Arts+Labs is a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today’s rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products and services to consumers. From the early development of motion picture technology, voice recordings and radio to today’s 3D computer graphics, streaming digital movies, “on-demand” entertainment and online virtual games, innovative technologies and creativity have always gone hand in hand to enrich our understanding and appreciation of arts, entertainment and culture.

Arts+Labs partners include entertainment companies, software providers, telecommunications providers, artists and creators committed to delivering innovative and creative digital products to consumers. AT&T Inc, Viacom Inc, NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co, Cisco Systems Inc, Microsoft Corp and the Songwriters Guild of America are then members of Arts+Labs. Arts+Labs is co-chaired by Mike McCurry, former White House press secretary to President Bill Clinton and Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to the campaigns of President Bush and current GOP presidential nominee John McCain. SGA President Rick Carnes and Chuck Sims of the law firm Proskauer Rose also have agreed to join Arts+Labs as the first members of its advisory board.After the launch, the Arts+Labs team kicked off a three-city media tour with stops in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles

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Google Gears is a technology that enable Gears for Web-sites and store information on your system hard drive. After enabling Gear, you can use these services even when your Internet connection  stuck due to any cause. Now Google Gears works with Google Docs but don’t support  Spreadsheets or Presentations. You can view your Google Reader feeds offline, but you can’t get to your Gmail or Google Calendar. First you need to install Gears, then visit Google Docs and open link and allow Google Gear security the service to store information on your PC labeled Offline in the top-right corner of the screen. The green check signal in the top-right of the Google Docs window indicates that you’re online. Click it and then click Settings to view your offline options. It will create a shortcut resulting dialog box on your desktop. In which you can disable the offline feature after selecting option. It will enable you to access online files and news feeds without an Internet link.

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Sony Ericsson , One of the largest mobile hand-set manufacturer  is now introduced a number of new and emerging technologies, these technologies will help to improve productivity for mobile for all type of users. This week In the Lund headquarters meeting Sony Ericssonteam said to developers that- develop more compelling applications with the greater functionality and give firms new ways/features so that we can  attract  more customers.

Sony Ericsson chief technology officer Mats Lindoff,  said

that recent advances in mobile technology, including increased processor power, improved connectivity and convergence of devices, have all opened the way for innovation.

Let’s have a look into technologies that Sony Ericsson may going to include in their mobile phones

1. Skype: Sony is planning to embed Skype in mobile because it will increase the CPU(power) by 10 times in future. This step is taken-up because of technology perspective of mobile Internet boom.
2. Java ME & Flash Lite: It’s a Sony Ericsson’s Capuchin project  to implement  Java ME and Flash Lite technology together, it will allow developer to to develop more compelling applications more quickly
3. TransferJet: New high-speed wireless transfer protocol backed by vendors including Samsung, Canon and Toshiba. TransferJet can enable downloading of content from one device to another at speeds of up to 560Mbps, with in very short range(3 Cm).
4. Hanashi project :  Hanashi is a project from Sony that enable mobile devices to connect to each other using an online client and after mobile devices connected they can share or transfer data. Cool thing about Hanashi is that mobile devices can transfer data even when they are off-line.

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Google Finance, yet another beta product from Google showed wrong data for nearly 12 hours. $1.2 trillion dollars was lost today, just because of Google Finance showing incorrect information. This service features business and enterprise headlines for many corporations including their financial decisions and major news events. Stock information is available, as are Adobe Flash-based stock price charts.

If you closely look into Google’s stock information site, you will find that numbers are off. This is the case when majority of country is looking for Stock information on Google’s Finance WebSite and a wrong information is there.Let’s look at an obvious stock: Google. According to Google Finance, Google closed at $390.08-a-share today. Down $40.96-a-share. Yikes. The only problem? It’s worse. It actually closed down $50.04, at $381.00-a-share, as Yahoo Finance correctly shows.

Google Finance chart looks like showing right information but the numbers are incorrect and these incorrect numbers screwed up closing number, stock falling even more in after-hours trading, when it’s actually rising.

Apple looses nearly 18% of it’s stock price today just because of Google Finance showing wrong information. Other stocks like eBay and Microsoft are also skewed.

Update: It looks like the numbers have finally been corrected as of 3 AM PST. With nearly 12 hours of wrong data and no word back yet from Google, this is still quite distressing. Others, including former Googler Chris Sacca share this concern in the FriendFeed

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Recently security service provider SecureWorks Inc.has published a report showing that United States of America was the top source of distributed attack traffic. These figures are based on Company’s 2,000 customers so far in 2008. According to SecureWorks, 20.6 million attacks originated from U.S. computers and 7.7 million from Chinese computers. Top 10 Source of Distributed Attack

Hunter King, a security researcher at SecureWorks, Said

It clearly shows that the United States and China have a lot of vulnerable computers that have been compromised and are being used as bots to launch cyberattacks. This should be a warning to organizations and personal computer users that not only are they putting their own computers and networks at risk by not securing them, they are providing these cybercriminals with a platform from which to compromise other computers.

Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at SecureWorks, Said

These findings illustrate the ineffectiveness of simply blocking incoming communications from foreign IP addresses as a way to defend your organization from cyber attacks, as many hackers hijack computers outside their borders to attack their victims. The Georgia/Russia cyber conflict was a perfect example of this. Many of the Georgian IT staff members thought that by blocking Russian IP addresses they would be able to protect their networks, however, many of the Russian attacks were actually launched from IP addresses in Turkey and the United States so consequently they were hit hard. This was a perfect example where we saw Russian cyber criminals using compromised computers outside their borders. On the other hand, we have found that many of the Chinese hackers will compromise large networks within their own country and use them as bots to attack other organizations. For example, entire university networks in China will belong to local hacker groups China’s hackers do create botnets from spamming through email and blogs, but a relatively larger percentage of the compromised hosts under Chinese control are simply machines in schools, data centers, companies — in other words, on large networks — that are mostly unguarded and consequently are entirely controlled by hacker groups, as opposed to distributed bots harvested from widely distributed international spam runs And often the groups have an insider in the networks they own. We also see many local hacker groups in Japan and Poland compromise hosts within their own country to use in cyber attacks, so the Chinese hackers are not alone in using resources within their own borders.

Computer security can be greatly improved by keeping your web browser and operating system up to date, using the latest versions of antivirus and antispyware software, following safe computer practices such as being wary of the websites you visit, and not clicking on attachments and links within emails until verifying that the sender intentionally sent the enclosed link or attachment.

Source : Compromised US and Chinese Computers Launch Greatest Number of Cyber Attacks, according to SecureWorks’ Data

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IBM opens one Cloud Computing data center in India. Apart from this data center IBM has opened three other cloud computing data centers also. These for new cloud computing data centers will help enterprises, universities and governments test Web-based services and applications. The Society for the Promotion of Excellence in Brazilian Software (SOFTEX) and Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications (VNTT) are some of the early customers for the new cloud computing centers. With these four new data centers IBM has total 13 data centers.

Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice president of IBM’s India Software Lab, Said

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology, and issues such as usage models need to be studied. The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the Internet to access services, IBM said. Using shared infrastructure like a cloud computing center allows businesses to manage and provision IT infrastructure dynamically depending on the requirements of business. The new center in India is positioned as an experimental platform for businesses and academic institutions to deploy and test applications.  While the platform would be offered free to academic institutions that IBM partners with, businesses will be charged. There are a number of production-scale applications using cloud computing available. Academic institutions in India are expected to work on using cloud computing for e-government applications and researching deployment models for cloud computing. Inadequate communications bandwidth in emerging economies like India will not be a bottleneck for the adoption of cloud computing. There are a lot of mobile applications built around cloud computing, for example, that run on less than broadband-grade connectivity.

Source : IBM- Cloud computing spreads in emerging countries

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Microsoft extends the capabilities of Microsoft Project with Project Server and Web Access. Microsoft Project Server stores project information in a central database, protected from unauthorized access and corruption. A Project Administrator can control security defining users and access rights. A big question is there how Microsoft Project Server stores data and what are the databases used by Microsoft Project Server ?

Microsoft Project Server uses four databases to store data on SQL server 205.

1. Archive: As the name suggests Archive database stores backup and other older data in Archive Database.
2. Draft: Draft Database data about the unpublished projects from Project Professional or any other application. Project Web Access does not show project data in the Draft database. Draft database also stores tables that are used for project queue.
3. Published: The Published database contains all of the published projects as well as enterprise resources, the enterprise global template, and other project templates. Published projects are visible in Project Web Access. The Published database also contains tables that are specific to Project Web Access (timesheets, models, views, and so on), and global data tables (outline codes, security, and metadata).
4. Reporting: Contains the same data as the Published database, but optimized for generating reports and online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes. Data in the Reporting database is updated nearly in real-time, is comprehensive, and is optimized for read-only report generation.

This diagram show how these databases are fit into the Project Server 2007 Architecture

Credit: MSDN

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3M Mobile ID reader is a portable device with an OCR swipe that reads MRZ and RF chip data from passports and Visas. 3M Mobile ID reader uses 3M’s own reader technology with Psion Teklogix’s WORKABOUT PRO hand-held data terminal to scan passengers’ identity documents and capture their biometric data. Then 3M Mobile ID reader quickly verifies data against local or international watch lists, through wireless networks. The unit is integrated with a touch screen and keyboard enabling security officials manually enter  data or they can correct the incorrect data.

The reader comes with a sunlight-safe color touch screen display, a capacitive fingerprint sensor, Wi? , GSM/GPRS EDGE wireless, and of course, Microsoft Windows Mobile 6. The reader uses an encrypted format for data transmission and the device has the capacity of 8GB. Before launching this into the market 3M has a case study over the summer at the Euro Cup 2008 soccer tournament that tested the capacity to deal with large, unpredictable crowds.

Rich Sanders, business manager for 3M Security Systems Division,Said

3M’s new Mobile ID Reader offers airport authorities, border management officials and transportation officers a complete, easy-to-use, portable solution in verifying identity that provides the security they expect from 3M Battery operation enables the use of this hand-held unit in virtually any travel situation - from airports to ships, trains and vehicles

Roger Zaugg, Commander Region North , said

With this technology at our disposal, we were able to stop people who thought trains offered a soft border entry point before they reached Switzerland and the tournament, quickly disrupting their travel plans Officers carry lots of equipment and are pleased that we have a device that is small-enough to be transported in cars and is easily operated in the confined space of a train carriage.

Source : Wired

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On September 26, 2008 Toshiba has launched a 256GB SSD using multi-level cell (MLC) technology. MLC technology offer competitive read and write speeds at a lower price point than single-level cell (SLC) SSDs. The drives will use the SATA II interface, and will be read at up to 120 mbps. The new 256GB SSD mounts NAND flash memory on a 70.6mm (L) x 53.6mm (W) x 3.0mm (H) platform. The drive offers performance characteristics essential for today’s mainstream notebook PCs: highly reliable, high density data storage and support for fast data transfer rates, with a maximum read speed of 120MB a second and maximum write speed of 70MB a second, via a high speed SATA 3.0Gb/s interface.

Flash Modules are fabricated on a 50mm x 30mm platform and offer a maximum read and write speeds of 80MB and 50MB a second, respectively. Flash Modules are also compatible with the SATA interface and will support continued development of the fast growing market for netbook PCs, UMPCs and mobile and peripheral applications by offering developers a wider range of SSD for integration in differentiated products.

Outline of New Products

256 SSD Specification

Flash Module

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  NASA( Center for Computational Sciences) has nearly tripled it’s super computer power by deploying IBM’s iDataPlex servers. NASA uses these super computers to simulate earth climate and weather. NASA also uses these super computers to find relationship between our planet’s and sun. NASA, scientists are integrating the iDataPlex servers with their existing system. The resulting system will have 1,024 quad-core Intel Xeon processors and raising performance capabilities from 25 to 67 teraflops (trillion calculations per second).

Dr. Phil Webster, NCCS Project Manager and Chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at Goddard Space Flight Center, said

By nearly tripling Discover’s performance, NASA scientists will be able to run models with higher resolution and greater fidelity to the underlying physical phenomena. IBM’s iDataPlex solution for NCCS will provide critical compute power for current and future NASA Earth and space science studies.

Computational projects running on Discover include projections of Earth’s 21st century climate, a reanalysis of global weather observations taken since the satellite era began in 1979, modeling of solar activity that affects weather and communications, and complex simulations of merging black holes and solar system formation.

Source : New NASA Supercomputer Will Play Critical Role as Scientists Simulate Climate, Weather and Solar Activity

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