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Today’s Latest News
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Government decides to increase SMS limit to 20
With the situation in cities affected by the hate campaign against the people from Northeast getting back to normal, the government on Thursday increased the number of SMSes to 20 per day with immediate effect.
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Microsoft unveils a new logo
Ahead of one of the most significant waves of product launches in Microsoft’s history, the company unveiled a new logo for the company.
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Google maps ancient Arctic village
New Delhi: Google is surfing new places in the remote northern outposts of the Canada's Arctic region with its mapping device, the search engine said in a statement Thursday.
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How you use Facebook can reveal your personality, say researchers
Want to know what kind of a person you are? Then, how you use Facebook can reveal your personality, a new study has claimed.
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Nokia commands 35% share of basic phone market thanks to 'Asha'
STOCKHOLM: Nokia, burning cash as it struggles to revive its smartphone business, is winning time for the recovery effort by gaining more customers for another product: basic mobile phones it sells for $39.
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Government decides to increase SMS limit to 20
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With the situation in cities affected by the hate campaign against the people from Northeast getting back to normal, the government on Thursday increased the number of SMSes to 20 per day with immediate effect.
It has been decided to revise the permissible limit of "bulk SMS/MMS to 20 in place of five with immediate effect", said a notification issued by the Ministry of Communication.
"The other conditions will remain the same," it added. It means mobile phone users can send a maximum 20 SMSes in one day. As far as MMSes are concerned, users can send only up to 20 KB of data in one go during the ban period.
The distorted messages and images in the past few days have led to the tension and panic in some of the cities in south India especially Bangalore. This has resulted in the mass exodus of the people of Northeast from these cities.
Keeping in view the situation the government on Friday had imposed a ban on bulk SMSes and MMSes for 15 days restricting them to five.
Industry lobby COAI , the limit of five SMSes per day may cause a loss of up to 8 percent to them.
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Featured Technology Talk
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Amazon launches Kindle Store in India
Finally, online bookseller Amazon has launched its India Kindle Store, which will offer over a million books to Indian customers at marginally lower prices.
In addition to this, Amazon has announced that the latest generation Kindle will launch exclusively in all Croma stores across India at Rs. 6,999.
In a bid to expand the e-publishing sector in the country, Amazon has also launched Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for independent authors and publishers in India.
This feature will enable authors and publishers to can make their books available to Kindle customers in India and around the world on both Kindle devices and free Kindle reading apps.
This isn't Amazon's first foray in India. Earlier, the e-commerce giant had launched search aggregation platform Junglee in the country.
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Microsoft unveils a new logo
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Ahead of one of the most significant waves of product launches in Microsoft’s history, the company unveiled a new logo for the company yesterday.
It has been 25 years since Microsoft updated its logo and the IT giant thinks this is the perfect time for a change. The year ahead looks like an incredibly exciting one for Microsoft as they prepare to release new versions of nearly all of their products. From Windows 8 to Windows Phone 8 to Xbox services to the next version of Office, Microsoft users will see a common look and feel across these products providing a familiar and seamless experience on PCs, phones, tablets and TVs.
This wave of new releases is not only a reimagining of their most popular products, but also represents a new era for Microsoft. They feel their logo should evolve to visually accentuate this new beginning.
"The Microsoft brand is about much more than logos or product names. We are lucky to play a role in the lives of more than a billion people every day. The ways people experience our products are our most important 'brand impressions'. That’s why the new Microsoft logo takes its inspiration from our product design principles while drawing upon the heritage of our brand values, fonts and colors," says the company in its official blog.
The logo has two components: the logotype and the symbol. For the logotype, Microsoft is using the Segoe font which is the same font they use in their products as well as their marketing communications. The symbol is important in a world of digital motion, and is aptly demonstrated in a video in their blog post. The symbol’s squares of color are intended to express the company’s diverse portfolio of products.
Starting today, Microsoft's new logo will be seen being used prominently. It will be used on Microsoft.com – the 10th most visited website in the world. It is in three of their Microsoft retail stores in the US today and will shine brightly in all their stores over the next few months. It will sign off all of their television ads globally, and will support their products across various forms of marketing. Microsoft, however, carefully adds that fully implementing a change like this takes time, so there may be other instances where consumers will see the old logo being used for some time.
"We’re excited about the new logo, but more importantly about this new era in which we’re reimagining how our products can help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential," says the company as it sign off the announcement on its webiste.
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Google maps ancient Arctic village
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New Delhi: Google is surfing new places in the remote northern outposts of the Canada's Arctic region with its mapping device, the search engine said in a statement Thursday.
"Search for Cambridge Bay on Google maps and you will fly to a tiny hamlet located deep in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavat in Canada's Arctic circle surrounded by an intricate lacework of tundra, waterways and breaking ice. High above the Arctic circle, it is a place reachable only by plane or boat," Google said in a statement.
This is farthest north that Google has reached with its map.
The isolated village of 1,500 people appears as only a handful of streets, with names like Omingmak (ox) Street and Tigiganiak (fox) Road.
"There are 4,000 years' worth of stories waiting to be told on this map. It is the furthest north the Google Maps Street View team has travelled in Canada, and our first visit to Nunavut. Using the tools of 21st century cartography, we're empowering a community and putting Cambridge Bay on the proverbial map of tomorrow," Google said.
The search engine is mapping the village with the help of residents, who hosted a community map-up event in Cambridge Bay, where village elders, local mapping experts and teenagers from nearby high school gathered around a dozen Chrome books and used a Map Maker to add new roads, rivers and lakes to the Google Map of Cambridge Bay and Canada's North.
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TECHNOLOGY
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
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Sony launches 20 megapixel DSC-RX100 camera at Rs 34,990
New Delhi: Sony has announced the launch of its 20.2 megapixel DSC-RX100 point-and-shoot camera with a first-of-its-kind 1.0-type Exmor CMOS sensor.
The DSC-RX100's sensor is about four times larger than the 1/2.3-type imager in regular point-and-shoot cameras.
The camera comes with Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* lens with 3.6x optical zoom. The DSC-RX100 has a 7.5cm (3-inch) LCD display.
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Famous Scientist
The Lord Rutherford of Nelson
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics.
In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation, proving that the former was essentially helium ions.
This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
Rutherford performed his most famous work after he had moved to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK in 1907 and was already a Nobel laureate. In 1911, he theorized that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton.
This led to the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by two students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932. After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.
Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Spring Grove (now Brightwater), near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was registered.
He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand where he was president of the debating society, among other things.
After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research at the forefront of electrical technology, in 1895 Rutherford travelled to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (1895–1898), and he briefly held the world record for the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be detected.
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LG Starts Mass Output of Screens Before New IPhone
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LG Display Co. (034220), a supplier to Apple Inc. (AAPL), started mass production this month of screens with built- in touch sensors, components speculated to be used in the next version of the iPhone.
“There were a lot of trials and errors as we tried a technology that hadn’t been used,” LG Display Chief Executive Officer Han Sang Beom said yesterday in response to a reporter’s question, without identifying the customer. “We’re all cleared now.” Steve Park, a Seoul-based spokesman for Apple, declined to comment on plans for the next iPhone.
The screens’ so-called in-cell technology embeds touch sensors directly into displays instead of adding them separately, allowing devices to be thinner. The new iPhone, expected to be introduced next month, will probably be the first to use this approach, said Hwang Joon Ho, a Seoul-based analyst at Daewoo Securities Co.
LG’s production of the screens is “largely in line with the release schedule of the new iPhone,” Hwang said today.
The new iPhone will have a larger screen and thinner body, according to analysts such as Piper Jaffray Cos.’ Gene Munster. Cupertino, California-based Apple is preparing to introduce the device on Sept. 12 in what will be a design overhaul of its top- selling product, two people with knowledge of the company’s plans said in July.
LG Display rose 0.2 percent to 27,000 won as of 11:23 a.m. in Seoul, while South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index climbed 0.1 percent. The stock has advanced 10 percent this year, compared with a 6.1 percent gain for the Kospi.
Touch-Screen Patent
Apple acquired a patent related to incorporating touch capabilities into displays this month, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Producing displays with built-in touch sensors is more difficult than using the current technology, which may result in a higher rate of defects and eat into LG Display’s profitability, Hwang said.
A shortage of such displays may limit availability of the new iPhone in September, Ben Reitzes, a New York-based analyst at Barclays Plc, wrote in an Aug. 13 report.
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Nokia commands 35% share of basic phone market thanks to 'Asha'
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STOCKHOLM: Nokia, burning cash as it struggles to revive its smartphone business, is winning time for the recovery effort by gaining more customers for another product: basic mobile phones it sells for $39. By adding features such as quicker Web and online games to its Asha handsets popular in faster-growing economies including India and China, Nokia boosted its share of the basic-phone market to 35% last quarter — the highest in two years. Unlike the smartphone division, the basic-phone business is profitable and unit sales are increasing.
The more than 70 million cheaper handsets Nokia sells each quarter is providing relief for chief executive officer Stephen Elop as he tries to stem revenue declines and recover from five quarters of losses. The basic-phone division is also winning over first-time users who may stick with Nokia when upgrading to a more expensive device. "Nokia's Asha models are selling quite well and that is good news for them since it gives the company a bit more time to get its smartphone business on track," said Teemu Peraelae, who helps manage $1.5 billion including Nokia shares at Alfred Berg Asset Management in Helsinki. Nokia's cheaper phones outsold its smartphones 7-to-1 last quarter and, at 2.29 billion ($2.86 billion), brought in 49% more revenue for the Finland-based company. Shares of Nokia have advanced 66% since it reported second-quarter results July 19 and rose 2% to 2.32 at 12:18 p.m. Helsinki time, gaining for a sixth day. They are still down 89% since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, a debut that started Nokia's decline in smartphones. If Nokia's smartphone strategy fails, the basic-phone unit may become the company's most attractive asset for an acquirer because it remains profitable and has a dominant market position in many emerging markets, said Sami Sarkamies, a Nordea Bank analyst in Helsinki.
A buyer would also benefit from Nokia's strong relationship with carriers in growth economies , he said. Nokia's Asha phones are gaining users in the developing markets because they resemble smartphones, yet cost a fraction of the price, Anshul Gupta, an analyst at research firm Gartner in Mumbai, said in an interview. Some Ashas have full-length touch screens similar to Nokia's higher-end models and Apple's iPhone. The underlying operating system is less sophisticated , making them cheaper to build. "They have almost all the features a smartphone should have like an application portal to download apps, a touch interface, social-networking integration — so these devices are completely like a smartphone," Gupta said. Nokia added touch-screen handsets to the Asha line in June to meet the surging demand for smartphone features. The Asha 305, retailing at 65, is Nokia's cheapest full-length touch-screen phone. The Asha 311, featuring a faster touch screen and a 1-gigahertz processor, costs 95. The company on average sells basic phones for 31 each, compared with 151 per smartphone. The 305 and 311 are seeing "fantastic traction" among customers, said Sathish Babu, who owns handset retailer Univercell with about 500 outlets across southern India.
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Tips to make your browser secure
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Browsers may be among the most commonly used applications, but they also offer the greatest number of attack options for dangerous content on the net.To keep viruses, worms and other malware away from your computer when surfing,it's crucial to configure your browser for security.
The firewall on a DSL router is a good first step for protecting the computer during surfing, says Marco Rinne from the computer portal chip.de. But that doesn't hold true if your browser is out of date: “Internet Explorer 6 and 7 or Firefox 2 no longer satisfy current security standards,” he says. For optimal protection, he therefore urgesusers to keep theirbrowsers updated.
There are numeroussecurity tools already present in Firefox and Internet Explorer. The pop-up blocker,for example, prevents more than justannoying ads. It alsothrottles other windows that can be used to sneak malicious software onto PCs. Phishing filters protect personal dataagainst theft.
Firefox offers additional configurationoptions underthe Settings item in the Security tab of the Options dialog box: thisincludes the ability to block risky or forgedwebsites.It's also a good idea to prohibit websites from installing add-ons on their own. Similar settings are possible under Internet Explorer in the Security tab of the Internet Options dialog box, accessible from the Tools menu.
Computer owners should also activate all options for warning against attacks, advises Markus Linnemann, managing director of the Institute for Internet Security (ifis) at the Polytechnic University of Gelsenkirchen in Germany. This applies in particular to warnings about suspicious content to be displayed using ActiveX, Flash, or JavaScript.
Yet the warning mechanism on most browsers alone isn't usually enough, Linnemann says. Those who wish to be especially careful can, for example, use the Firefox add-on 'No Script,' which blocks all active content of a website by default and allows the user to decide which should be permitted. The problem is that most users are unable to determine which content represents a threat to their computer, Rinne msays.
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Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.
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Cartoon of Technology
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Dubai: Indian taxi driver wins Lamborghini in lucky draw
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Dubai: An Indian cab driver scooped a USD 245,028 prized Lamborghini Gallardo in a lucky draw at a local shopping mall in Abu Dhabi.
Soupi Abdulla's prized car was plucked out from nearly a quarter of a million entries in a local mall's shop-and-win draw in Al Ain in Abu Dhabi, The National newspaper reported.
To be eligible for the draw, shoppers had to spend more than USD 68 at any of the mall's outlets.
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“Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you're going to live your life. "
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