amitbhandari

Its really good to read that one dude...an encouraging story of success. I would say Xisto and Xisto a success after being recognized as one of the best free hosting providers with so much options...thanx for keeping up such a good resource on Internet and sharing it for free!!

No doubt the online image processing will always be attractive but the problem with Net Imaging is very few functions availability. They could have implemented much more and provided a lot of options to the user (though not comparable to Photoshop) but still it is always required. Just by giving the options for adjusting Brightness, contrast only is not going to make it a good online image processing applications. Surely, it needs to be much better to be more effective..

USB drives are like keychains - they can easily be misplaced. You don't want your data in the wrong hands, so encrypt it and spoil the thief's party!! I am going to use TrueCrypt, an open-source freeware utility, to encrypt documents. Download and Install Download the utility from http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/. Unpack it and install it. The main interface window is as shown below. It looks sparse but it has got everything you need. Select What to Encrypt First we need to create a volume. On the main screen, hit the create volume button and follow on to the next screen. Here, select Create Standard TrueCrypt volume and click Next. Once done, you will get an option to create and encrypted drive or Device - select creation of volume your hard drive, and it can completely encrypt a hard drive partition or a USB device. Select your Drive Once Device is selected, a small window opens, listing all the partitions on your hard drive. This will also list any removable drives. Select the drive you want to encrypt and click next. The Actual Encryption This step deals with selecting the encryption and hash algorithms. Leave the defaults if you are not sure.The default algorithm is AES, which is industry-wide standard, and reliable enough for most purposes. The hash algorithm used is RIPEMD-160. The drop-down menu lists any encryption algorithms and hash algorithms. A detailed description about each is given in the Help file. The All-Important Password Here, the software will prompt you for a password, upto 20 characters in length. Ifyou're encrypting critical data, use atleast an 8- or 10-character password for safety. Key in thw password and then re-type to confirm. Formatting your Device The final step is to format the device. Here, you can select the desired file system and cluster size. Before clicking on Format, move the mouse at random for about thirty seconds to create a good encryption key. Use It! Once an encrypted volume ios create, it needs to be mounted before you can access it. To mount the drive, open TrueCrypt and select any drive letter from window, in this case, K. Then click on Select Device button and select the encrypted volume (the USB drive). You will be prompted to provide password; key in the password and the drive will be mounted. Once mounted, the drive can be accessed just like any other partition, and you'll be able to read from and write to it.

Wanna run F.E.A.R @ 1500x1200 @ 8x AA and 16x AF with Soft Shadows enabled at a consistent 60 fps and above? Any gamer worth his salt will know this was previously impossible. The Dell XPS 600 Renegade will make all this and more possible, because it brings together blistering frame frequency and stunning realistic visuals.Powering the XPS Renegade is the Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition running at a supercharged 4.26 GHz. Four NVIDIA 7900GTX GPUs in Quad SLI drive the graphics towards never-before seen levels of realism. Each of the four GPUs receive 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, making the total available video RAM a massive 2 GB. Ageia's spanking new PhysX PPU makes its appearance here, bringing the total processor count to seven! The PhysX will make effects like ragdoll physics and debris from explosions more realistic, while freeing up CPU resources. The Renegade features 2 gigs of low-latency DDR2 memory at 667 MHz, packs in two 160 GB 10000 rpm WD Raptors in RAID 0, and a Creative X-fi Fatality. With such a list of jaw-dropping hardware inside, and a 30-inch Dell 3007WFP widescreen LCD outside, the Renegade retails at impressive $9,930!Each rig comes painted by Mike Lavallee, one of the world's foremost automotive artists. Coupled with the fastest-in-their-class components on the planet, the Renegade is a work of art. Reason enough to tempt a gamer to sin!

Your music system has a 12-band equaliser, the MP3 player you are going to buy has six-band equaliser, and so on. What does that mean to you? An equaliser is meant to fine-tune the audio system to the environment where it is placed, and not to change the music itself-though most home users do precisely that. Let us gain an understanding of what frequencies are. The music you hear is composed of frequencies spread from 20 to 20,000 Hz in theory (practically though people hear sounds from 50 to 15,000 Hz). Different instruments and voices give out different frequencies.For example, the drums give low-frequency sounds called the bass, the treble is high frequencies, such as the higher sounds of violin, and the "mids"-the frequencies fall in the middle range-are typically dominated by voice. An equaliser allows you to increase or decrease a particular set of frequencies, thereby altering the levels of various instruments and voices. When it comes to music, it is the job of the music director to play with the levels of various tones and instruments. He is presumed to be competent enough to choose the best settings for his song, knowing well all the instruments that have gone into its making. When you change the settings on your system, you will be throwing away the sensibilities of the music creator, losing out on the intended experience. Sometimes, the ambience of the room where a system is placed will affect the way a certain frequencies come across to us. To offset this variation, equalisers are provided so that after careful observation, the user can negate the effect of the environment. Another use that equalisers find is to overcome shortcomings of a system. For example, take the case of a typical entry-level MP3 player that doesnot produce treble at the same level as the bass. When connected to a music system, you can neutralise this effect by sliding the bass control down or the treble control up. In many cases, simply keeping the equaliser off will provide you with the best sound. Even you need to change the settings, the amount of change should not be more than 20 percent. If you seriously wrong with your speakers or with the player itself. You might want to move the equaliser settings about if, for example, you love bass and want more of a thumping effect - or, for that matter, for highlighting any particular instrument. But remember that what you'll be listening isn't what the music director intended!

We often bookmark sites in the browser, but they really can't be carried with all the time...Actually, with https://del.icio.us/, you can bookmark your sites online, which you can then access from anywhere, provided with PC and Internet connection. At its simplest, the site is an online bookmarking tool.You have an individual page where you can tag a URL that you want to record or refer to. The page can be a bit confusing for the first time users, so, help is the link which must be followed to know the organization and working. The bookmarking procedure on del.icio.us is same as on browser. The advantage is that with del.icio.us, you don't have to restrict the number anymore. All your tags are visible on the right of the page in a cloud view. You can also bundle sites under a particular tag to create an open folder of sorts, so that similar pages are clubbed together. Besides, if you want to use two tags for similar page, you can. So, after creating the user profile, you can start tagging the site. For every site you have bookmarked, you see the total number of people who have also marked the site. Clicking on this statistic will take you to a page where you can click on any user's name to check out the site they have tagged, and view their choices. If you like something they have, you can bookmark that for yourself, or you can check out the people who have tagged the same sites as your host user, and you can furtehr conduct a search. Surfing possibilities at the site are huge. For beginners, your search starts when you discover a similar interest-in this case a web site- with another user. From there on, you can search under particular tags and also keep a count of the number of bookmarks a site has received. You can subscribe to sites under a particular tag such as "economics", and every site with that tag is redirected to your inbox. The site does not take for granted that you know how to use the page: it aids and guides you on how to go about tagging and using its features. There are also explanations for various tools and feeds such as RSS and HTML. Navigating the site does need some getting used to. With del.icio.us, there's a little more work involved - it isn't easy to navigate right from the word Go. The initial couple of hours may be frustrating, but more and more use facilitates better understanding. Del.icio.us is a welcome alternative to the other online social activities, IM and blogginig.

Well, the options are always unlimited. The basic idea is being to know them all and choose the best among them according to the situation or need of hour.

How current games and systems render a scene Consider a theoretical game scene of a box about to explode. The scene also contains a building and a person fleeing the frame. All this data is passed on from the game engine to the CPU for processing. Currently, the CPU keeps all data that requires physics processing. Once the CPU is done with these, it only passes all the graphics computations to the graphics card (aka GPU), which then renders the new position of the object and then outputs the final image or frame The GPU takes all the graphics data nad renders the scene. However, it is often bottlenecked by a comparatively slower CPU, mainly due to the load placed on the CPU because of the physics and AI calculations. The end-result is a scene that has unrealisitic explosions and physiscs. We cannot expect any more, because CPUs, by design need to be more general purpose, unlike a GPU, which is built solely to process graphics. How Upcoming Games and PPU-Enabled Systems will Compute and Render a Scene Consider the same scene being played out in a system that has a CPU, PPU and a GPU. As usual, data from the game is passed on to the CPU, which then sends all graphics computation by itself. However, it now has the help of the PPU (Physics Processing Unit) to perform complex physics calculations for it. The CPU breaks up the data into it respective parts and sends each processing unit its tasks; it computes AI and then passes physics data to the PPU and graphics computation to GPU for rendering. Since the PPU is specifically designed to do physics calculations, it can do a much larger number of calculations in a lot less time than the CPU. In current designs, the PPU will receive data for physics processing from the CPU, but if a game is designed to directly interface with PPU driver or software, it may bypass the CPU entirely and this will lead to an even further reduction in the milliseconds of lag that we currently see. The PPU then calculates the physics and send it to the GPU. The GPU renders the graphics, and then receives AI and physics data from the CPU and PPU respectively - and then renders the whole frame. Because of the PPU's enhanced physics computations, the blast look more realistic. The same will apply to all in-game fluid dynamics and collisions.

Winamp, surprisingly, has endured. It arrived in 1997, and survived the slew of copeting media players that came up after that-some of them Winamp clones-and kept adding features such as support for video and much more. Now, in version 5.2, its music management and other features are more advanced and useful than ever. Basics On the front panel, the preamp is something like a volume control for the equaliser - when you set it right up, all the frequencies you control via the equaliser are pumped up, and the effect of sliding aparticular frequency will be more pronounced. The other setting you might not know about is the "Auto" button: when you stumble upon an equaliser setting you like for a particular song - that us, a good equaliser song match, select Presets>Save>Auto-load preset... The next time that song plays, the settings you chose will automatically load. Something interesting about equaliser presets: you can load preset from a .eqf file-which is an exportable equaliser preset. So you make a setting and save it as .eqf, then send it to someone. Remix! In the main window of General Preferences page - accessibly by right-clicking anywhere in the Winamp window choosing Options > Preference - there's an option called "Allow multiple instances." Yes, you can have two Winamp windows open at the same time-create your own remixes! You could, for example, play a drum track in one window and slow violen track in another. Another, exotic use for multiple instances is to create an eerie, psychedelic reverb effect: you could enqueue the same track in both windows and start one and a half second later than the other. Try it! Priority and Jitter You will find "Priority class" in the same window as above. The higher this setting, the greater the CPU power Winamp will use. Keep it at Idle or Normal for most purposes; if you have a slow computer, and opening a document makes a track skip, you might want to change it to High. Realtime is hardly ever recomended, unless your tracks keep skipping all the time. Under Video in General Preferences, you'll see something called "Allow YV12 overlay mode." Without going into details, checking this option allows Winamp to use the YV12 overlay mode, which can result in better video performance. Under Video, you'll also see "Synchronize Video to screen refresh rate." This increases the fps of the video to reduce jitter and artefacts, if any. Playing With Lists Take a look at Predixis MusicMagic. The MusicMagic Mixer library manager that can compute the key acoustical attributes in music tracks. It's sort of a power tool to create dynamic playlists. The software analyses your collection, and builds custom playlists from analysed songs! You need to be connected to Net for this. Why would you want a playlist be created for you? Well, say you have a music collection that runs into thousands of songs. You're having a party and you need to create a long playlist that will last the length of the party or so. Syncing With Devices Winamp has taken a cue from iTunes in its 5.2 version, and you can sync your device with Winamp. Under Portables > Advanced Sync Settings, you'll find options for the plugins that allow you to manage your iPod or other music device from within the Winamp Media Library. There's a button called "Edit query": it's pretty easy to use, and you can use it to configure what media types Winamp will sync with your portable device. For example, you can tell Winamp to only sync songs that are larger than 5K and that also have a bitrate higher than 256 kbps. Metadata and More The Media library holds all your music-rather, it keeps track of your collection. From the menu on the left, you can bookmark items you just like in a browser, view recently played and most-played items, and so on. Also, you can search from the top options. Buffering, Fading, Silence Under Plugins > Input, look at Nullsoft MPEG Audio Decoder 3.5. This is what decodes your MP3s. The first tab lists "Full file buffering"; set this to a high value of you want your MP3s to get into RAM and play from there. This is useful if you have a lot of RAM, and have no patience with the tiniest amount of skipping. Then there's the option between logarithmic and linear for the equaliser. "Logarithmic" (the default) is the opposite of exponential, and means that increasing a certain frequency boosts it by a reasonable amount. Setting it to linear will enable more drastic playing around with the equaliser settings. If you want songs to play continuously without any gap, here's away: go to Plugins > Output > DirectSound output, and click Configure. What you need is the "Buffer-Ahead on track change". If you set the Buffer-Ahead to 5000 ms, Winamp will begin reading next track when the current track has five seconds left for a seamless transition. Anothrt interesting setting is Fading in the Fading Tab. It's irritating to have a song end abruptly, and you can control that here. There are too many options to set in here. The options in Other tab of DirectSound output plugin, allow to be able to remove the silence at the beginning or ending of tracks-and you can specify what Winamp interprets as silence. You can choose to have the volume control the behave in smooth manner, and you can choose between a logarithmic and linear volume control. SHOUTcastm Skins, etc. If you like Internet radio, remember that Winamp has SHOUTcast support, and can ably act as your SHOUTcast client. SHOUTcast is free radio. There are lots and lots of skins and plugins available at winamp.com, and new ones keep coming out. Keep checking the site to find what interests you. Then, consider DFX for Winamp which really makes the MP3s sound much better. Support Development If you are Winamp user, you can always support the development of Winamp by purchasing the PRO version of Winamp priced at $19.95 only. Though, you get get only two extra features, viz., ripping and encoding to AAC and WMA, but then you'll be supporting development of world's favourite media player.

Well, i tried and found that path/usr/bin/convert.I just want to confirm as if it is the correct path or not. Can you please do it for me?

thanks. It is working now.you may be right in saying that the config files might have slipped last time.Thanks once again.

What happens when you take your antenna to outer space? You get a cell that covers an area hundreds of kilometers wide, and the whole world becomes your cellular network. This is precisely what the Iridium project did, when 66 satellites were launched into orbit with the hope of creating a mobile network that would reach every corner of the globe. It didn't catch as well as they'd hoped, though because the signal from a satellite did reach all corners of the globe, but only outdoors. Inside a building, the signal quality took a severe hit. Iridium satellites, however, still orbit the earth and are used by other companies to provide satellite telephone services. How Satellite Phone Call Works A satellite constellation consists of many Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) satellites. When you switch on your satellite phone, it sends a signal straight up to the nearest satellite. The satellite then relays this signal to the nearest Land Earth Station (LES), registering you with the constellation. If you are calling someone at the other end of the world, your signal will be bounced off many satellites in the constellation before it is beamed down to the recipient. Satellite phone service offers common Internet services through their own gateways and outgoing servers, which is goog because one doesn't have to deal with the eccentricities of Internet access via cell phones - slow, sometimes unstable even as connections depend on network traffic. Nearly all companies that offer satellite phone services offer dual-mode phones - they can switch between satellite and GSM networks. The customer then doesn't have to bear the high cost of satellite telephony when in an area well-covered by a GSM network.

I requested SSH access for my account and was awarded successfully at http://forums.xisto.com/topic/89662-topic/?findpost=1064344112. Now, whenever I try to login into SFTP through some SSH client in xterm, it says access denied, contact administrator for support. What should I do now? Is the admin has disabled my account or something else. Please help me!

Before continuing with my post, I must admit that this may not be the appropriate forum for posting this topic, however, I couldn't find one that's why posting it here. There are four types of batteries available for mobile phones: Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) These are least expensive of rechargable batteries, but suffer from inherent shortcomings like memory effect. Here, if the battery is not fully drained before recharging, the unused portion crystallizes hence the complete capacity of the battery is not fully used. Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) This technology offers 30 to 40 percent longer operation as compared to NiCd batteries but it is susceptible to loss of performance at higher temperatures. Lithium Ion (Li-ion) The prime advantage of these batteries over NiMH are that they hold more energy for same weight and volume. Therefore, Li-ion batteries are much smaller and thinner in comparison. Also, they don't have any inherent memory effect. The only disadvantage is that they cost more than others. Lithium Ion Polymer (Li-Po) Li-Po batteries are rechargable batteries that have evolved technologically from Li-ion batteries. A significant advantage of these batteries is that manufacturers can shape the battery almost however they please, which is very important to mobile phone manufacturers constantly working on smaller, thinner, and lighter phones. Many latest phones, PDAs use these types of batteries. Steps for longer battery life In case the mobile phone uses NiCd or NiMH batteries, let them get discharged completely before you recharge them * Check that phone's battery contacts are clean * Keep the batteries in cool, dry place, away from heat and magnetic objects * Don't leave the batteries dormant over an extended period of time. * Switch of features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when not in use * Many mobile phones allows to customize the brightness and contrast of LCD screen. Setting these values low will prolong battery-life * Keeping the sound level for ringtones and other audio notifications at low will help you increase time your battery lasts. * Do not expose battery at extreme temperatures. * Do not overcharge battery * Use battery chargers specified by the manufacturer only.

I run phpBB with attachment mod applied. The mod is asking the Imagick path to convert images that will be attached.Can you please let me know the path of Imagick on the server and also let if know whether the support is there or not.

Parental control software sits on the computer between a browser and the Internet, it's something like a firewall - no data can be sent to and from the Internet by the browser without it first being checked by the software. Ways of blocking in Parental Control Software There are three ways by which parental control software block sites or their contents: (i) They check requested URLs against a list of blocked sites in their repository, which is automatically updated like anti-virus updates.(ii) The software checks the text on the site for banned words. If it finds any such words, it blocks the site's content, if not, it moves on to the next step.(iii) The software then checks the images on the site. Using a special algorithm, it determines whether the image contains too much "skin color", and blocks it. If the site that is being requested fails test 1 or 2, you get an error page. If the site passes test 1 and 2, but fails test 3, then the site gets rendered without the possibly offensive images. The setting is controlled via the options, and different software have different settings. As a result, some software might actually block the entire site if any images fail test 3. Considering that a home might have children of different ages, many parental control software allow for the user accounts to be created. Each account can have different "paranoia" settings. So, for example, you can set the security level to maximum for your 8-year old, but relax the setting for your 15-year old. However, these software are still not, and chances are that some clearly disguised adult content may get through. Also, it is more likely that a lot of innocent content might get blocked. For example, web pages that talk about "breast cancer" might be blocked because of the word "breast". Most parental control software allow to admninister the browsing habits of the children, so not only can you see what sites that were trying to visit, the sites can also be approved that were inappropriately blocked. The pros of these software outweigh the cons a million to one in this case, and if there are Ne-savvy kids, the parental control software is highly recommended.

There is lot of discussion on on-demand computing and is an urgent need for business sector. However, the small business can't really expect to buy a laptop for their employees. On-demand computing When we would sit in front of any PC, anywhere, and with the digital equivalent of having all the applications and data at beck and call. Many people carry their data around on a USB stick - presentations, documents, spreadsheets, you name it - why not carry the programs too! Portable applications are built for the sole purpose of being run off a USB stick - no installation, no writing settings to anything other than its own folder, and best of all, nearly all of them are free. The Demands Finding the best portable application for your needs is all about balancing size and features. Your first consideration is that the application should not write any settings to the host computer - you don't really want to leave your mark anywhere, do you? The next priority is size - the need is several small programs than one that hogs all the space. After all, even 512 MB USB drives can get full alarmingly quickly, and the more room is their for data, the better it is. Smaller applications have fewer features, but few of us use all the bells and whistles in most of the software. Before proceeding, remember that all the applications need to be crammed into 200 MB of space - the remaining 300-odd should be kept free for data. Small size is a priority, but as far as possible, any compromise on features will not be there. The office Suite Portable OpenOffice.org is the choice right from its excellent support for all common MS Office formats to its MS Office-like interface, however, it weighs a lot (144 MB) taking up a huge chunk of the limit. If only Word processor is required, then AbiWord can be used which takes up only 15 MB of space. The E-mail Client On one hand, there is i.Scribe, a small seemingly simple e-mail client that fills up only 1 MB of space. It even comes with its own Bayesian spam filter, and is extremely light on system resources. At the other end of the spectrum is Portable Thunderbird, which brings to the USB all the features of Mozilla Thunderbird - e-mail, internal support for RSS feeds, a spam filter and a spell checker. On the flip side, it occupies 9 MB. The Anti-Virus Now, be safe in assuming that USB drive is being connected to a clean PC with carrying an anti-virus with you. ClamWin is a free, open source, 18 MB antivirus that comes from the ClamAV team, who have been developing the Clam anti-virus engine since the days of DOS. To have ClamWin on USB, the software must be installed on a PC and follow the manual to set it up for USB drives. Remember, it isn't real-time or on-access scanner, so the program must be started manually and choose the file(s) to be scanned. The PIM For busy individuals who need to keep track of their tasks and schedules, EssentialPIM is very useful Personal Information Manager (PIM), which looks a little like Outlook's PIM side. You can use it to create to-do listss, schedule meeting and appointments, manage contacts, and leave little notes to yourself. The Browser There are only three browsers worth mentioning - Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Unfortunately, Opera is not portable yet. For IE users, Crazy Browser is available, a 500 KB browser that seams to be a head mix of all three - it uses the IE engine, but also brings in some cool features from another two, like tabbed browsing, plug-ins and mouse gestures. The same open source community that's responsible for Portable OpenOffice.org and Portable Thunderbird also gives us Portable Firefox, which is just that - a fully functional USB version of the Firefox browser, including support for installing the insanely popular Firefox extensions, but at 17 MB, you are going to be crunched for space. The Media Player Work or play chances are that you can't escape without encountering a sound or video clip that needs viewing. Since the presence of codecs on the host can't be guaranteed, two such players exist which bundle the codecs alongwith. VideoLan VLC Player which can play nearly any audio and video file in existence and doesn't require any codecs to be pre-installed. It's tad costly at nearly 25 MB though. MPlayer is lot lighter at 7 MB and ofcourse, it too doesn't any codecs to be installed on the PC. The Image Viewer IrfanView supports a huge number of image formats, is light on system resources, easy to use and can even convert images to different formats with some good compression ratios The PDF Reader While Adobe Reader is the de facto for reading PDF documents, but it is bulky and a resource hog. Overcoming both these nags is Foxit PDF Reader. It occupies only 2 MB of space. The Start Menu PStart is a program that sits in the system tray and gives customized menu that lets to choose which application is required to run. It even hunts down executable files on the drive, so that manual entries are not required. Once all the applications are in place, just select scan for executables function to create portable start menu. Making drive autorun If the host is running Windows XP and SP2, then you can even make the USB stick autorun by specifying an autorun.inf file. Just follow the listed steps (an example of PStart menu is shown): 1. Open notepad and type in the following text*[autorun]**open=Pstart.exe* (This is the application that you want to run)*action=Open the Start Menu* (This is the description of the action performed)*icon=Pstart.exe* (This is the icon which will be displayed in autorun menu)2. Save the file as *autorun.inf* in the root of USB drive.3. Don't forget to remove asterik signs from the text and delete all the text in paranthesis. Making Stick Bootable If you really want the freedom from host's OS, you can keep a copy of DSL (Damn Small Linux) OS in stick which is just 50 MB. It does comes with FluxBox Window Manager. However, on the hardware front, a bootable USB stick is required and the motherboard of the host PC must support booting from a USB device.

The Internet arose out of the natural need of the worldwide to communicate, and has become the backbone of digital age. Now-a-days, the Net has reached to billions of individuals as against in the past when it was envisaged only for scientific community. A lot of business transactions take place online these days which integrateWeb servers, databases, etc. Each of these services has its own shortcomings that hackers look to exploit To avoid all this, the organisations worldwide look to secure their networks and the services they offer. As the existing technologies mature, and new technologies are invented, hackers refine their technology as well, making it more expensive and difficult to detect digital onslaughts. Vulnerability analyses, incident response, forensic analysis, cryptography and monitoring are some of the sub-areas under network security and have evolved as a result of the need for information security. Vulnerabilities, threats and attacks Although all these terms seems to be similar, in reality, they differ. A vulnerability is a weakness due to hardware or software shortcomings. A threat can be defined as anything that could cause damage or loss to the assets. The loss could be of any form - financial, a loss of reputation for an organisation, etc. Attacks are active entities. The attacker exploits vulnerabilities and attacks your services/networks. Attacks The network attacks can be classified into various types. An attacker has to put in some groundwork before launching an attack. The groundwork includes identification of the hosts and the vulnerabilities that these hosts have. Later, the attacker uses the gathered information to launch attacks. Before attacking the network/services, the attacker probes the network/hosts for vulnerabilities. These types of attacks are termed as reconnaissance attacks. For example, an attacker from external network tries to poll your network and to identify the live hosts in your network. Knowing the live hosts is not a big deal. As a next step, the attacker would collect information on various services running on each host. The attacker sends a request to all the ports, and if there is any positive response from the server, it means that the service is running; and if the response is negative, it means that service is not running using that particular port number. Most of the services like Web server, telnet server, SSH server, etc, run using standard port numbers that are pre-defined and standardised. After getting to know the services running on the host, the next step is to attack the services running, using the vulnerabilities associated with each service. If the vulnerabilities are not properly patched, the host under attack could be compromised. CIA - the secret The principles of network/information security revolve around the seemingly simple abbreviation CIA; confidentiality, integrity and availability. Confidentiality is keeping the resources confidential and not disclosing critical information to any third party not entitled to receiving the information. Integrity is keeping the information intact by not letting others corrupt the data inappropriately. This includes marking the users with the right previleges require to modify/alter the data. Through integrity, we make sure that data is authentic and complete. Availability is another area that is often overlooked. Availability is act of keeping the resources available when they are needed most. The resource that is not available when required is as bad as not present at all. Also, asset is a resource that is of some value to you, and to your organisation. For example, for an organisation that has many online users, a Web server might be a critical resource. A security policy is a document that describes how your organisation will enforce security. It starts with asset identification. The second step is doing a risk analysis - possible risks might be Denial of Service (DoS) to authorised users, unauthorised access to the network/services by attackers, etc. References https://www.purdue.edu/securepurdue/

http://digg.com/ is a technology news site with a difference. The content is not managed by an editorial board but by the registered users. Although users can post articles on site after registration, the content retained is largely determined by what readers like to read. Each time someone likes an article, he "diggs" it - a word borrowed from American slang for "preference". An article has to be relatively new and has to have sufficient number of diggs before it is posted on the homepage. The Looks This is a very pretty, well-designed XP-esque site. The homepage is dominated by links to stories that have made it here. A box on the left of the title mentions the number of times the story has been 'dugg'. In addition, a tiny link below the number box allows the reader to digg the story. Once you do so, the number on the yellow number tab increases immediately to accomodate your digg or approval. To more organize the stories available, there's search bar and also a list of categories such as "robots", "hardware" and so on. You don't need to register to read articles, but if you want to do anything more, you have to. Starting Digging To start with digging, you can find three links on the top right - "Digg for stories", "Submit a new story", and "Digg Spy". With the first link, you get look at the stories that are up for reading and being rated. As a registered user, you can invite others to read your pick crop, by clicking on "Submit a new story". You submit the URL of news site from where you choose the story, then the site conducts a search for it. Once your story has been confirmed, you give it a title, submit a brief introduction, and specify a category under which you would like your story listed. The final bit is where the site searches if the same story has already been submitted and if it has, the site requests you to not submit your story. The story is then posted to the "Digg Area Queue". The third link-"Digg Spy" - is interesting. Clicking this link gives you a "real-time view" of the site - all stories on the site get streamed, and you can pause a story if you want. Whats More! As a registered member, you have a profile via which you can create a circle of friends. Links of the home page take you to the top-stories and show the top diggers. Why Digg?? The news posted on the site, though largely controlled by its readers, is also monitored for content. The site also requests and instructs readers to prevent inappropriate or irrelevant content from residing on the pages by reporting this on the "problem" link that accompanies each article. Four Reasons to Digg 1. To get most popular tech news on the homepage without needing to wade through tens of other sites. 2. Participate actively in several ways in what's going on. 3. Everything is neatly organized on the site. 4. The site embodies a sound accuracy.

The E61 is the first QWERTY business smartphone from Nokia, and has been touted as the Blackberry killer. It's optimized for e-mail, and has special features for e-mail such as an Inbox shortcut key, an indicator for incoming e-mail, and so on. With the E61, Nokia has departed from their notebook designs to an elegant, executive one.The brilliant 320x240 active matrix display lends the phone a Palm-ish feel. Its screen supports 16 million colours. There is the 75 MB of onboard memory, which can be ofcourse be expanded via the miniSD card slot. Expect Nokia to bundle at least a 64 MB card with the phone - that's goodish bit of memory for a business phone.The phone not only supports quad-band, but is also WCDMA-enabled- and so can be used anywhere in the world. The Nokia E61 comes with attachment viewers and editors for features of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Then there's MS Outlook contacts and calendar. It also supports Acrobat Reader and Zip manager, as well as several third-party e-mail clients including BlackBerry Connect.The phone plays MP3 and AAC, and can stream 3GP and RealMedia cntent. The connectivity spectrum spans Bluetooth, Pop Port and IR. There's no camera inbuilt, but this can be a virtue since many corporate offices ban the use of camera phones.

In August 2005, in a US government -run test, Google's translation application beat technology from IBM and from various universities. In the test, Google scored the highest amongst all competing software in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests; these wereconducted by NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). Each test comprised the task of translating hundreds of articles from Agence France Presse and the Chinese Xinhua News Agency from December 2004 to January 2005. How Google Wins? The answer lies in statistical analysis. It now seems increasingly likely that rather than have a system try to understand a piece of text, or formulate abstract representation taking context and other things into account, the most promising method involves looking at ready translations. How this works is that system would look at exisiting translations, and be trained on those. For example, if the German "reich" is often seen as being translated as "rich" in context of money, the system would pick it up. This means that the more the number of documents in the source and target languages available, the better the system would get at translating. And, of course, Google has a very large store of documents in various languages. All this means is that the Google team have trained their system to the extreme than the engines available from other vendors. However, it may be possible that the engine of some other university or even IBM is better than Google's engine but due to the extensive training at Google, it wins again. Online translation sites http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - Reasonably good; one of the oldest existing tools https://translate.google.com/ - Probably the best out there http://yahoo.com/ - Quirky. Sometimes OK, sometimes pathetic http://www.linguatec.net/ - Has an excellent feature: subject area selection for more accurate translation. Works better for German translations http://translation2.paralink.com/ - Not so good at translation http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.aspx?lang=EN - Very bad at translation

The pirate bay is world's best known source for illegally traded movies, games, music etc. However, they don't host it directly but provide the user with torrent links. So, a bit-torrent client is the requirement to access it all. So, how come such a pirate site can survive with so much popularity. The only reason behind it is the server on which it is hosted lies in Sweden. According to an analysis on Weird.com, the pirate bay operator himself agrees that they are against copyright laws. Inspite of all this, it is running and whats more exciting about it is that is has got one million unique hits a day. How are the surviving? Since they provided torrent data which by no means contains any copyright data, hence is perfectly legal to share thought it may contain pointers to some other sources from where all this copyright data is shared. This file sharing movement is really affecting the sales of many corporate houses and they are running into loses because of it. And according to Swedish Law, its perfectly legal. So, until the law is changed the services are going to be provided as such. Its really a shame for a country that can't stop such activities as it is leading to wastage of time and money for others. what should be done? In order to overcome this situation, the Supreme Court must come into play and save the organizations and support the developers who give in their maximum effort to produce quality software not just for being shared free all over the world. The Supreme Court must amend the law and stop these illegal activities of the website. PS: The website has not been mentioned as the intention is not to share the website but the thoughts against such websites.

In early March, "Origami" was the most searched term on blog search engine Technoarti. And finally, it was revealed by Microsoft that Origami is an ultramobile PC (UMPC). Most of the details are now in and is going to be retailed at $600 to $1000 and Samsung is going to ship the first pieces with a model called Q1. Though, it will be priced much higher at $1200. This will be followed by from other vendors too including Asus. What is a UMPC? It's something like shrunken Tablet PC, offering most of the functionality of full-fledged PC on a small package. Microsoft claims that it can be carried out easily. The specifications of Samsung Q1 includes 900 MHz Celeron M processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB hard disk drive. The touch screen will have a resolution of 800x480. It also hosts two USB ports, Ethernet port and stereo speakers. Not to mention Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi b+g. As for OS, UMPCs will feature a new software called the Windows Touch pack, which allows to customize the interface and makes application more touch-screen friendly. The device is a cross between Pocket PC and Tablet PC with a battery life of only 2.5 to 3 hrs. So, its still a waiting point for UMPC "Origami" as with such a low battery life, it is hardly going to be of any use to a mobile user. May be Microsoft comes up with a new model of UMPC that can have battery life for whole long day (24 hrs).

I have tried GTA Vice City many-a-times and have gone upto 90% but never completed it because get bore-off all the time at that level. It makes tiring at that level though it is exciting in the beginning of the game.As we progress in the game, it makes you more experienced vercetti but then there is a limit to it and that limit is at 90%. However, once i completed 100% using the cheats available online.

May be its a story by the bizhat owner only. I do agree with you but then stopping the services is really bad on their part as the users like me who use such services previously are rendered nowhere. I had a pagerank of 2 with bizhat and now, though the services provided by Xisto are great but still the submission to SE has to be started over thus making my work more tedious rather than just uploading my website.Anyhow, I am really enjoying the free-services of Xisto (Xisto) and it seems that there will no such hidden stories behind and this site will continue to provide their quality services.One thing, I really liked about Xisto is that the credit system is very genuine than others I have tried like Lifelesspeople.com. They just screw up things after a few days of activity.Thanks to the Xisto team for providing such a good services at really no COST.