Protect Your Equipment

Power fluctuations, surges, and failures are common occurrences. If your ofice isn’t prepared for them, your equipment and (perhaps more importantly) your data are on borrowed time. Use this article get familiar with the equipment that can protect your devices and computers—as well as the equipment that can’t.

Power Strips

In the power protection world, power strips are the bottom tier. Most typically feature a built-in circuit breaker that helps to prevent power overloads; this offers some limited protection against energy surges caused by lightning strikes and surges of power. As such, power strips are affordable and ideal for powering devices that aren’t critical to your productivity, such as lights, fans, and radios. A power strip is also handy for powering a series of devices that you want to shut off when you leave a room, because you’ll be able to simply lip one switch and kill the power to all the connected devices.

Surge Protectors

Also known as surge suppressors, these power protectors resemble power strips. The primary difference is that a surge protector can detect when power goes beyond what is considered to be an acceptable level. Excess power is routed to a grounding wire and fuse that will burn out if the electricity exceeds the level it can withstand. In addition to power outlets, many surge protectors also include protection ports for your phone, cable TV, and wired Internet lines.

Protection against extra electricity makes a surge protector perfect for connecting your vital devices, including monitors, printers, smartphones, and home theater equipment. Surge protectors feature a joule rating, which is how much energy the surge protector is capable of absorbing before failure. The higher the joule rating, the more electricity the surge protector can withstand.

UPS

Short for uninterruptible power supply, a UPS has an internal battery that keeps your electronics temporarily operational, even when there’s no power. Typically, the battery will provide enough juice for components to run for a few minutes, giving you time to properly shut the devices down. A UPS is an excellent addition for ofice computers, servers, and other equipment where data would be lost or hardware could be injured if unexpectedly turned off.

Another benefit of a UPS is that connected electronics won’t be damaged during power lickers, brownouts, and other short-term outages. Most UPSes also provide a few extra surge protection outlets (these normally don’t provide backup battery power), so you can connect PC peripherals and accessories that won’t need to be protected from surprise shutdowns. In addition to providing backup battery power, most UPSes can protect connected devices from electrical surges.

This Tripp Lite surge protector features 
eight outlets and can handle 3240 Joules of energy.

The Tripp Lite ECO750UPS gives you an extra 45 minutes of energy during a power failure.

This 6-inch power strip from Staples features a 15-amp reset circuit breaker for basic device protection.

Travel Adapters

International travelers must also consider how their electronics will work when they travel abroad, because other countries have different outlets than the United States. You’ll need to invest in outlet adapters that are designed to operate in the countries where you’ll be traveling. Most travel adapter kits provide you with several different types of outlet adapters and a guide that indicates where each plug should be used.

Read More..

Ayla Unreleased Secrets 2011

Genre: Trance | Quality: mp3 | Bitrate: 320 kbps

Total Time: 53:29 min

01. Ayla - Sunrise (Trust & Splint Chillout In The Garden Remix) (7:58)
02. Ayla - Vergessen (5:22)
03. Ayla - Tribal Symphony (6:52)
04. Ayla - Mystical Ways (3:48)
05. Ayla - Angelfalls (2011 Rewire) (4:26)
06. Ayla - Time Will Tell (4:38)
07. Ayla - Open Your Mind (5:24)
08. Ayla - Velvet (2011 rewire) (4:15)
09. Ayla - Vergessen (Leuchtpunk Remix) (3:58)
10. Ayla - So Heavenly (6:48)

DOWNLOAD Ayla - Unreleased Secrets (2011)

Read More..

Some Links About Holographic Data Storage

• Bell Labs: High-Density Holographic Data Storage
• Hand-Drawn Holograms
• Holographic data storage
  
• IBM: Holographic Data Storage
• Holographic Memory

Read More..

Falcon northwest tiki Mini tower review

The Tiki pushes its CPU as hard as any full tower box.

Here’s a little inside OEM trivia: Falcon Northwest is one of the most competitive system builders we deal with. The company flatout doesn’t ever like to lose a showdown on performance grounds. Price? Fine. Bundle? OK. But when it comes to performance, Falcon will sacrifice almost everything to win in that category.

That’s just what the company has done with the latest iteration of the Tiki, which damn near maxes out what can be done in a machine of this size.

For example, the 3.5GHz Core i7-4770K in this machine is clocked as high as in the Maingear full tower rig with custom water cooling that we reviewed in August: 4.7GHz. Falcon does this with the aid of an Asetek 120mm cooler that magically folds into the slim chassis. Of the boxes here, only the iBuypower Revolt and Falcon Northwest Tiki pack liquid cooing. The Revolt’s cooler is bigger at 140mm but its chassis is also pudgier.

Alongside the Tiki’s OC’d Hassy, we also find a GeForce GTX Titan, which, true to Falcon’s competitive spirit, is also overclocked.

The Tiki isn’t watered down in storage, either. You get two 240GB Crucial M500 SSDs in RAID 0 and a 3TB Western Digital Green drive. Despite its micro tower form factor, you should be able to easily push 2TB in SSD and 4TB in HDD. Not bad for such a tiny box.

Amazingly, all this runs off of a 450-watt Silverstone PSU. This is down 50 watts from the 500-watt units in the iBuypower Revolt and Digital Storm Bolt. We’re actually impressed that all three boxes buck Nvidia’s mandate of a 600-watt minimum for the Titan. Will there be problems long term? We guess not, as each vendor would have to eat the cost of replacing a bad PSU (all of them offer a three year warranty). It’s more likely that the 600-watt spec by Nvidia is based on a full tower application, which could run multiple hard drives and a dozen fans if so desired by the builder. A micro tower, on the other hand, is inherently limited to two SSDs, a hard drive, and a single GPU.

You can easily access the RAM and CPU under the Asetek cooler.

Getting inside the Falcon is a very straightforward, almost mid-tower-like affair. Remove two thumbscrews in back and slide off the side door. The 120mm Asetek’s radiator is attached to the door and can be easily removed, if need be. With the door off, you have easy access to the GPU, RAM, and drives. One problem, though: If you need to access the back of the motherboard to futz with a cooler backplate, you’ll have to pull the board, as it doesn’t have the giant cut out in back like the Digital Storm Bolt, nor can you pull off the right side of the case. As with like the Digital Storm and iBuypower boxes, getting to the GPU is work. It’s not horrible, but it’ll take a few minutes. Surprisingly, this makes the Alienware X51R2 the easiest box in which to access to the GPU.

In all four units, access to the critical components really isn’t bad. It’s not as easy as a mid-tower or full tower, of course, but it’s actually easier than most shoebox SFF cases and systems we’ve wrenched on.

The granite base was also a source of debate among staffers. We’ll admit that the aesthetic isn’t for everyone, but we’ve come around on its utility. Falcon Northwest has always said the heavy granite base helps prevent the system from getting knocked over. Most of us scoffed at that likelihood, but after taking the Alienware X51 R2 to a small LAN party and seeing how tippy a 3–4-inch-wide system can be when placed on a folding plastic table, we’re more convinced of the granite’s usefulness. The Falcon Northwest Tiki isn’t tipping over unless you shove it. We have to point out, though, that with the Alienware X51 R2, we could just lay the box flat on an unstable surface. The Tiki has no such option for that orientation.

In performance, it was no surprise that the Tiki cleaned everyone’s clocks. With its Core i7-4770K at 4.7GHz and its overclocked Titan, it made quick work of all three of its challengers. And we don’t mean by margin of error spreads, either. The Falcon Northwest is largeer, small and in charge. From CPU centric tasks to gaming, the Falcon had an edge over the others. Against its old foe and nemesis, Alienware’s X51 R2, the Falcon Northwest Tiki was nearly twice as fast in almost all of the benchmarks. If it took almost 4,000 seconds for the X51 R2 to encode a video, it took half that time for the Falcon Northwest Tiki.

There is a cost to all this performance, though. The Tiki under heavy CPU duress can get loud. Fortunately, it’s not the shrill fan noise or never ending whir that plagued machines of five years ago, but loud nonetheless. Acoustically, it was slightly louder than the Alienware (which also gets loud when its CPU is pushed hard) but quieter than the Digital Storm Bolt. At idle, the Falcon Northwest Tiki was as quiet as an agnostic mouse having an existential moment, but render a video hitting all eight threads of the chip for 25 minutes and it’ll get noticeable. The GPU, for its part, is better behaved even under heavy load.

The only other dig we have against the Tiki is its price. The system comes in at $4,443, which is more than twice as much as the iBuypower Revolt and more than three times the price of the Alienware X51 R2. Part of the price is the paint job, which costs $900 itself. Even with that removed, it’s still a lot of cabbage at $3,500, but it does have far more storage onboard than the others here.

As we said, Falcon doesn’t care if it doesn’t win the love of accountants; it just wants to prove that it can make the fastest computers around. With this Tiki, the company accomplishes that. There’s no doubt which machine here is the fastest, or the most expensive.

Read More..

CPU Cooler Silverstone Tundra TD02 Review

The TD02 gets points for style and toughness, but the extra-thick radiator may not fit in your case.

If you’ve beenfollowing the CPU-cooling market over the past year or so, you’ve probably noticed some stagnation. Multiple vendors license a design from a few manufacturers, resulting in a roughly identical product. Sometimes the fan control software is the same program with a different skin. Wouldn’t it be nice to shake things up a bit? Silverstone seems to think so, and it seems to understand that it’s not just about looking fancy.

The Tundra TD02 closed-loop cooler is immediately distinctive, with brushed-aluminum banding around the 240mm radiator, decorative white strips on each end, and white tubing connecting the rad to a copper block housed in more aluminum. Silverstone also trumpets higher radiator fin density. Because of these features, the TD02 is more than double the weight of a comparable 240mm cooler; it’s also 75mm thick after the fans are installed, and that extra 20–25mm won’t fit in a number of mid-tower cases. The extra metal also drives up the price a bit.

On the bright side, installation was pretty breezy. The TD02 comes with Intel CPU brackets preinstalled (AMD brackets are bundled in the retail box), and they’re sturdy aluminum. Remove four screws to swap the brackets. The backplate is solid steel, as well. The tubing has a plastic sleeve, so it’s not super flexible, but it does help prevent the tubes from getting accidentally slashed open. The unit as a whole has a rugged feel, and Silverstone reinforces that impression with a five-year warranty, matching Corsair’s H100i as the longest available.

Silverstone does not share the same cabling system, though. Instead of hooking into a SATA or Molex cable, you just connect the sleeved 4-pin fan cables to a sleeved and bundled Y-adapter, and connect that to your motherboard’s CPU fan header. The pump has a 3-pin fan that you can connect to a nearby case fan header. So you will be using your board’s fan controls instead of software provided by Silverstone. Our board uses Asus’s Fan Xpert2, so that was no big deal. We don’t think that a lack of bundled software is necessarily a bad thing, but it’s worth mentioning.

The fan behavior is also pretty different. This AS1225H12 model (also bundled with Silverstone’s Argon AR03 air cooler) is officially rated to idle at 1,500rpm, which is fairly high for 120mm units. But in our test rig, the fans hovered at just over 1,400rpm, and did not crack 1,700rpm on “silent” mode when we put the CPU under full load, using Intel’s internal torture-test software. As a result, the cooler maintained impressive acoustic levels. Silverstone has worked hard on its own fan designs to reduce noise from air turbulence, and that dedication bears fruit with the TD02.

While the NZXT Kraken X60 arguably has the best performance among closed - loop coolers, its 280mm - class radiator won’t fit in a large number of mid-size cases, and it has a plastic backplate and three year warranty. The H100i is the other main contender; like the TD02, it has a five year warranty and metal backplate, but it also gets comparable performance from a conventional size, giving it an edge when it comes to case compatibility.

SPECIFICATIONS

Model No.	SST-TD02
Water block	Dimension	60mm (L) x 55mm (W) x 33.5mm (H)
	Material	Copper base with nickel-plated aluminum unibody
Pump	Motor speed	2500±200RPM
	Rated Voltage	12V
	Rated Current	0.28A
Fan	Dimension	120mm (L) x 120mm (W) x 25mm (D)
	Speed	1500~2500RPM
	Noise level	16~33.5dBA
	Rated Voltage	12V
	Rated Current	0.3A
	Max airflow	92.5CFM
	Pressure	3.5mm/H2O
	Connector	4 Pin PWM
Radiator	Dimension	278mm (L) x 124mm (W) x 45mm (H)
	Material	Aluminum
Tube	Length	310mm
	Material	FEP
Application	Intel Socket LGA775/115X/1366/2011 AMD Socket AM2/AM3/FM1/FM2
Net Weight	1501g

Read More..

Review The Hydrogen Sonata

Any Iain Banks book automatically gets put on hold at the library. Triply so when its a Culture novel. The Hydrogen Sonata is the latest Banks novel, and its a romp and a fun read, but unfortunately, feels very much like an episode of American TV series pre-Buffy: status quo is reset and theres a bit of hollowness involved.

One of the biggest problems with writing a Culture novel is that the Culture is so technologically superior to most civilizations that they encounter that its ships and technology have no equal and face practically no resistance as they go about their tasks. To counter-balance that in this novel, Banks introduces the Gzilt, a civilization older than the Culture, and that was invited but declined to join the Culture during its setup phase.

As an elder race, the Gzilt has decided to Sublime, going off into hyper-dimensions (Banks clearly read quite a bit about string theory and incorporated what he learned into the novel) and saying goodbye to the Real. But before they can do so, theyre contacted by a predecessor civilization which tells them of a terrible secret.

This secret was so terrible that it sparked off fratricide within the Gzilt,  Prompting Culture ships to get involved in understanding the secret. Youll notice that at no point do I mention human/humanoid protagonists. Thats because in the Culture, humanoids are relatively ineffectual compared to ships and their minds.

If you enjoyed Excession, youll enjoy this book. Theres very much a similar setup, with a group of Culture minds discussing amongst themselves what to do next, how to approach the problem, and possibly kibitz amongst each other with regards as to what the right thing to do is. The primary human protagonist is uninteresting, in that all that shes good at is getting lucky. She just gets dragged along by one event after another, and when shes finally done, she doesnt seem to do anything with what she knows.

Ultimately, though, the terrible secret isnt very terrible, and in fact, you get a foreshadowing of what the secret was the entire time, and the fact that status quo is more or less retained at the end of the novel despite the reveal makes the entire novel feel empty.

Would I recommend this novel? Yes. Its a fun read, even though the ending was a let down. However, if youve never read a Culture novel before, Id recommend that you read Use of Weapons instead. Thats one novel thats great throughout and doesnt feel like a let down at the end.

Mildly recommended.

Read More..

Best unknown PS3 games with good graphics and gameplay

As a ps3 gamer, sometimes you may wonder to yourself, "what games should i buy and play next?". Well, this article will show you some best ps3 games but not really popular, keep reading..

Without a doubt, Playstation 3 is a storage of great and awesome games, metal gear solid 4 and uncharted are the best examples. Unfortunately, there are a lot of good ps3 game which are not popular among gamers due to the lack of publicity but worth to play (and buy). Here are some of them:

1. Vanquish

Vanquish is a third-person-shooter game developed by Platinum Games and released in October 2010 for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 video game consoles.

Vanquish is praised for some innovations to 3D shooter genre like original sliding-boost mechanic and beat em up elements.

Background Story

The game takes place in the future where human population has reached a maximum limit resulting the war among nations to get the scarce remaining resources.

Gameplay

You will play as Sam Gideon, a DARPA agent armed with the Augmented Reaction Suit which is very important to help you survive through the journey in the game. The Augmented Reaction (AR) mode can help you slow down the time, target the enemies easily and give you boosters to move quickly across the area.

Vanquish offers you unique experience. There are a lot of things you can do to winning the game, just like commandeering enemy vehicles, distracting enemies by using cigarette, and using the sliding-boost mechanic to slide into another area in slow motion (its the most fun part of the gameplay).

The Good
 + fantastic boss fights
 + the sliding-boost mechanic is really awesome
 + a lot of explosions, bullets, and robots
 + smooth control

The Bad
 - too short (about four hours gameplay)
 - bad dialogue and voice acting

Click here to buy Vanquish from amazon

2. Resonance of Fate

Resonance of Fate, also known as End of Eternity, is a Japanese role playing games published by Sega.

Gameplay

The gameplay is similar to Japanese RPG like final fantasy series, so if you are a big fan of JRPG, there is a big chance that you will love Resonance of Fate.

This game uses the three-Attack Battle system, a combination of turn-based and real-time control. The game itself consists of battle elements such as action battles and command battles. Each characters turn is limited by action points, so you can only move and switch weapons until your point runs out.

Setting

Resonance of Fate takes place in the future where a drastic change occurs to the environment of the earth. The situation becomes worst when poisonous layers of gases permeate the land and kill a lot of people and forces the remaining humans to build a gigantic device called Basel.

Reception

Resonance of Fate receives a lot of positive reception from popular game magazines and sites. Eurogamer praises its innovative gameplay mechanics and RPGamer chooses the game as the runner-up for its Best Script award and also the runner-up for RPGamers Best Voice Acting award.

The Good
 + unique combat mechanics system
 + offers you epic story
 + challenging enemies

The Bad
 - lack of visual variety

Click here to buy Resonance of Fate from amazon

3. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Publisher:  Namco Bandai
Developer: Ninja Theory
Genre: action adventure

Enslaved Odyssey to the West offers you a re-imagining of Journey to the West, a popular ancient Chinese story. But instead of ancient china, the story of the game takes place in the future where remaining humans must face a massive global war.

You will play as "the monkey" with a lot of skills. In combat battle for example, you will be equipped with a staff that can be used as both a close-combat and long range projectile weapon. You can also use staff to damage the the enemies or even stunning them.

Beside good combat, the gameplay also focuses on platforming (like scaling and leaping across the ruins, just like Tomb Raider). As a gamer, i must say if Enslaved Odyssey to the West is a beautiful combination between action adventure game and platforming.

The Good
 + satisfying and smooth combat
 + variety of beautiful locations
 + variety of boss fights and puzzles

The Bad
 - touchy movement controls

Click here to buy Enslaved: Odyssey to the West from amazon

4. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a role-playing game published by EA. This game offers you a fun gameplay, just imagine skyrim with third-person camera but without dragons.

Unique combat system

The combat system of the game is similar to to an action role-playing game where you need to press certain controller buttons to perform combos and eliminate the enemies.

The unique thing about the combat system is the "fate points". When you have accumulated enough fate points, you can transform into reckoning mode,  a slow motion mode that allows you to dispatch enemies and earn a lot of exp at the same time.

The Good
+ Good visuals and gameplay
+ Hundred of side quest

The bad
- The main campaign is too short (about 10-15 hours of gameplay)

Though the game got a lot of positive reviews, but it failed to reach financial success leading to Big Huge Games and 38 Studios closure.

Click here to buy Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning from amazon

Thanks for reading the article...

Read More..

Review The Facebook Effect

Despite the huge amount of hype surrounding Facebook, I still get occasional questions from engineers asking me if I think Facebook would be successful. Perhaps if they had read David Kirkpatricks The Facebook Effect, they would already have anticipated my answer: "Facebook is already successful, and whatever happens next, that success will not go away."

The book starts with a story of how political organizers have used Facebook to effect a change in the world. I think thats the very definition of success for any kind of startup: the product it has created has changed the world. Netscape, for instance, didnt make the kind of money Google and Facebook ever made, but it also changed the world, and the founders at Netscape have parleyed that success into important roles, including one described in this book.

The Facebook origin story has been documented in lots of places, including The Social Network. Kirkpatrick goes beyond that, however, and covers several other social networks, including Friendster, ConnectU, and of course Orkut and its predecessors. He even has a plausible theory as to why Facebook succeeded over all the others, though of course as a non-engineer he discounts the importance of the design and engineering efforts in letting Facebook scale beyond many of those competitors. I knew Facebook had a solid engineering team when they hired Jeff Rothschild, and several other folks that I had worked with in previous startups, but the numbers I had heard in 2007 were nothing short of astounding: Facebook was serving at that time 5 times Googles daily page views with 3% of Googles machine infrastructure. Thats 5 times all of Google properties, not just search. You can dismiss Facebooks problem as being easier than search (and I will dispute that: search serving can be treated as being fundamentally stateless, while Facebook has a lot of state), but just the sheer volume and efficiency is impressive.

All this history is there. The investments, the hiring and firing of various insiders (though obviously, some of the most juicy gossip can only be heard from insiders), but of interest to most people will be page 272-273, where various financial numbers are disclosed about Facebooks business. They add up to some very impressive numbers, and the entire chapter puts paid to many myths and answers questions about how Facebook makes money. Ill admit to being surprised at some of the answers myself! Im starting to think that despite having a track record of advising people to take a "smaller" package at Facebook over a "larger" package at Google, I might still have under-estimated how much potential is still to be unlocked over at Facebook (meaning that yes, earlier this year when I bought some Facebook stock at $7 a share I should have bought more).

The book does cover many of the fracas between privacy advocates and Facebooks founding and management team. It should come as no surprise that I side with Facebook on this: given how most people happily sell their purchasing habits to their local grocery store for $0.50 discounts on milk and other items, I have yet to see behavior which reflects that people actually believe in privacy about information they put online. If you dont want it spread around, it doesnt belong online.

All in all, I should have bought this book and read it earlier this year, rather than waiting in line at the hold queue at the library. Recommended.

Read More..

Review Scott Pilgrim

I came to Scott Pilgrim by way of the movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I could explain the plot, but youd probably have more fun watching the trailer:

In any case, I thought the movie was unique and very enjoyable in many ways, if not exactly deep. A more literary movie, for instance, would have each of Ramonas ex-boyfriends represent something, either about love or about Ramona, but most of the exes are played for laughs.

I thought the comic book series Scott Pilgrims Precious Little Box Set might have the ability to provide more than the movies relatively shallow plot.

The verdict: the books do a little better, but not so much better that I would recommend them over the movie. One of the best things about comic books is that they have an unlimited special effects budget, so you would expect the comic book to be even more over the top than the movie. But in many cases, the movies one-ups the books. For instance, the vegan police segment on the movie works way better than whats in the books.

You can read the books in a couple of days (theyre comics, each about the size of a Japanese manga). The style is not quite manga-style, though there is a lot of negative space in use, with certain scenes told entirely via pictures rather than with words. The plot is largely the same as the movie, and the characters, while a little bit more fleshed out, arent vastly different from that in the movie.

I would recommend either watching the movie or reading the books, but dont do both like I did. The movies a lot shorter, and gets all the highlights of the book right.

Mildly recommended.

Read More..

Review Drakes Fortune

Its my contention that now is the best time to buy a PS 3. Not only is the system cheap and easily available, its also mature, with all the streaming media options (such as YouTube) available that arent available on the PS 4, for instance. If you choose to use the machine for playing games, PS 3 games are also dirt cheap. I picked up the Uncharted Dual Pack for $10 over the holidays and started playing Drakes Fortune whenever I got frustrated at Drakes Deception.

Video games are the only genre of media where sequels are usually better than the originals. Game engine technology improves as developers learn to optimize for the console, and this goes triple for the PS3, which had a famously unfriendly processor to program to. Also, as game developers gain confidence with the console, they get to spend more time developing stories or new methods of game play that add quite a bit to the game, not just in terms of fun game play, but also in terms of aiding the story telling.

Drakes Fortune takes place mostly on a tropical island. As with the other games in the series, I love the art direction. Things are brightly lit, and most of the game takes place during the day, with caverns and underground environments less than 30% of the time. The game features cover-based shooting, traversal, and some light puzzles, but no chase sequences, which to me is the biggest thing I missed coming over from Drakes Deception.

The pacing is also much less even than Drakes Deception or Golden Abyss. There are several long sequences that feel like a shoot-fest thats dragged out more than I enjoyed. The jet-ski sequences are also less than enjoyable: the controls arent very responsive, and at first youre trained to use the jet-ski like a tank, and only at the end are you encouraged to just accelerate and blind-fire to make it past the stage. Neither of these hiccups occur in later games, showing that the game designers actually learned from experience. The game also uses the dual-shocks motion sensor control, which arent precise enough for me to consider fun. Fortunately, the few times its necessary arent frequent enough to annoy you.

Not everything is bad compared to the Drakes Deception, however. First of all, the easy mode is just challenging enough for an out of touch gamer but fair enough so that I didnt get too frustrated. It did give me a good feeling when I finished the game. I cant say the same for Drakes Deception. The jeep sequence was also fun, and also paced appropriately. What I like about the story as well is that the female lead, Elena, is no mere damsel in distress, unlike Marisa Chase in Golden Abyss. She rescues Nathan Drake as often as she is rescued. The music was also outstanding. Its scored by Greg Edmonson, who also scored the Firefly series. I have the theme song from the game stuck in my head now, and thats no mean feat. I dont know why I didnt think much of the music from Drakes Deception, but the music in Drakes Fortune stands out.

Nevertheless, this was my least favorite Uncharted Game so far. Despite that, its still a lot of fun and certainly well worth the price I paid. Recommended.

Read More..

Review Boomerang Travels in the New Third World

It didnt take very long to realize Boomerang is a reprint of various Michael Lewis articles for Vanity Fair. This in itself is not unfortunate, as the articles are well written and a lot of fun to read.

The book starts with coverage of Greeces financial crisis, and the (by now) well-documented fact that the Greek have a revenue problem in that everyone cheats on taxes. Then he moves on to Iceland, which had turned itself into a financial center by effectively trading equity to each other at insanely high prices. Then he moves on to Ireland, where the housing bubble took off in a big way, but the government came in and guaranteed all the private sector loan, in a major case of major-bone-headedness, damning the Irish public to pay for the sins of the crazy people.

The book rounds off with an examination of the Germans and the Californians, each of whom have yet to dealt with their own crisis. At the end of reading all of these short articles in short order (this is a very short book, and easily read in one day), its tough not to come to the conclusion that every country treats finances and financial responsibility very differently. Culture explains almost all of it, though it doesnt explain the bone-headed behavior of certain officials (and I dont mean the Californians exclusively) very well.

Unfortunately, the treatment of the financial topics is very shallow. For instance, theres no contrasting of the very different ways Iceland and Ireland chose to handle their crisis. In hind-sight, the very big differences have led to vastly different outcomes. Because Lewis doesnt actually have a framework or theory to hang it all together, the reader is left thinking that theres not a lot that can be done. He doesnt even interview people who think that the problem is soluble.

This is very easy vacation reading, but unfortunately, not very good for people who want a deeper understanding of the current arguments about what to do about the economy. For that, you might want to read The Big Short instead.

Read More..

2011 Book Reviews

Index Page for Books read 2011


The Books of the Year for 2011 have been selected
Fiction

• Surface Detail
• The Golden Gate
• Cryoburn
• Gridlinked
• Cutting for Stone
• The Engineer Reconditioned
• Shadow of the Scorpian
• The Skinner
• Prador Moon
• Cowl
• The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
• Blood Music
• The Immigrants
• Pump Six and Other Stories
• Pegasus
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• Troika 
• The Sultan of the Clouds
• The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queens Window
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
• Feed
• The Last Wish
• Assassins Apprentice
• His Majestys Dragon
• Throne of Jade
• Queen of Arlin
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Monster Hunter International
• The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught
• The Dragon Never Sleeps
• The AI War: The Big Boost
• Blood of Elves
• The Long Run
• The Last Dancer
• The Cold Commands

Non-Fiction

• The Facebook Effect
• The Party: The Secret World of China
• Writing Fiction for Dummies
• The Box
• The Victorian Internet
• Peopleware
• The World Without Us
• Brain Rules for Baby
• Outliers
• Battle Hymn of the Chinese Mother
• Nurture Shock
• In The Plex
• The Story of the Giro DItalia
• Why We Get Fat
• Presimetrics
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Steve Jobs
• Im Feeling Lucky

Comics

• Fables #14: Witches
• Fables #15: Rose Red
• Ex Machina Vol 1-6
• American Born Chinese
• Jack of Fables #2-4
• Girl Genius Omnibus #1

Read More..

Review Every Day

Every Day is a young adult romance. If theres ever a transparent voice, David Levithan has achieved it in this novel. The book reads effortlessly, transparently, and the pace is such that youll turn the page hurriedly, breathlessly, in search of what happens next.

The premise of the book is straightforward: the protagonist, A, wakes up every day in a different body. He can access the bodys memories, but has no connection to the emotions. Hes always woken up in a body thats appropriate for him chronologically (at the start of the novel he is 16). Hes learned to deal with this daily switch and has (surprisingly) evolved rules to live by. This changes when he wakes up in Justins body and meets Justins girlfriend, Rhiannon. He doesnt believe that Justin treats Rhiannon very well, and so for his one day in Justins body he treats Rhiannon nicely. Unfortunately, the result is that A falls in love with Rhiannon, and this knocks his previous equilibrium off-kilter.

One of the best things about this novel is that Levithan explores lots of different situations that A wakes up in. A is alternatively male, female, straight, gay, Black, White, Asian, nerdy, athletic, drug-addicted, suicidal, etc. Levithan spans the gamut of the teen experience. While some of As statements seem heavy-handedly politically correct, Ive met my fair share of teens who sound like that so its not jarring.

If the book does hit a false not, its in the ending. For me, the ending is either a blatantly obvious setup for a sequel, or the author screwed up and makes As character deliberately weaker by introducing a subplot that is left unresolved and yet drives his decision to resolve the situation. While the book does clearly standalone, without a sequel I feel that Levithan diluted the strength of the ending for no good reason.

Nevertheless, this is one of the better novels Ive read in a while and a relentlessly compelling read.  Recommended.

Read More..

TV Remote Applications for Samsung Galaxy S and Samsung Galaxy Tab Free Download

Surely it would be very easy if we have a multifunctional tool. As if we have a smartphone that could be TV Remote, this will soon be realized by Samsung. If you already have a type S Samsung TV output in 2010, then the Samsung Galaxy Tab  or Samsung Galaxy S will be ready to turn into your TV remote.

After 9 months ago released a TV Remote Applications to be installed at IOS (iPhone OS), there is now also a kind of application which can navigate channels on your TV using smarphone android. This time the Android OS is ready to bring the TV Remote Applications that can be installed on Samsung Galaxy S or Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Just like the previous IOS applications, these applications also require you to prepare for a television device can be connected to Wi-Fi networks, in particular Samsung TV model type C output in 2010 that supports Internet @ TV, LED 6500 Series, 650 Series LCD and PDP 6500 Series or similar types with the latest version.

Features offered by TV Remote Applications is quite interesting, because in addition to watching TV with a touch screen controlled by a smartphone, you can also access the internet like Youtube or Facebook directly on TV. Remote TV application you can get for free and without cost. Unfortunately this application is limited only to those who have the Samsung Galaxy S (or Samsung Galaxy Tab) and Samsung TV models only.

You want to try out this application, please download Samsung Remote App below

Samsung Remote

Samsung Remote-Tab

Enjoy!!

Read More..

Re read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school, and reading it then was an amazing discovery. I remember not being able to stop reading it, going on until well past midnight, barely able to stop when it was time to sleep, and finishing it the next day. When I saw that the Kindle edition was down to $2.99, I didnt hesitate and bought it and read it again.

Books are different beasts when you read them a second time. The first time I loved the description of the scientific method and its application to debugging computer programs (in addition to the problems you find when you need to repair a motorcycle):

When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method. For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. (Loc 1603)

This time around, I found another part of the story, the story about a father and son, re-united after a horrifying personal disaster, and the realization that it as his son that brought him out of the psychiatric ward:

We’re related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all. He was always the real reason for coming out of the hospital. To have let him grow up alone would have been really wrong. In the dream too he was the one who was always trying to open the door. I haven’t been carrying him at all. He’s been carrying me! (Loc 6249)

Whats great about the book is that all this is interspersed with a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. Its full of little tips about cycle touring that indicate that Pirsig did do quite a bit of motorcycle touring, though he does spend way too much time on a freeway in California instead of riding down the coast. (And much like most tourists, he makes the mistake of visiting the California coast during the summer, when its mostly fogged in) There are also little interesting observations about people on the road:

While we wait for chocolate malteds I notice a high-schooler sitting at the counter exchanging looks with the girl next to him. She’s gorgeous, and I’m not the only other one who notices it. The girl behind the counter waiting on them is also watching with an anger she thinks no one else sees. Some kind of triangle. We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people’s lives. (Loc 4385)

Ultimately, the books a philosophical novel, with lots of explanation of the authors ideas about the nature of Quality, the split between the arts and the sciences, and his attempts to unify the two by keeping Quality undefined as, "You know it when you see it." For a rhetoric class at the places Pirsig has taught, I think this approach might work. For those of us working in technology, however, Im not sure that non-definition is useful. Theres a certain sense that those who care passionately enough about their work enough to have strong opinions and defend them are better engineers than those for whom engineering is "just work." On the other hand, you could argue that in many ways, the constant arguments over the quality of say, the choice of programming language is well over-blown, and people would mostly be better of getting work done than engaging in the low-Quality flame wars that you find on the internet.

Regardless of how you feel, however, the novel is thought-provoking, interesting, and never dull, despite being mostly about ideas, rather than being about characters or plot. Its a great book and well worth reading and re-reading. Highly recommended.

Read More..

worms removal methods

Email Worms

These worms spread through infected email messages which may contain an attachment or a link of an infected website.

Instant Messaging Worms

These worms spread via instant messaging applications by sending links of infected websites to the entire contact list.

Internet Worms

Internet worm tries to gain access to any vulnerable machine either by scanning the Internet and/or using the local operating system.

IRC Worms

These worms spread through chat channels, sending infected files or links to infected websites.

File-sharing Networks Worms

These worms place a copy of themselves in a shared folder under a harmless name and thus the infected files spread P2P network.

Read More..

Networking

Networking hardware networking solutions collaborates with customers seeking solutions to remain competitive in a technology driven environment. By creating and maintaining a reliable, scalable and flexible network infrastructure. hardware networking solutions gives its customers the opportunity to not only keep current business operations running efficiently, but also gives them freedom to position themselves for future challenges. Being strategic partner for vendors of all hardware and networking companies like Cisco, IBM, D-link, hardware networking solutions can provide advanced network systems architecture, leading-edge applications, streamlined communications, and cost-effective network solutions. Our design team is well experienced to assess, plan, design and implement the infrastructure and support services as required by the customer. These consulting services are based on a proven approach, utilizing the latest tools and techniques, which result in a best practices solution. When accurately implemented, this solution can help reduce risk, accelerate implementation time, and lower overall project cost.

Network Connectivity Solutions hardware networking solutions has established a track record that has made it, the consumers default consult for support and expertise. We have no boundaries of environments. Our expertise lies in Linux and Windows environment and we aim at providing the networking services at the competitive cost.hardware networking solutions  has expertise in all the major network types, and can guide you in making the best choices to meet your needs. Common network types with which we work include:

Cable Networks - These cable networks can handle the latest gigabit Ethernet and voice technology. hardware networking solutions has proved its proficiency in designing and installing the cabling infrastructure to meet your requirements today, with the flexibility to accommodate future growth and demands. Wide Area Networks (WAN) - If you need a multi-location solution for a distributed organization, a WAN might be the answer. There are several models of WAN to consider: frame, leased lines, VPN (Virtual Private Network) or dial up. Wireless Networks - For smaller or more dynamic environments, a wireless network would be a cost-effective alternative solution to cabling. Internet connectivity by utilizing new DSL technology and secure firewalls can provide faster downloads and inter-site access to meet your exact requirements. Local Area Networks (LAN) - Our experience for several years briefs us that building a LAN to link the personal computers in small organizations will increase their online effectiveness by many folds. Connecting the organization’s computers, printers, servers and other peripheral equipment on a common platform lets the users share expensive hardware, application programs and exchange data files quickly, easily and reliably. These LANs make e-mail possible, support centralized data backups, and provide access to the Internet. Fiber Optic Solutions – Hardware networkin Solutions designs and markets a broad range of fiber optic transmission systems for point to point and point to multipoint fiber optic technology. Network & system architecture hardware networking solutions works on the concept of Blueprint - Erect – Rationalize. Network performance is optimized based on smart blueprints that cater each and every feature and functionality for the user. hardware networking solutions has the skill and experience required to analyze your organization, determining key system performance goals while also understanding many challenges for integration and inter-operation. This allows developing a detailed system architecture plans that enables to enter subsequent stages. hardware networking solutions is armed to meet likely challenges, and remain poised to resolve any unexpected developments. This front-end effort is vital to building a ready to use, flexible and reliable network that meets current organizational needs, and is future ready. Networking operations & maintenance A perfect network performance calls for consistent attention. Any network cannot simple be designed, built and left to perform without proper supervision. hardware networking solutions brings outstanding consciousness of ideal network performance requirements to its operations and maintenance efforts. Organizations benefit from having expert eyes on their networks, able to recognize issues and refine solutions before they become significant, often before they would be detected by the less experienced. This highly trained attention is the best available assurance that your organization’s networks continue to perform with cent percent reliability. hardware networking solutions  key functional areas of network management are  Fault Management: Provides facilities that allow network managers to discover faults in managed devices, the network, and network operation, to determine their cause and to take remedial action.  Configuration Management: Monitors network configuration information so that the effects of specific hardware and software can be managed and tracked.  Performance Management: Measures various aspects of network performance including the gathering and analysis of statistical data about the system so that it may be maintained at an acceptable level.  Security Management: Controls access to network resources so that information can not be obtained without authorization A number of different management applications are available, offering competence ranging from simple to extremely complex. Determining whether you need network management depends on your requirements  Networking  BNS provides networking solutions, networking products, set-up/service/maintenance of your computer network. We first determine your business needs for the coming years, recommend solutions for your existing network, or design a completely new one. The Process will include: Designing a new network from scratch, Planning for your network’s growth as your business grows, Selection the most cost-effective and secure way to connect your business to the Internet, Planning for the upgrade or replacement of hardware and software, Server & Desktop Setup. Once a your network is established, you can rely on BNS  to help you keep your network running. The support can take many forms, including: general network maintenance, Desktop and server maintenance, Scheduled on-site support. We supply networking products, some of which are listed below. Hubs Switches Modems LAN Cards Cables Crimping Tools

Read More..