

AMD were the first to introduce their dualcore processor solution to a desktop computer. This gave them a slight lead over Intel. Despite this, AMD gave people a bit of a surprise with their new offering.

Always having been renowned for giving far more than expected for the price, these new dualcore processors were very expensive. Part of what managed to give AMD a hold in a market previously dominated by Intel was their good pricing. This shock did not go down well with consumers.

To add insult to injury, Intels dualcore processor offerings came in at remarkably good value. Both of their initial dualcore processors cost less than AMDs lowest priced model. Thats right, AMDs cheapest dualcore processor cost more than Intels most expensive. This definitely put the ball in Intels court and was downright disappointing for AMD fans.

AMD did manage to introduce a cheaper model to compete better with the Intel offerings. Despite this, Intel was still the forerunner in this area.

Performance remains an area that is sketchy.

With the relatively new technology involved it is hard to draw a clear conclusion on who is faster. With operating systems only recently oriented towards fully utilizing dualcore processor technology, it is still new territory. Both offer increased performance, but as to who will rule the roost, well have to see.

For the meantime it would probably be advisable to just watch. Being a cautious buyer I prefer to buy into a sure thing, once things have settled down, prices will balance out and all the related technology will be in place. Then we will be able to get a true opinion on where to put your hard earned cash.

Eventually, however, the raw power of a processor began to be less important than its overall performance, information processing ability, and power consumption. The landscape began to really shift in about 2000. That year, AMD announced and began to develop its 64bit line of processors, Opteron and Athlon 64. The company essentially staked its future on these chip lines, and in 2003 they released to much acclaim. The balance of power had shifted decidedly in the processor market while Intels Pentium 4 chips struggled with power consumption and heat issues as they steadily increased in clock speed, AMDs 64bit offerings allowed consumers to take advantage of more powerful 64bit code in their systemsincluding gaming systems. Whereas Intel enthusiasts could always point to the performance discrepancy between the two different types of chips, AMD quickly became the processor of choice for computer gaming and computer hardware enthusiasts. The processing power provided by the 64bit AMD chips proved to be too great to pass up, and this was only reinforced in 2005 when the company released the first dualcore processors to the market. Since then, Intel has been playing catchup in terms of hardware availability, and AMDs market share has reached its highest point at roughly 20 percent, according to eWeek.com.

What are the Advantages of AMD Processors

As the processing landscape has shifted towards AMDs side, there are some key benefits of using AMDbased hardware that have been revealed. The first is obviously the pure power edge that AMD has attained. Toms Hardware tomshardware.com has long been regarded as a reliable authority in the field of computer hardware reviews. While Intel for years could always claim performance superiority over AMD at the high end, Toms reports that this is no longer the case. In conclusion to a comparison between AMDs dual core Athlon FX60 processor and Intels Pentium Extreme Edition, the reviewer writes, With the exception of a few audio and video encoding benchmarks, the Athlon 64 FX60 represents the new device to beat as far as performance goes, thanks to its two processing cores. Furthermore, the reviewer adds that the increased demands of running dual graphics cards configurations means that this processor is a great choice for the bestpossible 3D gaming experience. This status as the most powerful processor is reinforced by the fact that Alienware, renowned as the industry leader in terms of powerful custom computers, uses the FX60 exclusively in its topoftheline Aurora ALX system.

Another advantage of AMD processors over Intel, at least for the time being, is the lower relative power consumption of their systems. According to Toms Hardware, AMDs Turion 64 enjoys its status as the most efficient single core processor, and while Intels Core Duo is technically the most efficient dual core processor, the overall power efficiency of AMD systems offsets any advantage that the Core Duo might have. When you subtract the power draw of a graphics card, which can be massive, it remains clear that AMD processors just do their job in a more efficient manner.

So What about Intel

None of this means that Intel processors should be completely disregarded, however. One key advantage that Intel maintains is in sheer numbers. Intel still maintains a roughly 80 percent share of the market today, and as such you are more likely to find a system sporting an Intel processor rather than its AMD counterpart. Furthermore, Intels long string of dominance ensures that there are no softwarehardware compatibility issues as Intel is the accepted leader in the processor industry, companies base their compatibility around Intel processors first.

Its not as if Intel is resting on their laurels, either. As has often happened during the rivalry between Intel and AMD, competition is breeding a new level of performance. Intel has recently shifted to a 65 nm processor core process, beating AMD to the punch in the process. The reduced core size allows for greater possibilities in terms of chip efficiency and power. Intels toplevel chip is still more expensive than its AMD counterpart, however, perhaps due to the relative newness of the 65 nm process.

So Which Chip Should you Buy for Your Gaming Computer

All of these technical comparisons are well and good, but they dont answer the fundamental question which chip is best for computer gaming systems Though they continue to use the 90 nm core process for the time being, AMD processors still represent the best bang for your buck. AMDs highestend chips are still priced lower than their Intel counterparts, and the performance numbers available for them dont lie. Furthermore, AMDbased systems are more powerefficient in general, and certain technologies allow for technical innovation. nVidias nForce line of motherboards, for example, is just on the verge of achieving steady dualchannel DDR2667 memory support for Athlon 64 FX2 dual core chips. What this means for the consumer is that the memory will operate faster, with a higher bandwidth, and in greater harmony with the processor than ever before.

Reuse Your Old Parts

A good way to save money on your new computer is to reuse old parts where possible. Strip out all the good parts from your old computer, you may be able to use these parts in your new PC.

Components such as the monitor, keyboard, mouse, floppy drive, CDROM drive, and computer case are good candidates for reuse. In some cases you might even be able to keep your old graphics card and sound card, leaving you with only the core components to replace, the CPU, motherboard, RAM, and hard drive.

Watch for Sweet Spot in Market

Another good tip to building a cheap gaming computer is to watch for the sweet spot in the market. The sweet spot is basically the point at which certain components are still not far behind those with top performance, yet theyve already been through price drops.

Keep in mind that new hardware releases in the market will cause older components to drop in price. You should hunt for those quality components that have been through these price drops.

Shop Around For Your Components

This is common sense, but there are people out there who dont do it. To get the best deals around on your components you must shop around and compare prices. Avoid buying impulsively, whatever you do. Instead, become an informed and smart buyer.

If you want the very best deals you will need to put in a little effort. Try to compare prices from various sellers over time, perhaps a few weeks or so to get an idea of where the hot deals are.

Gaming computers can be pretty expensive. If youre like most people, you wont have all the money in the world to spend on your new machine. So use these tips to your advantage and build your gaming computer the smart way. Always remember, be a smart, patient and informed consumer. The money you save is worth it.

Check out BuildGamingComputers.com to learn all about building your own highperformance gaming computer. It includes information on choosing the best components for your gaming pc, and product reviews of the best parts.

Normally term hard disk is much familiar with computers only but it is widely used as network attached storage for large volume storage. Furthermore, appliance of hard disk drives spread out to video recorders, audio players, digital organizers, digital cameras, and even in latest cellular telephones.

Reynold Johnson invented the first hard disk in 1955 for IBM 305 computer with fifty 24 inch platters and total capacity of five million characters, and in 1956 first commercial hard disk was launched with 5 megabyte capacity, the IBM 350 RAMAC disk drive.

Within timeframe of 50 years and rapid progress in technical enhancement,we have now reached to latest 2006 First 750 GB hard drive from Seagate and First 200 GB 2.5 Hard Drive utilizing Perpendicular recording Toshiba.

Interior of hard disk consist of four basic components

The Platters Platters are the actual disks inside the drive that store the magnetized data. Conventional platters are made of a light aluminum alloy and coated with a magnetizeable material but latest technology uses glass or ceramic platters as they are thinner and also heat resisting. Most drives have at least two platters and the larger the storage capacity of the drive, the more platters there are.

The Spindle Motor Hard disk drive consists of a spindle on which the platters spin at a constant RPM. Moving along and between the platters on a common arm are readwrite heads. The platters in a drive are divided by disk spacers and are clamped to a revolving spindle that turns all the platters in a uniform motion. The spindle motor is built right into the spindle and rotates the platters at a constant set rate ranging from 3,600 to 7,200 RPM.

The Read/Write Heads Read/write heads read and write data to the platters, and each head is fixed to a single actuator shaft so that all the heads move in harmony.

Typically, only one of the heads is active at a time either reading or writing data. When not in use, the heads are inactive, but when in motion the spinning of the platters generate air pressure that lifts the heads off the platters. The space between the platter and the head is so minute that even one dust particle or a fingerprint could disable the spin. When the platters cease spinning the heads come to rest, at a preset position on the heads, called the landing zone.

The Head Actuator All the heads are attached to a single head actuator arm, which moves the heads around the platters. The Actuator arm moves the heads on an arc across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter. Contemporary hard drives use a voice coil actuator, which controls the movement of a coil toward or away from a permanent magnet based on the amount of current flowing through it.

Fundamental structures of all hard disk are same, and are composed of the same physical features, but their performance depends on the quality of their inner components.

Hard Disk Failure

Hard Disk Failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the accumulate data cannot be accessed. It may happen in the course of normal operation due to an internal or external factor.

Disk failure varies and the most common is Head Crash where the internal read and write head of a device touches a platter or magnetic storage surface often grinding away the magnetic surface. Head hover just micrometers from the platters plane which makes such collision a common one.

This sort of crash usually invites severe data loss and unprofessional data recovery attempts results further damage to the remaining data.

Hard drive also includes other controller electronics i.e., semiconductors, valves or electronic circuits, and major components such as Platters, Spindle Motor and Head Actuator. Failure of any these devices may cause a hard disk failure.

Factors causes disk failure are numerous, yet most common are power surges, voltage fluctuations, electronic malfunction, physical shock, wear and tear, corrosion, exposure to high magnetic waves, sharp impact, high temperature exposure etc.

The phenomena of hard disk failure is raising higher and higher as to increase the read and write speed, today we have latest hard disk rotating amazingly faster and this immense revolving speed generates massive centrifugal force, a single adverse cause in the course of normal operation can cause severe hard disk failure.

Hard Disk Data Recovery

Hard disk data recovery is the process of recovering the trapped data from the damage hard disk device, when it can not be accessed in normal circumstance.

Several Techniques are used to retrieving data from damaged hard disk and techniques vary accordingly. It can be done by moving disk drive to a working CPU, or may have to open the disk drive and replace parts such as read/write heads, arms and chips and sometime the platters have to be removed and placed into another drive.

Physical damage can not be repaired by the general users, as it requires clean and dust free lab environment, in addition proper hardware and technical expertise where under microscopic examination with proper tool and techniques, the damage drive is put on to observation for data salvaging.

In case of worse happening, do consult Data Recovery Service for saving your important data trapped within the damage device.

Install new hard drive

First of all I had to install the new hard drive. I was able to do this by disconnecting my CDR and leaving myDVD drive, two old hard drives in the machine, plus a new 80 gig drive with a 16 meg cache. I was unsuccessful at loading Windows though as I kept getting an error as the Windows setup was starting, after loading the drivers

I would get an error that it could not load the setup. I switched to my CDR from the DVD drive and had no problems.

I successfully did a quick format of the new drive thanks for that new feature Windows XP and successfully loaded Windows XP although now I have my operating system on the E drive. I will use the Boot Manager utility that is bundled with Patition Magic to change that back to C later tonight.

Rebuild hard drive partition table

After I booted to Windows I saw that my old drive was not showing up as a drive or a partition. If I reight clicked on the partition in disk Management it knew that the drive existed but could no longer find a partition on it. Windows Disk Management said that the drive was healthy, My first attempt was to create a partition but not to format the partition as I did not want to lose the data for good. I fought with this for a couple of hours as I did not back up lately and the wife would kill me if I lost all of her data. In the end I was able to use Test Disk from the Filesystem tools of the Dos Ultimate Boot Disk. It ends up that the partition table had a start but not an end and the program was able to fix this.whew I would have been in trouble.

Migrate Windows and Office data

After I had the old drive back I went into the BIOS and chose to boot from that drive. I was able to boot to the old Windows XP installation easily enough and did not want to keep any of the data there but thought it would be a good idea to transfer my Windows settings using the file and settings transfer wizard in Windows. I saved the settings using the wizard and chose this as the old computer and in the destination I chose a folder I created on the new hard drive called transfer files. I then decided to transfer only my settings as I knew that I was going to have to reload my software and would be manually copying over the file structure from the old drive to the new drive.

I also moved all of my settings for MS Office using the Save my settings wizard from the MS Office 2003 tools section. I was able to copy the settings, which come across as an OPS file to the same place as my Windows Transfer Files and Settings.

After I had moved the settings and files over I rebooted and went back into the BIOS and changed my first boot to the new hard drive and its windows XP installation. I was very happy to see that after running the wizrds for transfering the settings and after reloading MS Office 2003 I was able to move over my mail folder and saw all of my email, contacts, and best of all my email addresses Still had to fill in the passwords for email but thats OK. After a relogon I also had all of my desktop settings back includig the background picture of my daughter and the animated Pingu cursors.

Copy data from bad drive

Next I just did a blanket move of all of the files from the old hard drive to new into a new folder that I created in the root of the drive. I did this simply to save time as I am not sure about the stability of the old hard drive and fear that I will lose it again.

Reload software

I have started reloading software but as usual I am going to be slow about the move this time. I will install some of my favorite freewares and will install Streets and Trips, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop Elements and thats it.

I have roughly follwed about half of my Reloading Windows tutorial but since I have both drives functioning at the moment I have tried to cut some corners and make this work well as well as getting my wife up and running quickly for her work stuff this morning.

Both Intel and AMD specify the expected life of a home/office PC CPU at 30,000 50,000 hours at ambient temperatures. The life expectancy can be considerably shorter if the electronics are stressed in any way. That equates to 35 years. Most failures will be as a result of thermal stress and therefore to ensure the full 3050,000 hours the PCs should be well ventilated and have the fans and filters checked and serviced every 3000 hours approx 4 months. Everytime your PC CPU is operating above its ideal operating temperature it is ageing much faster.

Based on the assumption that most home office PCs are only switched on for 310 hours a day this makes the life expectancy 815 years. It also makes the fan/filter service interval at about 3 years which is when most people are thinking about upgrading to the lateset whizzo chipset or soundcard anyway.

So nearly everyone who consumes PCs are happy as technological development leaps forward faster than the failure rate of the PC components and therefore PCs tend to be scrapped or upgraded long before the hardware needs servicing or breaks down.

If we now look at an industry where the PC is required to work 24/7 most suppliers would recommend purpose designed fileservers for such a job. Fileservers are usually rack mounted in temperature controlled dust free cabinets ours is. It is therefore not unfair to assume that such environments and the purpose built ruggedised machines may double the life expectancy of a CPU.

So lets go back to the booking and dispatch environment where the PC are left on permanently. The environment is very poor indeed. Most offices have incredible temperature variations between winter and summer, day and night.

Coupled with this the air is full of dust, exhaust soot and human detritus. On many sites I have found CPU fans and filters totally blocked after only 9 months of use. This will cause the CPU to operate at a higher temperature and therefore decrease the life expectancy to 150000 hours.

So assuming that you actually clean the fans and filters every 4 months.

You must still accept that the temperature controlled environment of most taxi offices is less than ideal. The longest you could expect trouble free operation of your PC would be a little over 3 years. Also assuming that you would want to change your PC long before it starts to play up and potentially corrupt your data or cause financial loss to your business you should be planning it at least 6 months before.

Now lets take the worst case scenario.

You place your PC on the floor in a dusty office, you leave it on 24/7 and nobody ever cleans out the fans or filters. After approx 9 months the PC is overheating in another 6 months the CPU will be malfunctioning, so after only 1218 months you once lovely new PCs appear to be nearly scrap sound familiar.

Even cleaning out the fans at this point will not reverse the thermal ageing process. In this scenario you should be ordering replacement PCs in a little over a year.

What is the answer

Well there is no real answer but knowledge and education are probably the best weapons against premature thermal aging and extending your PC life expectancy.

Protect your PC from elevated operating temperatures.

Firstly try to make sure the room temperature the ambient temperature does not exceed the recommended IRO 1822 degrees c. Coupled with this is to choose a PC manufacturer who does not skimp on the cooling arrangements and has designed a PC with extended operating hours in mind.

Some CPU cooling fans

can cost as much at 7.00 is they have ball bearings and thermal sensors. Other cheap ones have nylon bearings and only cost 90p.

You will often hear these cheaper fans making squeaks or rattles as the bearings fail. Once this happens your PC is aging much faster than normal. Avoid cheap knocked down PCs. If you have someone building PCs for you pay the extra money and have a larger than needed power supply fitted it will run cooler. Also insist that the fans are expensive bearing fans with a 50000 hour or lifetime guarantee. Try and use machines with industrial 4inch fans and not the 1inch hobby fans fitted to most cheap PCs.

Temperature alarms

If your PC has CPU temperature warning alarms make sure these are set to the lowest recommended threshold to warn you if the cooling is failing. All Server PCs built by Diplomat have raid hard drives with built in thermal sensors, these trigger an email alert in the event of a hard drive failure or the PC has a temperature problem. This enables servicing to be proactive and not reactive.

Diplomat recommends

Diplomat recommends Dell optiplex computers. They have been designed for high usage business environments. They have 2 yes two large industrial 4 inch fans.

Due to the size and quality of these fans they rarely wear out or become blocked.

For more information go to www.diplomat.co.uk

Accept the life expectancy and plan ahead.

Even with perfect care and consideration you PC is not designed to last much longer than 3 years in a 24/7 environment.. You should plan your replacement schedule carefully and demote or retire mission critical PCs such asSTN1 to less critical positions after about 2 years.

Moores law dictates that the replacement will be twice as fast or half the price so dont see this as a burden just accept it as a running cost.

Be philosophical

If you compare the life expectancy of family car and then compare it with a family car that is being used as a taxi 24/7 it will be less than half. This also applies to PCs in the same environment.

Ok its expensive or is it

At around 600 for 1000 days work this means your computer costs you 60p a day. It works 24/7 never takes a lunch break or pulls a sickie. Its replacement in 3 years will cost less work faster and remember more. So all in all they are not such bad little critters after all, they just dont last forever..

Compelling arguments have been made on both sides. Ill try to sum up the important points on either side, and Ill even give you my recommendation, but ultimately, its up to you.

LEAVE IT ON

Constantly warming up and cooling down is bad for electronic equipment, and the computer experiences some mechanical wear and tear every time you turn it on and off.

Theres also the issue of convenience. Its much easier to plop down and go to work when you want to, rather than having to wait several minutes for the computer to turn on and boot up.

TURN IT OFF

The hard drive may last longer. Since it is composed of moving parts, it stands to reason, the less they move, the longer it will last. This may not be much of an issue with newer computers. The hard drive will probably last longer than the useful life of the computer, regardless.

If the computer is on all the time, it will suck more dust through the ventilation vents. More dust more heat shorter life span for the computer, so it may be worthwhile to turn it off when not in use.

All computers can benefit from the occasional reboot, and turning them off allows this to happen. Over time, minor things go wrong and the computer doesnt bother to inform you; it tries to patch itself up and moves on. The cumulative affect of all these little hiccups can be to reduce performance or even cause the computer to freeze or crash. Turning the computer off now and then gives it a chance to reset itself and start fresh.

Turning the computer off when idle uses less electricity. Depending on your computer, it may use as much electricity as one or more 100 watt light bulbs. That can add up to quite a few dollars over the lifetime of the computer. Also, less electricity expended means less carbon emissions, which is better for the environment, reduces global warming, etc. etc. etc.

ON THE SUBJECT OF ELECTRICITY While were talking about electricity, there are settings on all computers that we can adjust to save power right now.

If you have a PC running XP, rightclick on the desktop, and choose properties from the menu that pops up. This will open a little window titled Display Properties with several tabs underneath. Click on the Screen Saver tab. On the bottom of this tab is a section titled Monitor power with a button labeled Power... click on this button to bring up a window titled Power Options Properties.

On a Mac running OSX, choose System Preferences... from the Apple menu, then click on Energy Saver.

Computers running different systems will have slightly different menus and settings, but the main idea will be the same. Explaining all the different settings is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, these settings let you control how long the computer can run unattended with nothing going on before different parts of the system are turned off, or put to sleep, to save electricity. There are separate settings for the monitor screen, hard disk, and the system the entire computer.

Depending on how you use your computer, you can experiment with the settings to complement the way you work. Dont be afraid to tinker. Nothing you change here will damage the computer. Of course, the more things you turn off, and the sooner you turn them off, the more energy youll save.

MY RECOMMENDATIONS These arent Commandments; theyre suggestions. Be flexible and tailor them to your needs. If you plan on using your computer in the next 8 hours, leave it on. If not, turn it off or put it to sleep. I leave mine on during the day, and turn it off overnight. My computer is set to go to sleep if I walk away for more than twenty minutes. This way, my computer benefits from the occasional reboot, and I can reduce my total energy use, even if it is only a little bit.

What is a surge, and why must we suppress it Im vastly oversimplifying, but electricity runs through the power lines and into the outlets in your home much like water in a hose. The water in a hose moves from an area of high pressure to an area of lower pressure. Thats why it flows down the hose. Voltage is like the measurement of the amount of pressure in the electric lines. Standard power in North America flows at 120 volts. A surge is like forcing too much water down the hose at once.

Things can occur that affect the voltage. The one that most people think of first is a lightning strike on or near a power line. That can cause a surge of millions of volts. No surge suppressor can withstand that kind of force. In the event of a lightning storm, your best bet is simply to unplug your computer from the power outlet.

There are other, more common things that lead to power surges. Big pieces of electrical equipment like elevators, air conditioners, and refrigerators can draw large amounts of power as they turn motors on and off. This causes the power level to surge. It can happen over and over throughout the course of the day.

The system of electrical distribution, from generators through powerlines and switchboxes and transformers and eventually to the wall outlets in your home, is very complex, and there are many opportunities along the way for power surges to occur.

If the voltage increase lasts for three nanoseconds billionths of a second or more, it is called a surge. If it lasts less than three nanoseconds, it is called a spike. Spikes and surges can be very damaging to your computer equipment. In extreme cases, they can fry your power cord and even start a fire. Smaller surges can damage or destroy the delicate electronic components and microprocessors in your computer. If a surge doesnt destroy the equipment outright, it can still significantly reduce the lifespan of the computer.

So far, weve learned what a surge is and why we would prefer not to have it anywhere near our computers. Thats where surge suppressors come in. They are also commonly called surge protectors. A more official name is Transient Voltage Suppressor. Im not going to get into a technical explanation of how they work. There are a variety of different methods used, but they all boil down to the same thing suppress the extra voltage and keep it from harming your computer. Some suppressors divert the extra electricity to ground, some reduce it by absorbing it and letting it out at a more controlled rate. Some have fuses or circuit breakers built in that cut the connection altogether if the voltage gets too high. Most devices will use a combination of techniques.

There is a bewildering variety of surge protectors, with different features and prices, and levels of reliability and effectiveness. Ill give you an overview of your choices, tell you what to look for in a surge suppressor, and finally, give you a step by step checklist to help you rate a particular model youre considering.

Here are the main types of surge protectors

Basic Power Strip can be found for under ten dollars, has minimal or no protection from power surges.

Better Power Strip same as the basic, but has slightly better ratings and perhaps a few more features. Can usually be purchased in the 15 30 price range.

Surge Station Larger, more substantial units with serious protection and options to plug in phone and cable lines as well. These range in price from 30 to upwards of 150.

UPS Uninterruptible Power Supply. These arent exactly surge protectors, but often do the same work as surge protectors. They also can smooth out the flow of electricity, eliminating tiny spikes and sags in the flow. These start around 150 and can go up into the thousands of dollars.

An Uninterruptible Power Supply has a builtin battery, and protects against three things

Surges & Spikes just like a surge suppressor does

Voltage sags brownouts, or when the voltage falls below the acceptable level

Power failures the battery allows you time to shut down your computer properly without experiencing damage or data loss.

The UPS comes in two flavors the Standby UPS senses when there has been a power fluctuation, and quickly switches over to the battery power. This doesnt happen instantly, and for the small period of time before the switchover occurs, your computer is vulnerable. The other kind is called a Continuous UPS. The battery is constantly recharged from the wall, and your equipment is constantly fed a stable flow of electricity from the battery. This is the smoothest, most stable source of power, and is often preferred for servers or extremely important pieces of equipment. As you might guess, a Continuous UPS costs about twice as much as the Standby UPS.

A surge protector is like an insurance policy. You have to ask yourself what it is youre insuring, and how important it is. Then you choose how much insurance you need, and how much youre willing to spend for it. There is no one answer, but if you understand the question, youve got a better shot at answering it correctly.

What should you look for when purchasing a surge suppressor

PRICE Expensive doesnt necessarily equal good, but cheap does mean bad. If you buy a 1.99 power strip, you will get what you pay for.

UL Listing The Underwriters Laboratories is a nonprofit organization that rates electronic devices. A UL listing doesnt guarantee quality, but if the surge suppressor doesnt have one, youre probably looking at a piece of junk.

Indicator Light The parts in a surge suppressor can burn out or stop working and theres no way to tell. With an indicator light, as long as it is lit, you know that the device is in good working order.

RATINGS Good models will have specifications listed on the package. Understanding these is the key to picking a good surge suppressor. The types of ratings are 1 clamping how may volts does the device let through before kicking in 2 energy absorption/dissipation how much energy can the device absorb or dissipate before failing And 3 response time how quickly does it go to work when a surge occurs

WHAT TO LOOK FOR WHEN PICKING A SURGE SUPPRESSOR

What are you protecting How important is it For our purposes, were going to say Computer and VERY stereo and electronic equipment are also good candidates for protection

SUPPRESSED VOLTAGE RATING Lower is better. This is the clamping we talked about above. How much energy does the device let through before it kicks in 500 volts is ok, 400 volts is better, 330 volts is better still.

STAGES OF SUPPRESSION more is better, the number will be 1, 2 or 3

SURGE CURRENT RATING this is how much electricity the device can handle, rated in amps; higher is better

ENERGY ABSORPTION/DISSIPATION measured in JOULES higher is better. 200 is minimal, 600 is good. CLAMPING RESPONSE TIME Faster is better. Measured in nanoseconds billionths of a second 1 nanosecond or less is good or picoseconds trillionths of a second. Picoseconds are better than nanoseconds.

INCOMING LINES PROTECTED More is better. The number will be 1, 2 or 3.

Warranty Generally, the longer it is, the better. Good features to look for are a lifetime guarantee or an equipment replacement guarantee.

Thats it. Now get out there and suppress

Purchase a preassembled PC from a reseller like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, or others

Purchase individual PC components from a retailer like Radio Shack or Best Buy and assemble them on your own

Purchase a PC Kit from a retailer like Easy As My PC

Option 1 Purchase a Preassembled PC

Generally speaking, resellers like Dell charge a premium for the assembly services that they offer. It makes sense that they pay people to assemble custom PCs and, as a result, their PCs carry a price premium when compared to the raw cost of the parts contained within.

Preassembled PCs make sense for purchasers who can afford to pay a premium price for a PC, and they also make sense for people who are uncomfortable with general tools like a screw driver.

Preassembled PCs do not make sense for purchasers willing to invest a few hours of their own time in order to get high quality at a low price.

Option 2 Purchase Individual Components

There are a number of retailers that sell new and refurbished computer parts. Typically, the prices on these parts are affordable, and probably offer the cheapest path to owning a PC. That said, at these rock bottom prices, retailers often cannot afford to help consumers select compatible parts or help them during the assembly process.

Purchasing individual components makes sense for those people affectionately referred to as computer geeks who need no help assembling a PC from scratch.

Purchasing individual components does not make sense for firsttime computer builders or for people who prefer not to become experts in computer hardware design.

Option 3 Purchase a Computer Kit

Several retailers offer an option that falls somewhere between the two listed above. At these retailers, you may find items called barebone systems, diy pc kits, computer kits or some might just have a product category called barebones. In any case, what youre looking for is a set of pretested but unassembled computer conponents that you can put together to build your own pc. If youre lucky, your kit may also come with assembly instructions but, thats too typical.

Kits, from retailers like Easy As My PC, take the risk out of purchasing PC components and offer prices well below that of preassembled machines.

Unlike the typical parts retailer like Radio Shack, kits often are pretested and guaranted to have full component compatibility. Some retailers also offer customized assembly instructions and phone support to ensure your PC is up and running in only a few hours. And, unlike the typical preassembled reseller like Dell, buying a kit offers significant savings because the retailers is not paying for someone to assemble the PC for you.

Computer Kits make sense for people willing to invest a few hours of time to save a couple hundred bucks on the purchase of a home, office or gaming PC.

PC Kits do not make sense for people that dont care about price or are uncomfortable using a screwdriver.

yesterday, I came across an ad that had the caption In Steve we Trust. Very funny. See it on Popular Mechanics website.

Its entertaining writing about Apple and possibly even, dare one, mentioning something negative about the company. The many folk who explicitly trust in Steve tend to get quite irate and often leave a heavy footprint in the sand of the blogosphere.

But back to yesterdays Macworld happening. From a marketing perspective it is incredible how Apple does it. Who else can boast this kind of media attention at a product launch The baying crowd which includes dealers, developers, customers, techie journalists and anybody else who manages to get a ticket is waiting with baited breath for a sales presentation. Huh

So what was the main focus Steves new baby And it really looked as if he was presenting a new offspring the way he held the new thin laptop up for everybody to admire, sporting a very proud paternal smile.

Its supposed to be the thinnest laptop in the world now. It probably is. But would one want to rush out and buy one of these at a nifty little price tag of 1 199.00 plus the cost of an external optical drive which youll need as the Air doesnt come with one installed. With additional extras, the price can move up to twice as much.

Besides its ridiculously and sexy thin look, it is also fairly light without losing anything to power and usability. I especially love the larger trackpad and could imagine that eventually becoming a much larger surface. Along the lines of a keyboard morphing with a Wacom tablet, what an idea.

What does amuse me is how Apple, and in this case Steve Jobs, is able to present a product as the ultimate gadget and at the same time gloss over some fairly big issues. For me the lack of an optical drive is quite a big issue. But Jobs says that because one can take stuff off other computers so easily, or download off the internet, this isnt an issue at all.

Well, one would have to have other computers around first or a decent broadband connection. That or an external drive. But then Apple also took away the floppy disk drive and gave the customer USB slots in the keyboard, way before the consumer was ready to part company with those disks Cant remember which machine that was, but seem to remember it was the first iMac.

It also seems that the new Air doesnt allow one to replace the battery. Most serious Mac users tend to carry a spare battery around with them for eventualities such as long flights, delays at airports, working on trains etc. That could be a major problem.

Of course the other stuff such as cheap movie rental was also welcome news. It will of course depend on how quickly the movie downloads. For countries without decent broadband, the video store down the road will still be an important shop for home entertainment.

It must have been difficult to launch a new range of gadgets as well as additional features to old gadgets that could compete with the launch of the iPhone from the previous year. Not sure whether Steve Jobs managed to pull that one off with the new MacBook Air.

But then it doesnt really matter. The annual Macworld Keynote is always a welcome diversion. And to quote the journalist Glenn Derene writing for Popular Mechanics during the presentation My friend next to me says that this is the closest thing tech journalists have to a fashion show. Exactly. 

Refurbished computers have been rebuilt by the manufacturer, generally work well and are quite easy to find. The major manufacturers like Apple, Dell and IBM sell them online with moneyback guarantees and warranties. You can also find them at local computer dealers and online auction sites.

The Drawbacks

Before you hand over your hardearned cash though, there are some important factors to consider before purchasing a used system. For starters, you will never find out why the merchandise was returned. Maybe it was dropped, spilled on or kept shutting down spontaneously. You just dont know. Sometimes the computers are returned unopened, but most of the time they are returned by the customer because there was a problem. Some manufacturers repair and update these systems but you can never be truly sure what you are getting. This means before making any purchase, you need a solid warranty. You should have no problem finding a 30day money back guarantee and a one year warranty for parts, labor and tech support with the big companies. Be wary of anything less, especially when dealing with of private sellers and online auction sites.

Also, you cant customize a refurbished system the way you can a new computer. You have to settle for what is available and its never the current technology. Keep in mind that sometimes the seller can even leave things out like monitors, keyboards, software, etc. so its important to decide what you need and know exactly what you are buying in order to calculate if you are, in fact, saving money. It would be a shame to buy a used CPU and parts and find out later that it cost more in the end than a new system.

And last, but definitely not least, is the fact that refurbished systems are slower. But the fastest processors available today are incredibly fast, so if you can sacrifice a few features and some speed, then a reconditioned machine may work out well for you. However, you need to decide how fast is fast enough for you. If you are just sending emails, surfing the internet, paying bills and creating the occasional presentation then a 1.2 to 1.7 GHz processor would be sufficient. On the other hand, if you run lots of applications or have a demanding operating system like Windows XP, then you should spend some money on a faster chip.

Are You Ready

So the bottom line is weigh your options. Do the research. If youre on a tight budget, arent fussy about components, dont need tons of speed and want to save 3050 off the price of a new computer, then buying a refurbished computer may be a great solution.

Older computers are expected to be a little slower, unless youve done a lot of upgrading they just arent equipped to keep up with todays standards. But, even a brand new computer can become slow after even a few months of use.

A computer can become slower due to hardware problems, but many times the problem occurs simply because theres to many processes running at the same time. Often when you install a program it will by default set itself to start as soon as you start your computer.

There are probably processes running in the background that youre not aware of and theyre consuming your computers resources. Anytime you install any program carefully watch the selection screens, sometimes you will be offered the option of either automatically starting the program or manually starting it.

If the choice isnt offered then you will need to go into the preferences tab in the program itself and customize the options. Aside from your operating system the only programs that should run each time you start your computer are your antivirus, firewall and anitspyware programs that you have.

Another major cause of a slow computer is a crowded or fragmented hard drive. Your operating system needs a little elbow room to properly perform, at least 10 of your hard drive space should be left free for paging operations.

Even during normal use files become separated and stored in different places on your hard drive. But, moving, deleting files. installing or uninstalling programs leave fragments of files behind. Performing the defrag option on your computer will rejoin these files and help optimize the performance and speed of your hard drive.

Regularly clearing your cache files and cookies can provide faster internet browsing. The cache files consist of temporary files that are stored each time you visit a web site. These eventually take up much of the memory of your computer and will cause it to run slower.

Integrating a popup blocker into your browser will also speed up the amount of time it takes pages to load. Some sites are full of popups that eat up CPU usage to load. There are several free popup blockers available and many browsers will offer plugins that will block popups.

Most of the things that will slow your computer down actually occur over a gradual period of time and are sometimes not real noticeable. But, if your computer ran fine yesterday and is dragging today, the most likely cause is a virus, spyware or trojan.

Never run your computer without a antivirus and firewall and make sure to do perform regular updates. The best way to keep your antivirus updated is to set it to do automatic updates, that way you wont have to remember to do the updates Having an outdated antivirus program is almost as bad as not having one at all, any new threats since the last update will not be detected.

Just as your hard drive becomes covered with files that are no longer needed, your registry also contains left over files from things such as uninstalled programs that can decrease the speed of your computer.

Finding and using a registry cleaner will remove these file fragments and speed up your computer. However, the registry contains everything that windows needs to run and one deleted file can prevent your operating system from working at all

Before you download and install any registry cleaner do some research, there are many places online that offer individual reviews of programs. After running the registry cleaner, always look through the list of files to be deleted.

Sometimes files are included that are necessary to the operating system or programs that you use on a regular basis. If youre unsure whether or not to delete a particular file, do a internet search and see what the file is for.

If youve taken all the steps needed to increase your computers speed and its still running slow, then the problem is probably with the hard ware. Either something is experiencing problems or just needs to be updated

There are now many websites devoted to Wardriving, which involves people searching for exposed wireless networks and sharing this information via websites of via their social network.

If you have set up your wireless network straight from the box and have not changed any of the default settings, then there is a huge chance that you are supplying somebody else free Internet access or being hacked into. A wireless network will never be as secure as a cabled network. By following the seven steps below then you will stand a much better chance of protecting your home network.

1. Change Admin Password

The default password for most wireless kits is ADMIN. If you havent changed this password then change it as soon as you can. It is surprising the amount of wireless networks that are hacked into or accessed by a third party because the ADMIN password is still ADMIN. Especially as manufacturers manuals can be downloaded from the Internet with their admin password.

2. Disable or Change the SSID

The Service Set Identifier SSID is a code that wireless hardware sends out to identify itself to other devices. By default the SSID is normally the manufacturers name. The SSID is only required when devices are first synchronizing with each other, so the best option is to disable the SSID broadcast once your network connection is established.

By disabling SSID broadcast you will make it much harder for an intruder because they will have to start guessing the SSID code. Most wireless gateway devices offer the option to disable SSID broadcast, however some may require a firmware upgrade, and some devices do not offer that option at all.

If you cannot change the SSID or do not want to disable it, then the SSID should be changed to a unique phrase that is hard to guess. Using nondictionary words as well as numbers and special characters for the new SSID will make it much more for your wireless network to be accessed by hackers.

3. Use 128bit WEP Encryption

Wireless Equivalent Privacy WEP is the security standard and offers the option of either 64 or 128 bit encryption. It also includes additional encryption using the Initialization Vector IV, which is a series of random bits added in front of a message before it is encrypted. 64bit encryption is easier to hack into than 128 bit. You may need to update the firmware on your wireless device to be able to use 128bit encryption.

Bu using encryption, if the wireless device and computer do not contain the encryption key, then no exchange of data will take place. Enabling 128bit encryption will discourage people not permitted to access your network

and make your network more secure. The casual hacker will normally move onto an easier target if they find encryption is enabled.

4. Turn off DHCP

Most wireless devices have Dynamic Host Control Protocol DHCP enabled. This allows a new host on your network to introduce itself and request an IP address so it can then connect and use your wireless connection. All very convenient for a legitimate user, but for an trespasser onto your wireless network, thats like putting a come steal from me sign outside your open and unlocked front door.

While it may be a pin to the legitimate user to your wireless network, its a necessary one due to the amount of damage that can be done if left turned on. By using static IP addresses you will create another hurdle for the unwanted prowler wanting to steal your bandwidth and probably more.

5. Enable MAC Address Filtering

Each computer network adaptor has a unique address built in called the MAC address. Most wireless devices allow MAC address filtering. By creating a MAC address list of permitted network adaptors that are attached to a computer, you are creating a guestlist so to speak. If a computer with a MAC address on the list, they will not be permitted to access the wireless network.

Mac addresses can be spoofed by a very technical minded knowledgeable individual, however by using MAC address filtering you will deter all but the most determined hacker.

If you are unsure about how to proceed with any of the above please read the manual that came with your wireless hardware. There normally is a wizard or stepbystep walk through that will help you.

I hope the five above tips will come in handy and enable you to use your wireless network without the threat of an unwanted intruder.

Step 1 Ensure your computer has the following programs installed, regularly updated and working every time you are online.

Antivirus AVG or Avast are recommended.

Firewall ZoneAlarm is recommended.

System cleaner ccleaner is recommended

Antispyware program AVG AntiSpyware and Lavasoft Adaware 2007 are recommended.

All recommended programs are free for home use. Please use a search engine to find their download locations. By using the programs above you will ensure that your computer is ready to combat most of the online infections and people wishing to hack into your computer.

Step 2 Limit what personal details you make available on social networking sites. If you use Facebook, bebo, Myspace or any similar social networking site then be aware that some personal details that you entered when signing up are available for most people to see. Your location, your surname, email addresses and phone numbers etc are visible and these can and will be used by fraudsters to clone your identity. Revisit what details you have input on any social networking site.

Step 3 If you use chat rooms or use an instant messenger program then do not give out any credit card, bank account or personal details, especially to people you have just met online. They may seem genuine, but if they are not it will take them less than one hour to clone your details and start wrecking your credit history and spending your money.

Step 4 Shred all unwanted personal data. Yes, you may know this, but do you actually do it Use a cross cut shredder. They cost a bit more than the straightline shredders, but they are worth it. Shred everything you dont want. Bank statements, credit card statements, and phone bills, even junk mail. Dont throw it away if it has your address or any personal details on it. If any piece of mail contains any personal details, then shred it.

Step 5 Check your bank and credit card statements regularly, without fail. If you spot anything suspicious, then get on the phone quick smart and query it. Especially if you see a holiday, computer, flights or trip to the moon ok I exaggerate a little here that you never purchased.

Step 6 When buying anything over the Internet you should use a credit card rather than a debit card. You have much more protection when purchasing goods via your credit card. Phone up your credit card firm and ask what type of protection they offer. If they dont, Id advise moving to a company that does offer online protection.

Step 7 When out and about shopping never let your credit or debit card leave your site. Especially in the UK now, there is no reason as chip and pin means that you only need to enter your pin for any purchases, which can be done with portable terminals. Be very careful at restaurants and petrol stations, these seem to be the worst culprits for cloning cards.

A Trojan is malware. Malware is software that is designed to infiltrate or damage your computer without your knowledge, which is similar to spyware, adware, and viruses also. A Trojan is a stealthy and sneaky program that exists to cause damage to you and your computer.

Some examples of what Trojans are programmed to do are

Spreading other malware, such as viruses.

Erasing or overwriting data on your computer.

Allowing remote access to your computer.

Setting up networks of other computers in order to launch DDoS Distributed Denial of Service Attack or send spam.

Spying on your computer and silently reporting data such as browsing habits to sender of the Trojan.

Logging keystrokes to steal information such as passwords, credit card and bank account details.

Phishing for bank or other account details, which can be used for criminal activities.

Installing a backdoor on a computer system, so your computer can be used without your knowledge or permission.

Collecting email addresses and using them for spam.

Deactivating or interfering with antivirus and firewall programs.

Randomly shutting off your computer.

How Did A Trojan Infect Your Computer

A Trojan is able to gain access to your computer because it pretended to be an innocent or helpful program, or because you download movies, music or software illegally. Once the Trojan is activated, normally by you clicking on it thinking its a useful program, it will start the job it was programmed for.

It will do this silently in the background without your knowledge and so will often only interfere a little with your computer, choosing to do their dirty work while your machine is idle. Computers left on and connected to the internet while you are asleep, at work or school are favourite targets.

Removing a Trojan can be tricky as they hide themselves in the computers registry files and manual deletion is not recommended. Trojans can also disguise themselves as software your computer in reality needs, you could accidentally delete an essential program or system registry entry. This could result in your computer not being able to boot up.

Signs You May Have a Trojan

If you notice any of the following then you could potentially have a Trojan

When youre not using the computer for Internet access your computer modem or router is whirring away, or the lights are blinking wildly.

Your Internet connection speed has constantly slowed to a crawl.

Your antivirus and/or antispyware have been deactivated.

Strange icons appearing on your desktop.

Your computer start up speed has reduced alarmingly.

You could have a shower in the time it takes to open up a file.

Prevention

Be careful when opening files and especially email attachments from people you do and do not know. If in doubt, do not open the file. Using CDs, USB drives and more likely downloading the Trojan are the most common ways of your computer becoming infected.

Try not to download movie, music or software files that you know are meant to be paid for. Most of all files that are downloaded this way contain Trojans. If other people use your computer educate them too. Ensure they have user profiles, and that they have restricted profiles if necessary.

Cure

If you find that you have a Trojan, then ensure you run your antivirus and antispyware programs. They should be able to remove them. If the Trojan is stubborn, then boot your computer into safemode and run the antivirus and antispyware, this should remove the culprit.

If this doesnt remove the offending Trojan, then maybe invest in a stronger antivirus and or antispyware program. A good antivirus/spyware program should be able to remove a Trojan program from your computer.

By following the above suggestions you will stand a much better chance of preventing your computer from being infected by a Trojan, and removing one should you need to.

A slow computer can be attributed to many reasons. Lack of computer memory, spyware, viruses, Trojan cluttered computer files. An amalgamation of all of the above will make your computer really slow, and even booting up your computer could take 5 minutes or more.

Lack of Computer Memory or RAM Random Access Memory is the first thing you should check for. Yes, having spyware and malware on your computer will slow down your computer, but having insufficient computer memory or RAM is equivalent to driving a car with the handbrake on.

By ensuring you have the correct amount of memory for your installed operating system then you can have a speedy computer. Even adding 256MB over the stated minimum requirements will reap instant dividends. To find out how much memory your computer has right click on the my computer icon and on the general tab you should see the amount of RAM thats installed on your computer. 

The minimum requirements for XP are 128MB although 256MB is recommended and Vista Home Basic is 512MB, and Vista Home Premium / Business / Ultimate require 1GB.

Depending on what type of programs you frequently use on your computer, keeping to the minimum memory requirements wont make your computer fast. It will only allow the operating system to run adequately.

If you have Windows XP, as a minimum I would suggest 512MB and ideally 1GB in memory. For Windows Vista, which is a graphics hungry beast, I would suggest the minimum of 1GB for Home Basic and 1.5GB ideally 2GB for Vista Home Premium / Business / Ultimate. 

Computer memory or RAM Random Access Memory is relatively cheap and takes only 1015 minutes to install. Once the extra memory is installed then your computer will operate faster, and ultimately help you use your computer in the manner it was built for. Installing extra RAM is not difficult, although it can be scary to think about opening up your computer if you havent done it before.

If your computer is under warranty, maybe you could take it back to where you purchased it and ask them to install the extra RAM you may need. If not, there is plenty of information and even step by step videos of how to install extra RAM available via the Internet. As a last resort maybe you have a friend or family member who could help you

I would strongly suggest that you install additional RAM if your computer is below the minimum requirements of the operating system you have. If you use graphics programs or other programs that eat up memory, then adding an extra 256512MB will also help with increasing the speed of your computer. You will notice a difference in speed once you add the extra RAM.

A motherboard can be thought of as the foundation for any computer system. It is the largest component in your computer and provides pathways for all other devices, internal and external, to communicate with each other. Therefore, it is vital that you spend some time researching for a good quality motherboard.

Main motherboard specifications Before you run out looking for a motherboard, its best to know a little about the components that make up the motherboard.

Chipset

There are two main chipsets on a motherboard, the Northbridge and Southbridge controller. The Northbridge handles communications with high speed components such as the CPU, Memory, and graphics card. Conversely, the Southbridge handles communication from low speed devices such as I/O ports, hard drives, onboard audio and BIOS.

Motherboards are designed around these two chips, the Northbridge dictates what kind of CPUs and memory types are supported, whereas the Southbridge dictates things like the number of built in USB ports and whether or not the board comes with integrated audio, video, RAID, LAN, etc

CPU

The CPU is inserted directly into a socket on the motherboard and is responsible for processing instructions. The types of CPU supported by a motherboard depend on the Northbridge controller chip.

Expansion Slots

The expansion slots on the motherboard allow you to connect external components, such as graphic cards, sound cards, RAID controllers, and other various addon components. The slots come in varying speeds and some are intended for high speed components only, such as the PCIE x16 and AGP slots for graphic cards.

Form Factor

Form factor refers to the size and shape of the motherboard i.e. its dimensions. When purchasing a new motherboard you need to be aware of its form factor because certain cases and power supplies only work with certain form factors. The most common form factor is ATX and these days most motherboards are based on the ATX form factor.

Memory

Sticks of memory or RAM are inserted into special memory slots on the motherboard; most motherboards typically have three or four slots. Motherboards typically only support one type of memory e.g. DDR, DDR2, DDR3, Rambus, since the different types have a different number of pins that connect to the slot.

Internal I/O Connectors

These are connections that connect directly to the motherboard from internal components or your computer case. Examples include power connector from power supply, USB, hard drive and fan connections from case, internal SATA connections from hard drives, etc

Back Panel Connectors

These are the connections that you find on the back of your computer case where you plug in a mouse, keyboard, ethernet, printer, etc The number and type of connections is dependent on the motherboard you purchase which mostly depends on the Southbridge chipset used in the motherboard.

BIOS

The BIOS is a small chip on your motherboard that initializes and prepares hardware on boot, so software can communicate with it. If the BIOS cannot initialize a hardware device it will send a special sequence of beeps to your computers internal speaker that tells you which device is not installed or configured correctly.

Most, if not all BIOSs can be updated via special program from your motherboard manufacturer. The reason to update the BIOS is to fix hardware compatibility bugs, or to enable support for newer hardware, such as newer CPUs based on the same or very similar architecture. If everything in your system is working fine, do not update your BIOS, you dont want to chance an error occurring during a flash and the resulting hassle of fixing it.

Some Special/Unique Features

Ultra Durable

Some motherboards use newer solidstate capacitors that are less likely to leak or become defective. This is a relatively new feature and is nice to have if you can find it.

Advanced Cooling

Some motherboards add extra heat sinks to certain chips on the motherboard as well as a heat pipe for the north bridge; this allows the motherboard to run a bit cooler and is useful if you want to heavily overclock your system.

Overclocking enhanced

The motherboard, through the BIOS or a Windows application, provides finetune tweaking in regards to overclocking. This type of feature isnt essential for overclocking, most motherboards BIOS provide some fundamental options that are used for overclocking; this feature just provides more convenience and options to do so.

Dual Channel Memory

This feature allows you to install a pair of memory sticks in specially marked memory slots. This allows twice as much data to be sent from the memory to the memory controller, so it gets executed by the CPU faster. This feature will not double your speed, but may provide performance improvements with certain applications and hardware configurations, so keep an eye out for it. Also, this feature isnt dependent on the memory sticks themselves, just get a pair of the same memory and it should work in the motherboard.

Example of a motherboard specs To get yourself familiar with looking at motherboard specs, go through the spec sheet of the Gigabyte DS3L motherboard.

How to pick out a motherboard Now that you have an idea of what constitutes a motherboard, youre almost ready to start looking for one. Today you can buy motherboards for under or around a 100 that are top notch, the catch is these boards usually dont come with features like onboard RAID, advanced cooling, dual PCIE x16, etc, but for most people these features will never get used, so save your money and opt for boards without them, unless you know you are going to use them.

Try to find motherboards that come with some onboard functionality such as onboard audio, USB ports, onboard LAN and SATA connections. Most boards, even the cheapest should have these features by now. Once you have an idea of what you need on your motherboard, just search around and make a list of some candidates. Once you have it narrowed down it is important that you do some preemptive problem finding. Your goal is to know the motherboard and all major issues with it before you buy it, you dont want to wait until you get slapped in the face with some major issue. An easy way of finding problems related to a motherboard is reading through negative comments and just using Google or whatever search engine to conduct searches like this Gigabyte DS3L problems.

One of the most important components in any home computer system is the graphics card, yet most prebuilt systems on the market are equipped with the shittiest graphic capabilities money can buy; thats how manufacturers keep their costs down. Someone buys a PC that is hyped with the latest dual core processor

and a couple of gigs of ram, yet it can barely play the new games or even the latest HD video formats, all thanks to the el cheapo graphics card, or worse an integrated graphics chip.

My graphic card sucks, help If you bought a system with a lousy graphics card, fear not, you can upgrade that component. The hard part is figuring out which graphic cards provides you with the most bang for your buck. Fortunately, there are a lot of hardware review sites that benchmark specific graphic cards, and there are also forums where people constantly discuss these things day in and day out, so its not hard to catch wind of which cards are good and which are not.

Some good review sites you can try are

Tomshardware.com

AnandTech.com

In addition to those sites and forums there are some common sense guidelines you should follow when looking for a new graphics card.

1. Unless you are oozing money do not buy the most expensive graphics card you can find. Try to stay under 300, it is simply not worth buying anything more expensive. The reason is that newer versions of a graphics card chip are constantly being released, so in a few, maybe four months time someone could buy a card for half the price that performs better than your ultra expensive card.

2. Make sure your system is compatible e.g. If your computer only has AGP graphic support do not run out and buy a PCIE capable graphics card. The graphic card interface type is usually specified in the name of the graphics card, so just make sure your motherboard can support it.

3. Dont be duped into believing that the higher a number is on a graphics card the more powerful it is. There are many instances where a graphics card with a lower model number completely obliterates the one with the higher model number in regards to performance.

e.g. Nvidia Geforce 9600GT PCIE vs. Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT PCIE

The 8800GT wins hands down.

What to look for in a graphics card Performance aside, you should look to see if the graphic card has onboard video decoders, especially for HD formats like h.264. By having a built in decoder, your CPU will not have to work as hard which results in a more responsive system and smoother video playback.

Price is another major factor in choosing a graphic card, you dont want to cheap out and buy something that is mediocre or youll be upgrading again very shortly. On the other hand you dont want to run out and buy something that will cost you an arm and a leg. In my opinion the sweet spot for graphic cards is in the midrange to upper midrange 150220. Most of the cards in this range provide 80 of the performance of the ultra expensive cards, yet cost a fraction as much. A good midrange card should also last you around two years or longer if you can live without running games on ultra high settings and extreme resolutions.

To get you on the right track here are some examples of great performing graphic chips as of 2008. Any card using a chip from below will provide great performance.

Nvidia Geforce 8800GT

Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT

ATI HD Radeon 3850

ATI HD Radeon 3870

because of the convenience and you can take them anywhere. There are a few things to keep in mind caring for a notebook PC. Here they are

Please use a carrying case when transporting the notebook. The case will protect the notebook in case it is bumped or dropped accidentally. Also, make sure the case is closed and the notebook secure inside.

Do not check your laptop at airports. The last company I worked with four laptops were stolen this way, two from the same user.

Do not operate the notebook while driving. You could be injured in the event of an accident caused by paying too much attention to your notebook and too little attention to the road. If you use your notebook for driving directions, pull to the side of the road, or at a long red light.

Be aware of cables for AC adapters and telephone or network cables youre moving around notebook to prevent falls, pulling your notebook off of desks cats and vacuum cleaners are notorious for this, or breakage of the cables.

Do not twist any cables, especially AC adapters. AC Adapters are the number one replacement component of the notebook.

Do not leave the notebook lying on the floor, even though you are not clumsy. Pets, kids and others may not know it is there and notebooks are very fragile.

If you are working with your notebook and it is hot and humid, do not take it immediately outside where it is cold. The screen has a tendency to crack. Turn off the laptop for a while before going outside and put it in your computer case which will allow a slower initiation to the cold outside. The reverse is true as well, going from a real cold to hot environment. Take this one from experience.

People have a tendency to use the battery for an hour and when they get to the home or office, immediately they plug it in. Except for brand new PCs, doing this will deteriorate the life time of the battery.

Batteries, especially Nicad type batteries have memory built into it. So, if the battery drained only 25 and then you plug it in, now the life duration of the battery is decreased by 25. So if for example your battery life was 100 minutes, now it is 75 minutes.

Completely drain the battery. Waiting for the warning that you should plug the notebook into an outlet is good advice. I have a notebook PC that is on its fourth year on the same battery.

Some of the newer notebooks come with a wireless network. What that means is if you went to a place that offered wireless connectivity to the Internet, like Borders, Starbucks, some airports and hotels, you can connect to the Internet without cables. If you are not going to be traveling, turn the wireless networking off. You will save about 30 60 minutes of battery life each time you use it.

Take care of the notebook. Buy the screen and keyboard cleaners for PCs and use them. Also, use canned air to blow out dust in the ports and keyboards.

Buy travel and accident insurance. Many manufacturers offer that in addition to a three year maintenance. It is well worth it, even though some places charge 200 500 for the purchase. But, you usually receive the following

Three year warranty on all parts and labor.

If you accidentally drop the PC and the screen breaks it is covered The average cost to replace a laptop screen is 1,200 to have someone do it for you. 750 if you do it yourself.

If it is stolen, you get a new one.

There are others, but you have to look at what the manufacturer offers.

The legislation will impact on any business or organisation that manufactures, assembles, imports, resells, retails, disposes of or receives these items for disposal.

Non compliance could result in unlimited fines for offending companies and for individual Directors and Managers on a personal level.

So, what will be classed as WEEE

Well, the list is quite daunting, covering a huge range of domestic and commercial waste, including

  IT and Telecommunications Equipment e.g. PCs, copiers, phones, mobiles

Toys, Leisure and Sports Equipment e.g. video games, bike computers, slot

machines

Medical devices, except implanted and infected products e.g. ventilators,

analysers

Monitoring and control instruments e.g. smoke detectors, thermostats

Automatic dispensers e.g. drinks dispensers, chocolate dispensers, ATMs

Latest estimates put the amount of WEEE discarded in the UK every year at something approaching 2 million tonnes and escalating rapidly. Currently much of this goes unsorted to landfill, but an amazing 98 could be returned as

materials to the manufacturing chain.

And how can you dispose of it LEGALLY

Midex Reverse Technologies, the wellestablished Aldershotbased specialist processor of endoflife WEEE licensed by the DOE, is offering businesses and organisations across the region specific advice and assistance to help in meeting their new obligations.

Midex operates a unique, total reprocessing service encompassing endoflife disposal, secure data destruction, hazardous waste disposal and full endofprocess certification, guaranteeing its clients complete compliance with all the new statutory duties and responsibilities.

Offering two options its WEEEcollect cages for regular collections of smaller volumes and a bespoke service for larger quantities and organisations, Midex processes all the waste at its own facilities here in the UK, completely destroying all items rather than passing on or exporting waste for refurbishment or reuse, as many other disposal services do.

Once dismantled and fragmented, 98 of the waste, in the form of raw materials such as plastic, steel, aluminium and copper, is sent for reintroduction into the manufacturing chain. This reduces the pressures on global raw material resources and the pollution created by the manufacturing of new supplies.

Using Midex as your local WEEE processor will also reduce transportation and the associated environmental harm. Other disposal services are further afield and often transport their waste over long distances or export it overseas, where there is less control over its reuse, possibly for illegal scams and identity theft, or the involvement of child labour in its processing.

Midex offers experienced, specialist and environmentally responsible local disposal, guaranteeing you complete compliance with the new WEEE directive.

Ive shared previously with you the prettyinpink Keyboard for Blondes, a British product that pokes fun at all creatures dyed in peroxide.  Another company has decided to appeal to the diehard Star Trek crowd with its Klingon Language Standard Keyboard.  Its a normallooking keyboard, if you dont count the Klingon alphabet and other symbols stamped on the keys.  Theres also the New Standard Rainbow Keyboard, a childfriendly offering with keys in bright, bold colors, and the alphabet laid out on the keys in alphabetical order what else.  And dont forget the Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard, a cylindrical device which uses a laser to project a virtual keyboard on any hard surface.  You press on the virtual key, breaking the laser beam and sending the selected keystroke to your computer.  Although a little different, still these products look like what we expect from a keyboard.

Then there are the mutations.  The SafeType Keyboard advertizes itself as an ergonomic vertical keyboard, splitting the standard keyboard down the middle and propping the pieces up on end.  You actually get sideview mirrors so you can see what your fingers are doing.  Gameshow afficionados will love the abKey Revolution with its total redesign of character layout, based on the frequency of letters used in Wheel of Fortune.  I think you use your thumbs to buy vowels.  The Combimouse splits the keyboard in half again, but this time the righthand piece of the keyboard moves, replacing what would have been a separate mouse.  You can buy a lefthand version as well.  And one company designs both singlehanded and dualhanded ergonomic keyboards, with sides and keys that curve over, under, up, and around.  Dont even ask me what home row is on these puppies

Finally, there are the devices that look absolutely nothing like keyboards.  The iGrip Ergonomic Keyboard and Trackball looks almost exactly like a controller on a gaming device, with buttons that replace the standard QWERTY key layout.  The OrbiTouch Keyless Keyboard lives up to its name  Theres not a key anywhere in sight, just two large knobs that I assume you manipulate to generate your text.  Court stenographers could get into the Datahand Professional II, with ten keys one for each digit, including thumbs and not much else.  The Grippity1.0 BackTyping Keyboard lets you see what youre typing, since you hold it in your hands like a game controller and press the back side of the standard QWERTY keyboard layout.  Finally, theres the TouchStream ST, which...well, you need to see that one for yourself.

You can see all of these futuristic, quirky input devices on MSNs Tech Web site.  While you look them over, Im heading to my local computer store to pick up a wireless keyboard and mouse...you know, the standardlooking kind.  I know, I know...I guess deep down Im just too oldfashioned.

We receive tons of email from our readers with PC problems so we decided to put together a list of helpful solutions that we hope will come in handy for those times when you find yourself having to troubleshoot your own PC woes.

Starting With The Obvious

No matter what strange behaviour your computer is exhibiting, dont panic. Just start with the obvious. Many computer problems appear more serious than they really are so relax and breathe deep.

Cant start up Check the surge protector. Make sure it is on and working. Try plugging in a lamp or the like to verify there is not a power issue.

Check all cables, connectors, and power cords. Be sure they are seated properly.

Reboot Windows. Rebooting your system can resolve many problems with Windows.

Write down error messages. You can use Google to do a search to find others who may have had the same problem.

Ask yourself what has changed since the last time it was working properly

Make sure the floppy and CD ROM drives are empty.

Hardware or Software

Basic operational malfunctions can sometimes be very time consuming. When you dont know exactly what the problem is, its time for process of elimination. The first step is to determine whether you have a software or hardware problem

. Usually, its the software.

Software fixes can sometimes be tricky. Does the problem only occur in one program, or in all programs Does it happen when you have certain applications or devices running at the same time If you have warranty support, use it. You can also try uninstalling then reinstalling a problem application, which will often cure the problem. You can also check the manufacturers web site. A good site will list known problems and fixes.

Check your device manager for hardware conflicts. If you see any yellow exclamation points, select the device and view the properties. Sometimes you just need to reinstall drivers to establish normal functions. You can also try disabling the conflicted device and reboot the system.

Process of Elimination

Many problems require more digging. If, after doing the above, the problem still hasnt been resolved, then it is time for process of elimination.

Verify your virus software is up to date. Install any engine or DAT updates and run a full scan to be sure you have not been infected with anything.

Check the Windows Update site and install any patches and updates.

Verify you have enough disk space on your primary partition usually C. If you are running low on space, uninstall unused programs and run Disk Cleanup to remove any unnecessary files.

Verify you have antispyware software installed. If you dont have a good one, try Spybot. This program is really great for getting rid of existing spyware and keeping new files from being left on your PC. Be sure to check for updates after installing any antispyware program. Just like viruses, new spyware comes out frequently and requires updates.

Run ScanDisk and Defragment your hard drive. To make it easy, you might want to consider starting your system in Safe Mode to run both of these utilities and then rebooting when finished.

Check your firewall. Some firewalls like Zone Alarm will cause problems. Disabling it for the moment will tell you if your firewall is the cause of the problem.

Run MSCONFIG. UnCheck every item that is listed and reboot your machine. See if the problem still persists. If not, youve now isolated it to a problem at startup. Proceed back into MSCONFIG and recheck the items one at a time, rebooting in between, to see which process is causing the problem.

More Specifically

If you have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, you can use the following resources for help resolving it.

The Troubleshooting Expert, from PC Guide.com, is a database of questions and answers that will help you quickly find a solution to the most common PC problems.

Common Networking Problems, from PC Mechanic, can help you troubleshoot network issues.

TechTarget.com provides a list of common Internet problems with a table of error codes and common fixes.

Calling The Experts

When its time to call in the experts, note what you were doing when things went awry what application you were using and what you were working on. It is often the case that a problem resides with a specific application or file and this information may help a technician repair the problem. Also note any changes made to the computer system shortly before, and, at the time the problem occurred. Sometimes installing new software, adding a new peripheral, or otherwise altering the configuration of the computer can cause problems in seemingly unrelated areas.

Regular Maintenance

Performing regular maintenance can improve the overall speed and performance of your PC and can help reduce the amount of time you spend fixing problems. Go to PC Worlds Scheduled Maintenance page to see a list of maintenance tasks and a schedule of how often you should perform these functions.

In Closing

We could write volumes on this subject, but to keep it condensed, this is just a very brief and basic overview of what to do first when your computer is misbehaving. By checking a few simple items and trying a few things on your own, you just might repair the machine yourself. If a quick solution is not found, this process may help you describe the problem more effectively to a computer technician. Good luck

Note As with any piece of electronic equipment, be wary of the electrical hazards. It is not wise to open up your computer unless you know what you are doing. There is a risk of electrical shock and a high risk of damaging the electronic components inside the PC.

First we should clarify terms, because we are not actually changing the contents of the BIOS chip. The BIOS chip itself contains a program that is hardwired in, and while its possible to flash some BIOS chips, which electronically replaces the entire contents at once, its not possible to edit individual lines of the BIOS code in the chip. Unless its flashed, the BIOS will keep its contents intact essentially forever.

What we are really changing during a BIOS setup are the contents of the CMOS chip. CMOS is a type of slow memory chip that requires very little power, usually supplied by a small, longlife battery. This makes it ideal to save information that might need to be changed occasionally but also needs to be safely stored while the computer is off, because the BIOS will use that information at bootup. If you were to store a computer unplugged for a few years until the battery ran down, you would find that all of the data stored in the CMOS chip was gone.

Part of the programming stored in the BIOS is a routine that lets you edit the information in the CMOS chip, and that routine is commonly called the BIOS Setup program. You can access this program by hitting the correct key during the bootup process. Unfortunately there is no standard for which key to press. One of my computers uses the Del key, and another one uses the F2 key. You have to read the screen prompts early in the boot process, looking for one that says Press the x key for setup, or something similar. Then you need to press that key when it first appears, or soon after. By the time the prompt disappears, its definitely too late.

If you press the right key, and in time, the BIOS will discontinue booting and will open the BIOS setup program, which displays a series of menus and submenus for the various parameters that you can change. Because the operating system hasnt loaded yet, there will be no fancy interface and no mouse control. Navigate the menus using the arrow keys, using Enter to select something and the Esc key to back up.

Although the navigation is fairly standard, every BIOS version will have a different menu setup and a different selection of items that can be edited. Two of the menu items are to exit the setup and save the changes, or to exit without saving the changes. When you do either of these, the bootup process will continue where it left off.

Following is a sampling of the values that you can access and edit from the setup program. Keep in mind that any individual machine may have some of these and not others, and will probably have some options not listed here. Newer systems will generally have more options for configuration. They are also more likely to collect data automatically from the system hardware, in which case you should think twice before changing it. On older systems, it was often necessary to manually enter the configuration data when adding memory, peripheral devices etc.

Clock speeds Some setups allow you to change just the master clock, and some let you tweak the clock speeds individually for the CPU, bus and RAM. This feature is loved by gamers who overclock by jacking up the clock speeds, which is an excellent way to invite system errors, as well as voiding the warranty and possibly burning out your CPU chip.

Hard drive parameters The cylinder head and sector values can be monitored, and sometimes edited. You can also monitor the primary/secondary and master/slave arrangement of the IDE drives.

Boot sequence The usual sequence has the BIOS look for an operating system first at the floppy drive, then the hard drive and last at the CDROM drive, and the system will boot to the first OS it finds. This works well at the factory, but if you want to boot from a CD, for instance to run the MicroScope diagnostic, then the sequence needs to be changed to check the CD before the hard drive, which already has a resident OS.

ROM shadowing RAM is faster than ROM, so copying ROM contents into RAM normally provides better performance. This option is enabled or disabled in BIOS setup.

Power management Edit the conditions under which a system will go into hibernation, and the events that can wake it up again.

Caching Caching can be enabled or disabled, for the CPU and sometimes for video RAM as well. One occasion when you might want to turn off CPU caching is during RAM testing. Some memory diagnostics do not flush the cache, so the test is actually looking at cache rather than RAM. For diagnostics that do flush the cache, disabling the cache will allow the tests to run faster.

Voltage control or monitoring Some BIOS versions let you tweak the various system voltages. Some just let you monitor them, and some do neither. Like overclocking, changing voltages is something that should be approached with caution.

Passwords Some systems let you change the administrator and user passwords in the setup program. Some do not, and require you to drain the CMOS by disconnecting or shorting across the battery before a new password can be entered. Of course, all of the other CMOS data will be deleted too. Yet another reason not to forget your password.

Date/time The systems RTC RealTime Clock stores its values in CMOS, and is often incorporated into the same chip. The date/time values provide a reference for the OS and for many applications. Remember the Y2K hoopla a few years ago Part of the problem was that many computers had 19 hardwired into the BIOS and only allowed you to edit the last two digits of the year.

Memory Older systems sometimes required the user to enter the amount of memory the system was supposed to detect. Newer PCs will detect the amount of installed RAM automatically, and will let you view it but not always edit it.

PC Health This is a monitoronly feature found in many new systems, which displays system and CPU temperature, fan speeds and sometimes other data, depending on the manufacturer. Whatever PC Health information is available will also be reported under the Utilities menu of the MicroScope program.

Well, thats BIOS setup in a nutshell. There is one other thing that we should mention. Because computers have been known to fail on rare occasions, it can be quite handy to have the more critical CMOS information and settings written down somewhere on a piece of paper. And this paper record should be updated whenever major changes are being made to a system.

Computer technology is constantly being updated and upgraded and replaced. New applications are introduced which require technology that didnt even exist in the mainstream just a few years ago. Programs require more hard disk space to load, more memory to run, and in the case of computer games, more robust audio and video requirements to make those realistic shootemup games look and sound more realistic. As a result, the computer from two or three years ago may not have the power you need to do everything you want to do today.

So, are you looking at your current computer system and thinking you need something a little more uptodate Or are you a firsttime computer buyer If youre in the market for a computer and youre not sure what you need to get, heres a list of items youll need to consider before you or your parents lay down those hardearned dollars.

A computerliterate friend. No, youre not buying one. But if youre a computer newbie, or not up on the latest technology, it doesnt hurt to have somebody you can turn to who is familiar with the industry and can explain some of the hightech terminology to make the process less confusing. Use but please dont abuse this valuable resource and save yourself some time, trouble, and money.

PC or Mac This is the biggest decision youll have to make when looking at a new system. For years the debate has raged as to which computer is better. The answer is Both. Each has an area where it excels. The Macs strengths are in multimedia graphics design, audio/video, and are made even more powerful with the new suite of applications called iLife. The PCs biggest strengths are its large vendor base of commercial applications and a surplus of supported hardware. Price is becoming less of an issue as Apple gets more aggressive with its pricing, and as vendors continue to develop applications that allow hardware and softwarespecific products to be used on either platform. My recommendation If your major is in something like graphics design, music, or any of the hightech communications fields, seriously consider the Mac, because thats what folks are using in those industries. If you need something thatll run your business applications well and will give you a wellestablished library of software programs to choose from, then the PC is your best bet. If you still cant decide, check to see what your college is using in its libraries and computer labs, and go with that. At least youll be compatible with what theyre using on campus.

Desktop or laptop Your secondbiggest decision is whether to anchor yourself to a desk or to go portable. If you think you might need computing ability on the move, then a laptop is your choice. Be sure to keep in mind that portability costs money. All other things being equal, a laptop will cost more than a comparablyequipped desktop. You have the added issue of ease of theft/loss. If you have a tendency to leave things lying around and then forget to take them with you, stick with the desktop

Memory RAM. Now its time to start looking at memory. The more memory your system has, the more quickly it will load and run applications including the operating system, process information, perform calculations, and so on. Most operating systems give a recommended minimum amount of memory that they need to be able to run. Windows XP, for example, requires a minimum of 128M megabytes of RAM to run. Thats great, if all you want to run on your computer is the operating system. Youll need more memory if you want to run other applications. A good rule of thumb is to take the minimum amount of RAM the operating system requires and multiply by eight. That means for Windows XP, you want at least 128M x 8, or 1G gigabyte of RAM to allow your applications to run smoothly. That seems like a lot, but if you want this computer to last you for two to three years, youll need that extra memory.

Hard drive. Now you need a place to store all those programs and data files youll be using. How much disk space you need depends on the types of files you plan on keeping. Generally, multimedia file types like music, graphics, and video are larger than textbased documents such as wordprocessing and spreadsheet files. Youll need to take into consideration what programs you want to run immediately, and then figure in extra space for programs you might want to run in the future. Prices are very reasonable, with 160G hard drives running around 150. If that sounds like too much disk space for you, youre not thinking far enough ahead to avoid spending extra money down the road for an upgrade.

Printer. Unless your professors accept homework assignments via email dont laugh some do, youll need a printer to make hard copies. The current generation of color inkjet printers produce goodquality output and can be purchased starting at around 50. If you want to get fancy, you can get a combination printer/copier/scanner/fax machine called an allinone for under 150. Be sure to factor in the cost of paper and ink cartridges. Helpful hint 20lb paper is what most people use in their printers today. I recommend using 24lb paper instead. A heftier paper that holds up well, you can feel the difference which means your instructors will too and its not that much more expensive than the 20lb variety. Its a way to get your reports to stand out without having to go the fancy expensive paper route.

CD/DVD drive. These days, CD drives come standard with almost every computer, and many come with a drive that reads both CDs and DVDs. If you plan on making your own CDs and DVDs, youll need to spend the extra money on a burner a drive that lets you create CDs and DVDs from scratch. Remember that this isnt used purely for entertainment purposes. Data files can be burned to CD or DVD to transfer from one computer to another, or to store particularly large files, like databases or collections of graphics or music. Software to make that drive work properly is usually included with the drive itself.

Peripherals. What other things do you need to attach to your computer How about that digital camera Your iPod or MP3 player Your iPAQ or Palm Pilot Maybe even your cell phone If you have these devices and you plan on connecting them to your computer for whatever reason, make sure you have the proper cables to do so. If youre buying them for the first time, verify what you purchase will connect to your computer, and that any software and hardware needed is included with your device.

Applications. What software programs are included with the new system Will the programs let you do what you want, or are you going to need to purchase additional software Whatever other packages are included, make sure your new computer includes virusscanning software if you choose to go with a Mac, this wont be an issue. Also demand a backup solution, whether its included in the operating system or a separate program. You need to be able to make extra copies of your data in the event of a catastrophic incident. Be leery of free programs the vendor promises you that include photocopied manuals or CDs with handwritten labels they could be an indication of pirated software, and thats illegal Finally, make sure the vendor or your computerliterate friend shows you how to set up your system so that you have to enter a password to use it. Not passwordprotecting your computer is pretty much extending an open invitation for unlimited use to anybody who walks by. And a quick message to Mom and Dad cmon, folks. Spring for a couple of games. Remember, all work and no play

Warranties and insurance. Dont skip these crucial items when choosing your system. Generally, if hardware is going to fail on a new computer, itll do so within the first 90 days. Because of this, most vendors include a 90day warranty at no charge. If you think that will be enough for you, think again. If your hard drive dies five days before your midterm reports are due, will you be able to buy the right hard drive, install it, format it, install and update the operating system, and restore your data to it If not, then you most definitely need a longterm warranty. Ask about warranties where the vendor sends someone out to replace the defective part on site. These are usually available in one, two, and threeyear increments. Also check to see if existing insurance policies yours or your parents cover lost, damaged, or stolen computer equipment. If not, add that cost to your total computer outlay, especially if youre living on campus in a dorm or if youre purchasing a laptop. Hopefully youll never need to use it, but if the worst ever happens, youll be glad you spent the additional money.

Price. Ah, NOW were down to the nittygritty With companies running all kinds of specials both instore and on the Internet, its confusing. The best way to avoid the confusion is to determine ahead of time what features you want in a computer system, and then visit three or four vendors with your list of requirements. Get a written price from each vendor so you can compare apples to apples. Dont be afraid to take your price quotes with you when shopping. If you can show a particular vendor what his competition is offering, he may be able to give you a better deal on the same system.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesnt it Sure, theres some advance preparation required, but by the time youre all done, youll have the system you want at a price you can be happy with. Then you can buckle down and start studying right after you play a few of those games, and add all your friends to your email address book, and check out the latest cool Web sites, and...

Therefore the older a hard drive is, the greater the chance of failure although ironically the chances has also been increased by the everincreasing size and speed of hard disks.

There are two general kinds of hard disk failures physical damage to the hard drive itself and corruption of the information stored on it. Whatever the cause, hard drive recovery is of the utmost importance.

Expert advice is the first step to hard drive recovery. Sometimes hard disk failures may be quite simple to solve, but unless this is confirmed by a hard disk data recovery expert, a basic hard disk read failure could become a full scale hard disk crash that could cost you your computer.

A serious hard drive recovery effort requires the sort of sterile and pollutantfree environment which can only be found under professional conditions. Technicians will be able to properly diagnose the problem with the disk and will have the knowhow to deal with more serious problems, such as physical damage.

In this event, they will use a number of methods to solve the problem, ranging from simply replacing or repairing some of the damaged parts. If, as is more common, the hard drive failure is due to a corrupted file system, a hard drive recovery expert will know how to deal with this it cannot be stressed enough that users attempts to fix the problem themselves can easily do more harm than good, with irreversible and costly results.

Fortunately, there are a host of reputable companies offering professional hard drive recovery services. To ensure that you find the best service possible, look for an established company that has many testimonials from satisfied clients both personal and professional.

An expert service will swiftly diagnose the problem and let you know how long hard drive recovery will take. Its technicians will efficiently repair any damage to files or hardware and extract any previously lost data. The service will also ensure that there is afterservice cover, in the event of any subsequent problems.

is one of the devices that make the computer so easy to use. It allows you to input data by just moving your hand and pointing to items on the monitor. There are different types of mice available. It is up to you to choose the one that satisfies your requirements, and fits your budget. While most mice are designed for righthanded people, there are many that are ambidextrous. Also, there are some mice designed specifically for lefthanded people.

The ball mouse uses a ball that rolls on a surface, inputting data that moves the curser on the monitor. It is one of the earliest styles of mice.

Newer technology is used in the optical mouse, which uses an LED and a photocell to detect mouse movement on a surface, thereby moving the curser on the screen.

Most recently there is the laser mouse. This mouse uses similar technology to the LED mouse, but, replaces the LED with a laser. This allows greater resolution and more accurate movement of the curser. This type of mouse lends itself to graphics and art, which requires greater accuracy.

The trackball reduces hand movement and requires using only the thumb and finger. It is best used for drawing because of its accuracy.

The USB and PS/2 ports are the two most common interfaces for the modern computer mouse. Most desktop computers provide both ports, but older motherboards may require you to go with the PS/2 port. You will find most laptop computers do not have a PS/2 port. This requires a mouse equipped with a USB connector. One of the benefits of the USB port is hot swapping, this allows you to plug or unplug a mouse when the computer is running.

The availability of the wireless mouse adds an extra dimension to its use. This allows you to work, while not being physically attached to the computer. The two types of wireless mice are RF and Bluetooth. The advantage of Bluetooth is longer range and greater protection from interference.

The mouse controls usually are the two buttons and a wheel for scrolling. Some mice have one button Macintosh, while others have four or five buttons, some of which are programmable. In addition some of the wheels are capable of tilting sideways for lateral scrolling.

After evaluating this material go to your favorite online computer parts store

and check out the mice that are available. Think about which one will satisfy your needs and fit into your budget.

What if I run out of space

First of all do not neglect any warnings you get.  If the drive reaches a certain point it may not boot.  This is because programs need some space for temporary files that make them work.  This also includes the operating system.  Your options are numerous.  You could take the information such as pictures and move them to a CD or DVD.  You could buy a USB drive recommended and start moving your pictures or other data to that drive.  Although you could have another internal drive installed, I feel it is way to much work and may be expense now that there are USB drives. You will need to know if you have a ATA or SATA drive if you plan to put in an internal drive.   If you dont know how to install a second drive you may need to pay somebody to do it.  With a USB drive you just plug it into a USB port and youre done.  You can also use a Flash drive if you dont have too many files.  However, they do manufacture them up to 16 GIG which will store quite a bit of data.  These Flash drives increase in storage size and decrease in price all the time.  If you want to transport files from point to point this is the only way to go. 

What about RAM

First and foremost it is NOT storage.  It is also called memory.  It does not have any ability to store any information of any kind.  It is your working space or where programs go to do the work you need to do.  If you even type a letter it takes RAM working in the background to get any work of any kind done. If your computer runs slow

or you are have a hard time opening program, you may need more RAM.  The cheapest and fastest upgrade you can do is to add more RAM.  This will let programs load faster and you will be able to get more productivity.  In the event more RAM does not help speed things up, there could be other problems such as a Virus or Spyware.  There could be a hardware problem also.

If you are low on RAM, programs will try to use the Hard drive instead known as paging.  That is why things slow down. This is especially a problem if you are lacking hard drive space.  This is referring to virtual memory and it can be adjusted although it is beyond the scope of this article.

If youre operating a business in a home office, have a dedicated PC that noone else in the family is going to use when you need to get work done.

Think about growth be careful not to select a computer your new business will outgrow quickly. Investing in a computer with more capabilities more memory, a faster processor, more hard drive space, etc. will pay off in the long run.

Do your research on business computers and software.

Once youve done some general computer purchasing research, you need to figure out exactly what your business needs. Like many parts of starting a new business, you can either do it yourself or hire an expert.

Hire an expert such as an IT consultant to help you choose the right business computer Microsoft Small Business Specialists, many of whom offer free introductory consulting, can help you select the right computer hardware and software to help you get started while keeping an eye toward your future goals by helping you select a computer system that can scale to your business growth.

Choose a computer on your own There are various tools on the internet such as Microsofts Computer Assessment Wizard at the small business center to automatically assess your businesss needs and get the right computer system for you.

Buying a Business Computer When you have selected the right computer for your business, there are several ways you can purchase. Here are three options

OEM OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer, and when it comes to computers, it refers to companies like those mentioned here, where you can buy your business PC directly.

Dell, Gateway, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, IBM Computer Retailers There are many local and national technology retailers that sell business computers. Going to a retail location will allow you to try out a computer before you purchase it. You can also discuss your computer needs with a sales person at the retail location. The best sellers are those that offer value added services like design, deployment and support rather than your big retail chain or megastore.

Computer System Builder Microsoft has certified resellers who specialize in building computers for businesses and individuals. A system builder can help you select the right components to fit your business needs, and can then custom build your computer.

Being successful in your business means that you must have all of the components to do so. In todays developing world, the Internet is very important in having a profitable business. The same can also be said about owning a well functioning computer. With a few suggestions, youll be able to confidently learn how to choose a business computer.

Decide the important features that will best benefit your expanding business. If you have a large customer base and it is still growing, then you should consider choosing a computer with a lot of storage space. Many computers that are being sold at low prices will not allow you to upgrade easily. Having a computer with a fast processor, the right amount of computer memory, and upgradeable technology is extremely important for a business owner.

Figure out if you need a desktop or notebook computer. Some business owners are constantly on the road and need a computer with major portability.

Youll need to have a computer that will not strain your back every time you travel from destination to destination. The best computer choice for a mobile business owner is one that is strong enough to handle your daily work tasks without taking up large amounts of room.

Determine the right price point for your business budget. Although some computer users feel as though the higher the price, the better the product.

This is not always the case. There are numerous factors involved when choosing the best computer for your business. Leave out the unnecessary upgrades and focus on the important ones. Try to avoid purchasing the very first computer you come across. Do your research and price comparison first.

Investigate the computer manufacturers support team. This is a very important decision factor. Some manufacturers are too willing to drop you once they have made the sale. You need to stick with a company that will have ongoing support if needed. Buy computers with long term warranties, this will give you confidence that if anything was to go wrong then you have cover.

Unexpected things occur with computers and you need to know that you can get help from a reliable support team. Your business cant afford to miss out on profits because of a technical difficulty.

Choose a business computer that you can easily work with. If you dont understand anything about a desired computer, then dont buy it. Of course, you wont know absolutely everything there is to know about computers, but remember the reason you need the computer and what it has to do. As a business owner, you dont need a computer system that focuses on playing the latest video games with state of the art graphics. You need one that is designed for business.

Here are 3 tips

1. Dont rely on just the big gps sites If you want to get information and make a decision quick, the internet is the best place to find a car GPS review

. A simple search in a search engine for car GPS review should bring up a large number of results. Paradoxically, the big gps sites gpslodge, gpsmagazine, etc and the big computer sites

PC World, Mag, Cnet often arent your best source of info. Theyre filled with single reviews of the latest and greatest which makes it hard to compare.

2. Be critical of what youre reading Every site youll read is making money from the gps merchants, either through ads on the site or from taking a small cut of every sale. Thats not a problem in itself.

Just make sure the site reviews enough gps models that they have their bets spread out and can afford to be unbiased they arent pushing the one that makes them the biggest commission.

3. Look for both expert and user reviews. Users often want something different from the experts.

Experts have depth of experience, current knowledge, and sometimes rigorous testing methods. Consumers, on the other hand, use the gps system for weeks not hours, learn the ins and outs, and have a personal investment in the performance. Its two perspectives you can benefit from.

A car GPS review is an extremely useful tool for determining which GPS system is the one for you. And the search can be bewildering.

Bain, a clockmaker, used his knowledge to design and patent a basic concept that became the basis of the modern fax machine. The idea to use electric signals generated by a telegraph operator was a huge step in telecommunications. In Bains device, these signals would pass through a type of paper that was soaked in a chemical. The signal would then cause the chemical to evaporate, leaving a long or short mark in Morse code. These marks allowed for a faster transmission of information and allowed him to create punchedhole tapes that allowed for automated transmissions and receptions. This device became known, although not nearly widely enough, as a chemical telegraph.

The earliest days

Of course, in those days faxes could not be sent the way they are now. The original signal telegraphs were the first successful fax machines that could send messages by regulating electric currents. Continuing improvements in miniaturization, manufacturing and electric printing were the means of jumpstarting the technology that todays fax machines use millions, even billions, of times every day.

Since the fax machine dates back farther than you may think, it really should be considered one of the greatest milestones in the history of communication. The technology of the fax machine was built upon thencurrent telegraph technology. Telegraph wires were used to transmit those first chemical faxes. Transmission over phone lines was not a possibility in 1843, due to the fact that the telephone was not even invented for another 30 or more years

The basic concept behind the fax machine facsimile document sender was to send a facsimile, an exact copy. Other technological advances and discoveries have led to the evolution of our modern fax machines, which still retain the original concept of Alexander Bain. His idea was that you could scan an image, picture or text, and that the scanned image could be interpreted as signals on a grid that are turned either on or off. That is, the information would appear as light off and dark on dots to the mechanical receiver in the receiving fax machine, which would then print the image.

Into the modern era

Fax machines started to become very popular in 1983 when the Committee Consultative International Telephonique et Telegraphique or CCITT Group 3 set up the standard protocol for faxing. The CCITT is an organization that sets international communication standards, and faxing certainly became standard from that time forward. Fax machines quickly became commonplace in the business world. They were immediately favored bly for sending legal documents and many businesses wouldnt have it any other way. Though use has lessened due to email and other technologies, many businesses depend on fax technology to this day.

Even as late as the 1990s, fax machines were big, bulky and hard to manage. Technology has allowed for compact, userfriendly and more inexpensive fax machines to emerge. Ten years ago, 500 was considered a bargain price for a fax machine. These days, you can easily find a good, plainpaper machine one for around 50. In addition, faxes are now part of the all in one printer technology, so devices starting at that same price point now come with the ability to fax, scan, print and copy, all for one low cost.

Faxing in cyberspace

Although the fax machine has been around for many years and is widely used, it seems that faxing over the Internet has swiftly become a very popular means of transmitting information. The fact that the Internet can transmit information at such a high rate of speed makes it more convenient and easier for people to utilize. These days, more and more offices and people are getting rid their fax machines in order to make use of the Internet faxing tools.

However, the fax machine is not a thing of the past just yet, and the ability for computers to both send and receive faxes means people with fax machines can connect with both computer users and fax users. Many people still use fax machines everyday and it is easy to see why. They offer a very fast transfer of information and more accurate communication between people and businesses.

Fax machines have certainly come a long way. It was once considered to be the center of modern technology because it was able to transmit and replicate reams of important documents from anywhere in the world. Although increasing numbers of people have turned to Internet faxing, the fax machine is still considered to be a very important piece of technology.

Seeing how far weve come with the way we send and transmit information, its very interesting to note how the fax machine has taken us this far. It has been an essential element in all aspects of international communication, both business and personal. Without it, and the Internetenabled versions, we might as well send our documents via Pony Express. Faxing helps the world go round, literally

There are numerous top computer forensics schools and universities that would do you good to graduate from and promise you a bright future ahead. Such schools are

The American Intercontinental University

The Virginia College

The Capella University

The University of Phoenix

The Kaplan University

The Virginia College

These education centers are high in ranking and require a lot of hard work to get into. Nevertheless, it would be worth it as they give you great opportunities to have potential careers. How do you get a place in top schools

Have a solid foundation in computers, systems, architecture, law and storage media. You dont need in depth knowledge, just the basics.

Gain some experience. Best way to do this is through internships and participating in short term projects as you can learn quite a lot.

It would be better if you have experience working in an environment where information security is a major issue. Such places would be Banks, security firms and etc.

Youd definitely need to be tech savvy. Keep up with technology improvements and be uptodate.

Most of all, youd need the passion and interest in technology, fraud, banking, money laundering, so on and so forth.

Also, youd need to be good in analyzing and extracting information. This would require a lot of patience and quick thinking.

With these skills, passion and dedication you should be able to land yourself into a good, well known school and gain accredited degrees. Just dont give up and work hard

How do I know if I am Infected with the Conficker Worm

1. Conficker blocks access to over one hundred security and anti virus websites, so if you are having difficulty entering a security site or your anti virus program isnt updating this may be a symptom.

2. If you have trouble entering some directories or files on your computer, Conficker may be blocking them from being accessed.

3. If you are unable to get access to shared access to admin on your system this is mostly Conficker.

4. If you have tasks scheduled on your computer that you have no knowledge of, do a little research as this could also be Conficker.

Use the Conficker Eye Chart

One of the easiest and most ingenious ways of checking for conficker is to use a conficker eye chart. This simple chart of six images with each image linked to the homepage of a major anti virus or security site will quickly tell you if you system is infected. If when looking at the chart you see all six of the images theres is a good chance your system is clean.  If you are unable see some of the images Conficker could be blocking access to one or more of the security sites so there is a good chance your computer is infected.

Act now before its too late.

As I mentioned at the start of this article it is not know the true intention of the Downadup virus and it is growing stronger and constantly updating itself. Experts currently fear over 4 million systems are infected with Conficker with this number rising fast. Make sure your system isnt one of them

Im all for checks and balances. However, in order to detect threats against our nation and other global computer infrastructures from criminal hackers and terrorists, those in charge of cybersecurity must have full and unlimited access to networks. There is certainly a legitimate concern here that any government agency with too much power can overstep citizens rights. However, coming from a security perspective, there are some very bad guys out there who would like nothing more for you to be dead. Heres a glowing example of how this power is used for good. Wired.coms Kevin Poulsen who should be required reading reports on an FBIdeveloped super spyware program called computer and Internet protocol address verifier, or CIPAV, which has been used to investigate extortion plots, terrorist threats and hacker attacks in cases stretching back to before the dotcom bust.

This is James Bond, Hollywood blockbuster technology that makes for a gripping storyline. The CIPAVs capabilities indicate that it gathers and reports a computers IP address, MAC address, open ports, a list of running program, the operating system type, version and serial number, preferred Internet browser and version, the computers registered owner and registered company name, the current loggedin user name and the lastvisited URL. Thats the equivalent of a crime scene investigator having fresh samples of blood for the victim and perpetrator, and 360 degree crystal clear video of the crime committed. The FBI sneaks the CIPAV onto a targets machine like any criminal hacker would, using known web browser vulnerabilities.

They use the same type of hacker psychology phishers use, tricking their target into clicking a link, downloading and installing the spyware. They function like any illegal hacker would, except legally. In one case, they hacked a marks MySpace page and posted a link in the subjects private chat room, getting him to click it. In another case, the FBI was trying to track a sexual predator that had been threatening the life of a teenage girl who hed met for sex. The mans IP addresses were anonymous from all over the world, which made it impossible to track him down. Getting the target to install the CIPAV made it possible to find this animal. Numerous other cases are cited in the Wired.com article, including an undercover agent working a case described as a weapon of mass destruction bomb & anthrax threat, who communicated with a suspect via Hotmail, and sought approval from Washington to use a CIPAV to locate the subjects computer.

So while Big Brother may yield some scary power, criminals and terrorists are a tad scarier. Ive always viewed the term Big Brother as someone who watches over and protects you. Just my take. 

The average user cannot see the potential evidence that is kept in computer files and therefore believe that by simply pressing Delete the files are then erased. Providing these files have then not been overwritten by regular and sustained use of a computer, they can be relocated in the nonlive areas on the hard disk. These are called unallocated clusters and can hold gigabytes of deleted data.

Computer analysis should be carried out by highly skilled and qualified practitioners who understand the science behind recovering these potentially valuable files, which can be used as vital evidence within a court case. Forensic analysts use their expertise and specialist software to recover data that can hold a lot of information unbeknown to the user.

Depending on what information still remains on the computer, the forensic analysts can find a lot of valuable information about its background. For example they may be able to tell under what login name the files were deleted as well as the date and time that the deletion occurred. Many people also try to disguise criminal data under different file names and extensions. Forensic analysis tools can make this apparent and the analyst can see those harmful files being disguised as something else.

Passwords may not be enough to keep out a forensic analyst and depending on the level of encryption many forensics analysts have tools that can find ways into files that contain vital data.

Files that have become corrupted or partly erased can also be partially retrieved. Depending on the level of corruption, files can be traced and used as potential evidence against a suspect.

The process of computer analysis takes time and patience. Specialized forensic analysts can investigate whether anything that has been inputted or downloaded on to the computer. They have the tools to see everything on the hard drive regardless of whether it has been deleted or corrupted.

Laptops are the perfect educational tool for students.  They can handle an innumerable amount of tasks and serve many different functions that allow students to consolidate all of their class assignments and home studies into one convenient location, which simplifies workflow and increases productivity.

The two most important things to look for in a student laptop are portability and battery life.  This laptop will likely be carried in a backpack or shoulder bag from class to class, so you will definitely want a system that is light and easy to transport.  There is also no guarantee that you will have access to an auxiliary power supply in your classroom or on campus, so you will most likely want a battery that lasts up to several hours per charge.

Desktop real estate can be limited in your class, so you want to make sure your laptop is compact and economical in size, preferably around 14 X 10 in general dimensions.

As far as individual specifications, you can get by with most base configurations.  A 1.66GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and a standard DVD/CDRW drive should suffice, but you may wish to upgrade certain components depending on whether or not you intend to use your notebook for any extra curricular activities, such as gaming or multimedia production.

Unless you intend to do higherlevel networking, or unless your school requires domainbased authentication to access the school network check with your IT department, Windows XP Home Edition should more than meet your needs for an Operating System.

Laptop computers have become the single most resourceful device a student can use for school.  From providing instant access to a cornucopia of information for researching purposes to being able to process, edit and store a lifetime of documents and papers, laptops enable students to keep up with the intense demands and deadlines of academic life by providing them with the tools they need to better organize and execute their daily tasks and assignments whether at home, in class, or on the go.

Most veteran PC gamers know exactly what they want in a gaming laptop, and those who have the time and money have probably already built their dream computer themselves, but if you are a little newer to the field, a little more fond of the smaller notebook footprint, or a little less comfortable with a doityourself computer, you need to be armed with these basic facts before purchasing your gaming laptop.

The three most important components for any highend laptop are the processor, RAM and graphics card. Since you are building a gaming rig, you will want to focus on your graphics card first and foremost. Make sure you load up the video memory with at least 256MB and remember to select a notebook that has a dedicated graphics card. Integrated graphics simply cannot handle any modern, 3D gaming. 

The next most important component is your processor.  Dualcore CPUs are the hottest thing out right now.  Ideally, you want to stay within the top two or three fastest dualcore CPUs, in terms of processor speed, that are currently available at the time of your purchase.  This will ensure that your notebook is fully optimized for all of todays latest 3D games. 

The third most important factor in the speed of your laptop is RAM.  You will need at least 1GB to safely play most 3D games without any memory bottlenecking, although most hardcore gamers opt for 2GB or more just for the added punch and/or bragging rights.

The fourth and final tip would be to go with 7200rpm hard drives, as these will definitely speed up load times by adding some extra horsepower to your gaming machine.

With recent advancements in mobile technologies, laptops are now becoming more and more popular in the gaming community, as the prospect of a portable gaming rig that can produce desktoplike performance on the go is something that appeals to all gamers. Just remember to follow these four simple guidelines to ensure that your laptop will be able to meet or exceed all of the hardware requirements for your gaming sessions.

If the customers are not sure about the security of their personal details and financial statements, they will never conduct online business. Internet privacy security is very important for any online business site.

Internet Computer privacy is at risk due to the presence of different elements. The presence of spyware is one factor of risk for Internet privacy security. The spyware that is present in your computer can track your online behavior. Spyware software is enabled with the advanced features that allow the spyware manufacturers to surreptitiously track the actions of a computer user. The information gathered through this process can be used to commit frauds and other illegal activities.

Where there is data, there is a threat to its security. More so for very large organizations that need to be ready with disaster recovery measures and return to work as quickly as possible. Maybe you have firewalls, a regularly up to date anti virus program to protect your system and other software that detects spy ware and so on. But time is money. With the RollBack Rx system restore software, which also prevents data loss, you save both As a snapshotbased approach this software helps you manage the configuration of your systems and lets you save money on PC support. This naturally results in minimizing downtime.

All Microsoft Windows based PCs support RollBack Rx software. It operates at the sector level and enables both remote and local update. It helps in patch management as well, making it faster and more effective since it has the ability to make a snapshot of the system before the patch was installed, which means making it possible to instantly RollBack to the prepatch state.

Most computers have anti virus or spy ware protection installed in them. RollBack Rx is compatible with all antivirus and antispy ware applications and software. You can just instruct your RollBack Rx to take a snapshot of your system before or after anti virus updates.

Imagine yourself in a situation where someone else is able to monitor every move that you make. This is a terrifying situation to face. The best way for you to escape such a situation is to install the best security features in your Computer. You will then be able to surf online peacefully without constantly worrying about your Internet privacy security.

<p>You want to print an urgent letter for your client regarding the meeting and your printer is not working. The meeting has to be happen or else you are about to loose a big deal. The situation is very stressful and you do not want to loose this opportunity. Don&8217;t worry; The <a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> PrinterAnywhere.com</a> is here to solve this critical situation. Now you don&8217;t need to care about your important printing even if your office printer is not working. Just open the website, choose your printer&8217;s type and destination and send your document for printing. Surprised It is true and on this site you can share your as well as other&8217;s printer to print documents. </p>

<p><a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> PrinterAnywhere.com</a> is an online service that offers you worldwide printer to print your document wherever you want. Using this service, you can print your photos and documents using other people&8217;s printers. To use this service you need not be an expert in all printer mechanism. This <a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> Printeranywhere.com</a> service is compatible with all types of editing software. Just edit your work in and send the document for the printing on any printer of your favor. If you are preparing an urgent word document and you want a print but you don&8217;t have a printer. Don&8217;t worry you can request your client or your neighbor to keep the printer on, so that you can take a print of your document in a minute. .</p>

<p>Technology is pretty advanced and many people are aware what is going on the net. This <a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> PrinterAnywhere.com</a> is a little piece of technology. Like we do chatting and file sharing, in a same way we can print important document safely on other people&8217;s printers. The service provided by this site is faster and trustworthy. Each byte of the information is encrypted until it reaches to its destination. So instead of sending the confidential data across the net via file sharing, we can use this method to print our confidential documents. The documents that you pass on for the printing are encrypted in standard coding language. Therefore, the files are completely safe and secure. </p>

<p>We use internet frequently for chatting and emailing our documents for various purpose. Such file transferring is very risky as other third parties can access the files. However, when you transfer a file using <a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> Printeranywhere.com</a>, you files reaches at its destination printer without giving any access to third parties. Moreover, there are many possible virus, spam and spyware threats to the computer while downloading a file through internet. Hence, to avoid such potentially malicious programs PrinterAnywhere.com is the best way. For business personalities, this service is the best option when they are traveling. While they are on world tour, they can send their legal documents directly to their or clients office even though they are out of the country. Just put your office printer&8217;s name and start printing. </p>

<p>As we know, there are various word editing documents, <a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> Printeranywhere.com</a> supports almost all types of word file formats. Even you can print images, PowerPoint documents, excel sheets and monthly reports. If you office&8217;s LAN printers are not working then you can use extension printers from your partner&8217;s office. One can also ask friends or any trustable third party to make available their printers for the work. One can also use this service for the business purpose by making available own printer for other parties. </p>

<p>The PrinterAnywhere.com is powerful enough to connect you to any printer of your choice across the world. You just need to choose the correct location and the name of your printer. In addition, you also save your time as Printeranywhere.com does not scan your documents as other printers do. </p>

<p>So, just open the <a href http//www.PrinterAnywhere.com/> Printeranywhere.com</a> and start printing your documents on your favorite printer.</p>

Gone were the days when you have to go from one office to another, or climb seemingly endless stairs in a corporate building hoping to get a job. With the advent of Internet technology, searching for jobs has become an easy, comfortable task. If you already have an electronic copy of your CV and cover letter, sit down in front of your computer and start your job search online.

But before you do that, here are some points to remember when looking for jobs online.

Most companies nowadays have website or are connected online. This means most of their job vacancies are also posted on line. If you know how to use the search engine well in your search, finding the perfect job will be very easy. There are several excellent search engines online aside from Google. Vivisimo.com and alltheweb.com may not be at par with Google but for sure they are second bests. Using different search engines could sometimes not really very often could lead to different results so it will be best to try searching for jobs in other engines.

If you want to work as Computer Programmer, use Computer Programming Jobs or Computer Programmer Jobs as your keywords. It makes a difference as against using Computer Jobs or IT Jobs. Try typing the keywords in the search box and you will see different results. The first set of keywords as being more specific. So if you are looking for writing jobs in Singapore, typing Writing jobs will not be as effective as using Writing Jobs Singapore.

There are a lot of legitimate websites that posts legitimate job vacancies. Look for job sites in places where you want to work. But be careful. There also sites that are not legitimate and could be ran by scammers. Dont give out personal information immediately if you are not comfortable with the site.

Some job vacancies online may be outdated because webmasters failed to delete them from the site even as the position has been filled up. Observe carefully the dates of posting and expiry dates to ensure that the vacancies are still available. If no dates are included, begin your cover letter with question on whether or not the posted job is still available.

Sometimes, because of the ease of cut and paste method, we tend to forget that the HRD name in our letter has not been changed even if the letter is sent to other companies. Whoa Would you expect an invitation for interview from Company A when what you mentioned in your letter is the name of the Manager of Company B Be careful with this.

Apply only to jobs that you are really are interested in. Sending out application letters online just for the sake of applying is discourteous and unethical. Make sure also that you are qualified for the job that you are applying to avoid hassle in the future. Most importantly, use your common sense when using the Internet in your job search. Several scammers and fraudsters are lurking online waiting for victims. When someone asks for a fee in exchange of your application, immediately report the scam to authorities.

There are many sites on the internet that exist for only one reason and that is to show webmasters how they can improve their search engine rankings by using SEO Search Engine Optimization techniques. I do not want to comment too much on SEO sites except to say that although there are some very good SEO sites on the net I have found most of them to have no value at all. However, one thing that most SEO sites agree upon is the importance of having incoming links to your site in order to improve your site&8217;s rankings in the search engines.

I am often surprised at how many people follow the advice of SEO sites on how they can improve their site&8217;s ranking in Google&8482; without even considering what Google&8482; has to say on this topic. Nevertheless, Google&8482; is very clear on the importance of incoming links.

Take the time to read the &8220;Webmaster Guidelines&8221; issued by Google&8482;. You can find these valuable guidelines at www.google.com/support/webmasters and then click on &8220;Webmaster Guidelines&8221;. They are very clear.

In principle, links should come from sites with content that is relevant to your own site. It can be similar or complementary. These sites should link to your site because they find your site&8217;s content valuable and consider it to be useful for their own visitors

There are mainly two ways of soliciting links from other webmasters

The one is by looking for sites with content that is relevant to your own site and requesting these webmasters to post a link to your site. You normally need to give them your site&8217;s title, website address and a short description of what your site is all about in order for them to consider adding your link on their site. It is normal that they often request you to first post a link on your site linking back to their site and provide them with the link address to verify you have placed the link before considering linking to yours. Many of these sites will invite other webmasters on their home page to link to their site or inform other webmasters that they are open to exchange links called reciprocal links with suitable sites.

The above method is the correct method of getting other webmasters to link to your site. I like to refer to is as the straight and narrow road &8211; Not always easy and certainly timeconsuming but the best method.

The second method that webmasters often use to get other sites to link to them is to visit socalled &8220;link farms&8221;. These sites normally place adverts like &8220;Get thousands of other sites to link to your site for the low price of only 10&8221;, or &8220;Exchange links now with thousands of other sites&8221;, etc. Sounds good Sure it does. It is the easy way. However, it is not the correct way. The intention of these sites is to mislead the search engines by creating the impression that your site is very popular. Companies like Google&8482; are fully aware of these &8220;tricks&8221;. They will know if you get your incoming links from link farms and these type of links will certainly not help your site&8217;s credibility as far as search engines are concerned. Avoid link farms at all cost

Please note that not all webmasters are prepared to exchange links. Some of the very popular sites receive so many requests to exchange reciprocal links that they either refuse to post any new links or insist that your site must have a certain Google&8482; page rank before they will consider exchanging links. Some of these sites will even charge you a monthly fee for having your link on their site. Do not get discouraged. There are many good websites that will gladly exchange links with your site at no cost.

In case you are wondering, Google&8482; ranks website pages from 1 up to 10, where a page rank of 10 is an indication that Google&8482; considers it as very important. Most website pages on the internet do not have a page rank at all. It takes time to get a page rank. It can take years to get a high page rank. There are many sites that offer a free page rank checker. I can recommend www.prchecker.info. Try to exchange links with sites that have a high page rank, at least higher than your own website&8217;s home page. Having incoming links from &8220;important&8221; sites are always an advantage.

Lastly, it is easy to check how many sites are linking to your site. Once again there are many sites that offer this service for free. I can recommend www.webmastertoolkit.com.

Do not try to convince too many sites to exchange links with your site. Take your time and do not force anything. Having excellent content on your own site is the best incentive for any webmaster to link to your site. Do not make the mistake of chasing after links while neglecting the content of your site. Remember, Rome was not built in a day. It takes time to become a money maker and build a successful internet home based business.

If you mix the best of agile with the best of what opensource development has to offer, youre looking at a recipe for a successful software development experience.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, essentially said as much in a packed session at the OReilly Open Source Convention recently. His words were timely, as the Agile 2008 conference is running the week of Aug. 4 in Toronto.

However, Shuttleworth said from the practices of his team at Canonical, things seem to work best when they incorporate development practices from the opensource communityin with the agile methods they use. That way the efforts tend to run even better than with simply agile practices alone, he said.

Shuttleworth spoke about philosophy, principles, practicesthings that work, and said Canonical has taken on a communityinspired methodology. He said he was filling in for Ian Clatworthy, a senior software engineer at Canonical, who was scheduled to be at the event.

Free software and the process we are learning from communities are changing the professional practice of software development, Shuttleworth said. He noted that James Dixon of Pentaho has come up with a process known as Open Scrum, which resembles the methods Canonical is adopting.

I think free software is going to have a profound impact on the practice of software development in a community setting, he said, and I agree. Even Microsoft is taking advantage of the practices.

Yeah, Microsoft and a whole lot of other companies, including IBM, which refers to its practice of pursuing an internal opensource development model as its community source effort.

When worlds collide, wonderful things happen, Shuttleworth said, adding that most people who move toward agile development tend to look at Scrum, Extreme Programming and LD Lean Development, to name a few styles. So we try to synthesize some of these ideas regarding free software, he said.

For instance, with LD, Shuttleworth said the lesson learned is to eliminate waste, ruthlessly, measurably. He said lessons learned in classic production environments can be applied to software developmentlike from the auto industry.

Moreover, if something is piling upbug reports, tests or whateverthat is waste, he said. When you look at opensource software , its amazing how much waste there is.

Another practice to follow is to amplify learning, Shuttleworth said. In the free software community, the most productive people are not the specialists. Its the ones who know a little bit about everything.

Another agile practice that can be adopted for opensource development is decide late, deliver early, Shuttleworth said. Decide late freaks me out but it works. You do a little bit and deliver it. You have smaller chunks of work moving fast through the system.

Also, another lesson from agile development is to build integrity in. Dont try to add it later, Shuttleworth said. See the wholecultivate a shared result. It is not done until its completely done. This leads you to avoid handoffs, which is good because handoffs are one of the ways that things tend to pileup.

For his part, Shuttleworth said that he and his developers look at the agile world for some of the key valuesbut in the community environment, maybe we can go beyond that.

For instance, pair programming is a core practice of agile development methods. However, in the opensource community, where developers are spread out all over the world, pair programming in the classic sense is difficult. We value knowledge and interest over colocation or sitting together, Shuttleworth said.

Another instance where open source takes a different tack from agile is with the notion of having an inhouse customer. We value community collaboration over internal development, Shuttleworth said. Thats better than having a customer inhouse.

Meanwhile, the process of iterationor iterative developmentwhich is popular in the agile world, requires a certain amount of planning, Shuttleworth said. We value continuous integration over continuous iteration. That fits nicely into the free software world where you dont know whats coming in from the community.

As for quality, we want it for every build, not just every release, he said.

As far as the pace of delivery, cadence is key, Shuttleworth said. We need to go from release early and often to this cyclewe added X. Every month we roll out new code, and beta users get code every day.

It is also important to know where you stand in terms of bugs, features and ideas, he said. Its amazing how many projects dont have bug trackers.

On the issue of branching and merging code, Shuttleworth said developers must keep the trunk pristine, keep releases flowing and release on demand. He said branching and merging is the key practice that enables the team to create cadence.

Meanwhile, Shuttleworth encourages code reviews, which accelerate learning, maintain quality and verify test coverage. He also said he is a stickler for automated testing, including unit testing, integration testing and utilization testing, as well as precommit testing. He joked that a precommit test is like the saying I see you knocking but you cant come in. If any code fails the precommit test, the commit cant happen, Shuttleworth said. If you have precommit testing, you cant argue. Its a way to make sure the trunk is always releasable.

Finally, he said the product is the platform, and if its hard to hack they wont come back, he said.

Shuttleworth said Canonical continues to draw from the agile and opensource communities, which are not mutually exclusive, for ways to improve its development practices.

Meanwhile, from the Agile 2008 conference, according to a report released by Rally Software Development Aug. 4, development teams utilizing agile practices were on average 37 percent faster delivering their software to market and increased their teams productivity by 16 percent.

The report, entitled The Agile Impact Report Proven Performance Metrics from the Agile Enterprise, also concluded that agile teams were able to maintain normal defect counts despite significant schedule compression.

Commissioned by Rally Software Development in May and conducted through July by research firm QSM Associates, the study measured the reallife performance of 26 agile development projects against planbased or waterfall industry averages in three key areas productivity, time to market and defects.

Current market data on the agile industry often falls short of examining the true impact that agile practices have on teams throughout the entire lifecycle, said Tim Miller, Rallys CEO. We wanted to go beyond adoption rates or estimating project improvements and provide software organizations with proven metricssupported by actual project examplesthat accurately demonstrate how agile development projects measure up against planbased or waterfall projects.

By adopting agile practices, the companies measured in the report were able to produce largescale enterprise software in four to 12 months, compared to the one year to 13 months that it takes a typical organization to deliver comparable software.

VersionOne and Danube Technologies are rolling out products to support agile development environments.

At the Agile 2008 show in Toronto Aug. 5, VersionOne announced the availability of an opensource integration between its V1 Agile project management tools and Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008. The company also announced its support for Visual Studio 2008.

VersionOnes integration with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 delivers a Microsoft .Net Frameworkbased solution for agile development teams. By combining VersionOnes agile planning and management tools with Microsofts Visual Studio Team System platform, teams benefit from a scalable, agile ALM application lifecycle management solution.

The combination of VersionOne with Visual Studio Team System is great news for our developers, said Terry Clancy, a product manager in the Microsoft Developer Division. Through support for the Visual Studio development environment, VersionOne is helping .Net Frameworkbased development teams seamlessly incorporate an agile development workflow and project management tool into their existing infrastructure. 

VersionOne provides an opensource plugin for the Visual Studio IDE integrated development environment, which enables developers working in Visual Studio to view and update their work within the VersionOne tool without having to leave the IDE, the company said. With this integration, all team members, using VersionOne, have visibility into summary information about source code checkins and build runs along with a link to detailed information within Microsofts Team Foundation Server.

Meanwhile, Danube Technologies, also at the Agile 2008 conference, announced ScrumCore, its new services division that addresses the entire continuum of Scrum implementations, from early stages to advanced enterprise programs.

In addition to growing its training staff of certified Scrum trainers, the ScrumCore team now offers free Webinar sessions for beginners, and certified Scrum product owner classes. Danubes product and services offerings are designed to help organizations become more successful using Scrum.

By adding free Webinars for beginners and advanced enterprisefocused classes for experienced Scrum professionals, ScrumCore has broadened its focus to speak to the needs of novice and advanced practitioners, said Katie Playfair, Danubes director of client services. ScrumCore continues to provide strong support for our clients and is in the process of developing new ways to bring Scrum values, principles and practices to the software community as a whole.

Borland Software is going full bore into agile software development.

On Aug. 6 at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, Pete Morowski, Borlands senior vice president of research and development, is scheduled to present a session entitled Driving Agile Transformation from the Top Down.

In an interview with eWEEK, Morowski said that at agiles core is a process that seeks more predictable delivery schedules, higher quality products and greater user satisfaction. We made the decision that in order to be a more agile business, we needed to run a more agile software delivery organization.

He said that the biggest fear in going agile is that you will lose control, but the reality is that you never really had control in the first place. Project managers build schedules, but there is really no connection between these dates and windows and what is going on underneath. No visibility into the actual work.  Schedules become a reporting tool, not what is driving the delivery process.  Agile can change that.

Agile development involves a variety of methodologies for making the process of software development more lean and more productive by creating smaller portions of the overall product in iterations.

The reality is that as I lead our agile transition, Morowski said. I have to evaluate it from the perspective of the business  how is agile working for us I have to be able to look at both worlds and understand where the application of agile will achieve the best results. Ultimately, I could care less what methodology we are using as long as we are able to deliver predictable, highquality results. To manage that, I need intelligence. TeamAnalytics lets me see whats working and what isnt, identify trends, surface areas that need more attention, and make informed decisions.

Morowski also said that as an organization is making decisions on how to transform to agile development, visibility into current and historical metrics is critical. Its the only way to plan a successful transition. The data is what helped me to understand the key benefits that Agile brings to teams, so that I can identify the projects that make the most sense to transition, he said.

What prompted Borland to adopt an agile approach in its development strategy

The companys product organization consists of more than 350 personnel in five primary geographic locations, including development sites in Asia and Europe, Morowski said. It is a development shop organized into teams of 12 to 35 engineers delivering a very broad portfolio of products, which contain the typical mix of new and sustaining work projects that are consistent with both ISVs and corporate IT shops. In the past, these teams were able to work fairly independently, with none of the projects overlapping or significantly impacting each other.  However, Borlands evolving business strategy combining products into integrated suites has driven the demand for increased coordination between the teams, Morowski said.

Moreover, as a 25yearold company, Borland has gone through a number of changes. In the process it has acquired a number of companies in many different locations around the globe.

When I joined the company, I found a product organization that was overly distributed, top heavy, and at a cost and investment structure that was not in line with the strategic objectives of the company, Morowski said. In addition, the teams were struggling to consistently meet delivery goals. My charter was to introduce stronger operational oversight, reduce costs and boost the organizations efficiency and quality. I decided to overhaul the organization, and one of the components of this effort would be to broaden our use of agile.

Borlands initial experiences with agile were typical to many organizations they emerged as a grassroots effort started by a couple of teams. However, what was unique was the level of executive visibility and support these grassroots teams commanded from the start. This was in large part due to the fact that one of the teams was responsible for building a new product that the customers could use to manage Scrumbased projects.

Morowski said when he arrived in 2006, the environment was already agilefriendly, with a number of teams either experimenting or claiming adoption of Scrum. The team members that were utilizing it had various levels of experience with and commitment to the approach, he said. Members from teams not utilizing Scrum looked on with skepticism and curiosity, he added. 

Yet, there was no doubt that agile was generating discussion and debate throughout the organization, and there were clearly signs of success even in these early stages of adoption, he said. The success manifested itself in such things as better requirements management through the active use of product backlogs and user stories to drive work; enhanced team collaboration via daily stand up meetings; and greater visibility into the actual state of a project through the frequent integration and delivery of working code.

A typical day for a developer at Borland starts with the daily standup meeting where each team meets to discuss what they accomplished the day before, what they plan to work on that day, and any roadblocks or hurdles they are encountering.

Our teams run their standup meetings with the TeamFocus team board projected on the wall and available to any distributed team members, Morowski said. That way, if they change tasks or reassess work, they can immediately enter it into the system that they use throughout the day, keeping the team and the entire organization uptodate on the project. From there the teams go away and execute.  That is the beauty of the approach.

TeamFocus is a Borland technology for facilitating agile development.

He also noted that Borland is expanding beyond R&D to look at things like improving its processes at the beginning and end of the pipe to accommodate an increased cadence in delivery. No longer are dev cycles measured in 12 to 24 month cycles, he said. This drives a different behavior in both requirements definition and the NPI New Product Introduction processes to meet this change in frequency.

Morowski also said the companys new headquarters is designed to support the needs of the agile team.

As for benefits from agile development, Borland increased its number of releases per year by 100 percent, Morowski said.

Weve created one of the closest, most successful vendorcustomer partnerships Ive ever seen, and weve deepened our relationships with many of our strategic customers, who have participated in more than 50 sprint reviews, he said.

Using TeamFocus,  the company has reduced administrative and planning overhead by an average of 15 hours per threeweek sprint.  And Id say weve eliminated six days a month of VP and director time per product group previously spent reporting, he said.

Morowski also said Borland also has increased product quality, reducing open issues by 50 percent from release to release.

Borland TeamFocus, which will be generally available during the fall, is an enterprise project management and execution product that has helped the company with its transition to an agile enterprise, Morowski said.

However, TeamFocus is designed to support both agile and traditional approaches to development, allowing teams to work the way they are most effective.  For instance, the agile teams use it to plan releases and sprints, manage their backlogs and user stories, and collaborate with burn down charts and corkboards, Morowski said.  

The tool is designed to support the way agile teams work, empowering them to be more effective at their jobs while automatically giving management visibility into progress, he said. Today, Borlands agile teams use TeamFocus to manage their daily stand ups and sprint reviews. It also serves as the daily workbench where agile teams can chart progress against the daily plan, keep updated on changes and stay on the same page throughout the execution of the sprint.  From an organizational perspective, TeamFocus gives department heads a rollup of all their projects. Here they can view current, inflight metrics, which TeamFocus displays from the underlying ALM tools in our case Borland Caliber, Borland StarTeam and Borland SilkCentral Test Manager.

Virtual world software startup Vivaty, one of a handful of companies following the path Linden Labs Second Life has blazed since 2003, has opened up its platform to allow thirdparty programmers to come in and create avatars and threedimensional worlds.

Through a program called Vivaty Create, developers can leverage the companys software to create their own scenes.

Developers will use the threedimensional creation tool Vivaty Studio, which will let developers write 3D designs for the Vivaty platform.

Vivaty Studio can be also used to import COLLADA content that is exported from professional tools such as 3ds Max or Maya from Autodesk.

Vivaty Create is part of a major movement to break the silos and walled gardens inherent in so many social networks on the Web. Facebook started this movement in May 2007 by opening its platform. MySpace, Friendster and others followed suit in an effort to open the Web.

This trend has bled over into the virtual reality software arena with Vivaty. Indeed, the company earlier in 2008 rolled out Scenes, a browserbased widget users can download to construct their own 3D virtual environments on their Facebook profile pages and invite friends to participate.

Create is Vivatys next step in 3D virtual world generation, allowing anyone from a hobbyist to a professional to design and submit new content for Vivaty. Vivaty will choose 24 winners, with No. 1 getting 1,000 in cash toward a trip to meet the Vivaty team in San Francisco.

Early participants will also have the opportunity to join as members of the Vivaty Create Council, where they can voice their ideas and help shape the program. Vivaty cofounder and Chief Platform Officer Tony Parisi wrote on the Vivaty blog

We are eager to engage a wide range of developers. Anyone exporting to COLLADA or authoring in our own tool, Vivaty Studio formerly Flux Studio, can now take a hand to making content for Vivaty. The Vivaty Create program is in its formative stages, and we still have a lot to figure out, but I am excited nonetheless to start working with talented creators to see what can be done with our platform.

Parisi added that Vivaty has received input about Create from content creators such as Cassiopeian, Bryan Ogden well known for his work in Second Life and Living Artz.

Mark Hull, vice president of products at Vivaty, said the company is specifically looking for whimsy, variety, eclectic themes and a new take on 3D on the Web. But be careful what you wish for; Facebook opened with few application guidelines and thousands of annoying, spammy apps proliferated.

Vivaty is going for a more lightweight feel than Second Life, which sports a 100MB download package that chokes some users desktop computers. The company believes it can be the 3D virtual world generator of choice for Facebook programmers. Good apps written in Vivaty Create could proliferate on Facebook.

Vivaty is clearly not gunning for the enterprise user. Yet. IBM swears virtual worlds are slowly being woven into its Lotus Connections platform, but I believe enterprises are still a long way from using these with the frequency of, say, a wiki or a blog.

It is likely that 3D reality applications and widgets will be woven directly into the Web collaboration platforms that we all use in the next five years or so. Vivaty could be one of the early innovators to capitalize on this movement.

In the wake of Apple CEO Steve Jobs telling The Wall Street Journal that there have been more than 60 million apps downloaded from Apples iPhone App store, software maker Morph Labs has launched an application support program for iPhone developers.

Morph Labs is one company in a big cloud of PAAS platform as a service software providers looking to let programmers write applications and host them on its own infrastructure.

Morph, Coghead, Amazon.coms Amazon Web Services, Google, Salesforce.com, Elastra, Etelos and Bungee Labs are among the computing vendors looking to host software for developers or businesses that dont have the capital to buy computer servers and storage arrays, or even an IT staff to maintain the application once its up and running.

In this cloud computing paradigm, another example of how the Web is being used to leverage new business opportunities, programmers write an application, upload it to their platform of choice, and let the service provider deploy and maintain it.

Morph Labs CEO David Abramowski told me the new program for iPhone Web application developers will let them build applications based on Ruby on Rails, Java and Grails and deploy them to the Morph AppSpace service, a managed environment for running Web applications . PHP support is forthcoming.

Programmers upload applications to Morphs data center routing facility, which spins the apps off into an Internet cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud and S3 Simple Storage Service.

More detail about the nuts and bolts operations Abramowski said the Morph Application Platform reversevirtualizes the servers, aggregating the servers underneath the platform instead of atop it.

The computing environment is bundled together in a computer cube, which Morph charges 1 per day to run. Morphs entrylevel service is a twocube system. Morph can place as many cubes as it wants in the cloud, allowing the apps to scale.

Morphs systems administrators then track the bandwidth, providing monitoring and uptotheminute database backups 24/7. If a computing cube goes down at Amazon, Morph can reroute its customers around that to stay online.

That Morph would cozy up to Apples iPhone Apps programmers makes sense for a 1yearold company looking to build up its customer base. Apple launched the App Store July 11, one month ago today, with 550 applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

More than 10 million iPhone Apps were downloaded in the first three days. Apple skipper Jobs told the Journal Aug. 11 that the number has ballooned to 60 million downloads.

This makes it easily one of the most successful Web app platform launches in the history of the Internet, and certainly in the briefer history of the mobile Web.

Now, suppose a single programmer creates an app and puts it on iPhone App Store, and it proves extremely popular. Most programmers wont know how to scale that infrastructure, which is why Morphs opportunity is big.

Indeed, Morph hopes to tap the rabid application programming base for the iPhone to help programmers target the over 5 million iPhone users worldwide.

I believe PAAS providers such as Morph can do a fine job of gaining traction by folding programmers applications under its wing and letting them flourish.

The key, of course, will be uptime. We just got a taste of what happens when Googles Apps go down in the cloud. Morph, which is just starting out, cant afford such disasters.

In the meantime, Morph Labs has created an iPhone developer information center to support iPhone Web app developers.

This years Microsoft PDC Professional Developers Conference will be chock full of content for developers focused on the Microsoft platform.

If nothing else, the preconference sessions that will run Oct. 26, the day before the PDC actually begins, indicate a richness and variety of what Microsoft plans to offer its developer base.

The preconference sessions will touch on everythingfrom .Net data access and advanced Windows debuggingto agile development, multicore programming on Windows and .Netand creating rich Internet applications with Silverlight.

In short, even before the PDC officially begins Oct. 27 in Los Angeles, Microsoft will have set the tone for the event by covering nearly all major topics for early arrivals. For more information on the preconference sessions, check out this Microsoft Channel 9 video.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also will provide attendees with what it calls UnSessions, which include advice from experts, HandsOn Labs, PDC lounges and A Women in Technology Networking Event.

However, missing from the preconference sessions is a focus on Microsofts Oslo modeling strategy and the companys cloud initiative with the Live Mesh solution Microsoft is working on. However, those two areas will be heavily represented in sessions during the overall conference.

So far, Microsoft has listed 84 sessions that will be presented at the PDC, covering topics from ADO.Net to the WPF Windows Presentation Foundation. Other topics include ASP.Net, cloud services, Dynamics CRM, Entity Framework, HyperV virtualization technology, Internet Information Services IIS, Internet Explorer, Languages, LINQ Language Integrated Query, Live Mesh and Silverlight.

With Oslo, Microsoft is pushing its developers into a new directionenabling them to create applications from models. Microsoft officials said they expect to release a CTP Community Technology Preview of Oslo at the show. That means a CTP of the new declarative language associated with Oslo, the new repository and new tools.

In a PDC session entitled A Lap around Oslo, Microsoft architects Chris Anderson and Don Box will give developers a primer on the technology. Anderson and Box always deliver a good show and provide a good amount of technical information. I last saw the duo stand and deliver at the Lang.Net Symposium in January at Microsoft, so if youre interested in Oslo, you probably dont want to miss this session.

Meanwhile, another Oslo session to catch is the one by Oliver Sharp, a general manager in the Microsoft Connected Systems Division, which is responsible for Oslo. Sharp will present a session entitled Oslo Managing Software Services Applications. The online description of the session reads

Increasingly, applications will consist of services that run both onpremises and in the cloud. Learn how Microsoft is simplifying the deployment and management of Software Services applications.

In all, there are eight Oslo sessions listed on the PDC agenda thus far. Other Oslo sessions cover hosting workflows and services in Oslo, customizing and extending the visual design experience, focusing on the Oslo language and more.

There also are three sessions on Live Mesh, focusing on how to build applications for the platform. If youre interested in Live Mesh, you might want to catch Microsoft presenter Andres Sanabria in a session entitled, Live Platform Building Mesh Applications, which is described as

The Live Mesh cloud services and client platform provide powerful FeedSyncbased data synchronization capabilities, device P2P and cloudrelay communications, pubsub infrastructure, and an extensibility model for applications. This session describes how you can take advantage of the Mesh developer platform, protocols, and APIs to meshenable your existing and future Web services and client applicationsallowing you to target unique new scenarios and reach new users.

Between the Oslo focus and the Microsoft softwareplusservices drive around Live Mesh and cloud services about which there are 12 sessions, Microsofts PDC2008 looks like its shaping up to be a cloud festa comingout party for new technology for the new Microsoft. 

Microsoft is releasing to manufacturing the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Aug. 11, and developers have weighed in saying the new offering enhances their capabilities for building and delivering applications.

Although Microsoft is delivering new functionality in these service pack releases, the offerings provide a host of advancements that might otherwise have been made into an entire new release, if not a point or dotone release. Some early users of the technology have been able to build functional projects based on Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, using the more modeldriven aspects of the technology, among other things.

In an interview with eWeek, Shanku Niyogi, Microsoft product unit manager for the technology, said the releases come nine months after the release of the .Net Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 and include a substantial number of updates based directly on customer feedback.

With these SP1 releases, were doing something a little different, Niyogi said. Were providing the typical guidance, but were also looking at customer feedback and the way people are building applications, and were putting in building blocks to help them do that better. Were giving them a more modeldriven approach to development.

The service packs include new features such as the .Net Framework Client Profile for faster deployment of Windowsbased applications, multiple enhancements to ASP.Net, and support for database application development through the ADO.Net Entity Framework, ADO.Net Data Services and integration with SQL Server 2008.

Another big area of focus is were making data driven applications better and easier to build and to be flexible and able to evolve over time, said Sam Gazitt, a product manager in the Microsoft Developer Division.

Were enabling developers to be able to build application user interface and customize that in a modeldriven way, Niyogi said.

Microsoft also is promoting more of a rapid application development scheme with the service pack releases, he said. Were making the challenge of application development a much easier and quicker proposition.

The .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 includes several improvements to the Microsoft CLR Common Language Runtime, such as the ability to generate managed code that improves application startup time by 20 to 45 percent and endtoend application execution time up to 10 percent, and the ability of managed code to take advantage of the ASLR Address Space Layout Randomization security feature in Windows Vista, Microsoft officials said. In addition, .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 has improvements for the creation of richclient applications and lineofbusiness applications using WPF Windows Presentation Foundation.

Moreover, the .Net Framework 3.5, released in November 2007, already contains features for developing Web 2.0 applications and dynamic Web sites, including new server controls and a clientscript library for AJAXstyle applications. Yet with .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, the .Net Framework now offers support for ASP.Net Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that allows rapid datadriven development without writing code.

In addition, the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 includes ADO.Net Data Services and ADO.Net Entity Framework, which raise the level of abstraction for database programming and supply both a new modelbased paradigm and a rich, standardsbased framework for creating dataoriented Web services. With this service pack, Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 also support SQL Server 2008.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is more than a service pack. It is the ship vehicle for the Entity Framework as well as Astoria aka ADO.Net Data Services as well as Dynamic Data, said Stephen Forte, a developer focusing on the Microsoft platform. So it is full of new features on top of any service pack items we may care about.

For their part, to help medical staff reduce manual, paperbased processes, Misys Healthcare Systems and Veracity Solutions collaborated to create FreeNatal, a Webbased application that provides prenatal care providers with an easytouse, secure interface for managing patients records. Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, eight members from the MisysVeracity team created the application. By taking advantage of these powerful technologies, the team increased development speed by 60 percent, enabling accelerated market delivery and further strengthening their respective positions in the health care informatics industry.

Its a rare thing to have the right business opportunity at the right time with the right people, said Galen Earl Murdock, president and CEO of Veracity Solutions. Its even rarer to have the right technology at the same time. Such was our experience with FreeNatal. ADO.Net Data Services and ADO.Net Entity Framework were precisely what the team needed to deliver a secure, robust backend for this product. Its not often the planets align like that.

Murdock said he was initially skeptical about the Microsoft technology. We knew that FreeNatal would be a rich, AJAXbased Web application. We also knew that wed store the data in SQL Server, he said. The question was how to connect the twowhat to put in the middle. Entity Framework seemed like a nobrainer, but we were wary about the new technology on the blockADO.Net Data Services. Imagine how pleased we were to have a technology completely measure up to our needs and expectations.

Meanwhile, Gregg Jensen, a senior software engineer at Veracity Solutions, said

After many years of manually architecting my own data access layers, I can honestly say that Entity Framework was able to accomplish everything of the systems that I have built, and much more. In projects of the past I have spent many weeks both maintaining and updating data access layers, and it is great to see that Microsoft has build a data access layer that handles all of the setup and maintenance for you. I have been very impressed by the ease with which queries and updates can be performed using LINQ Language Integrated Query to Entities, and the flexibility of the underlying model. FreeNatal, as well as other new projects I have worked on, have benefited greatly from the time savings of using Entity Framework, as well as the maintainability.  Microsoft has truly taken out a major piece of any new project, the data access layer, and done all of the work for you.

Moreover, regarding ADO.Net Data Services, Jensen said that in a world of growing interconnected services, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain compatibility from application to application. Yet, ADO.Net Data Services now gives developers the ability to develop reliable, secure and reusable services without needing to interact directly with each company that might use them, he said.

On the FreeNatal project we were able to quickly add new features using JavaScript and HTML, with rarely needing to change the underlying ADO.NET Data Service that handled all of the data access, Jensen said.

In addition, the innovation behind the SQLlike URL query capability of Data Services is a technology that the internet has needed for a long time, Jensen said.

While ADO.Net Data Services comes with most of what you need right out of the box, it is also very customizable with the ability to add focused queries and updates using Service Operations. We have used Query and Change interceptors extensively on FreeNatal.  Throughout the application we were able to write simple URL queries, and allow Data Services to automatically filter the data retrieved by each user that should have access to it. We were able to use change interceptors to update interrelated fields such as an estimated date of delivery, and the gestational age of a fetus, which allowed us a simple abstraction of updating a single field and having the results cascade through the database.

Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at Twentysix New York, said

The reality is that ADO.Net is still very much alive and well and given EFs Entity Framework reliance on it, its not likely to be going away. Conventional ADO.Net code will likely remain the most efficient way to perform data access. Even if Microsoft developers were to flock to ORM programming in droves, ADO.Net would likely remain in place and be at least the .Net data access analog to native code.

Meanwhile, Using the Entity Framework has significantly sped up our development cycle by removing a lot of the custom code we have to write, said David Copple, lead developer at The Test Factory. The Entity Framework took away the tedium of having to write standard data access code and business objects, which gave our team a big productivity boost.

Oracle is rolling out a new release of the WebLogic application server the company acquired when it bought BEA Systems in January.

The new release features enhancements for Web 2.0 development and enhanced support for the Spring Framework and other improvements. Its also the first release to unify Oracle and BEA technology. The release also solidifies Oracles commitment to the BEA customer base, Oracle officials said.

On July 1, Oracle announced its Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy and plans for integration of BEA products, and the company delivered Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3 Aug. 11.

Oracle officials said WebLogic Server 10g R3 is among the first of a number of products that combine technology from Oracle Fusion Middleware and BEA Systems.  In addition, Oracle WebLogic Server 10g R3 is the cornerstone of Oracle WebLogic Suite.

The new Oracle WebLogic Server also includes new features and capabilities, as well as integration with other strategic Oracle Fusion Middleware products such as Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle TopLink, as well as Oracle Enterprise Manager. It also extends Oracles hotpluggable middleware strategy and supports a variety of development environments , including Eclipse, Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle WebLogic Workshop 10.3.

New features for the product include enhanced support for Spring Framework developers, a new HTTP publishsubscribe feature that supports Web 2.0style rich user interfaces, and support for Java SE 6 and JRockit Mission Control. The latter two features enable developers and end users to get more performance and insight into application behavior, Oracle officials said.

For those of us who can accept that some software knows where we are, Yahoo Aug. 12 trumpeted the launch of Fire Eagle, a platform that lets programmers write Web services based on users locations.

Fire Eagle lets users submit and store information in a Yahoo repository that lets them decide how and with whom they want to share that information. Importantly, Fire Eagle lets users hide themselves, change their preferences or delete any of their stored information.

Use Fire Eagle if youre willing to disclose where you are at a given time and place. The idea is that, eventually, a software service might find you to give you notifications of, say, a friend or a sale in the area.

For that reason, Fire Eagle is best used when youre on the go and using your mobile phone, though it can also be used to let Web desktop applications update users locations on the fly or manually.

Such a service only works if Web services will work with it, which is why its good that its been tucked into more than 50 live applications, including Dopplr, Pownce and Movable Type.

Pownce users, for example, can now say where they are and geotag their notes. Brightkite, a locationbased social network, also leverages Fire Eagle to let users track their friends locations and meet new people in their area.

Programmers for these participating companies use the Fire Eagle API so they can leverage location in their services without having to build the infrastructure to find where users are.

Fire Eagle, hatched in Yahoos Brickhouse startup incubator, is free for users and developers, though its conceivable Yahoo will try to place online ads alongside the application if such locationbased services catch on.

ABI Research said locationbased mobile social networking services from startups such as GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt are providing users better social networking services because they let users exchange recommendations about places and find nearby friends.

Despite these services and the emergence of Fire Eagle as a platform on which companies might build locationaware perks, Im not thrilled with the prospect.  ReadWriteWeb raves about the privacy element of such services, but I cant get too worked up about that.

Some people will love that they get picked out by their friends from their mobile phones, but I dont need my privacy infringed upon any more than it is. Its hard enough to disappear in this electronic age without another service to help find me, find me people to talk to or find me things to buy.

Would I have appreciated a GPS when I got lost in Siena and the backroads of Chianti this summer Absolutely. I dont mind if a computer knows where I am, but Im not certain I want a computer telling other people where I am and what Im doing.

Unless I see otherwise on the East Coast, I think Fire Eagle and other services of its ilk will be a Silicon Valley value proposition for the cool kids and little more.

I realize Fire Eagle has been in the works for awhile, but its still not a service thats going to help the company pull its head out of the financial quagmire. Dont be surprised if, when Microsoft buys Yahoo next year, the service gets lost in the void.

Michael Phelps is not the only one breaking records and winning gold at the Olympics in Beijing.

If Microsofts Silverlight continues to have the success it has had in streaming video coverage of the Olympic Games around the world, it could mean gold for Microsoft as the software giant continues its competition with Adobe and that companys ubiquitous Flash technology.

Adobe claims that up to 75 percent or more of the video on the Internet uses Flash. The company also claims a huge number of Flash downloads a day. In a recent interview with eWEEK, Adrian Ludwig, group manager of product marketing in the Adobe Platform and Developer Business Unit, said Adobe sees 10 million downloads of Flash each day. However, with the Olympics and the deal Microsoft has with NBC to stream the coverage, Microsoft officials said Silverlight has been downloaded up to 8 million times a day over the last several days.

You have to look at things like the development perspective and what this all means for developers, and how this changes the game, said Brian Goldfarb, group product manager of Microsofts Developer Division. Weve provided competition in a market that desperately needed competition.

Goldfarb also noted, from a Silverlight perspective, this is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate whats possible with the technology. This puts a stake in the ground and is saying were here. This may be the single biggest online event and Microsoft is empowering it.

And the 2008 Olympic Games are smashing old online records set for the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. In the first four days of events, NBCOlympics.com surpassed the totals for the entire Athens Games in page views, video streams and unique users.

Here are the stats through first four days of the Beijing games compared with entire Athens games. There were 13.5 million video streams for the Beijing games, versus 2.2 million for the entire Athens gamesa difference of 514 percent. Through the first four days there were 16.9 million unique users for the Beijing games, versus 11.1 million for the entire Athens games. And regarding page views, there were 291.1 million for Beijing versus 229.9 million for the entire Athens games.

NBC and Microsoft are enabling viewers to watch more than 3,500 hours of Olympics coverage, with nearly 3,000 hours of live coverage being made available, Microsoft officials said.

Moreover, Goldfarb said, on Aug. 11, for instance, 250TB of data was delivered via Silverlight.

When you think about the size and scope of all this its kind of mindboggling, he said.

Some have mentioned that Microsofts Silverlight strategy could conjure up vestiges of past antitrust issues. To this Goldfarb simply said, The key thing here is this is the first time people have had competition. Indeed, Ludwig noted that Flashs penetration may be as high as 98 percent of all PCs. Goldfarb presents Silverlight as an opportunity for developers and designers.

Goldfarb also noted that developers can use Microsofts free Visual Studio Express tools to create Silverlight applications. And its not just for .NET developers, Goldfarb said, noting that Microsoft is working with Novell to deliver a Linux version of Silverlight known as Moonlight.

The specification that was to lead to a revised JavaScript language has been taken off the table in lieu of a more harmonious approach to reaching standardization for the next version of the language that will take the Web forward.

The Ecma International standards body, which oversees the ECMAScript language, has decided to scrap the ECMAScript 4.0 standardization effort to focus on a new project known as Harmony. Ecma also is working on a specification called ECMAScript 3.1, which was to be an interim spec before ECMAScript 4 was released. ECMAScript 4 was to become JavaScript 2, but no more.

First, the difference between ECMAScript 3.1 and ECMAScript Harmony should be made clear. 3.1 is a bug fix for the current JavaScript, said Alex Russell, cocreator of the Dojo Toolkit and a member of the Ecma technical committee working on the specification. Harmony will pick up from 3.1 and try to introduce many of the types of features that were slated for ES4 but with different syntax and from a different approach. This is great news for everyone since it means that the standards body is going to be working toward a future that is deemed good or bad based on whats good for the language as it will exist in Web browsers . There is likely a mandate for the language outside of the browser environment, but designing the next language in a vacuum of realworld users of new syntax was going to hound the ES4 effort. That risk is now gone.

John Resig, creator of jQuery and an evangelist for Mozilla, which was one of the major forces behind ECMAScript 4, said in a blog post Aug.13, First, you can forget a lot of what you learned about ECMAScript 4, previously. Many of the complicated concepts contained in the language have been tossed. Instead there is a considerable amount of effort going into making sure that new features will be easily duplicable through other means.

Meanwhile, Harmony is the new code name for a language which is to come after ES3.1. It will feature many of the things ES4 was trying to accomplish, but may attempt them from different directions and will focus much more on incremental, stepwise evolution of the language, Russell said. JavaScript 2 is a nowdefunct name, he said.

Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, spoke of some of the issues regarding ECMAScript standardization in an eWEEK interview earlier in 2008.

Doug Crockford, a Yahoo engineer and a member of the Ecma technical committee focusing on advancing ECMAScript, said in an Aug. 14 blog post

Some of the features that were in ES4 were reasonable, so a new project, called Harmony, is starting which will look at adapting the best of ES4 on top of ES3.1. The success of this project will depend on the ability of TC39 the Ecma technical committee drafting the standard to do a better job of managing the tradeoffs between innovation and stability, and adopting a discipline for managing complexity. Simplicity should be highly valued in a standard. Simplicity cannot be added. Instead, complexity must be removed.

Meanwhile, some have characterized the move toward Harmony as a loss of face for Adobe because ECMAScript 4 was to be based on Adobes ActionScript 3. Yet, The folks who have written it this way have gotten it wrong, not least of all because they havent been sitting in the meetings and havent seen how the resulting differences come from good faith disagreements, not simple strategic posturing, Russell said. ES4 as outlined last fall wasnt Adobes language, and there was no chance that ES3.1 would have ever been as tepid as many assumed Microsoft wanted it to be.

Indeed, Russell said ECMAScript 4 was not ActionScript 3. Major changes to the semantics of Adobes initial contribution ensured that any truly compliant ES4 implementation from Adobe would have required many concessions, including the inclusion of a clientside compiler, he said.

Googles Android team took significant technical and procedural steps Aug. 18 with the release of a beta version of the new Android 0.9 SDK and the introduction of a development road map for the Linuxbased mobile operating system.

The release comes the day Engadget, VentureBeat and other blogs found schematics for the first Androidbased phone, the HTC Dream, as well as the blessing by the Federal Communications Commission for the device to hit the market Nov. 10.  

More significantly, the software development kit comes after a raft of controversy in July in which programmers building Android applications complained that only the 50 winners of the Android Developer Challenge contest were given the SDK beta.

Some programmers took exception to the perceived preferential treatment and vowed to take their coding skills to Apples iPhone or some other smart phone.

This would be a difficulty for Googles Android effort as the company seeks to expand its mobile advertising and applications positions versus the iPhone and devices from Nokia, Research In Motion, Palm and Microsoft.

Other developers complained about Googles lack of transparency around Androids development timeline. This brings us full circle to today, Aug. 18. Google Android Developer Advocate Dan Morrill wrote in a blog post that the 0.9 SDK beta is the first big step on the SDKs road to compatibility with 1.0. Morrill added

Since this is a beta release, applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0. However, the APIs are now pretty stable and we dont expect any major changes. If youre one of the many developers who were waiting for something a bit more mature, this might be a good time to take another look.

To help programmers on this yellow brick road of development, Google has published an Android development road map, which you may view here.

Google reaffirmed a bunch of release dates, including the Android 1.0 SDK release 1 availability date third or fourth quarter of 2008, the first Android 1.0 devices available fourth quarter and the release of the source code in the fourth quarter.

The road maps details are sparse, but it should allay programmers fears that the Android team, by virtue of being so secretive these last few months, was clashing with classic opensource practices of full disclosure.

As for the SDK itself, the changes are many. Morrill said it includes a new Home screen with user interface changes for 1.0, new development tools, such as a graphical preview for XML layouts for users of Eclipse, and a tool for constructing 9 Patch images.

Android advocates also removed GTalkService and the Bluetooth API for security reasons. Read about more changes here in the release notes.

Overall, programmers should be pleased by the work. The rest of us can prepare for another tidal shift in sentiment around Android. 

In June, Google was besieged by negative press after the Wall Street Journal said Google and its partners would not meet their fourthquarter deadlines for producing Android phones.

Google stoutly refuted these delay claims. A couple of weeks later, Googles Android team was perhaps justly abused for partiality around the SDK release.

In the course of one day, we learned that the HTC Dream was cleared for takeoff Nov. 10, just in time for the holiday rush, and got a look at the new Android SDK and a development road map.

Thats quite a turnaround. As we roll toward the fall and Google and its Open Handset Alliance partners have to file more public documentation about Android phones, expect more reports and schematics to surface.

Ill reserve judgment until people buy these phones and begin to use them. If most people dont feel the user experience is on par with the iPhone, thats when well be able to begin sounding the death knell for Android.

Embarcadero Technologies plans to release the next generation of its CodeGearformerly Borlandrapid application development tools for Windows, Delphi 2009 and CBuilder 2009, on Aug. 25.

For packaged software developers and enterprise developers building client/server applications, the new CodeGear releases will make application creation more efficient and productive, Embarcadero officials said.

The new releases are going to be the biggest releases of Delphi and C in many years, going back to the Delphi 7 time frame, said Michael Swindell, vice president of products for Embarcadero, which attained the technology when it bought CodeGear from Borland in May. Delphi 7 came out in 2002.

Swindell said Delphi 2009 and CBuilder 2009 are targeted at both ISVs and lineofbusiness, workgroup client/server development.

We think the packaged software industry and the lineofbusiness and client/server area are very important parts of the software market, and Delphi and CBuilder are premier tools for these areas, Swindell said.

He also noted that with the new releases, developers can now easily expand the global reach of their applications with builtin support for Unicode throughout Delphi 2009 and CBuilder 2009.

Weve gone through the products from top to bottom and Unicodeenabled everything, Swindell said. We also revamped all our localization and translation tools.

Builtin support for Unicode means that applications will look and operate properly on all language versions of Windows and seamlessly support both Unicode and ANSI data, the company said. In addition, new and enhanced localization tools make it easier to translate applications to take advantage of specific local opportunities, Embarcadero officials said.

Hannes Danzl, a software developer at Nexus Database Systems, which uses Delphi, told eWEEK

For us as a database vendor, Delphi 2009 is the most important new release since Delphi 3. We are very excited about the full Unicode support and the numerous changes to the data access layers. Naturally, for a database product Unicode was always important, and we had to jump through a number of hoops to support it. Delphi 2009 now fully implements this functionality at all levels from compiler to IDE integrated development environment and allows us to provide complete support for Unicode to our customers. Delphi 2009 is bringing CodeGear back to the top spot of RAD rapid application development. For anyone serious about internationally deployed database applications, Delphi 2009 is an absolute must.

Moreover, the new releases take the Delphi and C languages forward with a host of powerful new programming language features such as Delphi generics and upcoming C0x standard language features. Were bringing the languages to the leading edge, Swindell said.

In addition, a new multitier DataSnap architecture enables developers to use RAD to build highperformance, highly scalable database middleware applications, Embarcadero said. The middleware applications can be connected to via a lightweight, open communications protocol with thin, fullfeatured clients that can reside on virtually any native or Web client platform, Embarcadero officials said.

Swindell said the community of Delphi and CBuilder developers continues to grow. In 2006 there were 1.75 million Delphi developers and now there are more than 2 million, he said.

Mauricio Buso, a developer with HK Engenharia and another Delphi user, said

Delphi 2009 will bring to us a new level of deployment, using the new DataSnap/DBExpress framework. Now, without dependence of COM and Unicode support, we can deploy new concepts of clientside applications, and new clients in other languages. We plan to deploy our ERP system in all of Latin America and the USA, because today we deploy only in Brazil.

Swindell said Delphi and CBuilder 2009 are tailormade for organizations building packaged software for resale or redistribution, highperformance graphical workstation applications, and client/server workgroup database applications. Top industries using Delphi and CBuilder today to build nextgeneration solutions include ISVs, microISVs, banking and finance, manufacturing, government, health care, science and engineering, and telecommunications, he said.

Delphi 2009 and CBuilder 2009 support development and deployment on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Other new and enhanced features of the two products include new VCL Visual Component Library components including Microsoft Officestyle ribbon controls, PNG Portable Network Graphics image support, dozens of new capabilities for existing controls, and the ability to seamlessly build powerful UIs for Windows XP and Vista desktop applications simultaneously, the company said.

The releases also feature a new capability known as VCL for the Web, which enables developers to build AJAX and Silverlightenabled rich intranet and lineofbusiness Web applications, Embarcadero officials said. The products also have updated builtin dbExpress support for CodeGear InterBase and Blackfish SQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Informix, IBM DB2, SQL Anywhere, Sybase and MySQL databases.

Swindell pointed out that Delphi 2009 and CBuilder 2009 are the first CodeGear products to emerge from Embarcadero since the acquisition. Thus the new releases represent the first Embarcadero solutions to bring together advanced CodeGear and DatabaseGear functionality in a single offering, he said.

The addition of Embarcadero technology enabled the company to deliver new editions of the CodeGear toolsthe Architect editions. The Delphi and CBuilder Architect editions include ER/Studio Developer Edition to provide a complete solution for designing and building database applications. This integration results in enhanced productivity and time to market for developers, Embarcadero officials said.

Our goal as a combined company is to eliminate the development barriers between applications and databases, Swindell said. This release combines database architecture and design features from ER/Studio with Delphi and CBuilder to create the ultimate database application design and development solutionthe allnew Delphi and CBuilder Architect Editions.

Delphi 2009 and CBuilder 2009 will be available on Aug. 25 with North American pricing beginning at 399 per license for Professional editions, 1,299 for Enterprise editions and 2,299 for Architect editions.

Googles OpenSocial API has been available for several months, but the company hasnt provided much of a sandbox in which developers can test the social software.

That changed Aug. 21 when Google launched Partuza Spanish slang for party, a sample social networking site where programmers can write and test their OpenSocial widgets on their own computers. Here is the live Partuza site.

Partuza is written in PHP and is available under the Apache opensource license. This allows developers to see how they can use PHP Shindig to add OpenSocial support to their sites and even take the code and use it directly in their social network.

Started by Google Nov. 1 2007, OpenSocial is an effort to make the Web more social by allowing programmers to use opensource APIs to write applications that will run on any social network, including MySpace, Hi5 and Friendster.

Though Google doesnt lay claim to a large social network Orkut is big in Brazil, it wants to provide an alternative landing for programmers who may not want to work with leading social networks Facebook and MySpace, which propel their own data portability efforts.

Partuza was created by Chris Chabot, a software engineer at H2Services, and a member of the project management committee at the Apache Software Foundation.

Chabot describes himself as interested and involved in OpenSocial. He offers a guide on how to set up the PHP version of Shindig and Partuza on a Windows machine here.

According to sources Ive spoken to in my West Coast travels, OpenSocial iterations have been creaky enough to dissuade developers from using the APIs.

But by supporting a sample site from a thirdparty engineer, Google is fostering good will among current OpenSocial programmers. Moreover, Partuza may be the push that Google needed to get people over the OpenSocial fence.

I think Chabots work should give people who are nervous about working with Google some comfort. Google likes to say OpenSocial is not its baby. When other people develop resources for the OpenSocial APIs, it supports Googles claim.

Facebook and MySpace have advantages in that they have networks with a combined 200 millionplus people, but the disadvantage is that because they preside over the network, people accuse them of being too controlling when it comes to data portability efforts. It doesnt matter that their platforms are positioned as open; the perception stands.

Google doesnt yet suffer the same perception.

Partuza comes two days after Friendster deployed OpenSocial v0.7 as part of its Friendster Developer Program. This will deliver OpenSocial applications to over 75 million Friendster users around the world.

The folks at Mozilla have souped up JavaScript with a new justintime compilation scheme in a project known as TraceMonkey, which boosts JavaScript performance as much as 22.5 times depending on which benchmarks and tests you use.

Brendan Eich, chief technology officer at Mozilla, called the technology a game changer and said TraceMonkey moves the goal posts for JavaScript developers.

Like other dynamic languages such as Ruby and Perl, JavaScript has suffered from issues of poor performance compared with statically typed languages. TraceMonkey helps overcome those performance issues. Mike Schroepfer, former vice president of engineering at Mozilla, who now works at Facebook, developed a demo to show how TraceMonkey improves JavaScript performance.

Moreover, in a blog post, Eich said, Im extremely pleased to announce the launch of TraceMonkey, an evolution of Firefoxs SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1 that uses a new kind of JustInTime JIT compiler to boost JS performance by an order of magnitude or more.

In an interview with eWEEK, Eich said Mozilla began work on TraceMonkey just over 60 days ago with the help of Andreas Gal of the University of California, Irvine. And TraceMonkey is slated for inclusion in Firefox 3.1, Eich said.

In a post on Ajaxian.com, Ben Galbraith, cofounder of Ajaxian, said

For years, many of us have been salivating over the idea of JITed JavaScript in the browser. Adobes JITing Flash VM virtual machine showed a preview of tremendous speed gains to be had, but weve had to wait until SquirrelFish from WebKit to see anything dramatic happen in the browser. Until now.

A fantastic new improvement to Mozillas JavaScript engine has landed. Codenamed TraceMonkey, this engine utilizes a technique, called trace trees, which adds justintime native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, said John Resig, a Mozilla evangelist and creator of jQuery JavaScript library.

A major goal of the project has been to set JavaScript up to compete with natively compiled code, rather than simply against other interpreters, said Resig. This means that were starting to see speeds that are completely out of this league when it comes to performance.

Added Eich, Were supporting a bunch of platforms out of the box, including ARM, so were supporting mobile Firefox.

In a section of his post describing What it all means, Eich said

We have, right now, x86, x8664, and ARM support in TraceMonkey. This means we are ready for mobile and desktop target platforms out of the box.

As the performance keeps going up, people will write and transport code that was too slow to run in the browser as JS. This means the web can accommodate workloads that right now require a proprietary plugin.

As we trace more of the DOM and our other native code, we increase the memorysafe code base that must be trusted not to have an exploitable bug.

Tracing follows only the hot paths, and builds a tracetree cache. Cold code never gets traced or JITted, avoiding the memory bloat that wholemethod JITs incur. Tracing is mobilefriendly.

JSdriven <canvas> rendering, with toolkits, scene graphs, game logic, etc. all in JS, are one wave of the future that is about to crest.

Moreover, Eich said, TraceMonkey advances us toward the Mozilla 2 future where even more Firefox code is written in JS. Firefox gets faster and safer as this process unfolds.

Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla, said of the TraceMonkey results

These are the early results from a project weve been calling TraceMonkey, which adds native code compilation to Mozillas JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey. Based on a technique developed at UC Irvine called trace trees, and building on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project, a few of us have spent the last 2 months and most of the last few nights teaching SpiderMonkey some exciting new tricks.

The goal of the TraceMonkey projectwhich is still in its early stagesis to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code.

Describing the concept of tracing, Resig wrote

In simple terms tracing works by watching for commonlyrepeated actions such as loops, function calls, or type checking and tries to optimize their resulting native code into the lowest number of actions. The premise is rather simpleand its an advance that well probably see proliferate to many interpreters and engines in the upcoming years.

You record the instructions the interpreter is executing, like a VCR, Eich said.

Were looking at putting this tracing JIT into our native C DOM Document Object Model code base, Eich told eWEEK. Were going to make our DOM traceable. Well move a lot of our code into JavaScript.

With the performance enhancements afforded by TraceMonkey, developers can start transporting code from other languages and other platforms and porting it to the browser, Eich said. This moves the goal posts on proprietary plugins, he said. JavaScript with TraceMonkey will be so fast people can do ports of games.

Eich also noted that this TraceMonkey news is only a start. With tracing, performance will keep going up. We have easy small linear speedup tasks remaining better register allocation, spill reduction around builtin calls. We will trace string and regular expression code. ... We will even trace into DOM methods. The tracing JIT approach scales as you move more code into JS, or otherwise into view of the tracing machinery.

So what does this all mean, you might ask Well, Resig asked the same question and answered it

It means that JavaScript is no longer confined by the previously challenging resource of processing power. With this improvement its leapfrogged any sort of traditional and has gone headtohead with computationally powerful languages like C.

Resig also said he expects to see more, massive projects being written in JavaScript, including projects that expect the performance gains that were starting to see, such as applications that are numberheavy like image manipulation or objectheavy like relational object structures.

For his part, Resig said he is especially interested in how TraceMonkey will impact development using Canvas. Canvas is an HTML element that can be used to draw graphics using scripting, typically with JavaScript.

The primary thing holding back most extensive Canvas development hasnt been renderingbut the processor limitations of the language performing the challenging mathematical operations related to vectors, matrices or collision detection, Resig said. I expect this area to absolutely explode after the release of Firefox 3.1 as we start to see this work take hold.

Eich said he expects other browsers to follow suit and begin to use JIT compilation for JavaScript.

I believe that other browsers will follow our lead and take JavaScript performance through current interpreter speed barriers, using justintime native code compilation, Eich said. Beyond what TraceMonkey means for Firefox and other Mozilla projects, it heralds the JavaScript Lightspeed future weve all been anticipating. We are moving the goal posts and changing the game, for the benefit of all Web developers. 

Mozilla Labs has launched a prototype of a software service that lets nontechnical Web users create mashups, those marriages of applications such as Google Maps and other information to create more useful apps.

As the name implies, Ubiquity is intended to bring together any Web content in what is largely a disconnected Web.

Our current iteration of the Internet, Web 2.0, lets users generate a lot of content, but that content is largely siloed in different repositories. Ubiquity aims to create new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to carry out common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

For example, Ubiquity takes more traditional Web 2.0 mashups a step forward. Todays mashups are problematic for the average Web user because they are static, require Web development skills and are created for specific Web sites, wrote Aza Raskin, Mozilla Labs head of user experience, in a blog post Aug. 26.

Programmers know how to access this content, pull data from different apps together and create mashups of two or more apps. But Joe Web User has to leverage the mashups of the programmers because he lacks the knowledge and training to create his own mashups.

Ubiquity 0.1 will let users perform such tasks as emailing friends or colleagues maps of locations; translating text to a different language directly from a Web page; searching key sites including Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon.com, Digg and Twitter; and finding and inserting reviews from local search site Yelp.

Here is Raskins reasoning for why we need Ubiquity

Youre writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. Youd like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a Web mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you havent even really sent a map or useful reviewsonly links to them.

In a video demonstration, Raskin used Ubiquity to highlight a restaurant in a Gmail email to a friend, select a map it instruction from the Ubiquity tool bar in Firefox, tailor the map and insert it into Gmail. Then he added a restaurant review from Yelp to the email and booked the appointment into his Google Calendar.

Its 2008 and I cant actually add a map to my email, Raskin noted in the video. We want to empower the user to be able to make mashups on their own, not have to wait for a developer to do it for them.

All of the code for the Ubiquity experiment is being released as opensource software under the GPL/MPL/LGPL trilicense.

Ubiquity is very forwardlooking, so forwardlooking that I think its Web 2.5worthy, for lack of an official descriptor for the next iteration of the Internet.

I havent had a chance to play with Ubiquity yet, but if this service works as easily as what I saw in Raskins video demo, the tool will be a huge hit with users, particularly because of the integrations with Yelp, Twitter, Google and other Web services.

Giving lay Web surfers the ability to mash up and manipulate content to their hearts content is great, especially because its open source. Lets hope more Web service providers hop on board to support Ubiquity if it passes muster with testers.

Aptana is bringing its brand of AJAXstyle development to the Python community by acquiring the Pydev suite of Python development tools.

Aptanas acquisition of the Eclipsebased IDE integrated development environment for Python also is a boon for developers integrating Web development with cloud computing, as on the Google App Engine, because not only is Aptana enhancing its stable of Web development tools, it is upleveling support for the popular Python development tools suite. Google App Engine only supports Python development for now.

This has been a great year for the Python developer community with the advent of great frameworks such as Django and deployment solutions such as Google App Engine, said Dion Almaer, open Web advocate for Google. Django is a popular Python Web development framework.

Now the tooling is getting better all the time. One of the great tools is Pydev, especially if you are Eclipseminded. Having Aptana take on Pydev only means progress for that project and Python developers, Almaer said.

Kevin Hakman, director of evangelism at Aptana, told eWEEK, The addition of Pydev to the Aptana product suite rounds out the set of scripting languages that Aptana already supports, including AJAX and JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and now Python too. Pydev brings firstclass Python support to Aptana and sets the stage for a full suite of products and services from development through cloud deployment. Pydev is one of the most popular Python IDEs for Eclipse. Since Aptana Studio is also Eclipsebased it was the natural choice for Aptana.

Paul Colton, CEO and founder of Aptana, said users of Aptana and Pydev can today use the products side by side by either adding Pydev into the standalone edition of Aptana Studio or plugging both into Eclipse. The company plans deeper integration of the products, but has not announced a road map or plans for that integration.

Pydev accelerates software development for Python developers by providing code completion and analysis, a debug console and server, refactoring utilities, and many other capabilities. Pydev is a plugin that enables users to use Eclipse for Python and Jython development. Aptana Studio eases Web development, deployment and management by integrating AJAX tooling with PHP, Ruby on Rails, Aptanas Jaxer AJAX server and now Python.

Moreover, Aptana Cloud, which is built to integrate the application development, deployment and management cycle with cloud computing providers, supports PHP and Jaxer today with plans for Ruby on Rails and Python in the future, Hakman said.

Pydevs popularity in the Python community and Eclipse ecosystem made it the clear choice for Aptana, Colton said in a statement. Interest in Python has been steadily growing and got a big boost earlier this year when Google announced that Python was the language for Google App Engine. Google is also a worldwide licensee of the commercial version of Pydev, Pydev Extensions, which includes even more highproductivity features for Python developers.

Fabio Zadrozny, a Brazilian programmer, developed Pydev and is joining the Aptana team to head up the companys Python development strategy.

Pretty much anyone these days who is creating Web sites and applications is using AJAX, Zadrozny said in a statement. Offering Pydev as an extension to Aptana Studio, and therefore Eclipse, will make it even easier and faster for Pydev users to create, test, deploy and manage their Web applications.

Google took the application development world by storm Sept. 2 with Chrome, a beta of the companys new open source Web browser. But its more than just a gateway to Googles search and other Web applications.

If Chrome, with its fresh takes on stability, speed, security, privacy and ease of use, proves superior to other Web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, the browser will be the equivalent of a nuclear warhead to use against Googles chief opponent Microsoft.

With Chrome, Google will be able to tie the browser, search and applications together, providing an endtoend experience on which to place more search, display and other ads in front of users.

Just as Microsoft nuked rivals Novell, Sun Microsystems and others in the desktop market by tethering Windows and IE to PCs, Chrome could become Googles operating system for the Internet, challenging Microsofts search and other Web apps.

IDCs Al Hilwa noted that with Chrome, browsers for the first time are being thought of as the new Web operating system and so they are inheriting standard isolation features and security that typically had been the province of an OS. He added

This is good news. It shows Googles ambition in taking its dominance deeper and broader. With Android , Google took the OS to Web devices, now they are taking it to the PC. I think Chrome provides much needed features for security and the tabs interface do show innovation and outofthebox thinking on browsers.

Id have to think this would shut Microsoft out of the Internet market. TechCrunchs Michael Arrington agreed

Microsoft, meanwhile, is stuck with a bloated closed source browser that they dont even tether to their search engine for fear of more antitrust woes. Google can push their search engine and other Web services all day long on Chrome, with no government interference. So not only will Chrome drive lots of incremental revenue to Google, it also paves the way for a Microsoftfree computing experience.

Forrester Research analyst Sheri McLeish told me that despite Googles deep funding of Mozilla, in which it is the preferred search button on FireFox, Google needed to have its own branded browser with which to combat Microsoft.

Theyre coming up with something that can be potentially be more compelling than Microsoft because youre basically eliminating the need for a consumer or a business to have Microsoft on their desktop for the search or browsing tools. They can create a onestop shop for people to access tools and services and surf the Web.

Microsoft should be very afraid, but it isnt, or is putting on its bravest face, according to this statement sent to me today from Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer

The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online.

It remains to be seen how people will take to IE 8. Most people I know, and not all of them are tech savvy, have been using Firefox for years.

Similarly, Mozilla CEO John Lilly welcomed the competition, applauding Google for following Mozillas footsteps in creating and open source browser, in a blog post

It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here their business is the Web, and theyve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and itll be interesting to see how it evolves.

It will be interesting and potentially disastrous for Firefox, which is still trying to grow share versus Microsoft. With Chrome coming up from below, Mozilla could find itself squeezed out.

Do we need another browser I love Firefox 3. But Hilwa think its not enough. He told me

Independently of what Chrome is or is not, I think the state of stability, privacy and security on the Internet has atrophied significantly. While rich Internet applications are making new demands on Web applications and the Web is becoming the default OS for most users, we have allowed it to become something between the Wild West and a Banana Republic. We do need some fresh thinking about how to make the Web safer for every day uses.

Fair enough, but Chrome had better be special when it comes out of beta, showing at least some of experience promise to live up to the hype.

Also, if Google wants business users to use it, it had better be pretty darn secure because, just as people are fed up with IE crashing, they are also tired of its vulnerabilities.

If Google has learned from Microsofts Web browser failures, it will gain trust quickly among users.

If Google starts to gain browser market share quickly, expect Microsoft to desperately start buying search share, returning to Yahoo and snapping up additional ecommerce properties, similar to its recent purchase of Greenfield Online.

Snarky comments aside, Google has other issues it must contend with, including questions of privacy. Google stores 2 percent of the information users type into the Omnibox, a bar that combines a browsers address bar and search box.

It should be noted that this applies only to Google Chrome users who have Google set as their default search engine on the browser and have the suggest feature turned on.

A Google spokesperson explained to me that many of those entries are for search queries, which we already store basic log information for as we do for a search made from any browser when the user hits enter.

Also, a user can either turn off the suggest feature or use the Incognito mode and entries into the Omnibox will not be stored in Googles logs, unless the user hits enter and has entered a search query in the Omnibox.

In my opinion, 2 percent isnt so bad. Google is already tucking away info on our search queries, so why should the Omnibox be any different

And if youre totally paranoid about this, turn off autosuggest; you need to make the decision about whats more important. Is it the autosuggest feature, or the comfort of knowing that Google cant access the minute quantity of search query data from you through Chrome that it already gets from your general search queries

For all of the glitz and glamour swirling around its Chrome Web browser, Google is working out to put out fires among corporate users concerned that the EULA enables Google to own source code and other proprietary information.

One day after Googles beta launch of the Web browser Sept. 2, users complained that Section 11 of the enduser license agreement gave Google too much control over information after it was entered into the browser.

An anonymous Google Watch reader told me Sept. 2 that his company is banned from using Chrome.

He also noted that a security officer of another organization told him Chrome was put on that companys banned software list, calling for users to remove it from their system. The reason He explained

Google has included some extremely harsh terminology in their user license that gives them ownership of content you view through the viewer. In our environment that could include source code, proprietary information stored in PDFs viewed online and other property. Until we can research the impact, this browser will remain on the do not install list.

Google swiftly amended the section, but here is the original iteration of the section that troubled people

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royaltyfree, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services.

A Google spokesperson told me Google has since updated the language in Section 11, which was culled from Googles broad Universal Terms of Service, used for many of Googles products.

Section 11.1 now reads You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

So the OpenAjax Alliance is working to relieve this situation with its OpenAjax Hub technology and OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets specification. The OpenAjax Hub 1.1 provides a framework for loading and isolating widgets and secure message management, Ferraiolo said. Then OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets defines an industrystandard widget wrapper format. Then opensource transcoders convert popular existing proprietary gadget formats into OpenAjax Metadata, and the OpenAjax Alliance opensource minimashup application shows how to use all of these technologies.

The OpenAjax Hub is a small bit of standard JavaScript that enables multiple AJAX runtimes to work together, and Version 1.1 provides for widget security. There is a draft OpenAjax Hub 1.1 specification that should be finalized by the end of 2008, Ferraiolo said.

OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets addresses the two core shortcomings of widgets for mashup use. In terms of widget interoperability, OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets defines industrystandard XML for mashup widgets and is very close to Google Gadgets, Ferraiolo said. OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets is designed to work with OpenAjax Hub 1.1, which provides a secure mashup runtime.

Google Gadgets is the gorilla of the Web widget space, and we want to match Google Gadgets wherever possible, Ferraiolo said.

The OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets specification is at the first draft stage and should be completed and approved by the end of 2008, Ferraiolo said.

Much of the progress for the OpenAjax specifications will rely on the outcome of the OpenAjax InteropFest, where the organization will test OpenAjax Metadata interoperability across multiple vendors, and also test OpenAjax Hub 1.1 for reliability, performance and suitability.

As we head into the fall, the goal is that each of the tool vendors in the IDE working group will demonstrate via the OAA InteropFest how they can consume these description files for a variety of widgets from various sources like Google, Yahoo, Dojo, jQuery, EXT JS, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mootools and have the things described be easy to use in the context of the tool, Hakman said. With this group of tool vendors behind the specification, wed hope that developers creating libraries and widgets will have strong incentive to produce the description files or annotate their code with ScriptDoc/JSDoc such that their libraries and widgets can benefit from the tooling of many leading companies.

Also, We see mobile AJAX as the next big frontier, Ferraiolo said. Weve been trying to advance the ability for AJAX to be successful for mobile initiatives.

The OpenAjax Alliance is working to promote mobile device APIs, including opensource JavaScript, to access GPS, camera, address book, SMS Short Message Service and more, Ferraiolo said. The effort targets both existing proprietary, systemdependent APIs via plugins and emerging industry standards, he said. And the organization is collaborating with the OMTP Open Mobile Terminal Platform and tracking work being done by the World Wide Web Consortium in areas like geolocation, he said.

Ferraiolo mentioned the OpenAjax Alliance feature wish list, where the group polled 222 participants and came up with a list of top requests. The top feature requests include twodimensional graphics, security, improved lowlevel DOM Document Object Model hooks for visual layout, DOM performance, rich text editing, server push Comet, video and audio, Ferraiolo said.

VIENNA, Va.The OpenAjax Alliance is working to address interoperability issues among development environments for AJAX as well as to facilitate the creation of secure mashups.

At the Rich Web Experience conference here on Sept. 4, Jon Ferraiolo, an IBM engineer and director of the OpenAjax Alliance, a consortium of vendors and organizations working to promote AJAX interoperability, said the group has published draft specifications for ways to make AJAX IDEs integrated development environments more interoperable, to secure the creation of mashups and to make widgets more interoperable for use in mashups.

Ferraiolo said the capabilities in AJAX IDEssuch as code assist, debug and visual layoutought to be interoperable across the different IDE platforms, but as each AJAX tool kit documents its APIs and widgets in its own way, that has been a problem. So the OpenAjax Alliance is working to overcome that problem with a new specification known as OpenAjax Metadata for AJAX Libraries, which delivers industrystandard XML for JavaScript APIs and user interface controls.

It should be possible for there to be intelligent code assist for APIs across different AJAX libraries, and visual design should be possible using widgets from AJAX libraries, Ferraiolo said. The OpenAjax Alliance specifications will help get to that point, he said.

Aptana is leading the OpenAjax Alliances IDE Working Group. Ferraiolo said the group wanted to follow the lead of the leading AJAX IDE in the industry and that is Aptanas.

Standards will improve industry efficiency and unleash innovation, Ferraiolo said. So in that regard, AJAX libraries can produce one format, OAM OpenAjax Metadata, for their APIs, and these libraries will then be compatible with many IDEs, he said. If the library uses JSDoc, then autogeneration of OpenAjax Metadata is possible. We are investigating autogeneration for other inline documentation formats, such as what Dojo uses, Ferraiolo said. AJAX IDEs can consume one format, OAM. That IDE will now support dozens of AJAX libraries. By unifying the industry around a single XML file, this makes it so that IDEs can now innovate and compete in other areas.

The OpenAjax Alliance IDE Working Group has a number of participants, but the core group that shows up on the weekly calls includes folks from Aptana, folks from Adobes Dreamweaver group and folks from Microsofts Visual Studio team, Ferraiolo said.

And while Microsoft has taken a rap for not participating or playing well in some standardization and opensource efforts, Ferraiolo said the company is working to make Visual Studio support the OAM format. Other organizations with participants in the working group include the Eclipse Foundation, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO and OpenLink Software.

Aptana has contributed much to the effort, including sharing some of its extensive experience with the ScriptDoc.org project for annotating JavaScript in a way that enables code assist and code completion style features in Aptana Studio, the companys opensource IDE for Web 2.0 apps that use AJAX.

Microsoft has been a strong, active participant, as has Adobe, IBM, Eclipse, Sun, OpenLink and others, said Kevin Hakman, chairman of the IDE Working Group and director of evangelism at Aptana. All have influenced the specification offering insights from their respective IDEs, user communities and code annotation conventions. Not to diminish others who have contributed significantly, but Bertrand Le Roy of Microsoft has been a consistent core contributor to this process whose input has been very insightful and formative.

VIENNA, Va.Douglas Crockford, a JavaScript architect at Yahoo and founder of the JavaScript Object Notation, says he wants a browser war. Well, with Googles introduction of its Chrome browser Sept. 2 he just may have it.

During a keynote at the Rich Web Experience conference here Sept. 4, Crockford said the term Web time used to mean fast, but not anymore. The last time ECMAScript and HTML were revised was in 1999, an era when things happened fast on the Web, he said. What happened then Crockford asked, questioning the source of that speed. They had a browser war. I want a browser war, he said, although acknowledging that the industry still needs to undo some of the pain of the last browser war.

It turns out a browser war is a good thing, although most of the pain will be borne by Web developers and users, Crockford said.

Crockford said innovation should be happening in research labs and not in standards bodies. Indeed, some of the good works in the Web world of late include AJAX , JSON, Google Gears, XDomain Request from Microsoft, and Googles Chrome. Im not sure if Chromes going to be successful on its own or not, Crockford said.

Moreover, Crockford said this time around in a browser war the market must punish bad behavior. Yahoo has a Graded Browser Support program where the company gives grades to various browsers, with A being the best and C being the grade for blacklisted browsers. The X grade is reserved for fringe browsers.

My proposal is if a browser maker screws up were going to rate them poorly, and we can put significant pressure on the browser makers to stay in line.

The benefit of Yahoo having its Graded Browser Support program is, Web developers are under tremendous pressure to have their applications run on everything. But developers can look at it and say, If Yahoo is not supporting IE 5.5, why should I Crockford said. Were going to get a lot of inducement by all the browser makers to try to trick you so your site works only for them; we shouldnt fall for that bait, he said.

For his part, Crockford said because of the first browser war the industry needs standards. Never again, he said of the industry enduring another period like the mid to late 90s when Microsoft and Netscape engaged in a bitter standards war, because the companies were warring so much and making changes so quickly that they put a lot of bugs into the network because they didnt have time to get it right.

Indeed, the reason AJAX happened in 2005 instead of 2000 is because it took all that time for the bugs to get flushed out, he said. Microsoft has been condemned for having done nothing after winning the browser war. I contend that their doing nothing is the best thing they couldve done because it led to innovation by others. Bravo, Microsoft.

Crockford, who has been critical of some of the proposed Web standards, particularly the ECMAScript 4 proposal, said, A revision to a standard is an act of violence; it causes pain and injury. Careless revision of standards has a huge social and business cost. Minimalism should be highly valued in standards. Crockford then said the ECMAScript 4 proposal lacked a credible value proposition and added a huge amount of complexity. And he praised the Ecma working group governing the specification for abandoning it for an ECMAScript 3.1 proposal that brings the standard more in line with reality.

Crockford entitled his talk Web Forward and said, Im really interested in how the Web goes forwardthe Webs been stuck and we need to get it unstuck.

Crockford added that there is no such thing as Moores Law for software, but that software seems to be governed more by Murphys Law. Rather than a doubling in productivity every two years, we see a doubling of software productivity every 10 to 20 years. He noted major advancements in software and pointed to OOP objectoriented programming as the last major step in software development. But OOP has been around more than 20 years, he said.

Were still waiting for the next thing, Crockford said. He said that next thing might be assembling software like Lego pieces using components. Were doing that now with mashups, and JavaScript is the mashup language.

Meanwhile, Crockford said the Web is under attack and browser security is the biggest problem for the Web. The weaknesses of the browser are hampering innovation.

Crockford also noted that JavaScript is close to helping to get the security equation right, but it needs object capability. He said in an object capability system an object can only communicate with objects it has reference to. And there are three ways to obtain a reference by creation, by construction and by introduction.

However, safe JavaScript subsets such as Caja, Cajita, ADsafe and Dojox.secure offer some safety now, and the Ecma technical committee governing ECMAScript has begun work on Secure ECMAScript, he said.

The war is coming; Ill see you in the trenches, Crockford said.

Platformasaservice providers, such as Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and Google, offer developers a means of coding their applications and allowing a provider in the cloud to not only handle the details of hosting and scaling these works, but make them available for sale as well.

Etelos is a PAAS provider with a familiar twist. Where other frameworks require developers to code parts of their applications to work with the cloud service in question, Etelos development environments enable software makers to bring their standard LAMP Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perltype applications to the cloud with little or no modification required.

What sets Etelos apart from a traditional LAMP hosting service, such as DreamHost, are the services that the firm wraps around LAMP for selling, managing licensing and accounting for scalability of Web applications. In addition, Etelos has some interesting services in the works which I did not test for sharing data between separate applications and for enabling applications to run offline.

Based on the time I spent with Etelos platform, I can suggest that companies or departments seeking nohassle, flexible hosting of common opensource or builtinhouse Web applications take a closer look at what Etelos has to offer.

Taking Etelos for a spin

As a means of demonstrating its platform, Etelos sells ondemand versions of a few popular opensource Web applications, including MediaWiki, WordPress and Sugar CRM community edition. I opted to take Etelos MediaWiki offering for a spin to get a feel for the platform and perhaps move a MediaWiki instance I currently host in our lab out into the cloud.

Etelos MediaWiki to Go, which is priced at 4.95 per month and includes 5GB of storage additional storage costs 34 cents per gigabyte per month, was as easy to set up as its ondemand label would suggest. I created a user account at Etelos Web site and selected the MediaWiki service from the firms applications marketplace, and within a couple of minutes I received a welcome message in my email with my new wiki sites address and logon information.

Among those details was a pointer to my own Etelos Development Environment, a Webbased console for accessing and editing the files and folders that comprised my MediaWiki installation, for administering my database instance and for accessing other Etelos functionality.

My ondemand MediaWiki installation came with a PostgreSQL database, which I could administer with the popular Webbased phpPgAdmin tool. The folder that housed my project code was deployed by default in a Subversion repository, which kept track of my files versions whether I edited them using the Web interface, the provided WebDAV Webbased Distributed Authoring and Versioning interface or a standard Subversion client on my local computer.

Due to a bug, Ubuntu Linux annoyingly lacks support for SSL Secure Sockets Layer WebDAV folders right now, so I opted for a local Subversion client to manage my code. I checked out the remote files to my notebook computer using a Subversion client and set about making my modifications locally, before committing them back into my site hosted at Etelos.

I ran into a software snag when I set out to install the Semantic MediaWiki extension on my Eteloshosted instance, since the latest version of SMW does not support PostgreSQL.

Since MySQL is the primary database for MediaWiki, and most deployments and development are tied to MySQL, MySQL would have been a better choice for the ondemand service.

However, this incompatibility gave me a good reason to try the MySQL flavor of Etelos developer kitcurrently free to use.

Spawning myself a developer kit account was as easy as ordering up the MediaWiki service had been, and my new developer kit greeted me with all the same access options and Webbased tools that came with the MediaWiki service.

For a flash demo of Etelos developer kit, go here.

Part of the Etelos pitch is that LAMP applications install on the platform with little or no code changes, and this was certainly my experience installing MediaWiki. To install the application, I committed the MediaWiki code into my development account with Subversion, visited the Web address of my new account and set about configuring my new instance through the softwares Web setup interface.

I grabbed the database name, user name and password for my MySQL instance from the info tab of the EDE, and adjusted the permissions on MediaWikis config directory to allow the setup script to do its work.

From here, I was able to install my desired Semantic MediaWiki extension without issues.

Microsofts Connected Systems Division is working on giving users a less complicated experience when it comes to distributed computing.

I had an opportunity to spend a bit of time with some key folks in Microsofts CSD Connected Systems Division recently to have a look at where theyre going with distributed computing. And, as expected, they talked at length about Oslo, the code name for Microsofts upcoming modeling platform.

Oslo consists of a repository, a visual tool and a new declarative language. In a Microsoft PressPass interview, Oliver Sharp, the general manager of Microsofts Connected Server team, and one of the guys I met with, said of Oslo

Oslo is the codename for Microsofts forthcoming modeling platform.  Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. Oslo consists of a new modeling tool which helps people visually interact with models in rich and intuitive manner, a new modeling language which allow developers to efficiently define domain models in a form that is natural to the author and a new repository which provides a shared store for linking together all of the various model artifacts that describe an application across both design and runtime.

One of the driving forces behind Microsofts move to modeling is to enable more people to participate in the distributed application development process, as Sharp said. Indeed, Sharp says he will not be satisfied until his mother can build distributed applications. And he went on to describe how things like word processors and email were once difficult to use, but now both are commonly used daily by people like his mother. Microsoft will be unveiling Oslo at its PDC Professional Developers Conference in October.

David Chappell, principal of Chappell & Associates, a software development expert who has been briefed on parts of Microsofts Oslo strategy, said Microsoft is using the term modeling in a different way than its classic sense or that of technologies such as the UML Unified Modeling Language. Microsoft has sometimes used the word model when describing Oslo. They use the term in the broadest sense Its an abstract representation of something, Chappell said in a session on Oslo that he presented at the Microsoft TechEd Developers 2008 show in June.

So Microsoft is aiming to use modeling to make it easier to create applications. But the question remains How easy is easy All the Microsoft folks I spoke with are highly technical guys. Their easy might not be the typical computer users easy. Brad Lovering, the Microsoft technical fellow who is the lead architect behind the Oslo effort, said if you know Microsofts Access application you will be right at home using the new Oslo tool to create applications.

Sources said the Oslo tool is aimed at power users and business analysts. Lovering said Microsoft will continue to evolve its tolling for building distributed computing so that it becomes easier and easier for more and more people to use.

At the same time, Microsoft is delivering a new Oslo language. Don Box, a partner architect at CSD who is working on the Oslo language stack, will be presenting a talk on the language at the upcoming PDC. Other Microsoft engineers also will delve even more deeply into the language and its capabilities. In a session entitled Oslo Building Textual DSLs, Chris Anderson and Giovanni DellaLibera will take you further into the language. According to the session description The Oslo modeling language can define schemas and transformations over arbitrary text formats. This session shows you how to build your own Domain Specific Language using the Oslo SDK Software Development Kit and how to apply your DSL Domain Specific Language to create an interactive text editing experience.

Meanwhile, another CSD architect and Microsoft technical fellow who was among the folks I met with, John Shewchuk, is slated to deliver a session entitled A Lap around Building Block Services, which appears to be about the introduction of some of Microsofts .NET infrastructure into the cloud. The session abstract reads Learn about the building block services that enable developers to easily create or extend their applications and services. From consumertargeted applications and social networking Web sites to enterprise class applications and services, the building block services make it easy for you to give your applications and services the most compelling experiences and features.

It was enlightening to meet with the guys from CSD, which started as an entrepreneurial incubation team under Robert Wahbe, who is the corporate vice president in charge of the division. Wahbe and the rest of the team members I met with, including Box, Shewchuk, Sharp, Lovering and Steven Lucco, a distinguished engineer in Microsofts Developer Division, all said the two primary backers of the Oslo project were Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, who put the oversight of the project in the hands of Eric Rudder, now senior vice president of technical strategy at Microsoft.

Serena Software has delivered on its promise of bringing mashups to the cloud and on Sept. 10 will announce the availability of its Serena Mashups on Demand service. The company also is slated to demonstrate its upcoming ondemand agile development solution, which will be available in December.

The announcement and demonstration will take place at Serena Softwares annual user conference, Serena Tag.

Ren Bonvanie, senior vice president of global marketing, partnerships and online services for Serena Software, said Serenas Business Mashups will be available on demand with no software to install or infrastructure to manage so that enterprise staff can build and deploy mashups faster. And this can help spur broader adoption of mashups throughout the enterprise, Bonvanie said.

Analyst company Forrester projected that the mashup market will be worth 700 million by 2013 in its May 2008 report, The Mashup Opportunity.

We now have a full mashupsondemand capability in the cloud, Bonvanie said. Its our whole suite in the cloud at a very aggressive pricing model.

Moreover, Bonvanie said Serena Mashups On Demand offers new features to create more consumerstyle mashups, which is expected to encourage more users to embrace mashups as a way to solve simple business problems and be more productive. And as part of this ondemand release, Serena has integrated Rich Interface Mashups into the solution, allowing users to simply drag and drop widgets, RSS feeds, Flash components and other types of consumer data into their workplace mashups, he said.

Serena Business Mashups allow knowledge workers around the world to automate processes to solve their everyday business problems, Bonvanie said.

Mashups On Demand is just one of three solutions Serena Software is providing in 2008 as SAAS software as a service solutions. In March, the company delivered its Serena Mariner project and portfolio management solution on demand, and later in 2008 will provide agile lifecycle management tools as a service, Bonvanie said. Serena Software claims it will be the first major application development tools vendor to deliver a pure agile tool set that allows IT departments and ISVs to manage agile projects over the Web.

Serenas subscription structure for Mashups On Demand is priced at 15 per user per month. That price includes an ondemand account to run mashups; Serena Mashup Composer, a pointandclick visual design tool for creating mashups; and access to free prebuilt business mashups that automate everyday processes.

Serena also announced plans to deliver a pure agile solution based on best practices via SAAS in December.

Bonvanie said Serena Agile On Demand will enable software development groups to add agile development to their development portfolios and support global teams working on multiple projects.

We know there is still a lot of waterfall development out there, but there has been a massive adoption of agile development practices, Bonvanie said.

Serena Agile On Demand offers a new approach to adopting agile practices by coupling the developer tool with agile adoption and training services from Valtech, an agile services provider and Serena Software partner.

The new Agile On Demand solution will make it simpler and faster to manage concurrent agile projects with new capabilities and virtual training that fosters team collaboration whether a team is in the same room or spread across continents and time zones, Bonvanie said.

In addition, Serenas Agile On Demand offering combines tooling with agile transformation services, such as video instruction on common agile practices, virtual training on a comprehensive list of agile topics and live coaching where an expert is only a phone call away, the company said.

The Coach Live service is an exclusive offering from Valtech available only in Agile On Demand, Bonvanie said. Coach Live gives users access to an agile development coach who can walk a development team through adoption and transformation issues.

Other Agile On Demand capabilities include work management; sprint planning; release planning; reporting and dashboarding; collaboration, via RSS notifications, instant messaging, wiki support and virtual whiteboards for remote standup meetings; and mashup integration, in that the solution integrates with the Serena Business Mashups platform.

Traditionally, agile practices have had higher adoption rates among smaller, colocated development teams, which today are a rarity, John Scumniotales, codeveloper of the Scrum agile methodology and vice president of product development at Serena Software, said in a statement. Our new Agile On Demand solution has been designed from the ground up to support multiproject and multimethodology environments, making agile accessible to any development team.

Moreover, Serena has announced a free agile certification training program that is open to anyone. More information on the program can be found at Serena.com/go/agiletraining. The program includes 1,400 worth of agile training for free, Serena officials said.

Meanwhile, although Serena Software continues to produce a host of tools for the traditional application development life cycle, such as software configuration management tools and requirements management tools, the companys agile environment does not necessitate any Serena products. But it works with them and also with other vendors products, Bonvanie said. Its an open environment and an ondemand environment, and we do not intend to deliver any software onpremises.

In addition, Were doing this in a very aggressive way to ensure that people are successful, he said. We think you should be able to run your first sprint with everything you need out of the box.

Once again, Microsoft has proclaimed its support for software modeling, this time joining the premier organization backing the adoption of modeling in the enterprise, the Object Management Group OMG, and pledging to support the OMGs primary modeling standard, the Unified Modeling Language.

Microsoft began talking about supporting modeling in earnest in 2003 when company Chairman Bill Gates announced to financial analysts that modeling would be a means by which Microsoft could make software development easier for developers. That vision is being borne out in the companys Oslo modeling platform, which Microsofts CSD Connected Systems Division is championing. However, Oslo and the overall modeling initiative is intended to permeate Microsoft and reach users through various Microsoft groups and products, particularly the Developer Division and the companys flagship Visual Studio tools.

So although Microsoft announced on Sept. 10 its approach for taking modeling into mainstream industry use and announced its membership in OMG, Gates sort of preempted this announcement at Microsofts TechEd Developers 2008 conference in Orlando in June when he said Microsoft would be providing support for UML in the upcoming version of Visual Studio. 

The move indicates something of a turnabout for Microsoft and is supported by Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, who is credited with being serious about interoperability, transparency, openness and taking Microsoft beyond squabbles of the past. For instance, this is not the first time Microsoft has been a member of OMG. The company was previously a member of the organization, but fell out of favor with the group over disagreements around OMGs support for the CORBA Common Object Request Broker Architecture, as Microsoft was in favor of its own COM Component Object Model technology.

Moreover, although Microsoft is announcing its OMG membership now, sources said the company actually became a member as early as July. Yet, the move signals progress in an otherwise chilly relationship and indicates Microsofts and Muglias willingness to move beyond petty stances. For instance, Steve Cook, a Microsoft engineer who has been particularly critical of the UML specification, is now Microsofts representative to the OMG.

Modeling is a core focus of Microsofts Dynamic IT strategy, the companys longterm approach to provide customers with technology, services and best practices to enable IT and development organizations to be more strategic to the business.

Microsoft officials said that although the promise of modeling has existed for decades, it has failed to have a mainstream impact on the way organizations develop and manage their core applications, and the company said models must evolve to be more than static diagrams defining a software system; they are a core part of daily business discussions, from organizational charts to cash flow diagrams.  Thus, to make modeldriven development a reality, Microsoft is focused on providing a modeldriven platform and visual modeling tools that make it easy for all mainstream users, including information workers, developers, database architects, software architects, business analysts and IT professionals, to collaborate throughout the application development life cycle. By putting modeldriven innovation directly into the Microsoft .NET platform, organizations will gain visibility and control over applications from end to end, Microsoft officials said.

Were building modeling in as a core part of the platform, Muglia said in a statement. This enables IT pros to specify their business needs and build applications that work directly from those specifications. It also brings together the different stages of the IT life cycleconnecting business analysts, who specify requirements, with system architects, who design the solution, with developers, who build the applications, and with operations experts, who deploy and maintain the applications. Ultimately, this means IT pros can innovate and respond faster to the needs of their business. 

Richard Mark Soley, CEO of OMG, told eWEEK

Since the adoption of UML in 1997 and the introduction of the Model Driven Architecture in 2001, OMG has been successfully applying modeling languages including UML to problems like electronic payments interoperability, healthcare records portability, space systems integration, property and casualty insurance systems and many other verticalmarket areas. Im ecstatic that Microsoft has decided to join several of those verticalmarket efforts, lending both their deep and broad expertise and their market presence. Software developers want common, standardized solutions not only in modeling infrastructure like the UML, but in verticalmarket solutions to increase choice and bring down costs. Microsoft has assembled a worldclass team of modeling experts in many areas, and we welcome them as a leading member of the OMG.

In addition to joining OMG, Microsoft will take an active role in several OMG working groups to help contribute to the open industry dialogue and assist with evolution of the standards to meet mainstream customer needs. For example, Microsoft is already working with the finance working group on information models for insurance business functions related to the property and casualty industry, and will eventually look to expand those models so that they can be applied to other areas. Another early focus will be on developing specifications for converting messages across the various payments messaging standards.

Microsoft said developers can begin to implement modeldriven approaches today through innovations such as Extensible Application Markup Language XAML the declarative model that underlies Windows Presentation Foundation WPF and Windows Workflow Foundation WCF and ASP.NET MVC, which integrates modeldriven development into the .NET Framework and makes it easy to implement the modelviewcontroller MVC pattern for Web applications. Both XAML and MVC are examples of models that drive the actual runtime behavior of .NET applications , Microsoft said. These are part of Microsofts broader companywide efforts to deliver a connected platform modeling, which includes technologies being delivered across both Oslo and Visual Studio Rosario initiatives.

Its good to see Microsoft lending its weight behind OMG and getting beyond former discord with the organization.

Indeed, in a paper from 1999, Microsofts own Don Box, now a partner architect in Microsofts CSD unit, who at the time was still with DevelopMentor, the company he cofounded, said Ironically, while Microsoft and the Object Management Group OMG were arguing over whether the Internet would be run on DCOM Distributed Component Object Model or CORBA, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP took over as the dominant Internet protocol.

Moreover, Box cogently observed

At the end of the day, the primary function of a component technology is to act as glue between multiple pieces of software. This is true of the Component Object Model COM, as well as Java the technology. This is also true of Common Object Request Broker Architecture CORBA. All three technologies provide infrastructure for integrating software components written by autonomous organizations. From the 10,000foot view, these three technologies are more or less the same. Up close, however, each technology uses radically different techniques and programming styles to achieve its goals.

Microsofts participation in OMG helps not only with the companys plans to garner support for modeling, but also to extend one of Bill Gates legacy issues. Modeling was one of Gates pet projects. The company has even courted the attentions of leaders in the UML space, including Ivar Jacobson and Grady Booch, two of the coauthors of UML. Jacobsen lent his support to the Microsoft Solutions Framework and sources said Microsoft has twice tried to hire Booch, once when Gates personally attempted to woo the IBM Fellow, and again since Gates departure at the end of June.

Microsoft eschewed UML at one point in favor of a modeling strategy around domainspecific languages DSLs. And although with this move Microsoft is not abandoning DSLs in favor of UML, there is sufficient demand for UML that Microsoft cannot afford to ignore it. Brad Lovering, a Microsoft technical fellow in the CSD unit, said Oslo would support UML because of significant customer demand. Research firm Forrester estimates that 71 percent of the development shops that do software modeling use UML.

Yahoo this week used the CTIA Wireless show to preview availability of its Yahoo oneConnect social address book in Apples iPhone App Store and upgraded its Blueprint mobile development platform.

OneConnect, which Yahoo introduced last February, lets users integrate their Yahoo contacts and communicate with them via instant or SMS messages, or check on the latest activity from their social networks.

OneConnect is part of Yahoos YOS Yahoo Open Strategy to open up its traditionally siloed services used by some 273 million Yahoo Mail users, allowing them to be more interactive, making the application more social and collaborative.

The company is accelerating YOS at a Yahoo Hack day at its Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, where it is opening up its portal to services from Amazon, Netflix and others. Yahoo has already opened up its search platform to let thirdparty programmers write widgets that aim to augment the search results.

The idea is that more open search combined with open communication between contacts will make exsiting users stay and lure more users to Yahoos fold. Yahoo could use broader adoption, as its stock is suffering in the wake of a failed acquisition bid by Microsoft.

What better way to test oneConnect than on Apples popular iPhone Yahoo oneConnect for iPhone includes the address book that integrates contacts from the users Yahoo Address Book, iPhone and social networks. Users may then instant message friends from their iPhones.

The mobile app also includes Pulse, which lets users see whats happening on their social networks, including Bebo, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. There is also a Favorites tab to let users keep tabs on their most important contacts.  

oneConnect is available free for the iPhone and iPod touch in the United States, with support for additional devices and other countries coming later.

Yahoo also gave its Blueprint mobile development platform, previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show last January, a boost at CTIA.

Previously, the platform only let users create mobile widgets that run within Yahoos Go mobile application.

Now developers can use Blueprint to build standalone applications for Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, create mobile Web sites users can access from HTML or xHTML mobile browser. Yahoo Blueprint Runtime for Mobile Sites are hosted in developers server infrastructure and are accessible under their own URL.

The runtime creates a proxy layer that redirects HTTP requests from programmers servers to Yahoos servers. This allows developers to host the Blueprint service on their own server while relying on Yahoos back end to interpret and render Blueprint markup.

Continuing to embrace the iPhone, Yahoo is also using Blueprint internally to develop iPhone applications and is in discussion with Apple on how to make Blueprint for the iPhone available to other developers.

With Blueprint, Yahoo wants to help the fragmented mobile app development market to coalesce around its platform by allowing programmers to write apps once and have mobile services run across several devices and operating systems.

The beauty of this process, to Yahoos thinking, is that anyone can develop their application with custom features and advertising options.

Accordingly, Blueprint contains an SDK for thirdparty developers. Developers can submit Yahoos Blueprint applications to Yahoos mobile widget gallery, potentially reaching millions of mobile users.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and frenemy Google await sentencing by the Department of Justice on their search ad deal, which would give both companies some sales bumps.

A recent survey indicates that investment in .NETbased enterprise applications is now outpacing investment in Javabased enterprise applications.

Of course, no survey is 100 percent reliable, but what is interesting about this survey is it is not sponsored by Microsoft. CA sponsored the survey, which was conducted by Evans Data. The survey targeted enterprises with 1,000 or more employees and queried 350 developers and managers involved in creating or managing businesscritical .NET applications.

Microsoft has been touting the advance of .NET for enterprise applications for years. Now CA is supporting the claim. But CAs interest is not purely casual here. One of the findings of the survey is that a strong market exists for integrated APM application performance management solutions that support the increased use of both .NET and Java development architectures in the same organization. And CA just happens to own Wily Technology, which sells APM solutions. Wily got its start delivering performance management solutions for Java applications, but now supports both .NET and Java.

These survey results confirm that .NET applications are pervasive in large enterprises and their acceptance and dependability is continuing to increase, said Mike Allen, director of product management for CAs Wily Technology division. This begs the question of how to effectively manage environments that use both .NET and Java. CA Wily advocates a comprehensive application performance management solution that addresses both with a single solution and helps key Web applications to meet business, customer experience and performance goals.

Moreover, the survey found that most enterprises have highly heterogeneous application environments and that .NET support teams are similar to Java support teams in terms of size, structure, problem types and time needed to isolate problems. A majority of respondents said their .NET and Java groups are integrated within their organizations, and the management responsibility is spread across departments such as development, operations and quality assurance, and is equally required in both environments.

The survey also found that nearly 60 percent of respondents said their .NET investment is growing, while 50 percent said they are adding new .NET personnel. Fiftyseven percent of respondents said .NET expenditures comprise more than a quarter of their overall businesscritical application investment, and nearly 20 percent of respondents put that figure between 75 and 100 percent.

An increasing number of enterprises are realizing the benefits of deploying applications built on both .NET and Java, Jasmine Noel, cofounder and partner at Ptak, Noel & Associates, said in a statement. However, with those benefits come the challenges of managing a heterogeneous environment coupled with the unique issues of both development architectures.

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Communications Converged Application Server 4.0

Oracle Communications Converged Application Server 4.0 provides high levels of availability and reliability through clustering, replication and geographic redundancy. This enables service providers to eliminate single points of failure, in case of catastrophic failures in one or more nodes in their telecommunications networks.  

The product, formerly named BEA WebLogic SIP Server, which was attained in Oracles acquisition of  BEA Systems, enables network operators, network equipment providers, systems integrators and independent software vendors to develop, deliver and operate realtime, multimedia communications services,  said Liam Maxwell, vice president of products, Oracle Communications.

As network operators worldwide deploy nextgeneration architectures, it has become increasingly important to quickly generate new revenue from these network investments, Maxwell said. Oracle Communications Converged Application Server delivers the IT and telecommunications tools necessary for deploying new services quickly and costeffectively.

Maxwell said Oracle Communications Converged Application Server is a converged Web and communications application development and deployment platform that combines Internet and communications capabilities with carriergrade high availability, performance, scalability and reliability.

The technology is a key component of the Oracle Communications Service Delivery product portfolio. Maxwell also said Oracle has pushed the development of the latest Session Initiation Protocol SIP Servlet 1.1 specification, Java Specification Request JSR 289, through the Java Community Process JCP.  JSR 289 introduces a new application router that enables application developers to more quickly create services that help turn Webbased, realtime communications applications into enduser services, spanning existing business and operations support systems BSS/OSS. Moreover, Oracle Communications Converged Application Server is the first commercial SIP/IPMultimedia Subsystem IMS application compliant with the JSR 289 standard, Maxwell said.

Operators are increasingly looking at Web/telecommunications convergence as a potential source for new and innovative nextgeneration services, said Brian Partridge, director of Yankee Groups Enabling Technologies Service Provider group. One effective approach to bringing the telecommunications and Web worlds together is to converge at the IMS services layer, using an open, standardsbased Java EE and IMS application server. Deploying a highly available, standardsbased application server with a converged container better positions operators to leverage the combined market dynamics of Web 2.0 and telecommunications.

Oracle also announced that a leading mobile service provider in Central and Eastern Europe, known as mobilkom austria group, has deployed Oracle Communications Converged Application Server to underpin its IMS services layer and deliver innovative, new services to its 16.5 million mobile customers.

In addition, Oracle officials said Korea Telecom Freetel KTF has deployed components of the Oracle Communications Service Delivery portfolio, which leverages Oracle Fusion Middleware, to build nextgeneration mobile services.

NEW YORKMicrosoft plans to deliver a new generalpurpose programming language to developers, known as F pronounced F Sharp, that takes advantage of the functional programming model.

Speaking at the VSLive New York conference here on Sept. 8, Luke Hoban, the F program manager at Microsoft, said F is a functional programming language for .NET, which will join C and Visual Basic as core .NET languages.

Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state.

Functional programming means functions are very important, Hoban said. With F we pass around functions like any kind of data.

Hoban further explained that F is a functional, objectoriented, imperative and explorative programming language for .NET. And, F makes an inference that a language should be good at doing explorative development, he said.

However, by no means is F a replacement for C or Visual Basic, which are great for mainstream development, Hoban said. F is meant to go out and extend the reach of .NET to new developers and new types of developers.

F started as a research project in Microsofts research lab in Cambridge, England. And about eight months ago Microsoft decided there was an audience we could target more aggressively with the language, Hoban said.

Although Hoban described F as a generalpurpose language, he said it is particularly suited to doing technical algorithms and explorative tests, financial modeling and analysis, data mining, scientific data analysis, domain specific modeling, and academic uses. In fact, Hoban said many of the early adopters of F are financial services companies in New York on Wall Street.

Hogan also noted that F borrows from other languages and is strongly typed, has a succinct syntax, is scalable, has libraries, and is explorative, interoperable and efficient. Other characteristics early users have listed as benefits of F are that it is quick coding, supports scripting, has good performance, is symbolic and has .NET integration.

At the end of August, Microsoft released the September CTP Community Technology Preview of F. That CTP features improved integration with Visual Studio 2008 and was codeveloped by Microsoft Research in Cambridge and Hobans group in Redmond, Wash. The September CTP of F also features improvements to the F language and libraries to make them simpler and more regular. And there is also a new language feature, Units of Measure, which extends Fs inference and strong typing to floatingpoint data.

Don Syme, the Microsoft researcher who devised F, in a blog post, said

F is a simple, typesafe, efficient, scalable language for the .NET platform that supports both functional and objectoriented programming. One of the key things about F is that it spans the spectrum from interactive, explorative scripting to component and largescale software development. In this release weve made major improvements to the language, libraries and tools across this spectrum.

Along with the CTP, Microsoft also launched a new F Developer Center on MSDN Microsoft Developer Network, said S. Soma Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsofts Developer Division, in a blog post. This developer center provides resources for F developers and links to F user communities.

Hoban said Microsoft will deliver in 2009 the first supported release of F that will be aligned with the next version of Visual Studio. However, Hoban said it is not yet clear whether F will be delivered as an addin or out of the box.

Because F supports immutability, it is good for parallel programming, Hoban said. We treat things as being immutable, and immutability comes up when we get to more parallel applications. ... What immutability means for F is if you define a value you cant change itits not mutable.

F has the static typing of C with the succinctness of a scripting language, Hoban said. The language also features a type inference capability, where the compiler can tell what type the developer intended to use. Indeed, Hoban demonstrated the integration of F with Visual Studio, where he hovered the cursor over a piece of code and a popup displayed what type the code was. On the language side, some of the consistent feedback we get about F is that the combination of typeinferred programming and interactive exploration allows you to develop correct algorithms and objects quickly and with a very low error rate, Syme said.

F also supports pattern matching, functional collections and scripting via the Script.fsx extension, said Hoban said, who showed a demonstration in which he used DirectX and F to do visualization of data.

Regarding performance, in F you get really good performance, Hoban said. F can probably run 10 to 20 times faster than Python. ... You should look for performance at about the same level as C.

Moreover, Hoban said as proof of the applicability of F, we develop F in F, with only one or two side projects in C, Visual Basic and C contributing to the development of the language.

New Relic, maker of application performance management software for Ruby on Rails environments, has announced a new free version of its performance monitoring solution, as well as new features to its enterprise version.

New Relic announced Rails Performance Management Lite, a free, supported performance monitoring product that helps developers and application managers optimize production Rails applications. Developers who use RPM Lite can troubleshoot problems fast by seeing how their applications perform, in production and in real time. The free performance monitoring service is now available to anyone for unlimited use on as many applications or hosts as they need, company officials said.

RPM Lite monitors controller actions; ActiveRecord and database utilization; CPU and physical memory utilization; and slowest pages with drilldowns into page response time and slowest components. In addition, RPM Lite features a realtime dashboard displaying the performance and availability of all a users Rails applications at a glance; weekly email reports; Apple iPhone access for monitoring on the go; and no limit to the number of hosts or applications a user can monitor, or to the number of users in an account.

Being without New Relic RPM was like being stuck in a traffic jam, with frustrating lane changes that led nowhere, said Ryan Boyce, CEO of iOffer.com. Using RPM is like speeding through the carpool lane. Its fast and simple, and enables us to finetune our application for much better performance.

Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, in a statement, said The wide adoption of any application development platform demands an ecosystem of highquality tools and vendors. With a free RPM Lite subscription, Rails developers can now deploy and maintain apps of all sizes, building in performance and scalability from the start. As Rails development and operations teams see their applications grow, they have the opportunity to upgrade to our other subscriptionbased offerings.

RPM Lite is available for free for unlimited monitoring in both production and development. Cirne said installation and setup take less than 5 minutes.  Upgrading from RPM Lite to a paid subscription provides additional features such as Transaction Tracing, Automated Incident Detection, Error Tracking and Scalability Analysis.  These are the new features New Relic announced for the standard enterprise version of RPM. The new features are available as part of the Bronze, Silver and Gold subscription levels for RPM.

Microsoft is beginning to shed a little light on what we can expect to see in the next version of Visual Studio, which has thus far been referred to as Visual Studio 10 or VS10.

MJF has a post on it based on a blog entry from Jeffrey Schlimmer, a Microsoft engineer who attended the VSX Developer Conference, which ran Sept. 1516 at Microsofts Redmond, Wash., campus.

VSX stands for Visual Studio Extensibility and at the VSX Developer Conference, Paramesh Vaidyanathan, Principal Product Unit Manager, and Rico Mariani, Architect for the Visual Studio Platform team shared some of their ideas and longterm goals for Visual Studio.

Indeed, Schlimmer said according to the keynote by two of the Visual Studio teams thought leaders, VS10 has four primary themes or pushes Experience making Visual Studio the developers favorite application; Customer Focus on a specific customers needs for this release, the smalltomedium business developer; Platform  Ride the latest platform technologies for this release, the 2009 technologies; and Architecture Take the first of many steps to improve the infrastructure.

The duo also broke things down as far as what features are expected to be in VS 10 and which ones are more likely wishlist items that will come later.

Regarding architecture, VS10 will be more extensible VS10 will feature a new Windows Presentation Foundation WPF based text editor with finegrained extensibility, Microsoft Extensibility Framework MEF, also known as Component Object Model COM for managed code, and new features to support multiple languages. In the later category under extensibility, Schlimmer said Visual Studio Tools for Applications VSTA will be used for macros and other enduser extensibility; more addins can be built in managed code; common project system; richer types and protocols for discovery, activation, and manipulation; synchronous extension and visualization model.

Moreover, Schlimmer said the Visual Studio team presenters said VS10 will be frugal and scalable in that it will have a smaller footprint and emphasis will be placed on largetomedium solution development. Other features include MSBuild improvements in Visual C performance and scalability, support for the elimination of quadratic algorithms in C and VB project systems, a new editor that improves scalability, and a smaller footprint than Visual Studio 2008.

And later the product will support lazy population of UI elements for solutions, feature a common/scalable project system, and have common lowlevel storage in language services, Schlimmers post said.

The VS10 release also will be more modern in that it will provide greater support for WPF, as well as for multiple monitors and multiple cores. Developers will be able to take advantage of a more modular WPFbased look and feel of the shell. And later the product will feature support for the full WPF shell, with WPF in all new feature areas, providing new and interesting views on code. There also will be support for extensive use of parallel framework to effectively utilize multicore hardware to improve VS responsiveness, Schlimmer said

Meanwhile, with VS10, the help system will use Live Search and integrate community ratings. And developers with multiple machines can synchronize using Live ID/Mesh. And later, the VS10 product will, like IBMs Jazz collaborative development environment, support instant messaging as an integral part of the small team development experience, with multiuser editing of shared source, Schlimmer said.

Microsoft gave no indication of when VS10 would become available.

Do you remember the first time you used Google Maps I do. I remember being stunned by the usability and then thinking, If this has always been possible in a browser, why did it take 10 years before someone did it

The reality is that Google Maps is a feat of engineering that consists of almost 10,000 lines of JavaScript code executing within the browser. You can see much of this code by clicking on View Source from within your Web browser. However, this is not the standard JavaScript that is used to validate fields of a Web form or provide dropdown menus. Many JavaScript veterans would struggle to follow the source code because it is so complex. 

So, is it possible for mere mortals to build RIAs Rich Internet Applications, or does it require a development team like Googles, composed of PhDcarrying JavaScript ninjas Increasingly, the answer is Yes, it is possible. Many tools and libraries have been created both commercial and open source to reduce the complexity of building RIAs.

An interesting, related trend is the movement of more and more logic off the server and into the clients browser. Fueled by the ubiquity of broadband connectivity, the increased processing power of PCs and improvements in browser support for JavaScript, the amount of JavaScript code embedded in a Web page has jumped significantly in the past few years. While users may not understand the technology underneath, they do notice that fewer of their clicks require a complete page refresh that is, rating an article by clicking on a number of stars. As the migration of user interface logic off the server and into the client accelerates, the obvious question becomes, Why do ANY UI logic on the server Answer Because change is hard, so people naturally resist it.

Since the first CGI Common Gateway Interface program in 1995 generated HTML dynamically in response to a Web request, we have continuously built on this concept of serverside, dynamic HTML generation. Innovations in Web development were often just abstractions built on top of this concept. But abstraction is a doubleedged sword. It eliminates the need to understand everything going on under the hood. However, each abstraction layer typically includes its own configuration, quirks and conventions. The result is that Web development has become unnecessarily complex for example, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.

One of the main reasons for this complexity is that Web application architectures are still an evolution of the CGI model from 1995. But, at the time CGI was invented, a different programming model dominated the software development landscape. It was known as clientserver. The clientserver years are likely the single most productive era in software application development. But when the tidal wave of the Web hit, there was no turning back.

One of the most compelling concepts of clientserver computing was the idea that the UI should be independent of the technology chosen for the business logic and data persistence. In todays Web programming model, if you decide to change your middle tier from Java to Ruby, you rewrite your entire UI, generating HTML from .rb scripts instead of .jsp scripts.  The UI is tightly coupled with the serverside technology choice.

An opportunity exists today that hasnt existed until recently outside of building UIs completely inside a proprietary player such as Flash. Stop generating your UIs from serverside scripts. Write rich Web applications as standalone clients based on open standards such as HTML, CSS Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript that interact with the serverside purely through Web services . Call it clientserver if you like, but without the baggage of software distribution, version management and platform dependencies. While JavaScript was the foundation of this revolution, it was the introduction of CSS, DOM Document Object Model manipulation, and finally, AJAX Asynchronous JavaScript and XML that allowed us to build truly standalone Web clients. 

An interesting result of this model is the division of labor created by isolating the technology skills to the specific layer of the architecture. You can have UI developers who know only HTML, CSS and JavaScript, instead of paying a Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition J2EE architect lots of money to write Web pages. Likewise, your serverside developers can focus on providing serviceoriented business logic and persistence rather than adding bold tags to Web pages. 

The Web is morphing into a delivery platform for client applications that consume external services from one or many sources, as well as a platform that provides a rich user experience with minimal page turns. This is the future of Web development. The client operating system IS the browser. Need proof See the rise of offline, SSBs Single Site Browsers and desktop Web integration. 

NEW YORK In a session billed as the browser wars up close and personal, key Microsoft, Mozilla and Google representatives spoke about the past present and future of the browser platform as they see it.

In the session at the Web 2.0 Expo here on Sept. 19, entitled The Future of Browsers, Chris Wilson, platform architect in the Internet Explorer IE team at Microsoft, Brendan Eich, chief technology officer at Mozilla and creator of JavaScript, and Ojan Vafai, a software engineer on the Google Chrome team took questions from the dynamic duo of Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, the cofounders of Ajaxian.com.

Despite having reps from three heralded browser teams that compete for user and developer attention, the session was pretty subdued. But what could really expect Despite the best laid plans of my good pals Almaer and Galbraith, the browser boys kept things tame and refused to sling any mud. But the Ajaxians did a masterful job, not only of corralling topnotch talent to speak on their panel, but also of getting things going with a series of relevant questions ranging from Microsofts support for various web standards, to Googles plans to grab market share, to how will react to new competition.

Yet, one of the issues that stood out to me was that of developer discontent. When the Ajaxians opened up questioning to the audience, an attendee stood up and said Googles announcement of its new browser was greeted with shock and horror, by him. This is hell, he said to applause from the audience. And he followed up with a question to the panel What are you going to do about it

The guy was referring to developers often having to choose which browser to support or having to create variations of their applications to run on different browser platforms. And based on the reaction of the crowd, developers want to see something done, whether its standards or what.

Chris Wilson of Microsoft said he recommended investment in test suites. Getting more tests and test suites will help some. Wilson also said Microsoft has addressed the issue of compatibility in Internet Explorer 8. Meanwhile, the attendee jokingly asked if Microsoft could just kill off IE 6. Wilson said there is a user base for IE6 that Microsoft has to support.

In another telling point in the session, blogger Hank Williams asked the panel if the browser was becoming the new operating system. Its apples and oranges comparing an operating system and a web browser, Vafai said. While there are some similarities they are two very different things, Vafai said in Googles do no evil tone of response. He said there are some things in a browser that are operating system competitive such as font rendering. But, its not even clear what you could do to replace an operating system with a browser

Of course, when Google announced its Chrome browser that was the first thing many observers said that Google was moving to replace the operating system.

Its already happening, Eich said. You dont see as many Windows apps being built per se; browsers have already intermediated operating systems. This is the kind of evolution you see when platforms grow platforms on their backs.

Galbraith asked Eich, who was seated between Wilson and Vafai, how he felt with Microsoft having such a high percentage of the browser market on one side of him and fierce competitor and upstart browser entrant Google on the other. Weve got them right where we want them. he said

Eich then said that although Google is a mighty competitor, Mozilla has been doing open source software for years and although WebKit, the engine for Googles Chrome browser has been around for some time, Googles challenge will be to move it forward with its own developer community. You cant just sprinkle open source pixie dust on it and it works like magic, Eich said.

Meanwhile, asked if Googles goal was to take market share away from Microsoft and Mozilla, Vafai in more donoevil speak said The primary goal of Google Chrome is to push forward web development. He also said Google plans to implement the features in the HTML 5 specification. Google wants to see web applications do well. If it adds competition to the market and makes web apps done better, great.

Please. Of course Google wants to take share away from Microsoft and Mozilla. And it will.

Vafai also noted that Google intends to support addons, like the Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, and we intend to do both of those with Google Chrome. He said the founder of the Greasemonkey extension now works on the Chrome team.

Eich said addons in Firefox are a potential source of instability, but also a vehicle for innovation. Wilson said addons have been part of IE and the general pattern of extending the platform will continue.

Galbraith asked Wilson if Microsoft is holding back support for the Canvas element of HTML 5 because of its proprietary Silverlight rich Internet application technology. We dont get to choose whether there is an open standard called Canvas or HTML 5, Wilson said. Silverlight is an endtoend platform thats not the platform my team works on. We look at the need for vector graphics and I never said to my team Hey, lets just use Silverlight; we dont need vector graphics support. Vector graphics support is one of the things well see next.

For his part, Eich said Mozilla has implemented many HTML 5 features including Canvas, offline support and Web Workers. Firefox has taken the lead in including HTML 5 features, he said.

Vafai added that all the credit for HTML 5 features in Chrome goes to the WebKit team. Google Gears also supports HTML 5 features, he added. Vafai said Google has not done a lot to extend the WebKit platform. With Chrome, it was an intended goal to match Safari, he said.

Moreover, Wilson said We took a lot of functionality weve shipped in IE 8 beta 1 and 2 from the HTML 5 spec, like the local store work.

Wilson also said IE 8 features tooling with lots of polish and has added profiling. Whenever you build an application its really important to have a rich tool set on each browser, he said. With IE 8, you dont have to go into FrontPage or Visual Studio and hack a fix, for problems, he said. Meanwhile, Vafai said Google Chrome has broad support for debugging.

Wilson also said Microsoft has a representative working on the incubation group for a geolocation specification for browsers. However, the challenge there is user privacy, he said.

Serena Software has announced its acquisition of Projity, maker of an opensource project management solution as well as a softwareasaservice project management offering.

Were announcing the acquisition of a company called Projity to deliver opensource desktop project management and a SAAS project management solution  to give us an ondemand project management offering along with the free desktop project management offering, said Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president of global marketing, partnerships and online services for Serena.

Projitys free, opensource desktop project management software is called OpenProj, and it is available under the Common Public Attribution License for individual project managers to download free of charge. OpenProj offers similar functionality as Microsoft Projectwith support for multiple platforms.

Serena Software acquires Projity, maker of an opensource project management solution called OpenProj and a softwareasaservice project management offering. OpenProj is available for Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Unix, and works with leading opensource office suites including Suns StarOffice, IBM Symphony and OpenOffice.org.

Serena Software has announced its acquisition of Projity, maker of an opensource project management solution as well as a softwareasaservice project management offering.

Were announcing the acquisition of a company called Projity to deliver opensource desktop project management and a SAAS project management solution  to give us an ondemand project management offering along with the free desktop project management offering, said Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president of global marketing, partnerships and online services for Serena.

Projitys free, opensource desktop project management software is called OpenProj, and it is available under the Common Public Attribution License for individual project managers to download free of charge. OpenProj offers similar functionality as Microsoft Projectwith support for multiple platforms.

Bonvanie said the success of OpenProj, with more than 600,000 downloads in 142 countries over the last year alone, shows there is considerable market opportunity for an opensource alternative to commercial desktop project management applications. OpenProj is available for Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Unix, compatible with Microsoft Project files and available in 11 languages. It is designed to work with leading opensource office suites including Suns StarOffice, IBM Symphony, and OpenOffice.org, which boasts 100 million users, Bonvanie said.

Meanwhile, Projitys ProjectONDemand SAAS solution is for small and midsize organizations where several users collaborate on multiple group projects, Bonvanie said. ProjectONDemand helps to eliminate the complexity of deploying Microsoft Project for large, geographically dispersed teams. It builds on the functionality in OpenProj by delivering additional multiproject, collaboration, reporting and management features for a small subscription fee. Many companies use ProjectONDemand, including Corning and Sun Microsystems.

Meanwhile, with this acquisition, Serena bolsters its Serena Mariner PPM Project and Portfolio Management offering. Serena Mariner provides visibility into project and portfolio status and metrics to ensure the right people are on the right projects at the right time.

With this acquisition of Projity we achieve two goals better integration of our project management solutions, and we also gain a fully functional alternative to Microsoft Project, Bonvanie said. We have acquired the company and all of its employees, he added, but noted that the terms of the transaction would not be made public.

Ultimately, Well also produce a unified product that will deliver combined functionality of this product with Mariner, Bonvanie said, noting that Serena will integrate ProjectONDemands project management capabilities into Serena Mariner, the companys enterpriselevel PPM offering.

Moreover, Serena will continue to offer OpenProj through open source under the name Serena OpenProj.  ProjectONDemand is available immediately as Serena Projects On Demand and is priced starting at 10 per user per month. Serena Mariner 2008 is available now for onpremises and ondemand implementations. Pricing for Mariner 2008 On Demand is as low as 18 per user per month. The integrated Serena/Projity product will be available in the first quarter of 2009, Bonvanie said. 

Adobe Systems has announced the Adobe Creative Suite 4 product family, a new release of the companys design and development software for virtually every creative workflow.

Adobe officials said Adobe Creative Suite 4 helps smooth workflow among developers and designers, and the software suite includes enhancements in the companys print, Web, mobile, interactive, film and video production offerings. Company officials called Adobe Creative Suite 4 Adobes biggest software release to date. It includes Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design editions, Creative Suite 4 Web editions, Creative Suite 4 Production Premium, Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, as well as 13 point products, 14 integrated technologies and seven services.

Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection CS4 combines virtually all of Adobes new design and development applications, technologies and services in a single box.

Designers and developers are shaping the way that people consume information, share ideas, sell products, tell stories and create memorable experiencesin print, online and via mobile handsets, said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe, in a statement. Whether youre creating a rich Internet application, a video or a bestselling magazine, Adobe Creative Suite 4 delivers powerful crossmedia technologies that have the ability to elevate products, brands and ideas above the clutter.

With Adobe Creative Suite 4, users can choose from six suites or full version upgrades of 13 standalone applications, including Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver CS4, After Effects CS4 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

InDesign CS4 includes a new Live Preflight tool that allows designers to catch production errors and a newly customizable Links panel to place files more efficiently, the company said. The new ContentAware Scaling tool in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended automatically recomposes an image as it is resized.

Meanwhile, Flash CS4 Professional now offers the ability to apply tweens to objects instead of keyframes, providing greater control over animation attributes. Also in Flash, the new Bones tool helps create more realistic animations between linked objects.

Also, Adobe Creative Suite 4 expands access to services available to creative professionals and developers who want to collaborate online, the company said. Adobe ConnectNow, a service of Acrobat.com, can be accessed from InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Acrobat 9 Pro, allowing realtime collaboration with two colleagues or clients, company officials said. Designers can also share color harmonies with Adobe Kuler, which is now accessible from within InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Extended CS4, Flash CS4 and Fireworks CS4.

Other online resources include Adobe Community Help for technical questions; Resource Central for accessing video and audio productrelated news and tutorials, as well as Soundbooth scores, sound effects, and other stock media; and Adobe Bridge Home, a customizable resource for tips, tutorials, news and inspirational content.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 and its associated point products are scheduled to ship in October 2008 with availability through Adobe Authorized Resellers and the Adobe Store at adobe.com/go/gnstore.

Moreover, Adobe Flash Player 10 is available in beta as a free download from Adobe Labs at adobe.com/go/astro with general availability expected by the end of the year, the company said.

Adobe Flash technology continues to revolutionize expressiveness on the Web while Creative Suite has become the industry standard for the creation and delivery of online experiences that delight audiences and customers worldwide, said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe, in a statement. Having impact on the Web is essential for any brand, product, company or organization that wants to remain vital and Adobe Creative Suite 4 has the tools to make the Internet the primary communication channel for any idea or message.

Meanwhile, With the next generation of tools in Creative Suite 4 and Device Central CS4, Adobe empowers creative professionals to bring great new content to a broad set of mobile platforms, said Gary Kovacs, vice president and general manager of Mobile and Devices at Adobe. Device Central CS4 dramatically simplifies the testing process and reduces production time to bring rich and consistent enduser experiences to hundreds of the latest device models worldwide.

During the past two decades, Ive worked with some really great programmers and software developers. And, unfortunately, Ive worked with more than a few who probably should have chosen a different field. But the vast majority of the programmers fell somewhere in the middle. They were good. Not amazing, but definitely not bad either.

For managers and executives who have programmers and software developers reporting to them, the variation in skill can present quite a problem when youre trying to build a great product. How can you transform the good programmers into fantastic, amazing, awesome programmers

Believe it or not, you can. Lets see how to do it.

First, you need to make sure your programmers have the essential skills, the fundamentals. Some do; some dont. Just because they survived an undergrad program in computer science doesnt meant they do.

Now this is going to sound obvious, but at the very least, every software developer must be a master of writing good lines of code. Youve seen those who arent, the programmers who sit there for hours, staring at 10 lines of code, trying to figure out whats wrong and cant. This kind of thing can happen to all of us programmers occasionally. But the problem is the programmer who does that on a regular basis.

Ive worked with these programmers and youve probably had some working for you. They would come to me all the time, interrupting my work, and drag me to their cube to debug their code.

And this is going to sound rough, but the reality is some people just arent cut out for programming. Im talking about a very small percentage of people here, fortunately. But theyre out there. If you have such a programmer on your staff, it might be time for a meeting with HR and a talk about other opportunities, perhaps in sales, customer support, testing QA or some other area of the company. He or she may excel in these areas. But you probably dont want him or her dragging the whole team down.

Fortunately, thats just a small percentage. Lets talk about the huge population that are in the middle, those who are good but not amazing. These are the ones you can help.

In fact, many of them are future experts but are, right now, just younger and less experienced. Such people dont always know about all the issues that can arise in software development. This isnt a problem with their ability; its really just a problem of inexperience, something theyll overcome with time.

Probably the single biggest issue that younger programmers overlook is the hidden complexity in todays software systems. This is true especially for todays Webbased systems that can serve multiple Web users simultaneously.

In the old days, we would run what was called stress testing on our desktop applications. This involved running a program that would put our computer into a lowmemory, lowdiskspace state, allowing us to see whether our software could function. But with todays multiuser Web sites, the biggest problems arent so much stress on memory and disk space, since typically the software will be running on large servers with a team of IT people making sure theres plenty of both. Instead, today the problems come more from multiple users trying to do the same thing simultaneously. And thats where the less experienced programmers might fall short in their coding.

Heres an example Suppose your team is developing an ASP.NET application that will be storing data in an XML file. Ask your team what it takes to write data to the file. If theyre inexperienced, they might express the answer very simply, as in

         You open the file.

         You write to it.

         You close the file.

Or, you ask them how to read a file

         You open the file.

         You read the data you need.

         You close the file.

Seems simple and straightforward enough. But its not. There are actually far more complex issues that can come up, issues that experienced programmers are well aware of but less experienced programmers might overlook, causing major problems when the software is running in a production environment. For example, what if two people are visiting the site simultaneously Both are entering data into a Web form that needs to be saved. Your server is handling both people at the same time. Remember, the servers can run multiple threads at once that is, the program is running the same parts of the code simultaneously. A separate thread is used to handle each user.

And thats where things get messy. The programmers might have written the code to open the file, read the whole thing into memory and close the file. Then the program would add on the users new data to the data in memory, and write the whole thing back to the file, effectively replacing the entire file. This is common practice and it works well.

The problem is that if there are two users accessing the system, both threads might open the file, read the data in and close it at roughly the same time. Then simultaneously each thread might modify its own private version of the data. The first thread will write the data to the file and close it. Then the second thread will do the same, perhaps a tiny moment later, overwriting the first threads version, losing the first users data.

Or, one thread might open the file for writing, and then the second thread might try to do the same but not be able to because the operating system locked the file when the first thread opened it, and this thread might not handle the situation appropriately and could crash the whole site, causing error messages to show up in the browsers of all the people visiting the site.

Ive seen this kind of thing happen many times. And thats when we programmers get a phone call at 3 in the morning because the operations team couldnt get the software up and running again. And then we have to either connect remotely or drag our butts into the office in the middle of the night, load up on caffeine and track down the problem.

And then we find exactly what the problem is and how to fix it. In our example in particular, it turns out the programmer would have been better off using a set of classes built into the .NET framework that allow for read and write locks on files. These classes are easy to use and take only a couple lines of code. Had the programmer used these, the problem wouldnt have occurred.

As a programmer, I remember seeing such messups in code and complaining to others in the company about it. One tech writer friend of mine laughed and said, Oh, you guys each have your own way of doing things, and neither is better than the other.

Oh, really Well theres a good litmus test for determining if the code is right Does it crash

Good software doesnt crash. Good software doesnt cause phone calls in the middle of the night where panicked people have to try and figure out why the software crashed.

Ive expressed this litmus test before to others, but was met with severe resistance from other programmers. People dont like criticism. But the fact is, perfect software doesnt crash. The reality is that with todays massive systems its nearly impossible to get every single bug out. But its certainly within reason to get as many as bugs as possible out, minimizing crashes as much as possible and not using the excuse that Bugs are inevitable and we should live with them.

And writing code for a Web server that crashes when two users connect to it simultaneously is unacceptable.

Handling things correctly, a manager can teach his or her team to not allow such bugs in the first place, and can oversee the process to prevent such bugs. How can this be done

First, the team and the QA folks must do their job in testing. Its easy to run through a test and see that the program works fine when only one user is accessing the software; its also easy for you, as the manager, to see that its working wonderfully and to feel good about it. But its not so easy to run a real stress test where hundreds or even thousands of threads are running simultaneously, all trying to access and manipulate the data. Thats when youll discover the real problems, the kind that can bring a system to its knees.

To run these kinds of tests requires that you have a QA team of testers who know their tools and know how to simulate such conditions. And further, its important that the coders are aware of the issues so that by the time their code gets to the QA team, its already set up to handle highload situations.

That brings me to the second point The developers must be trained in how to write code that handles such situations correctly so the system doesnt crash. I said that some bugs will creep in, and as much as I dont want to live with that situation, I suppose I accept it as fact. And your programmers, by the way, should have a similar attitude, rather than just shrugging and saying bugs are normal. Bugs are unacceptable, and we must stop as many as possible, but occasionally we have to accept that a couple might slip through.

Thus, at a minimum the programmers must be aware of what can go wrong, and must know how to write code that handles those situations correctly. And that means writing code that is threadsafe and is scalable meaning it can run not only on a singleuser basis, but easily and efficiently when hundreds or thousands of people are using it simultaneously, and even when divided up onto multiple servers.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. In an interview with eWEEK, Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at Adobe Systems, said Adobe is looking beyond competition from Microsoft and others and focusing on providing innovation for its base of designers, developers and end users of its technologies.

For instance, when asked whether the new Google Chrome browser with its nascent ability to run Web applications as desktop applications might present competition to Adobes AIR technology, which enables users to run Web applications across operating systems and work on the Web as well as the desktop, Lynch said Chrome is a Web browser and Im excited to see more innovation in the Web browser space.

However, the ability to run an application in Chrome and save a shortcut to the desktop, right now what that means is basically its an icon that launches you to a Web page and then youre interacting with that application again, Lynch said. Thats not the same approach that were taking with AIR, where you can actually install a Web application on your computer and it runs whether youre online or offline and you can access information you couldnt with a Web application so being able to access your local documents and edit them in a word processing application or a rich editing application. Thats not possible inside the Web model with the sandbox. Doing things like notification on the screen and being able to drag and drop information between applications, these are things that AIR is enabling you to do on the computer that the Web browser doesnt do.

Moreover, Lynch, who spoke with eWEEK at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Emerging Technology conference here, asked why should a user have to switch from a preferred browser to Chrome anyway. If you like using Firefox or you like using Opera or Internet Explorer and you want to install a Web app on your computer, you have to change browsers, he said. And my view is you shouldnt have to change browsers, you should be able to do that without having to make that switch.

However, Lynch said that now that Google is also supporting the WebKit engine, which Adobe also supports, in Chrome, the companies will likely be working together more. Theres a lot of momentum around using WebKit as a core technology for HTML, Lynch said. We adopted that for AIR and were contributing to the opensource project. Nokia is active there, Google is, and Apple is. So I really think theres increasing momentum around that as a good implementation of HTML that is broadly applicable and works on mobile as well as on PCs.

Meanwhile, Lynch said Adobe has seen no real impact of the concentrated focus Microsoft has placed on some of Adobes core business. Asked how the competition with Microsoft has been going, Lynch said

I would characterize it more as weve been going in an innovative direction for a long time at Adobe in terms of enabling people to express themselves with tools, get great clients out across the Web and get great serverside experiences. And what I see now is Microsoft starting to target each of those areas that we continue to innovate in and that weve been leading in for decades. But that is more of a following position than an innovative position. If you look at Silverlight versus Flash, for example, weve been deploying Flash on the Web for a decade to great success. There is no other technology thats as widely distributed as Flash today. We havent seen any impact or lessening of Flashs momentum so far. In fact, acceleration is what were seeing. Flash came from nowhere on video. By incorporating video in Flash Player across the Web, almost overnight we saw this incredible revolution and now over 90 percent of video streaming on the Web is actually in the Flash format.

In addition, with AIR, Microsoft has no solution in that space right now, Lynch said. While its competing with Flash via Silverlight, there is no competition for AIR right now from Microsoft. Except maybe from Windows, but thats an operating system. And AIR runs across operating systems. So thats kind of missing the point to say a particular OS is competing with AIR.

And in tooling, Lynch said Adobes newly announced Creative Suite 4 is just the best in the world at enabling people to express themselves. I would say Creative Suite is really light years ahead of where Microsoft is coming in with tooling. So were just going to keep focusing on our customers, working to innovate and not be distracted by how we might be pursued in some cases.

Kevin Lynch, Adobes chief technology officer and senior vice president, Experience & Technology Organization, oversees Adobes experience design and core technology across business units. This role includes driving Adobes technology platform for designers and developers across desktops and devices, including Adobe Flash Player, PDF Portable Document Format, Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, the crossoperating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the realtime dynamic capabilities of the Web. Lynch sat down for an interview with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Emerging Technology conference in Cambridge, Mass., on Sept. 25.

Q What stands out to you about Adobe Creative Suite 4 CS4, which you just announced the other day

A Well, the integration between all the tools is something that we did when we brought Macromedia and Adobe together. And with CS3 we were able to do some of that integration, but with CS4 we were able to dramatically move the integration along. The other thing is with Flash Player 10 we added a lot of new innovative expressiveness inside that release. That includes things like filter effects, so you can take the same language used in After Effects to do production time video effects so youre able to do that now live at runtime in the Flash Player. So thats a really big change in the ability to make those effects interactive if you decide to change them later. But its a lot of tooling inside the Flash Player.