All posts by Utkarsh

Solution designer with Firstsource solutions. A post grad in Networks and IT Infrastructure. Technology enthusiast, blogger, webdesigner, Network security aspirant and in love with electronics and gadgets. This blog is an attempt to share what I find interesting... almost anything @Mtaram on twitter and
Computers

Microsoft’s Antitrust Saga Finally Comes To An End

Leave a comment

http://seerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/patent-infringement.jpgMicrosoft’s historic and prolonged dispute with U.S. regulators over antitrust violations has finally come to an end. And how things have changed.

May 12 marks the expiration of a consent decree the software giant signed with the Department of Justice in 2002, an agreement that narrowly saved Microsoft from being broken up after it was found guilty of using its dominant position to stifle competition.

On the anniversary of the agreement, the Department of Justice cheered its victory, while Microsoft adopted a more repentant tone. The company said of the thirteen years it spent under the scrutiny of antitrust regulators, “Our experience has changed us and shaped how we view our responsibility to the industry.”

The Department of Justice celebrated the Microsoft antitrust case as a vital ruling that fostered competition in the tech industry and said it had paved the way for new products, including “computing services and mobile devices.”

Read more: Huffigton Post

Google, Internet

Google Objects on India Internet Regulation

Leave a comment

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-NV931_igoogl_D_20110511072343.jpgGoogle Inc. told Indian regulators in a confidential memo that tough proposed restrictions on Internet content could hamper the company and others in a promising market by exposing them to liability for a broad swath of material published by third parties.

The regulations were enacted last month with little change from the proposal. Google’s concerns, laid out in a February memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, added to criticism from civil-rights advocates who said the rules amounted to a crackdown on free speech on the Web.

Among other things, the rules require websites to remove objectionable content, including anything “grossly harmful” or “harassing.” They require Internet-service providers and social-networking sites to bar certain types of content under terms-of-service agreements with users. The websites also are responsible for removing objectionable content within 36 hours of being notified by authorities.

Via India Realtime

Hacking

Angry birds for Chrome already hacked

Leave a comment

Well, that did not take long at all. The Chrome version of Angry Birds has only been live for a few hours and it’s already been hacked to give players access to all of the levels. Web developer Wes Bos saw the potential to make a slight change to the web cache and had a working hack in a short time.

Bos says that he was able to quickly find a hack that gave him access to all of the levels in the game, even the special Chrome levels.

I was quickly able to find a hack that gave me access to all the levels, even the special Chrome levels!  So to  get access to all levels in Chrome Angry Birds, just copy and paste the following line into your browser’s address bar.

Here’s the code that Bos provided to unlock all of the levels, just copy and paste this into your address bar in Chrome and fire up Angry Birds.

javascript: var i = 0; while (i<=69) { localStorage.setItem('level_star_'+i,'3'); i++; } window.location.reload();

If you want to switch the game back to all levels locked, use this code in the address bar.

javascript: var i = 0; while (i<=69) { localStorage.setItem('level_star_'+i,'-1'); i++; } window.location.reload();

Bos goes on to explain that the key to the hack is that Rovio mentioned that it was using HTML5′s LocalStorage to cache game files.

If you open up Web Inspector in Chrome, you’ll see they are keeping track of your score and stars with localstorage. Lucky for us, that means we can use setItem() set all 70 levels to 3 and get access to them all.

So if you don’t want to play through all of the boring early levels, try out Bos’ hack and let us know how it works.

via The next Web

Applications, Gaming

Angry Birds for free on Chrome app store

Leave a comment

Bosses beware! Gaming sensation Angry Birds is now available on the Web browser. This could very well mean that employees, who till now played solitaire or switched tabs to move to other gaming sites at work, now have a killer of a game to kill their time with.

The game featuring birds destroying the pigs who stole their eggs, with the help of a slingshot is addictive and has been, according to the developer, Rovio Mobile, downloaded over 140 million times.

When Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man game with an interactive doodle, that allowed users to play Pac-Man right on the Google home page led to, according to analysts, a loss of $120 million to the British economy. Wonder the damage Angry Birds can do?

Angry Birds attack the Web, work hours at stake

At the Google I/O developer conference Rovio Mobile announced the web version of Angry Birds which is now available on Google’s Chrome Web Store. But that doesn’t prevent users on other browsers from enjoying the Angry Birds experience. We have tested the game on Mozilla Firefox 4, Opera 11 and on Internet Explorer 9. While it plays smooth on Firefox and Opera, it’s buggy on Internet Explorer. The game can be played in two formats, standard definition and high definition.

The Chrome app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has an average 4.7 star rating.

The Chrome version of the game is a beta release and includes 63 levels out of the 120 in the original game and an additional seven special Chrome levels. But not everything is going right with the release. “Those nasty pigs don’t want you to proceed past Level 1-20. We are flying fast and are working on the fix,” says the description on the Angry Birds page on the Chrome Web Store.

While the mobile phone is the hot platform for game developers, but the Web is still thriving as a platform for gaming and this appearance of a popular game from an app to Web avatar further establishes the fact.

The Web version of the Angry Birds game is available at chrome.angrybirds.com

Via IBN Live

Computers

PC sales slump likely to affect windows

Leave a comment

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/04/27/Win7_HomePremium_web_270x378.jpgWhen Microsoft announces its fiscal third quarter earnings after the market closes today, most analysts will zero in on one data point–how Windows is selling.

Windows–one of the three engines that powers Microsoft sales and profits, along with Office, and server software–seems likely to have a sluggish quarter. Two weeks ago, research firm IDC surprised industry watchers with a report that global PC shipments declined 3.2 percent during the first quarter, compared with the year-ago period, citing “cautious business mentality and waning consumer enthusiasm.”

“Clearly, the PC market is under pressure,” said Adam Holt, a Morgan Stanley analyst. And since the vast majority of PCs run Windows, Microsoft earnings are under some pressure too.

There’s little doubt that Microsoft will report its best-ever fiscal third quarter revenue. But with slowing PC shipments, Windows, which should account for about 28 percent of Microsoft’s overall sales this quarter, will be a drag on earnings. Slowing sales of Windows, long the fuel for Microsoft’s economic engine, is cause for some concern.

On Tuesday, Holt cut $200 million from his projections for Windows sales in the fiscal third quarter to $4.47 billion, a 4 percent decline from the year-ago period. And since Windows accounts for about 28 percent of Microsoft’s overall revenue, Holt nudged his overall quarterly estimates downward, expecting the company to earn $4.47 billion on sales of $15.8 billion.

Read more @ Cnet News
Internet

Facebook’s smear campaign against Google

Leave a comment

http://www.shefeekj.com/wp-content/gallery/google_fb/090114_GoogleFacebook.jpgWith privacy a hot-button topic for the past few weeks, thanks to revelations about location tracking via smartphone and the like, the timing of what has now been revealed as a Facebook smear campaign against Google must have seemed perfect. But the campaign gets a big fat “F” for execution.

The Daily Beast reports that Facebook has admitted to hiring PR firm Burson-Marsteller to push the media to write about privacy issues surrounding a Google tool called Social Circle, which allows Gmail users to see their social connections as well as those of their contacts. A Facebook spokesman told the Daily Beast that the company is concerned with the privacy implications of Google’s scraping of what a Google spokesman told USA Today is information that’s public — data gathered from Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp and more. The PR campaign began to unravel when a blogger refused to cooperate because Burson wouldn’t name its client; the blogger instead published the email exchange with John Mercurio, a former reporter now working for Burson.

via The silicon valley blog
image: Source
Internet

The Pirate Bay down

Leave a comment

http://trendsupdates.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/the_pirate_bay_logosvg.pngThe Pirate Bay, which calls itself “the world’s largest bittorrent tracker,” is currently inaccessible to many people around the world, including Comcast users in the United States, according to various reports. This has raised suspicions that Comcast is “at it again” and is blocking the Sweden-based file-sharing site, but in a comment to Engadget, Comcast denies doing so. Comcast, of course, has throttled file-sharing traffic before. Its 2007 throttling of BitTorrent traffic led to an FCC investigation, and was the precursor for net neutrality rules that are still being debated to this day.

Environment

Sunlight May Turn Jet Exhaust Into Toxic Particles

Leave a comment

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/05/airplane-jet-exhaust-flickr-tj.jpg

Airports can pose a far bigger threat to local air than previously recognized, thanks to the transformative power of sunlight.

In the first on-tarmac measurements of their kind, researchers have shown that oil droplets spewed by idling jet engines can turn into particles tiny enough to readily penetrate the lungs and brain.

Allen Robinson of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his team collected the pollution spewed from a plane powered by one of the most common types of commercial jet engines as it operated at different loads. Though jet engines operating at full power produce mostly solid particles, at low engine loads — such as when a plane idles at the gate or on the runway — emissions are predominantly in the form of microscopic droplets.

 

The researchers piped the engine’s exhaust into a 7-cubic-meter covered Teflon bag. When the bag was full the researchers uncovered it, allowing sunlight to fire up chemical reactions that would normally occur in the open air.

Within minutes solid particles were generated by interactions between the oily microdroplets and gases. “Driving this chemistry,” Robinson notes, “was hydroxyl radical,” or OH — the oxidant that’s most effective at catalyzing the breakdown of oily hydrocarbons. “To create this hydroxyl radical, you need sunlight,”

via Wired Science

Google

Google defending its Music service already

Leave a comment

http://www.thereaderseye.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Google-Music-Beta.pngGoogle defended its music storage service at a press conference today shortly after it unveiled the service at its developer conference here.

The new Google Music service, which  allows people to store up to 20,000 songs in the Internet “cloud.” The benefit of doing this is that they will then be able to access the music from any Web browser that supports Flash or Android devices. The service is still being beta-tested and will only be offered to a select group of invitation-only users in the U.S. Initially, the service will be free to users, but Paul Joyce, a Google project manager demonstrating the service during the keynote this morning at Google I/O, hinted that Google may charge for the service in the future.

He also hinted at capabilities being added to the service in the future. But for now Google only will allow music to be stored remotely. It won’t allow users to purchase new music via the cloud.

Jamie Rosenberg , direct of digital content for Android, answered a question from a reporter about whether Google was afraid that music studios would take issue with Google allowing its users to move music digitally across the Internet. He responded by saying that the service is “completely legal,” because it allows people to store only music that they own legally. Rosenberg admitted that Google had wanted to offer music labels an opportunity to sell music to Google users through the cloud service, but that the labels had asked for certain conditions that Google couldn’t accept.

Read more: Cnet News
Applications

Beam Music, Movies, Photos from iPad to Mac With AirServer

Leave a comment

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2011/05/AirServer.jpeg

AirServer is a Mac app that turns your computer into a receiver for AirPlay. We have seen this kind of thing before, in the shape of Banana TV, but AirServer works better, and adds in some functionality not found in Banana TV.

AirPlay is what lets you throw content from an iPad or iPhone wirelessly to speakers or your TV. To do this, you need to have an AirPort Express next to your speakers, or an Apple TV hooked up to your TV. Bluetooth speakers show up in the list, too. What you can’t do is beam movies from your iOS device direct to your big-screen iMac.

AirServer is a $3 app that adds in this last piece of the puzzle. With it running on your Mac, a new entry will show up in the AirPlay popover of any iOS device on the same network, as you’d expect.

Music just appears magically from your Mac’s speakers, or whatever speakers are hooked up to it. Movies open after a second in the Quicktime player, and it’s on-screen controls let you play, pause, scrub and change volume on the Mac itself.

Both of these (usually) work just fine in Banana TV (although that app can also use its own video viewer). The difference is with photos. With AirServer, you can not only view individual photos, but you can also run a slideshow. Pick your album in the Photos app, choose slideshow and a popover will pop, erm, over to let you choose a destination. You need to select a photo in that album to see the popover, and the promised transition is replaced by one photo simply appearing to replace another, but it works.

via Wired