deepu

I ran spyware and antivirus removers to see if there is some problem!!! But nothing could be found!!!

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft Corp. will release a new version of Internet Explorer, the world's most widely used Web browsing software, with stronger, built-in security features, chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday. The move is the latest in Microsoft's three-year effort to beef up security to protect its software products which are the most-targeted by malicious programers. The company has made three security software-related acquisitions, with two of those coming in the past few months. "We have decided to do a new version of Internet Explorer, this is IE 7," Gates said at the RSA Security Conference being held in San Francisco. The world's largest software maker had not previously indicated whether it planned to release a new version of IE. Gates said Microsoft would offer a consumer anti-virus product by the end of 2005 in a move that will step-up pressure on traditional security software players like Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., which have seen their share prices pressured recently on the emergence of a Microsoft anti-virus product. No details were provided on how Microsoft would price its consumer product nor on when the company might unveil an anti-virus product aimed at large businesses. A new browser version with improved security and other features can help Microsoft fend-off small, but fast-growing competition from alternative browsers, analysts said. Firefox, a free Web browser developed by a network of software programers, has given Internet Explorer competition for the first time since Microsoft overtook the Netscape Navigator in the late 1990s to become the dominate way computer users view the World Wide Web. The new version of IE, which Gates said is to be released for preliminary testing this summer, will have new protections against viruses, spyware and phishing scams, which fool users into entering sensitive information on Web pages that appear to be legitimate. Security, Firefox --------------------- JP Morgan analyst Adam Holt said the new browser could also include features such as headline-watching capabilities, to allow Microsoft's Internet Explorer to better compete with Firefox. Gates said security remains the biggest threat to the "fantastic advances" happening in the world of technology, and said Microsoft was spending more than a third of its annual $6 billion in research and development spending on security. Microsoft's browser announcement comes three years after the world's biggest software company launched a major initiative to improve the reliability and security of its software, which runs on about 90 per cent of all personal computers. Martin Reynolds, a vice president of technology forecaster Gartner Inc., said he believed existing features in Internet Explorer would be improved to better protect the browser. "I don't think we will see a whole bunch of new features. We will see the existing features of the browser tightened up so the security becomes more manageable," Reynolds said. The company last month began offering a preliminary version of its free anti-spyware software, which prevents malicious programs from snooping for data on computers and recording a user's keystrokes. Internet Explorer held a 90.3-per cent share of U.S. browser usage at the middle of January, compared with a 95.5-per cent share in mid-2004.

What are the features!!!

Good way to get more money from subscribers!!!

Will your mobile phone replace the ipod? REUTERS[ SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2005 05:47:14 PM] --------------------------------------------------------------------- PARIS: Top French radio group NRJ predicted on Friday mobile phones would replace portable music players such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods, as it unveiled plans to become France's third high-speed mobile service provider after Orange and SFR. "The mobile phone will become the digital portable music player of tomorrow on which you can do everything," Jean-Paul Baudecroux, chairman of NRJ Group's supervisory board told Reuters in a interview. "I don't think people want to have several devices in their pockets." NRJ -- which broadcasts radio channels including the popular Nostalgie, Rire et Chansons, NRJ and Cherie FM -- is to launch a mobile phone service in September using the high-speed 3G network of SFR. The radio group will buy 3G minutes wholesale from SFR, France's second largest mobile phone provider, which is controlled by media group Vivendi Universal, and effectively become the country's first alternative mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). The move is part of NRJ's strategy to diversify into new media. The group is planning to launch in France a new digital TV station, partly music-themed, called NRJ 12 at the end of March. The mobile phone deal marks an audacious bid by the radio group to tap into the youth and over 50's markets and leverage its weekly radio audience of 24 million listeners. "We believe there are customers to be grabbed in the 11-14 year-old age bracket and in the over-50s," said Baudecroux. As the French mobile phone market matures, mobile phone service providers believe that one of the best ways they can widen their customer bases is by targeting specific segments of the population. "MVNOs are a good way to exploit and penetrate different segments of the market," a London-based analyst said of the NRJ/SFR deal. NRJ said its mobile customers would be able to find out the title and artist of a song played on the radio and download it from their mobile devices within minutes. "It is also a way to encourage people to download music legally," Baudecroux said of the new 3G service. As 3G picks up in France, Baudecroux said NRJ Mobile aims to attract 1 million mobile phone subscribers within three years. "There will be a 3G boom in France just like there has been a broadband (high speed Internet) boom in the country," he said. "In the long term, only 3G will remain; it's the balance between mobility and high-speed data transmission. Data increasingly represents a higher proportion of sales than voice, so average revenue per user (ARPU) will continue to increase." NRJ said it would benefit from mobile handset purchasing agreements secured by giant service provider Vodafone Group Plc, which owns 44 percent of SFR. The MVNO agreement with SFR coincided with the announcement on Friday of a co-branding deal between Orange, the mobile arm of France Telecom, and TV broadcaster M6 and the aim of later enabling M6 to become an MVNO. Orange, which launched its own 3G service in Britain and France in December after SFR and Vodafone launched theirs, said Orange 3G mobile phone subscribers would get access to M6 content under the co-branding deal at first. SFR and Orange have been under government pressure for months to sign an MVNO agreement to increase competition in the French market. The French industry ministry has long been seeking to end the cozy oligopolistic situation in the French mobile market enjoyed by its main three players Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom. Already two MVNOs operate in France -- Breizh Mobile, which uses Orange's network; and Debitel, which has access to SFR's network -- but their commercial success has been relatively limited, at least until now. One analyst in Paris said he was skeptical of the NRJ deal. "I don't know if NRJ will have the means to support such a distribution network" for the new mobile phone service, he said. "But we will see how it works out." French banking group Credit Mutuel-CIC is to take a 10 percent stake in NRJ's mobile unit and will provide the wireless service provider with payment and client management systems.

I am using Windows XP Media Center Edition and this problem happens in that too.... Its not bcoz of low memory (I am having 512 MB)... There clearly seems to be a bug with SP2...

Gtran handset is having several complaints as many has found out... Buy a new handset and move your number over to that using HCC!!

Mostly those pirated DVDs come from places like china where they are made in bulk and then smuggled to India!! Stamping is the way they are made in bulk.... Like say a 1000 in one go!!!

ha ha ha !!! That was funny!!!

Computer programme patenting may brake IT boom --------------------------------------------------------------- courtesy - TIMES NEWS NETWORK NEW DELHI: Imagine a scenario where a music composer is prevented from being inspired by another musician. He has to start from scratch and give an entirely new definition to music. Unimaginable, isn’t it? Now replace ‘music’ with ‘software’ and this is what the Indian government is seeking to do. Or so some critics argue. The amendments to the Indian Patent Act introduced by a recent Ordinance will allow all computer programmes to be patented. The Indian Patent Act, as modified in 2002, had made “a mathematical method or a business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms” non-patentable. However, the recent amendment changes this phrase defining what cannot be patented to “a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware, a mathematical or business method or algorithms.” Since any commercial software has some industry application and these applications are technical in nature, it opens virtually all software to patenting, say the critics of the move. As a booming software nation, can India afford to take such a step without harming interests of the industry? These were concerns expressed at a press conference organised by the Delhi Science Forum on Tuesday. The US and Japan, they said, are two countries that have provided for patent protection in software, which has adversely impacted smaller developers. European Parliament has been forced to defer software patenting in the wake of widespread opposition to such a move. A patent in the case of software grants monopoly control over not just the ‘expression’ of a function or idea in computer code, which could be covered by copyright, but over the very idea itself. Thus, software would be covered by both copyright and patents, perhaps the only instance of a product being underpinned by both. Richard Stallman, co-developer of the GNU-Linux operating system and proponent of free software says, “Since software patents cover software ideas, it makes them a dangerous obstacle to all software development.” An example is Amazon’s singleclick agreement. Amazon.com was granted a patent on a system that remembers customer credit card data from visit to visit, so that customers could, on all visits after their first, simply order products and then click once to buy them using a stored credit card number. After two rounds of litigation, this patent was upheld and Amazon was able to prevent its chief competitor, barnesandnoble.com, from using a similar system. The main argument against software patenting is that it will kill innovations, by leaving small firms or software developers liable for patent infringements. “That’s like saying, be the greatest genius in history or don’t even try”, said Stallman. Small developers will always be fighting with their backs to the wall as they would not have the financial muscle to compete with dominant players in the market.

This is what I got from another site regarding "Segmentation fault" " Actually a segmentation fault is Unix technese for: "that program stepped out of bounds!" It is similar to the old MS Windows "General Protection Fault" or the old QEMM "Exception 13" etc (except that segfaults don't make Linux kernels unstable and don't indicate that we should hastily save all our work and reboot "before it's too late!"). The way that Linux keeps user programs from interferring with system operations, and other user programs is through memory management. When a program is loaded it is allocated some memory for it's binary executable code (ironically called "text"), it's static data segment (the "BSS"), and its stack and heap (dynamic data). If the program needs more memory it must request it through the malloc() system call. If a program ever tries to access memory outside of its segments it is stopped by the processor (on x86 and some other platforms) or some other hardware MMU (on some other CPU architectures). This processor or MMU "exception" (or "trap" as its known in some architectures) then calls on a kernel exception handler, which then summarily kills the program, (optionally) dumps a post mortem debugging file, usually named 'core' (and consequently known as a "core file"), and signals the program's parent process (with a SIGCHLD). When the parent process is the shell, it prints a message like the one you describe: "segmentation fault, core dumped" So, probably the programs in question have bugs in them. Perhaps they swallowed a corrupt bit of data that the programmer wasn't quite clever enough to foresee in his parsers. Possibly some of the libraries on which these programs depend have changed or differ from the versions that the programmer was using. Of course there are other possibilities. Perhaps the binaries or some of their libraries have been corrupted on the disk. Possibly you have some bad memory chips (possibly some RAM that only misbehaves under specific conditions, such as when you are running the video card is specific resolutions)." I think the version of Yahoo Messenger you installed may not be compatible with Redhat 9 (Its quite old).. Simply reboot and see if this happens again... It may be also due to faulty memory!!

Should telemarketing be banned? ----------------------------------- February 17, 2005 - source rediff.com Insensitive and rampant soliciting of customers on the phone may hurt the brand being marketed, but banning it altogether is not a solution either. Harish Bijoor, CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc Neha wakes me up at 2 am in the morning in Boston. Uma shakes me out of a deep slumber in Frankfurt at just about half past three. I wake up in a sweat both times. My mobile is never switched off -- my work is thus. Working in different geographies means being able to stay in touch. Neha is from Stanchart (or so she claims, as most outsourced operatives do) and wants to know if I want a draft on loan. Seema is from Citibank, Chennai. She wants me to take a Diner's Card. Never mind that I have one now for the past 20 years. I get an average of six calls every waking day. Someone either wants me to own that "absolutely amazing timeshare" in Timbuctoo, or it is my time to be "the lucky winner of an experience of a lifetime". I am tired of all this. The Supreme Court's mention on telemarketing in response to the public interest litigation filed on the subject is the ultimate recognition of this menace. It's time to put a stop to it and get going with processes that seek to protect the privacy of the consumer. I am a marketer at heart but my soul is that of a consumer. Each of us is a marketer and a consumer at the same time. The consumer in me cries out to stop this menace. Let's remember that marketers who think like the consumer does are more in touch with reality than the ones who get carried away by the potential of the medium of telemarketing altogether. Let's look at some of the issues. Marketing evolves. But it must evolve with the consumer's want and need. Just as the consumer have wants and needs in the realm of products and services that they want to use and partake of, they are also are capable of expressing their needs, wants, desires and aspirations of how they want to be communicated to. Ask the savvy consumer in the marketplace. If the marketer can be a savvy entity by the process of his education in the realm of marketing and his diverse experiences, the consumer is savvy as well. She has been marketed-to for a long time. The savvy consumer is fed up of the way she is spoken to. The communication has been top-down for far too long and the marketer is just about waking up to communicating at level terms with the consumer. A time will come when the marketer will communicate bottom-up and the consumer is really begged to, to buy. Today, however, the consumer is tired of the calls that pester than placate a need and want. We started in the good old days by marketing 1:1. Selling, marketing and advertising happened one-on-one. When this became difficult, marketing assumed the easier and more practicable route of going 1: many. Here, mass media like television played a big role. While branding seems to work here, nothing else does. Mass marketing is too mass-driven. Wanting to solve this problem, direct marketing of the 1:1 kind happened in many markets of the developed world. Direct marketing such as the mailer kind happened. And so did telemarketing. And both killed the goose that had the potential of laying the golden egg, by insensitive and rampant use. Telemarketing is an excellent tool if used sensitively and with caution. Marketing is, however, a democracy. It is exploited by everyone till consumers cry out in pain to stop. Direct marketing of the insensitive-mailer kind had the US market scream in pain. And telemarketing had the US, Europe, the UK and Japan scream in anger. The kind of telemarketing we practice in India is insensitive and intolerable. I believe this is the time to put an end to it. We need a national register of "Do not call" numbers. And if Sneha still calls, it's time to claim that $11,000 compensation from the insensitive company she represents. Let's remember, the onus to find out which is a DNC number lies with the court of the telemarketer. From the marketer's perspective, it would be wise to remember that the equity of your brand is exposed to the risk of being sullied if your ill-trained, insensitive and mechanical readers of the telemarketing script continue to irritate the high-net worth consumer in the market. H N Sinor, Chief Executive, Indian Banks' Association The Supreme Court has recently admitted a PIL that seeks the Court's intervention against calls made by telemarketing agencies claiming that these calls invade the customers' privacy. While the PIL hearing process will take its due course, the attention seems to be focusing on the telemarketing agencies/ direct sales agents. Before we pass any judgement against these agencies, their role needs to be seen from a different perspective, particularly in relation to the evolution of the consumption-driven economic growth of the country. The current economic boom has resulted in higher spending by the usually-conservative Indian consumers. According to the ministry of statistics, the private final consumption expenditure has risen by 8.3 per cent during 2003-04 in comparison with the previous year, and this is the highest growth rate in 23 years. A rise in PFCE growth rate also suggests a rise in the income in the hands of the customer. Considering that this component forms 60 per cent of the GDP measured by the expenditure or demand method (as compared with the GDP by economic activity, which divides the GDP into agriculture, industry and services), it suggests that most of the rise in the GDP is coming from PFCE growth. One of the main reasons for the PFCE growth has been the banks' ability to extend their retail services at the consumer's doorstep. The banks have achieved this through the services of the direct sales agents or the direct marketing agents. The DSAs are entrepreneurs who employ agents and have ability to offer personalised service to the end customers. These agents provide scale and cost efficiency that gets passed on to the end consumer. The growth of these intermediaries has also created new employment opportunities and has further fuelled consumerism. Currently, about 15-20,000 young men and women are employed by direct sales agents of banks as telemarketing agents and field sales personnel. The agents bring convenience, comfort and speed in today's fast-paced life of the customers by offering door-to-door services. The customer gets personalised services and the service providers are able to offer this service only because of the efficiency that the agents bring to the delivery channel. This is evidenced from the fact that 40 to 50 per cent of cards and upto 25 per cent of retail loans are sold through telemarketing, which translates into at least 300,000 cards a month. Pro-active sales initiatives by banks have improved consumer awareness and knowledge of products exponentially over the past five years. This has benefited consumers by way of lower annual fees, lower rates of interest on retail loans, improved service, and so on. Telemarketing enables banks to significantly reduce sales-related expenditure that is being passed on to the consumers, which may not be possible under a direct sales approach. As a measure of cost dynamics, tele-sales is at least 40 to 50 per cent more economical than other sales options. The advent of mobile technology has further enabled the banks widen the net of "anywhere banking". What is, however, needed is an urgent need on the part of the banks to put in place a self-regulatory mechanism that is designed to protect customer privacy. The Indian Banks' Association is highly sensitised towards this need and, in conjunction with the Reserve Bank of India and the constituent banks, is taking concrete steps to put in place a self-regulatory mechanism in the form of a fair practice code to be followed by the banks, a model code of conduct for the DSAs involved in the banks' business, and an effective consumer redressal mechanism to address consumer grievances. Several measures are being considered to handle unsolicited calls from telemarketers. One such proposed solution is the institution of a "Do not call" registry mechanism, which will help the customer avoid unwanted telephonic solicitation calls by placing their contact details on this common registry. Another measure could be the setting up of a ring-tone that will advise the caller that it is a sales call. This service can be activated by the consumer when he does not want to be disturbed. These methods are technically possible and our telecom service providers should offer them to customers. Any approach to ban promotional and marketing calls will deprive the customers of the benefits and be a severe hindrance to those who are open to receiving information about various products and services. The solution is to empower the consumer and give him the choice of receiving a call rather than banning the activity altogether. source - rediff.com

I read some where that MS is going to bring plugins along with their next browser version.... They are the worst copy cats the world has ever seen!!!

Me too!!!!!!! East or West India is the best!!!

Yes.... Tabbed browsing and Ad Blocking are some things that are really missed in IE..

Such links you can post under "Amazing Websites" pinned topic

If you are still under warranty ask them to replace the whole board and not just the S/W.... that may fix it up!!

That was a nice find Jusmail!!!

Have some one tried this out!!

I think for this requirement its better to have Windows PE based CD in your hand.... It is a knoppix like Windows XP live distro and will allow you to do all these... The best part is that you can do lots of system maintainance activities using this which you cannot do in DOS... I have seen some torrents around on the internet of Windows PE...

The advertisement is excellent... No wonder it got the award!!

One way to run multiple OSs on a PC is to install them in a multi-boot scenario. But, this way you cannot run them simultaneously, and rebooting to switch between OSs is a hassle. Instead its better to use some emulating s/w. QEMU is one such s/w. you can get from http://www.freeoszoo.org/ The advantage is that you can run DOS in a window and never needs to reboot to switch between OS. You can also try microsoft's Virtual PC 2004 too... Infact I have some softwares which I use regularly...Unfortunately they will not run in WIndows XP.. I used to dual boot until I stumbled upon Microsoft's Virtual PC 2004. Now I am running WIndows 95 in a virtual PC environment.. Of course you will need a decently powered machine and some amount of memory to get good performance...

Samsung Mobile has announced the launch of a nationwide contest to find India's fastest SMSer. The Delhi leg of the competition will be held from February 9 to 12, 2005 at the Mobile Expo 2005 to be held at Pragati Maidan. The message to be typed -- a Guinness World Records standard text -- for the competition is: The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human. This SMS has to be typed on the cellphone keypad, complete with punctuation marks and lower and upper case. No predictive text (T9 Dictionary), QWERTY keyboards or any other keyboards are allowed. According to the Guinness World Records, Britain's James Trusler typed this text of 160 characters on his mobile phone in 1 minute 7 seconds at Sydney in 2003. This record was broken in 2004 by a 23-year-old Singaporean woman Kimberly Yeo, who thumbed the 26 words message in 43.24 seconds into her phone. Interested participants in the National Capital Region of Delhi should register on the Samsung Fun Club Web site - http://in.samsungmobile.com/. The competition will be held at the Samsung Mobile Stall at the Mobile Expo 2005, Hall Number 14, Pragati Maidan from February 9 to 12. Samsung India is a leading provider of high tech information technology, telecom, consumer electronics & home appliances products in India. Samsung Electronics Co is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2004 parent company sales of $55.2 billion and profit of $10.3 billion. It employs 123,000 people at its 93 offices in 48 countries.

Wow!!!....

Special metro tariff for Reliance pre-paid FWP * 33% cut on calls to local mobiles in Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai * Calls between Mumbai & Delhi cheaper by 14% DAKC (Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City), Navi Mumbai, February 01, 2005 India's largest private telecom company Reliance Infocomm has announced special tariff structure for its prepaid fixed wireless phone (FWP) subscribers in the metropolitan cities offering savings of up to 33% with effect from today. Reliance FWP subscribers can now enjoy the benefit of increased pulse rate of 90 seconds, as compared to the old 60 second-pulse, for making local calls to non-Reliance mobiles. As a result, the new effective rate per minute works out to just 73 paise, down 33% from the old rate of Rs1.10. Calls from Reliance FWP to all Reliance phones are already free under various prepaid schemes. The company has also introduced a special reduced tariff for calls from FWP to fixed lines between Mumbai and Delhi. The new rate is Rs1.90 with an increased pulse rate of 60 seconds as against the old rate of Rs1.10 with a 30-second pulse. The new rate per minute works out to Rs.1.90, down from the erstwhile Rs2.20 S.P. Shukla, President - Wireless Products and Services, Reliance Infocomm, pointed out that "Reliance FWP stands out in the marketplace and the new tariffs would be of immense benefit to frequent callers in particular." Reliance Infocomm Ltd., a Reliance group company, is India's largest private telecom service provider with a subscriber base of over 10 million. Reliance Infocomm has established a pan-India, high-capacity, integrated (wireless and wireline) and convergent (voice, data and video) digital network to offer services spanning the entire Infocomm value chain - infrastructure, services for enterprises and individuals, applications and consulting. The Reliance Group, founded by Shri Dhirubhai H. Ambani (1932-2002), is India's largest business house with total revenues of over Rs 99,000 crore (US$ 22.6 billion), cash profit of Rs 12,500 crore (US$ 2.8 billion), net profit of Rs 6,200 crore (US$ 1.4 billion) and exports of Rs 15,900 crore (US$ 3.6 billion).