Technology

Friday, January 25, 2008

The MacBook Air

The MacBook Air features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display that has a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. The backlighting saves power and provides "instant on" response from the moment you turn it on, according to Jobs. The device has a slightly wedge-shaped profile. It weighs about 3 pounds, and sports a thickness of 0.16-0.76 inches. It's 12.8 inches wide and 8.95 inches deep.

The MacBook Air features a 1.8-inch hard disk drive with 80GB of storage capacity standard. A 64GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive is an option. The hard drive is a Parallel ATA (PATA) model that operates at 4200 RPM.

The laptop is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo chip running at 1.6GHz, with 1.8GHz available as an option. Jobs noted that Intel was willing to engineer a new version of the Core 2 Duo specifically to Apple's specifications -- it's 60 percent smaller than others. The chip operates with 4MB of on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed, and uses an 800MHz frontside bus. 2GB of 667MH DDR2 SDRAM is also included.

Beta Windows Vista Service Pack 1

With dissatisfaction over the Vista operating system persistent, can Microsoft right the OS's wrongs with its upcoming Vista service pack?Microsoft made the latest beta of Vista SP1 available to the public earlier this month, and after informally testing it for a couple of days, I find my PC is working more reliably--and some tasks especially file copying, take less time. But I was hoping for more out of SP1, such as bigger system performance gains and fixes for Vista annoyances including the oft-criticized User Account Control feature.

And if you are waiting for major improvements to switch to Vista, you'd better hope that Microsoft's SP1 development team goes into overdrive before the service pack's official release and gives you more compelling reasons to make the jump to the OS. Vista undergoes no major overhaul with the SP1 release I looked at. By the way, Microsoft has said SP1 will ship sometime in the first quarter; sources recently said SP1 would appear in the next few weeks.

Key features in Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate Refresh (the downloadable beta's official name) include improved reliability, security, and performance. In its description of SP1, Microsoft notes many tweaks are buried deep in the shell of the OS and include hard-to-quantify improvements--for example, support for a couple of emerging standards--Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT)--and better compatibility with third-party software and PC peripherals.

SP1 Boosts Reliability, Security, and Performance

On the reliability front, Microsoft says SP1 reduces the time it takes to boot and power down a Vista PC as well as the time it takes a PC to wake from hibernation mode, or to snap back after a photo screen saver has been running. Also fixed is the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL at boot up and the appearance of the password prompt. Other fixes address the mysterious problem of how browsing network files eats up more network bandwidth than expected, compared to earlier version of Windows.

And lastly, Microsoft says it has devoted considerable effort to improving file and folder management. SP1 claims to cut the time it takes to extract files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder - but won't say by how much. However Microsoft does make some specific claims about performance gains. It says the service pack reduces by 45 percent the time it takes to copy files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system. A 50 percent gain is seen, Microsoft says, when copying files from a remote SP1 system over a LAN to a local SP1 system.
Microsoft's TechNet has a full list of notable changes in Windows Vista SP1.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Sony Ericsson W960i

The new Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, is the phone that I targeted at the moment.

Some key features:

OS :Symbian OS v9.1, UIQ 3.0

Walkman® Music Player

8 Gbytes Memory

2.6 Inch 262k Touch Screen with Handwriting Recognition

3.2 Megapixel Camera with 3 x Digital Zoom

3G Technology (384 kbps)

Bluetooth® Technology

WLAN: Wi-Fi 802.11b

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 Now Available!

New features and changes:
Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.

Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.

Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.

Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.

Retail Wi-Fi Wide Open to Hackers, Study Finds

A study has discovered that while retailers are physically securing their businesses to prevent theft, they are not taking the same precautions with their wireless security.

The "2007 Retail Shopping Wireless Security Survey" conducted by AirDefense, tested the wireless "perimeters" of 3,000 shops across the United States and parts of Europe. It discovered that of 2,500 wireless devices such as laptops, hand-helds, and barcode scanners detected, 85 percent of these were wide open to hacking.

This is mostly down to data leakage, misconfigured access points, outdated access point firmware, poor naming choices for access points, and a "cookie-cutter" technology approach by large retailers.

The survey also monitored nearly 5,000 access points, and AirDefense discovered that 25 percent were unencrypted. The good news was that 74 percent were encrypted, but 25 percent used Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), one of the weakest protocols for wireless data encryption. Forty-nine percent used Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) or WPA 2, the two strongest encryption protocols.

As would be expected, the study found that retailers maintained much stronger physical security measures than wireless security.

"Retailers today are much more adept at preventing or minimizing shoplifting by using a layered security approach, but the same can't be said for wireless security, where misconfigured or unencrypted access points were evident in every city," said Mike Potts, president and CEO of AirDefense.

Indeed, it seems that the most common data security lapses involved misconfigured access points that open backdoors to data. Some of the networks were discovered to be fresh out of the box, using default configurations and SSID (Service Set Identification), such as retail wireless, POS Wi-Fi, or store#1234. This is especially dangerous, as it shows hackers that nothing has been changed on these wireless networks.

The importance of securing networks was highlighted last week when a study by security vendor Sophos found that 54 percent of computer users had "piggybacked" on other people's Wi-Fi connections.

Retailer TJX was hit earlier this year by a highly damaging data breach when at least 94 million credit and debit card accounts were stolen from its computers by hackers.

In an effort to help, AirDefense has unveiled a list of 'best practices' that consumers and retailers can use to protect themselves while using their wireless devices at locations offering Wi-Fi networks

Article taken from Tom Jowitt, Techworld