Microsoft Working On Better Tablets

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said Microsoft Corp. needs to do better in the market for tablet computers that Apple Inc. has found success in with the iPad.

View Full Image

"We've got to make things happen" with Windows on such devices, Mr. Ballmer said at a conference for investors on the company's Redmond, Wash., campus. "We're in the process of doing that right now."

Mr. Ballmer said Microsoft is working closely with hardware partners to improve the quality of tablet devices that run Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. The software giant, which currently has four retail stores, is also planning to open three more, he said

Tablet or slate devices—thin, keyboard-free computers with touchscreens—running Windows 7 haven't caught on yet, as computer makers struggle to create products with the responsiveness and ease of use of the iPad.

Apple has done an "interesting job" with the iPad, Mr. Ballmer said, adding "they've certainly sold more than I'd like them to sell."

"

On Thursday Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said Apple has sold more iPads than he would have liked, and discussed Microsoft's plans to improve the quality of tablet devices that run Windows 7 OS. WSJ's Marcelo Prince and MarketWatch's Rex Crum join Simon Constable on the Digits show to discuss Microsoft's strategy. Plus: Emily Maltby reports on affordable 3-D software for small businesses.

Microsoft will "get a boost" early next year when Intel Corp. comes out with a new microprocessor known as Oak Trail designed to work better within the thin confines of a slate device, Mr. Ballmer said. The processor will allow devices without fans to cool them and with better battery life.

Mr. Ballmer said there will be a "lot of cacophony" in the tablet market as hardware companies use other operating systems for their products than Windows. Mr. Ballmer didn't mention those competing operating systems, but a number of its PC partners are planning tablets running Google Inc.'s operating system.

Hewlett-Packard Co. is also expected to make similar devices that run WebOS, an operating system made by Palm Inc., which H-P acquired this year.

Mobile Appication Development

Accessing your favorite sites from your smart phone or other web-enabled mobile device is more popular than ever. Statistics suggest smart phones will be nearly 1/3 of the entire mobile market before the middle of the decade, and as a result, developers are rushing to ensure their applications are not only popular, but create a level of lasting usefulness as well. As a result, a number of trends in the mobile application market have begun to appear.

The Financials

Few individuals take the time to physically write a check these days. Paying online almost always involves simply accessing your credit or debit card or bank account from a service like PayPal that’s designed for web usage. This trend hasn’t escaped mobile web designers either. Because it’s difficult to go through screen after screen of the typical online purchase process from your smart phone, many designers are creating new payment interfaces from everything to downloading new applications and music to your mobile device to making small charitable contributions with a few clicks. Western Union recently announced a pilot project involving mobile bill pay, and the cell phone companies themselves almost all have a feature where customers can pay the mobile bill directly from the phone. As traditional banks begin reinventing the security protocol that will be necessarily involved with the process, it’s likely they’ll play a role as well.

Application Buying Diversity

Apple has certainly cornered the initial market share on application development and sales, and their ad campaigns don’t hesitate to let you know, but there are some real drawbacks. Not only is it more difficult for developers to get an app to iTunes these days for purchase, but with the market increasing for other brands, the idea that Apple will remain king of the market isn’t likely to last forever.
What’s more, though, is the real lack of organization iTunes presents. Most iPhone users know they can download an app that will allow them to make various fart noises or make a virtual stapler staple every time you touch it, but with so many applications on the market today, it’s difficult for business professionals to sort through the ones that may actually help them more effectively work with clients or accomplish tasks. As a result, niche app markets, and the associated stores, are increasingly appearing to help with promotion. Because today’s most popular app stores don’t offer professionals a way to sort out virtual staplers from those that may offer you the best project management help, compiling them in this format is essential to individuals who simply don’t care if one of their apps allows them to get exclusive messages from Britney Spears.

The World of Advertising

Along with the newfound diversity in purchasing apps from other stores and for other devices besides the iPhone comes application advertising that just wasn’t a possibility a few years ago. These days, however, there are sites and networks that are entirely dedicated to covering the thousands of applications that are released each week, and that’s going to be essential as the market gets bigger and bigger. One study suggested that over the next five years, ad revenue for apps will increase to nearly $1.5 billion, and as a result, the very rudimentary promotional strategies many app developers are using to encourage mobile users to download their app over another one aren’t going to stand the test of time. Applications for every smart phone on the market are being released at a fast pace, and when you add that to the development of apps over the past several years, any smart phone user has to have the advertising just to make sense of the mountain of virtual products that are now available.

The Ever Present Social Media

Sure, social media marketing was the zeitgeist of the last decade, but it’s not going anywhere in the near future unless it’s headed to your smart phone. People already tweet or update a Facebook page from their mobile devices, so it’s little surprise that mobile development as a whole is headed in this direction as well. When you add the GPS capabilities to today’s most popular social sites, you have an entirely new animal that may redefine social media as it struggles to find its place in this emerging market.

Most Useful WordPress Plug-Ins

1. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you should have an XML sitemap and this plug-in makes it a one-click process.

2. All in One SEO Pack – While WordPress software now includes the rel=canonical directive by default, if you wish to write search friendly titles that are different from the heading of the page, get this plug-in.

3. Automatic WordPress Backup – I host the static JS and CSS files of this blog on Amazon S3 and this plug-in helps me create a backup of all the essential WordPress files (like themes and plugins) and the MySQL databases to the same S3 account.

4. Hyper Cache – This is a nice caching plug-in for WordPress that helps in reducing the load on your web server. I was initially on the more popular WP Super Cache plug-in but had to switch to Hyper Cache as the former was not quite compatible with my web host.

5. Redirection – If an external site is linking to a non-existent or a 404 page on my site, I use the redirection plug-in to forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

6. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page on my site for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 pages like labnol.org/flickr has links to my Flickr related stories.

7. WordPress.com Stats – Google Analytics is obviously the best solution for tracking visitors but if you want something quick and simple, WP Stats is something nice-to-have alongside Google Analytics. The advantage – it will display the traffic charts right inside your WordPress dashboard.

8. Akismet – I generally close comments on my stories after a couple of days while Akismet helps me filter out spam comments on fresh posts.

9. SlideShare – This helps me easily embed SlideShare presentations in any of my stories using short codes. It saves time and the embedded presentation automatically fits the width of the site – see example.

10. WordPress PDA – If you ever had a chance to visit @labnol on your mobile phone, you may have noticed that the layout is completely different. Earlier, the mobile version of the site was done through Google Reader but now its the PDA plug-in that handles the mobile traffic based on the browser’s user agent.

11. WP-Paginate – If you scroll to the bottom of any archives page (like this one), you may see some numbered boxes – they are done through the Paginate plug-in.

12. Debug Queries – This is another awesome plug-in that helps me debug which of the MySQL queries are taking time to execute and thus slowing down the blog.

13. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps you expose your archived content to search bots.

14. Smart YouTube – Like the SlideShare plug-in, Smart YouTube helps me easily embed videos from YouTube into my site. Here, I just have to copy-paste the URL of a YouTube video and the plug-in will automatically convert it into an embed code.

15. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

For Annotatin Web Pages We Have Best Tools

You are reading a web page, say a news story on the CNN website, and would like to share it with your friend. The article is interesting but a bit long and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the stuff that you really want him to read.

In the good old days of paper, you could have used an highlighter pen to mark the important lines but now that the text has gone digital, so have the highlighter pens. Let’s look at some of the best tools that let you add highlights and text annotations to web pages without installing any software.

One of the easiest tools for adding annotations to public web pages is the Awesome Highlighter.

As soon as you open a web page inside Awesome Highlighter, your mouse cursor will automatically turn itself into a highlighter pen – you just have to select a piece of text to highlight it. You can use different colors for highlighting and there’s also an option to add text notes to web pages -- see example.

Next in the category is BounceApp – this is actually a service for capturing screenshots of full web pages and there are built-in tools to annotate these screenshots.

You just have to draw a marquee around the text that you want to highlight and these are numbered automatically – this will help in case you would like the other person to read the different highlighted sections in any particular order.

404 ERROR REASONS AS THEY HAPPEN

Your website can display 404 errors for two reasons:

Reason #1 (in your control) – If you change the URL of an existing page or decide to delete it completely from your server, your visitor will get a 404 or “File Not Found” error when they try to access that page.

Reason #2 (not in your control) – You page URL is abc.com/xyz and another site decided to link to your page but they mistakenly used a wrong URL (say abc.com/xyy) – if anyone visits your page through the other site, they’ll see a 404.

Track all the Missing Pages on your Site

It is extremely important that you get your 404 errors fixed as soon as you spot them because they not only spoil the visitor experience but your site is also losing Google juice. You get juice from every incoming link to your site but the benefit is lost if that link is pointing to a non-existent page.

Let me now share the various tools that I use to track track 404 error pages on my site.

NOKIA C5 NOW AVAILABLE AT LOW PRICE

Nokia C5, the budget phone from Nokia is now available in India. Nokia C5 is the first device in the C Series range of phones

. It has a 3.15 megapixel camera, 2.2 inch display, 3G Connectivity, 16 GB expandable memory, Ovi Maps navigation and much more.

This handset runs on Symbian S60v3 operating system. It has some amazing features such as 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPRS/EDGE, USB, 3.5mm headphone jack, contact bar on the homescreen, Bluetooth, OVI Maps, FM Radio, Java, 2GB card included, 16GB expandable memory and so on.

Nokia C5 is available in two colors – White and Warm Grey. It has a built-in Nokia messaging and social networking features. This handset comes with a price tag of Rs.7,999. Would you like to buy this handset when Nokia has already announced some great budget phones like Nokia C3, E5 and C6? Let us know your views in the comments below.

SITE ON MOBILE CONCEPT

BANGALORE, INDIA: Taking Internet to the masses is a big challenge especially in a county like India where Internet penetration is low and majority of mobile phone subscribers use basic phones. HP Labs India has now come out with a path-breaking technology that can take Internet content and services to even basic phone users without Internet connectivity.

Sudhir Dixit, director of HP Labs India said new solution 'SiteonMobile' enables portal owners to easily design mobile applications that are task based. The HP cloud service enables users to access the applications just using SMS or voice.

Also read: 'Reduce time-gap between innovations'

Instead of delivering a complete web page to a mobile phone, the solution delivers only the short content relevant to the users' task. It is built around a novel concept named 'Tasklets' that represents the interactions for a user's specific web task, Dixit said.

In addition to mobile phones, even those owning the PCs can run 'TaskLets' by clicking the corresponding widgets on their computer screens. Since the TaskLets reside in the cloud they can be accessed from anywhere from any device.

Also read: HP Labs working on gestures-based PCs

There are several small and medium businesses in India that have invested in e-commerce web portals for their businesses, but such portals are mot much accessed by the end-consumers today. The SiteonMobile solution enables such website owners to define specific tasks on such websites and make those tasks easily accessible to their customers on their mobile phones.

Also read: Now, web conferencing on smartphones

“We are ready with the portal-based solution where website owners can create TaskLets for the services. We received an overwhelmingly positive response from select businesses whom we approached to partner with us. They have not only agreed to use our platform, but also offered to enhance their web portals to offer services they wished to make available through mobile phones but hadn’t been able to invest time, money and resources for it so far”, the HP Labs director said.

Solar System

Views of the Solar System presents a vivid multimedia adventure unfolding the splendor of the Sun, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and more. Discover the latest scientific information, or study the history of space exploration, rocketry, early astronauts, space missions, spacecraft through a vast archive of photographs, scientific facts, text, graphics and videos. Views of the Solar System offers enhanced exploration and educational enjoyment of the solar system and beyond.

Introduction	Sun	Mercury	Venus	Earth
Mars	Jupiter	Saturn	Uranus	Neptune
Pluto	Asteroids	Comets	Meteorites	History
People	Planetary Data	Glossary

C PROGRAMMING AND ITS IMPORTANCE

The C programming language is unique. It is special. It is small. It is great and it is filled with UNIX genius. It is just like a typical UNIX tool which does only one job, but does it well. The C language is small but it is the most challenging programming skill to acquire today.

I have been doing serious C programming for close to a decade now. But I feel like a child on the seashore picking up a pebble here, a pebble there when the vast ocean lies unexplored in front of me.

This was stolen from Isaac Newton. And I also wish to steal another saying of his. I have been able to do whatever programming I did using C only due to the open source C programs I have seen in different projects available in the familiar places like sourceforge and also in later days the operating system source code under /usr/src in OpenBSD.

THREE OTHERS GET BWA SPETRUM,INFOTEL

NEW DELHI: Government on Wednesday allotted spectrum to four operators, including RIL-owned Infotel, in all 22 circles and Bharti Airtel in four, paving the way for starting high-speed mobile broadband.

According to senior officials in DoT 20 Mhz of spectrum has been given to the four firms — Infotel, Bharti, Aircel and Tikona Digital, which have licences to offer services.

The other two — Qualcom and Augere (Mauritius) Limited — would be given the radio waves as soon as they procure telecom licences, they said, adding there is no other problem with their cases. The government had recently held auction for selling spectrum for 3G and Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) services and had collected over Rs 1,06,262 crore.

With the BWA, the operators can offer broadband services that can facilitate high-speed wireless transmission of data. The speed can be as high as up to 40 Mbps. The operators have started talks with the telecom vendors like Samsung, Motorola, Ericsson and firms like Huawei and ZTE for deploying either Wimax or LTE platform.

READING LENGTHY EMAILS BY USING BLACKBERRY SHORTCUTS

Carry a BlackBerry mobile phone? Here’re some keyboard shortcuts that will help you quickly navigate through any of the long email messages that you may have in your BlackBerry Inbox.

If you in the middle of a lengthy email message, the “T” key will move you to the top of the screen while you can hit the “B” key to scroll to the bottom of the message.

Then you have the space key that lets you scroll through an email message one page (or screen) at the time. You can also use Space with the Shift key to move up the screen just like the Page-Up key on your desktop.

Finally, you have the very useful but lesser-known “G” key.

Let’s say you are reading a long email inside your BlackBerry and then have to close the mail app because there’s something more urgent at hand. When you re-open that same message later, you can hit the “G” key and it will take you back to the exact position in the message where you left off.

If you are using Pearl with SureType, press GH instead. This shortcut was recently shared by the BlackBerry team on Facebook and I doubt if its documented in your BlackBerry manual. Also see:

GET THE USE OF FIVE BAR PHONE SIGNALS

Apple's recent explanation that iPhone 4 reception issues are linked to Apple's miscalculationof how it measures signal strength on iPhones, has left many people wondering what that five-bar icon displayed on the phone really means.

Earlier on Friday, Apple issued a statement blaming iPhone reception issues on a software miscalculation rather than on hardware design. Since the iPhone 4 launched last week, thousands of consumers have complained that when gripping the phone around the lower left-hand corner of the device, the signal degrades or calls are dropped.

Apple acknowledged the problem, and explained that customers were simply covering up the antenna with their hand. Now the company says its engineers have made a "stunning" discovery.

People may be finding that their reception is poor and that calls are being dropped not only because they're holding the phone wrong, but also because they think they have a better signal than they actually do. In the statement, Apple says that it had made a mistake in the formula that calculates the number of bars that display the signal strength on all of its iPhones.

But experts say that the bars that one sees displayed on any cell phone can be misleading. CNET talked to Ron Dicklin, co-founder of Root Wireless, a company that tests and provides accurate data on wireless network and consumer phone performance, to get some answers. Based on that conversation and some additional research, CNET put together this FAQ.

What do the wireless signal bars that appear on the upper left corner of my phone mean?
They are supposed to represent the handset's ability to connect to the cellular network based on how powerful the carrier's radio signal is being received. The five bars measure the decibels of power that is being received from the cell phone tower.

What does it mean if I have fewer bars versus if I have more bars?
The closer you are to a cell tower and the more powerful signal you receive from the cell tower, the more bars you're likely have. If the signal strength is too low, you may have trouble completing a call or receiving data. And if you can make a call, the likelihood that a call may drop or a data connection is interrupted is higher.

Is it different if I have fewer bars on a GSM phone versus using a CDMA phone?
Yes. With GSM, the technology that AT&T and T-Mobile USA use, the probability of having an issue with the cellular network at the lower bar range is going to be higher than with CDMA. CDMA, which is the technology used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, is more efficient in how it manages its connection with the network. So even at the lower signal range with CDMA, as long as there's not a high level of noise due to network congestion, you can maintain a connection just fine.

In raw numbers, what is the range in decibels of what's considered a good strong signal and one that is weak?
As a rule of thumb around -113 decibels is on the low end of the signal bar range, and around -50 decibels is on the high end (more signal bars). The closer the decibel measurement is to zero, the stronger the signal.

Apple said it was "stunned" to discover the formula it used to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. What does this mean?
While one might assume that each bar represented on the iPhone signal strength icon represents the same number of decibels, apparently that's not the case. According to testing by the Web site AnandTech, the fifth bar on the iPhone represents about 40dB, but the fourth bar only represents about 10dB. The third bar represents a change of only about 2dB. The second bar represents 4dB, and the first bar represents a difference of 6dB.

Why doesn't Apple just measure the bars in a linear fashion so that each bar represents an equal share of decibels?
Because the range is so big, it's harder to diagnose problems at lower signal strengths. Signal strength measurement doesn't need to be very granular at the top end of the scale because performance is only affected when it drops off considerably. But more granularity is needed in the lower part of the scale.

Is there a standard way that cell phone manufacturers use to measure the signal strength?
Unfortunately, there is no standard way to measure signal strength. One of the steps Root Wireless performs to properly validate that its on-device metering software is working correctly, is to put each of the supported handsets in a lab which measures a known decibel rating against what the handset reads and displays in signal bars. Through its tests, Dicklin said, the company has seen rather large differences in how handset manufactures relate decibels to bars.

Is there a more precise way of measuring signal strength other than the five-bar graphic?
Smartphones, such as those using the Android software and RIM's BlackBerry, can also display reception in terms of numeric decibels instead of just as a five-bar graphic. But AnandTech points out that Apple has removed the tool.

Should I even care about these wireless bar signals?
Yes. If the phone is working correctly you probably wouldn't reference it much, but if you are having an issue it's a good tool to help isolate what the problem may be. It's like a gas gauge on a car. If you were driving down the road and your car suddenly stopped and the gas gauge reads empty, you'd conclude that the reason your car stopped is because you ran out of gas. If you are having problems with a call and the signal bars are low, you're probably not able to make the call due to poor signal strength.

So if I have all five bars of service my phone should work perfectly?
Not necessarily. You can have full signal bars and if the network is heavily congested you will still have problems maintaining a good connection. This condition happens more in heavily populated areas where many people are using the network at the same time, like in big cities and at sporting events for example.

NEW UPDATED TECHNOOGIES FOR SECONDLIFE

Over the last few weeks, Linden Lab staff have been talking about a few upcoming Second Life projects during their in-world office-hours sessions. Now the Lab has always been quick to stress that the accuracy and reliability of information obtained through those venues is questionable, and that we shouldn't assume that anything said at them is actually accurate.

With that in mind, we went back to the Lab about several identifiable (or at least apparent) projects to get the skinny on them and find out what's actually happening with them, and where they're at.

Project Firefly

Project Firefly was hinted to be a client-side scripting project, that is making the Second Life viewer itself scriptable. Exactly what the scope of that might be remains unknown. It might allow for very simple alterations of the user-interface, or might extend to the capacity for full-blown automation of a viewer.

Probably the actuality, if it goes ahead, will be somewhere in between the two.

Linden Lab says that Project Firefly is "at the earliest stages. We cannot discuss this project right now. We'll share more – and work closely with the Second Life community – when we're farther along."

"At the earliest stages" could mean a lot of things, ranging from drawing straws to see who goes to the meetings to figure out if it is even feasible, how much functionality to include, or even coding up a preliminary framework. Your guess is as good as ours.

Linden Lab sounds confident that this is going ahead, but there's no timeline at this stage, and heaven only knows how much of the viewer code will have to be ripped up in order to provide functionality. It's possible that it might happen in new viewer, built mostly from the ground up as an alternative to Viewer 2.0 – but then we'd strongly advise against holding your breath. It could be a while.

Havok 7

Havok physics is the underlying third-party middleware physics system that underpins Second Life simulator operations. Unfortunately, Havok's not been all that optimal for Second Life, being that the sorts of tasks that Havok is not so great at performing well are relatively common on Linden Lab's simulators. It's not that there's anything actually wrong with Havok, it's just that it is a tool made for slightly different tasks.

Nevertheless, the demands of games have expanded significantly since Havok 4 (which is what the Second Life grid runs on at present), and Havok has grown with that. Havok 7 might present a much better option for the actual conditions that prevail in Linden Lab's virtual environment nowadays.

Linden Lab recently hired Falcon Linden (a former Havok engineer) specifically to work on Havok physics.

Falcon Linden and Oskar Linden seem certain that Havok 7.0.0 is already going ahead and that it will be ready for public testing around May this year.

Linden Lab's official comment was considerably more hesitant, "We're also interested in upgrading Second Life's physics engine and are examining Havok 7, but cannot share an implementation timeline at this time."

"Investigating" is a softer term than "at the earliest stages", and implies that the Lab isn't even really at the planning stages yet and hasn't decided what, if anything, they will do about it.

Someone's wrong, definitely. It remains to be seen exactly who. If Havok 7 gets announced before the end of Q2 2010, we'll know that "investigating" probably really means "in heavy, active development" and we'll be able to put that in our Linden-to-English dictionaries.

C# scripting

Since the first mention of the introduction of a Mono runtime engine to handle scripts written in LSL, there has been talk on and off about actually providing object-scripting support in Second Life for other source-languages. Python, Ruby, and C# have all been mentioned.

Less fortunately, the Lab has identified a number of fairly serious-looking language and performance issues that would actually make LSL a far more preferable source-language for object-scripting; at least from performance and sanity standpoints.

Now, though, the Lab says that (and here's that "investigating" word again), "We're investigating C# as an alternative to, but not a replacement for LSL."

That naturally leaves us wondering whether the problems that the Lab's previously noted with general-purpose languages running in grid objects have been solved, worked around, or simply ignored – in the latter case, LSL would still then be the language of choice for performance and lag-reduction.

We're also wondering whether this use of the term "investigating", is the same as the one for Havok 7.

Second Life 2.0 Viewer AKA Viewer 2

On a final note, during a Web-site update yesterday, a link appeared for what appears to have been intended to be the Second Life 2.0 viewer. It didn't actually go anywhere, and was taken down fairly quickly (after only a few thousand people noticed it and started asking questions).

Quoth the Lab, "As we've announced previously Viewer 2 is coming soon. Today, we mistakenly published a link leading to a placeholder download page, which was visible for a short time to Residents logged-in on the website. The Viewer is not ready yet, and the link did not lead to a download. We're looking forward to releasing Viewer 2 to everyone as an open beta very soon, and we'll make that announcement when it's time via the Second Life blog."

We can only guess at what "very soon" means, but smart money says that it will be within two weeks as the Lab only has until the end of March to get the new viewer out of beta and into production if it intends to meet the Q1 2010 target.