Sunday, May 22, 2011
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Connect Mac to a Windows PC using CrossLoop
If you are looking for ways to share files between a Windows PC and a Mac (via the Internet) or need to remotely access your Macbook at home from your Office PC (and vice-versa), keep reading.
CrossLoop, a free application for screen sharing and remote desktop access, is now available for Mac OS X as well in addition to Windows.
With CrossLoop, you can remotely fix problems on your mom’s computer or list yourself in the CrossLoop Marketplace and get paid to provide tech-support related services while working from home. It’s like running your own Geek Squad but with zero investment.
CrossLoop running on Mac - Access Windows from Mac OS X
You can use Crossloop to connect a Mac to another Mac or a Mac to a Windows PC (and vice-versa) as as long as they are both connected to the internet.
Once the connection is established, you can view the contents of another computer (screen sharing) or you can request full control to the keyboard and mouse of the remote computer and use it from your current location.
Other than screen sharing, CrossLoop may also be used to transfer files across Mac computer or from a Mac to a Windows PC so there’s something for everyone where.
CrossLoop running on Windows - Access Your Mac Desktop from Windows
To run the CrossLoop application on Windows, you must must be an administrator of the computer.
Transfer Mails from one Email Account to another
Reason #1. Your existing email address gets too much spam so you plan to dump the old account and switch to a new email address (a form of email bankruptcy).
Reason #2. You are leaving your existing job for higher studies and need to transfer all personal emails from the Microsoft Exchange server to your new university email account.
Reason #3. Your ISP’s email service isn’t reliable and you therefore plan to move to a free web based email service like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.
Reason #4. You think the new email service from XYZ Inc. offers more features than your existing mail provider and hence want to make the move.
Moving Emails from One Account to Another
This illustration will help you visualize how to transfer email messages across the three most popular web email services. The transfer will happen online and you just need to specify the credentials (user name & password) of your old email account (from where you want to move message out) and your new email address (where you want to move messages in).
Moving to Windows Live Hotmail
Windows Live Hotmail is integrated with TrueSwitch so you can easily transfer emails from Yahoo Mail, AOL, Gmail, Live.com, .Mac, etc. to your shiny new Hotmail address. The same service may also be used for copying old email from an existing Hotmail account to a new Hotmail address.
Moving to Yahoo Mail
Like Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail too provides integration with TrueSwitch so you can easy copy mails from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Juno, Rocket Mail, etc. into your Yahoo! account. With TrueSwitch, you can also copy mails from one Yahoo! inbox to another without upgrading to Yahoo! Mail Plus.
Moving to Gmail / Google Apps
Gmail (or Google Apps for Email) has a built-in Mail Fetcher feature that lets you download email messages from 5 different email accounts that support POP access. You may therefore use this feature to move your old Hotmail or AOL messages into Gmail as both these service provide free POP3 access.
The migration from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail is slightly tricky but possible. Keep reading.
Trick: Move emails from Yahoo Mail to Gmail or Outlook without POP
The free account of Yahoo Mail doesn’t provide IMAP or POP3 access so you can’t move these emails into Gmail or a desktop client like Microsoft Outlook.
The Yahoo! Mail Plus upgrade will add POP3 access to you account at $20 per year but if you want to same money, here’s a simple trick.
1. Create a new account at Windows Live Hotmail and fetch all your Yahoo! mails into this account using the free TrueSwitch Service.
2. Now that your mails are inside Hotmail, you can setup POP3 configuration to fetch those Yahoo messages into Gmail via Hotmail.
Migrating Emails Away from your ISP Account
TrueSwitch mentioned above supports all popular ISPs including Comcast, Verizon, CableVision, AT&T, etc. but if your ISP is not in the list and you don’t have the time to configure your email client for POP3 or IMAP access, check out Yippie Move.
It’s a online email transfer service similar to TrueSwitch but supports an even larger number of email service providers including the .edu addresses of certain colleges and universities in US. With YippieMove, you can choose folders (or labels in Gmail) that you want to copy to the new location without having to move the entire mailbox. The service is quick and easy but costs around $15 per email account.
Copying emails from Microsoft Exchange / Outlook
Every organization has a different policy with respect to corporate email so check with the administration if your Exchange service offers POP3 or IMAP access - if yes, you can easily transfer messages into any of the free web mail accounts directly as listed above.
Find the Date When a Web Page was First Published on the Internet
There are basically three different dates associated with any "public" web page that’s available on the Internet:
1. The publication date - this is the date when a web page or a website is first uploaded on to a public web server so that human beings and search spiders can find and read that page.
2. The discovery date - this is the date when search engine spiders first discover a web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl can be the same as the actual publication date (#1).
3. The cache date - this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the search bot. While webmasters can use XML sitemaps to hint search engines that a page on the site has changed, search bots are free to ignore that advice and therefore the cache date may or may not be the same as the last modified date.
To give you an example, the publication date of this article is February 25, 2008 (it’s mentioned on the web-page), the discovery date (when Google first crawled that page) is also Feb 25, 2008 but the cache date, or the day when Googlebot last crawled that page, is April 20, 3009.
Know The Publishing Date of Web Pages
Now in the above case, the author has himself indicated the publishing date of the web page but in situations where the date is not specified (or you think the mentioned date in incorrect), here’s a simple hack to help you know when a web page or web domain was last published on the Internet.
Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of the web page in the search box along with the inurl: operator (e.g. inurl:www.example.com). Hit enter.
google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.labnol.org/websites
Step 2. Now go to browser address bar (Ctrl+L in Firefox or Alt+D in Internet Explorer) and copy-paste "&as_qdr=y15" at the end of the Google search URL. Hint enter again.
google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.labnol.org/websites&as_qdr=y15
Step 3. Google will load the results again and this time, you’ll see the actual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in this screenshot.
Video Screencast: Know when a web page was published
Using the same trick, Google tells us that the MySpace.com domain appeared in Google around 31 March 2002, Orkut on 12 Jan 2004 while Barack Obama created his Twitter account on 05 March 2007. The first publication date for Yahoo.com, Whitehouse.gov, CNN.com, Microsoft and other very old domains is mentioned as 31 Jan 2001 which is incorrect but that probably is a bug because Google’s crawler database does include pages prior to that date like this one.
These site publication dates may not be 100% accurate in all cases but they should be very close especially for new web pages and domains.
Monday, May 04, 2009
BlackBerry Curve 83XX overtakes iPhone 3G in US smartphone rankings
How to place Google ads on pages
The best location for Google ads varies from page to page, depending on content. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when considering where to position your ads:
| |
 | Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This "heat map" illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page. While this heat map is useful as a positioning guideline, we strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad location. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages. For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well. It's almost as if users finish reading and ask themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads can answer that question for them. |
Accounting Video Lectures
Lecture 01: Accounting and Business (0:57)
Lecture 02: Double-Entry Accounting (0:57)
Lecture 03: Accrual and Cash Basis Accounting (0:57)
Lecture 04: Merchandising Accounting (0:57)
Lecture 05: Internal Control (0:58)
Lecture 06: Receivables & Inventory (0:57)
Lecture 07: Inventory (0:57)
Lecture 08: Inventory & Depreciation (0:56)
Lecture 09: Depreciation (0:57)
Lecture 10: Stocks & Bonds (0:57)
Lecture 11: Debt vs Equity & Financial Statement Analysis (0:58)
Lecture 12: Ratio and Financial Statement Analysis (0:55)
Lecture 13: Managerial Accounting (0:58)
Lecture 14: Cost Behavior and Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis (0:56)
Lecture 15: Differential Analysis (0:58)
Lecture 16: Budgeting & Standard Cost (0:57)
Lecture 17: Decentralized Operations (0:56)
Lecture 18: Capital Investment Analysis (0:58)
TOTAL: 18 titles available, 0 titles not currently available
10 Most successful top ways to make money online
I got a plenty of hits on this site from those people who just type and search on google Ways to make money online, top ways to make money online, best ways to make money online, how to make money online etc etc. So i just though why not I should write a short post on a topic which can guide them how they can make money online in the easy way.
Money making is not a tough job on the Internet, people make it thought because this thing really need a few sacrifices in order to return you something.
- Patience - People who went rich in nights, they did not do that in one day. They spent time and keep a patience on what they were doing
- Time & Effort - Nothing in this world can be obtained without any effort. You need to spent time on a job in order to make a successful business. That’s the big key to success.
Anyways making money on the internet is really not that tough. You can make it in easy way or difficult way. Easy way is to find the skill you have on your own. For example may be you can write good on different topics, or may be you can make beautiful designs or may be you have good development or programming skill. If you continue with the skill you have, it is the easiest way to make money online
The harder ways can be many, from starting mini sites to earn $100 a day with Adsense TO spending money on PPC and promoting products from other people or affiliate marketing in simple words.
Here is a short list of some of the best ways to make money online.
1. Do you know how to copy/paste
You can start any sort of data entry job. This is easiest way and everybody can do that. But payout in this way is sometimes less while you have to do more effort and work. Data entry jobs can be found at many places like freelancing sites (Elance, RentaCoder, getAFreeLancer, Guru.com etc). Or there are many companies too which are looking for data entry persons. Just google it and you’ll find the top results.
2. Can you design ?
Graphic designing is a long term way to make money online with you designing skills. If you have good grip on graphic designing, you can get a lot of money by designing graphics for other people. The best way is to start a few pages portfolio website and put some of your best work on it along with the client’s testimonials (if you have). Testimonials really works and can attract more clients to you. You can also try freelancing sites to find work and clients.
3. Coding is always needed
If you are a good web developer then you have the best skill to make tons of money online. Because coding is always expensive for clients but this expense worth for them. I am myself a php web developer. I know i m the one of the best coders in this field because I have experienced a lot of things and make tons of money with this skill. In last 3 years I don’t remember but I have made more than a million myself with this skill. I am still with my long term clients because if people know you are the best, they won’t leave you and give you jobs regularly. You can start from freelancing sites and find the best people to work with them regularly and focus on your behavior with them. They won’t leave you as big companies are always in need of web developers to maintain their websites.
4. Do you have good writing power?
Content writing is another best way to make money online. If your English skills are good and you have a big bag of words in your mind, then you can start writing for other people. Try if you can focus on one topic it would be best but it is not aways required. You can write on financial topics (that’s is the one which pays most), you can write on Internet marketing topics or on health topics (another big demand).
5. Do you have something to spent? Try website flipping
Money can not always be made freely. Sometimes you can spent a little money to make more. If you have some financial resources, you can start a couple of websites, hire some writers to write best articles on the topics. Start building links for this website. Make all of your efforts for atleast one month and bring a couple of visitors each day on your website. Then sell it.
You can get $7.21 a .com domain from godaddy. Better if you could try an expired one.
A hosting budget (one time only)
One month for building FREE links.
Then you can sell a website with few daily visitors around $100 to $300 easily. This is called making money with website flipping :) Now image if you do the same with 30 websites. You can earn up to $3000 each month.
6. come on, at least you can fill a Form to make money - lol
You can try paid surveys. They can give you good money by just keeping yourself busy in filling out the surveys. There are many websites you can try like survey savvy.com or cashcrate.com etc
7. Giving SEO services to people
Search engine optimization is a big need of Internet business these days. Everyone wants to get tons of traffic in FREE ways. Free ways is to obtain visitors from search engines and for this, they have to build links or optimize their website to make it SEO friendly. If you have the right formula you can give SEO services to people. Believe me it is the highest paying job. One of my friend is taking $500 per hour for SEO service for a big company and he is proving to them that he deserve this rate 
8. Forum posting Services
Of Course this one pays too. Everyone wants to promote their website and one of the promotion method is forum posting. You can get some clients easily and start posting them on different forums by giving them backlinks or sometimes clients wishes you to post on their own forum. You can easily get up to $0.50 per post easily and for each post you just to write two to five lines of text.
9. Social Bookmarking Service
You can also try by giving social bookmarking services to people. This is also one of the best ways to drive quick traffic to websites. All you have to do is to prepare a short paragraph about a site and submit it to a desired number of social bookmarking sites.
10. Sell Stuff from other people
You can also sell other people’s stuff. This is also known as affiliate marketing. you can join some of affiliate networks and start promoting products of other people. As a return you’ll your commission. See my post on what is affiliate marketing.
List of useful Resources
- Elance (Freelance Website)
- RentaCoder.com (Freelance Website)
- W3Schools.com (For learning Web design and development)
- DigitalPoint Forum Marketplace (For trying forum posting and social bookmarking)
Google gives out secret trick to Improve CTR
I don't know how many of you even know about the option you have in your Adsense account, to select multiple color palettes, for 1 Adsense ad.
What does this option do, how does it work, and why should I use it?
It's very simple. Instead of you manually changing the way your ad looks every now and then, you can set it to be automatic, so it changes constantly with out you needing to do a thing.
You'll have to ask Google exactly how it works.. But what I know is that it simply modifies the code which is generated, to have the option of changing the color palette.
Why should you use it?! That's a good one..
Ok Ok.. I'll explain..
Assuming your site has visitors who come back to your site, or even if you don't, and most of your visitors are first timers and will never come back again, it is good to have a variety of ads. Different ad colors attract different people, and it is good to mix and change constantly.
People who come back to a site they have visited before, will suddenly notice a slight change in your site, and then they will look for the change, and see the different ad. Which means
Now, since I know you'd love to have a screen shot tutorial of this terribly complicated process, I have created one.. I made it extremely easy to follow so you'll all be happy.
You can find it right Here.
That's the end of this tip/trick..
I know you liked it, but I still like to hear comments..!
Amigo!
3 ways to make your blog profitable
Few years back, nobody was aware of what the heck is blogging. But today’s nobody care about building websites. Everyone is going to stick with blogging because its sometime fun and you can even make yourself rich with blogging.
Blogging is basically an update of your thoughts that you gives to other readers. Unlike a web forum or community website, blogging is a personal publishing system. Anyways, lets keep the heck of definition away and start the topic.
There could be many way to make money with blogs. Some can bring you a lot while some can give you only few cents a day. Its all up to you that how you run your blog and how much of course.
The key to success with blogging is to update your blog as much as you can. Do an update at least 4 times a week and you are not going to lose generic search engine traffic. Because thats the traffic which brings free money and traffic.
1. Three old words - Sell Advertisement space
Of course selling advertisement space is the biggest way to make money with your blogs. As long as you have enough traffic on your blog, you have the gold chain. If you are starting a blog then choose the topic you can write most because people will stay on your blog as long as they have good information on your blog. Otherwise they will just read and go away forever. You can sell advertisement space on your blogs easily as much as from $50 to $200 per 125×125 banner. But this really need good and targeted traffic. To obtain traffic, you might need to read SEO Tips section to learn how to optimize your website search engine friendly and the best way to get backlinks to your blog.
2. Write reviews for other blogs
This is another good way to earn with blogging. You can go to some best review sites like sponsoredreviews, payperreview, reviewme etc. Then sign up as blogger and start writing reviews or posts on a topic of advertiser’s choice and give them two or three link backs. This way you get two things. One is the few dollars for writing reviews for advertisers and second is the update of your blog. Yeah , your blog is always up to date to get more traffic from Google and other search engines.
3. Write reviews for affiliate Products
Another way to earn with blogging is to start writing your own reviews or posts on different affiliate products. In an action (e.g sale or lead) you can get a good amount of commission from your affiliate advertiser. You can sign up for commission junction, neverblueads or some other good affiliate networks and find the product you can write on, and promote. A good and helpful review always returns something. People make plenty of money by running web hosting blogs, health & fitness blogs etc.
If you like this post on blogging, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed from top right corner of this website. This way you can get latest updates in your feed reader or email whenever I publish any post
Increase Google Adsense Income with Simple but Effective Tweaks
As an experienced Adsense publisher, you know tons of Adsense Optimization tricks that will yeild maximum advertising revenue.
To quickly recap, you know by heart that wide rectangles perform better than banner formats, that Google Ad colors should blend with page background color, that section targeting serves more relevant ads, that border-less Ads convert best, that split testing helps you shortlist the best ad formats, that Google CSE is much better than Adsense for Search.. the list goes on and on.
But what’s the next step when you have experimented with all these Adsense tweaks but the CTRs and eCPM figures are stationary or aren’t moving north as you would like them to? Well, the simple solution is – some more optimization.
1. Turn Low Performing Units into Image Only Ads
In that case, an alternative is to use Image Only Ads for that using – Image ads are generally CPM ads so you will generate revenue each time the ad makes an impression. Image ads are also effective in places where the visitors are Adsense publishers themselves and less likely to be interested in clicking your ads.
Use Google Adsense Sandbox to see image and Flash ads that are likely to appear on your web pages for visitors from different countries across the world.
2. Harness the Comments Section of Your Blog
If they have a question or need more information about the product / service mentioned in the blog post, they’ll either leave a comment or will leave the site search for more resources.
That’s why an ad unit placed in the comment section would immensely help. The visitor is in a mood to search for extra information and the Adsense unit in the comments could have an ad for a product that might appeal to the visitor. The best place for place an ad unit their is immediately under the comment textarea box.
3. Don’t Use Adsense At All
Some Adsense publishers are shy of placing ads in prominent and visible locations on their site thinking that that ads might turn away visitors. So they will put ads in some corner hoping that visitors will still find them.
Think from the perspective of Adwords advertisers who are renting space on your blog with the hope of getting prospective customers. Why would they be willing to invest in your site (by buying ads) when they are not getting the expected returns. If you want advertisers to bid on your site, it is advisable that you place ads above the page fold else don’t use Adsene at all.
4. Sell Your Website to Adsense Advertisers using Channels
When you create a custom channel in Adsense, edit the channel settings and allow Targeting. Then type a marketing pitch – tell your advertisers about your site, where the ads will appear and why should they advertise on your site. Believe me, this works.
5. When Nothing Works, Put One at the Top
Thanks to tabbed browsers like Firefox, IE or Opera – a horizontal ad unit placed at the top of your web page can perform quite well because visitors often notice the areas near the browser tabs.
Whether they are planning to exit your web page by pushing the close button of the current tab or cycling to another browser tab, chances are high that your ad near the tab bar will get noticed. See implementations at Statcounter and Digital Point forums.
6. Avoid Using Common Blog Words
As far as possible, do not use the common jargon like “feeds”, “RSS”, “blog”, “XML”, etc as that might result in RSS and blog related ads even when your website belongs to a different niche.
You can again use section targeting to suggest Adsense bots to ignore the blocks of text that have irrelevant words.
7. Pick Only High Paying Adsense Referrals
Adsense referral payments can vary from few cents to couple of dollars. For example, a newsletter signup may fetch you 5 cents while if someone signs up for Lulu, you may get $10.
I recommend using referral products that give a high return – the conversion ratio may be low but the since the gain per conversion is very high, you will have more revenue overall. One conversion for a high paying referral is much better than several small referrals put together. You can also considering highlighting referrals with a custom FONT tag.
Google AdSense Optimization Tips - WordCamp Presentation
I discussed a couple of "AdSense Optimization Tips" at the recently concluded WordCamp conference. The session was primarily focused at improving the performance of your Google ads though I did touch upon topics like "AdSense Alternatives" and "Getting direct advertisers".
View the presentation online at Issuu or download the PDF slides from SkyDrive.
Google AdSense Optimization Tips
1. Don’t Feel Shy - If you are seriously willing to monetize your website with AdSense, make sure that you place advertisements in prominent locations where visitors will notice the ads.
2. The best performing ad units for AdSense are 160×600, 336×280 and 300×250. For text only ads, you should go with the 336×380 format but in all other situations, 300×250 may be a better format since it is most popular among advertisers and also supports rich media. 160×600 can easily fit in the sidebar of your blog.
3. Web visitors have a very short attention span and majority of them may simply leave after a quick glance. Their eyes follow a F pattern so you can get good results if the Google ads are placed in the areas colored red on the heat map. Sidebars and leaderboards at the top are often ignored.
4. Depending upon the layout of your website, you should consider placing the first unit somewhere in the middle of the page and above the fold.
5. Even kids would know that AdSense works best if there are no borders and that the background color of the ads matches with the background of the page. That may not always be true and sometimes colored backgrounds (like light yellow or very light grey) can convert better - look at the top AdWords unit on the Google search page.
6. If you have a website with a dark theme (like a black background), experiment using a contrast color scheme for Google ads.
7. While it is a good idea to use section targeting around the main content, you should skip adding the section targeting tags for the comment section in your blog because the comments may not exactly convey what the page is all about. The aim is to increase the relevance of Google Ads.
8. Site visitors generally look for a search button at the top left region. Use the word "search" in the submit button else some visitors may not notice them. AdSense doesn’t allow publishers to pre-populate search boxes with keywords. Always use a second search box at the bottom of your pages and if possible, host site search on a separate sub-domain (e.g., search.labnol.org/) as regular readers can easily remember that address.
9. I recommend using only text ads for the first Google Ad unit but place another 300×250 unit in the sidebar (or somewhere below the fold) - these generally serve CPM based ads and will therefore help you monetize visits from places like Digg and StumbleUpon even when the bounce rate is very very high.
The CPM of ad units will decrease as you come the page but that may not be the case with link units - they are small, text based, can fit in even small locations and perform brilliant.
10. These are recommended ad placements for a website depending upon the design (two-column or three-column). If you write long articles, try fitting an ad unit somewhere in the middle of the article or at the bottom because when readers are done with reading, they’ll probably look for more resources or related information.
11. Once your new ad placement is live, make sure you test the AdSense layout with help of your grandma or subscribe to a professional mouse tracking service like CrazyEgg to know how people interact / navigate your content.
12. Sometimes traffic flowing in from Image search engines can earn you more AdSense Revenue than regular web traffic. So upload good quality images and use text captions with alt tags to make sure that blog images rank good in Image Search results.
13. Flickr is another great source of traffic (especially from Yahoo!) and you may also use it to indirectly improve your organic rankings.
14. You can also increase relevance of Google Ads on your site by linking to authority websites using descriptive anchor text. This will also help improve your organic ranks since outgoing links and citations carry weight in the eyes of the search engine who may then consider you as an authority for that niche.
15. Look for variations in Google Analytics - AdSense reports. If you are seeing impressions for a page but no CTR or CPM, chances are that the page may be serving PSAs or the ads aren’t relevant enough. You may also use the AdSense Sandbox to figure out if visitors from other countries are unable to see ads on some page that have low (or zero) CPM.
Also see: How to Enable Analytics in AdSense
16. Placement targeting is an excellent opportunity for you to market your site to potential AdWords advertisers. Therefore always make it a practice to use descriptive text when describing your AdSense channels.
17. Archives, Tags, Category or Author pages in a blog aren’t good landing pages and are hard to monetize as well. Redirect their Google juice to single post page using NOINDEX, FOLLOW tags.
18. Reward your regular visitors (I call them influences) with ad-free content. AdSense in feeds is not a loved option either so you may have use the feed footer to find spammers & feed scrappers.
19. If you run a multi-author blog, you can very easily implement AdSense Revenue sharing through channels. Assign a separate channel to each other and use that number for his or her blog posts.
20. AdSense Premium sites like CNN, Mahalo, New York Times, About.com, etc. generally have dedicated AdSense account managers to help them optimize their Google ad units. You can study their layouts and probably implement some of the techniques in your own blog(s).
Another great resource are these official Case Studies discussed on the AdSense blog. Folks like Jensense, Problogger & Barry Schwartz are also pretty good at spotting trends early and often. I also recommend joining the AdSense forums at Webmaster World - especially follow conversations of "Preferred" or "Senior Members" as they generally have lot of experience.
With Google AdSense, one should never feel complacent because there’s always a chance to improve earnings provided you are willing to experiment. The software theory - "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" doesn’t really apply here.
Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online Microsoft Offers Secure Windows … But Only to the Government
It’s the most secure distribution version of Windows XP ever produced by Microsoft: More than 600 settings are locked down tight, and critical security patches can be installed in an average of 72 hours instead of 57 days. The only problem is, you have to join the Air Force to get it.
The Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide it with a secure Windows configuration that saved the service about $100 million in contract costs and countless hours of maintenance. At a congressional hearing this week on cybersecurity, Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, shared the story as a template for how the government could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products. And those could eventually be available to the rest of us.
Security experts have been arguing for this “trickle-down” model for years. But rather than wield its buying power for the greater good, the government has long wimped out and taken whatever vendors served them. If the Air Force case is a good judge, however, things might be changing.
Threat Level spoke with former CIO of the Air Force, John Gilligan, to get the details.
Gilligan, who served as CIO of the Air Force from 2001 to 2005 and now runs a consulting firm, said it all began in 2003 after the NSA conducted penetration tests on the Air Force network as part of its regular testing of Pentagon cybersecurity.
NSA pen-testers made Swiss cheese of the network, and found that more than two-thirds of their intrusions were possible because of poorly configured software that created vulnerabilities. In some cases, the culprit was an operating system or application that came bloated with unsecured features that were never re-configured securely by Air Force administrators. In other cases, systems that were configured securely became vulnerable later (for instance, when a system crashed and original software was re-installed without patches that had been on the system before the crash).
“It was really an easy target,” Gilligan says. “All the NSA had to do was scan the network.”
The Air Force, on the verge of renegotiating its desktop-software contract with Microsoft, met with Ballmer and asked the company to deliver a secure configuration of Windows XP out of the box. That way, Air Force administrators wouldn’t have to spend time re-configuring, and the department would have uniform software across the board, making it easier to control and maintain patches.
Surprisingly, Microsoft quickly agreed to the plan, and Ballmer got personally involved in the project.
“He has half-a-dozen clients that he personally gets involved with, and he saw that this just made a lot of sense,” Gilligan said. “They had already done preliminary work themselves trying to identify what would be a more secure configuration. So we fine-tuned and added to that.”
The NSA got together with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Defense Information Systems Agency and the Center for Internet Security to decide what to lock down in the Air Force special edition.
Many of the changes were complex and technical, but Gilligan says one of the most important and simplest was an obvious fix to how Windows XP handled passwords. The Air Force insisted the system be configured so administrative passwords were unique, and different from general user passwords, preventing an average user from obtaining administrative privileges. Specifications were added to increase the length and complexity of passwords and expire them every 60 days.
It then took two years for the Air Force to catalog and test all the software applications on its networks against the new configuration to uncover conflicts. In some cases, where internally designed software interacted with Windows XP in an insecure way, they had to change the in-house software.
“We started to put discipline into what people were fielding in the way of applications,” Gilligan said. “It required a lot of senior-level attention because this was not something that the IT guys were happy about. We were taking control from them and forcing them to make modifications in systems. But the benefits were huge because now the Air Force knows what is fielded; they know all the applications that run against a certain configuration.”
In addition to the secure configuration, they also got Microsoft to install automated tools to update patches and to detect and prevent someone from altering the configuration.
Having a single configuration across the network greatly reduced the time it took to patch systems. Gilligan said it used to take the Air Force well over 100 days to install patches after new vulnerabilities were discovered, because the military’s network administrators had to test the patches against multiple configurations. Emergency patches that needed to be installed post-haste took 57 days to install, leaving systems vulnerable to intruders during that time.
“Once the flaw was known, then those who wanted to attack our systems could be developing attacks in that time,” Gilligan said.
Former Air Force CIO John Gilligan
But with a single configuration, all that testing is now done by Microsoft before it releases a patch, saving the Air Force time. An added benefit of the new configuration was a 40 percent drop in the number of calls to Air Force help desks.
“Turns out when you configure things properly and don’t touch them, they actually work pretty well,” Gilligan said.
The Air Force began the project in 2005 and finished installing the new configuration on systems in 2007. In contracts with hardware providers it demanded that vendors pre-load the special Windows XP configuration onto systems before delivering them to the Air Force.
The USAF saved $100 million on a five-year license agreement with Microsoft by consolidating more than 30 contracts — made possible by the fact that it was now able to buy a single standard configuration.
Most importantly, security of the system improved. Gilligan said 85 percent of attacks were blocked after the configuration was installed.
“Once you get the standard configuration, then it becomes a much harder target to attack,” Gilligan said. “I will not say that the Air Force cannot be penetrated, but the incidents have decreased. The hope is that those who are defending the networks can focus their energies on a smaller set of vulnerabilities and more sophisticated attacks. It dampens out the low-hanging fruit and the easy attacks.”
The project was so successful that it became the foundation for the government’s Federal Desktop Core Configuration program, which was mandated last year by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to improve the security of government systems across the board. Gilligan said other departments have started with the Air Force configuration and modified it slightly to fit their unique needs and applications.
He said the next step is to expand the project to other software products, such as database management systems. He added that he’s confident the Microsoft example marks the turning of the tide against vendors that arrogantly resist locking down their products.
“They’re still in the model that they want to give all the features enabled to clients,” he said. “But I think we’ve reached a point where that model is one that is no longer effective. I’m of the opinion that all products ought to be configured with these locked-down configurations, and if the customer decides they want to undo them, then they can do that. They cannot continue fielding products where the cost that is being borne by the consumer in terms of having to maintain configurations and deal with attacks is so high.”
What this means for the rest of us is unclear. Threat Level contacted Microsoft to find out if any part of the locked down Windows XP configuration got into general consumer versions of the software or has influenced how it configures future versions of its software. The company did not respond.
Top image: Brigadier General Gary T. Magonigle and Colonel Brian Dravis present Steve Ballmer with a plaque showing the Air Guard’s appreciation for Microsoft’s support of Guards and Reservists. (United States Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Douglas Olsen)
The Highest Paying AdSense Ads May Not Always Be On Top
If there are multiple Google AdSense ad units on a web page, it is generally assumed that the top ad unit (the one which appears first in the HTML source code) will serve the highest paying CPC ads. Well, that may be true most of the times but not always. Let’s understand why.
But before you dive into the example below, please watch this excellent video by Dr Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, as he explains how an ad auction works and what factors determine the position of AdSense ads on a web page for a given keyword.
The Google AdWords system assigns a "Quality Score" to every advertiser who is participating in the ad auction and this score is determined by the quality of the advertiser’s website, the historical CTR of his ads on Google and a couple of other factors.
For instance, the Google ad system is likely to assign higher Quality Scores to Sony.com or Amazon.com for the keyword "digital cameras" than an advertiser xyz.com who is trying to promote his eBay auction on the AdSense network.
Google than computes the final rank (or ad position) of each advertiser using their respective quality scores and the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a single click (CPC).
Ad Rank of an advertiser = Quality Score * Maximum CPC Bid
Coming back to our original example, let’s say four advertisers are bidding in an auction to show up on a web page that is about "digital camera".
The advertiser Sony.com has been assigned a score of 8 by Google and they are ready to spend a maximum of $16 per click. Amazon has an even quality score (9) but they have specified their maximum CPC as $14 and so on.
Now the ad position (column 5) of various advertiser in an AdSense unit is determined on the basis of Ad rank (column 4) but the actual cost (or CPC) that these advertiser have to pay per click to Google is not always in that order.
As Dr Varian explains (time 05:50), the price that an advertiser has to pay (his actual CPC) is equal to the Ad Rank of the advertiser just below him divided by his own CPC bid.
So in the case of Sony, they’ll have pay 126 (the Ad Rank of Amazon) / 16 (CPC Bid of Sony) and this is equal to 7.88.
The click cost for Amazon will therefore be 120/14 = 8.57 which is more than that of Sony but the Amazon ad will still show up below the Sony ad since the Ad Rank of Sony is higher.
Google will share a fixed portion of ad revenue (or click price) with the AdSense publisher (where these ads are shown) and therefore a click on a Sony ad will fetch him less revenues even though the ad occupies the top slotThursday, April 30, 2009
watch supernatural season 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 online
Season 1
- Supernatural S01E01 - Pilot (1)
- Supernatural S01E01 - Pilot (2)
- Supernatural S01E02 - Wendigo (1)
- Supernatural S01E02 - Wendigo (2)
- Supernatural S01E03 - Dead In The Water (1)
- Supernatural S01E03 - Dead In The Water (2)
- Supernatural S01E04 - Phantom Traveler
- Supernatural S01E05 - Bloody Mary
- Supernatural S01E06 - Skin
- Supernatural S01E07 - Hook Man
- Supernatural S01E08 - Bugs (1)
- Supernatural S01E08 - Bugs (2)
- Supernatural S01E09 - Home
- Supernatural S01E10 - Asylum
- Supernatural S01E11 - Scarecrow
- Supernatural S01E12 - Faith
- Supernatural S01E13 - Route 666
- Supernatural S01E14 - Nightmare
- Supernatural S01E15 - The Benders
- Supernatural S01E16 - Shadow
- Supernatural S01E17 - Hell House
- Supernatural S01E18 - Something Wicked
- Supernatural S01E19 - Provenance
- Supernatural S01E20 - Dead Man's Blood
- Supernatural S01E21 - Salvation
- Supernatural S01E22 - Devil's Trap
Season 2
- Supernatural S02E01 - In My Time of Dying
- Supernatural S02E02 - Everybody Loves a Clown
- Supernatural S02E03 - Blood Lush
- Supernatural S02E04 - Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things
- Supernatural S02E05 - Simon Said
- Supernatural S02E06 - No Exit
- Supernatural S02E07 - The Usual Suspects
- Supernatural S02E08 - Crossroad Blues
- Supernatural S02E09 - Croatoan
- Supernatural S02E10 - Hunted
- Supernatural S02E11 - Playthings
- Supernatural S02E12 - Night Shifter
- Supernatural S02E13 - Houses of the Holy
- Supernatural S02E14 - Born Under a Bad Sign
- Supernatural S02E15 - Tall Tales
- Supernatural S02E16 - Roadkill
- Supernatural S02E17 - Heart
- Supernatural S02E18 - Hollywood Babylon
- Supernatural S02E19 - Folsom Prison Blues
- Supernatural S02E20 - What is and What Should Never Be
- Supernatural S02E21 - All Hell Breaks Loose (I)
- Supernatural S02E22 - All Hell Breaks Loose (II)
Season 3
- Supernatural S03E01 - The Magnificent Seven (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E03 - Bad Day at Black Rock (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E04 - Sin City (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E05 - Bedtime Stories (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E06 - Red Sky at Morning (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E07 - Fresh Blood (I) (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E07 - Fresh Blood (II)
- Supernatural S03E08 - A Very Supernatural Christmas (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E09 - Malleus Maleficarum (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E10 - Dream a Little Dream of Me (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E11 - Mystery Spot (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E12 - Jus In Bello (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E13 - Ghostfacers (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E14 - Long-Distance Call (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E15 - Time is on My Side (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S03E16 - No Rest for the Wicked (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S04E01 - Lazarus Rising (Alt Link)
- Supernatural S04E02 - Are You There God? It's Me, Dean Winchester
- Supernatural S04E03 - In the Beginning
- Supernatural S04E04 - Metamorphosis
- Supernatural S04E05 - Monster Movie
- Supernatural S04E06 - Yellow Fever
- Supernatural S04E07 - It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester
- Supernatural S04E08 - Wishful Thinking
- Supernatural S04E09 - I Know What You Did Last Summer
- Supernatural S04E10 - Heaven and Hell
- Supernatural S04E11 - Family Remains
- Supernatural S04E12 - Criss Angel Is A Douchebag
- Supernatural S04E13 - After School Special
- Supernatural S04E14 - Sex and Violence
- Supernatural S04E15 - Death Takes A Holiday
- Supernatural S04E16 - On The Head of A Pin
- Supernatural S04E17 - It's A Terrible Life
- Supernatural S04E18 - The Monster At The End of This Book
- Supernatural S04E19 - Jump The Shark
Record HD-quality Screencast Videos with Screencast-o-Matic
Screencast-o-Matic, the first web based screencasting app, has added some new features and revamped the screen recording interface to catch up with nearest rival - ScreenToaster.
You can now record full HD quality screencasts videos (1280×720) in your browser without even creating an account at Screencast-o-matic.
You may then save the recorded movie to your desktop in Quicktime (MP4) format or directly upload the screencast to your YouTube account where it will be encoded as HD for sure - see example:
The screen capture quality is brilliant and Screen-o-matic also adds some visual hints to the screencast - the cursor size is increased and mouse clicks get highlighted with a circle - thus making it easier for people to follow the mouse in the final movie.
Screencast-o-matic, like other online screencasting apps, is a Java applet and can therefore be used on Windows, Mac or Linux machines.
Intel sees green chips of recovery
It released a survey and statistics on Tuesday that suggested investing in upgrading three or four-year-old computers will quickly pay for itself.
The study, carried out by consultants Wipro involving 106 US and European companies, said that two-thirds of them were continuing to upgrade their computers during the recession.
Their reasons were that new PCs were more secure and cheaper to run, to the extent that they paid for themselves with energy and other savings in a matter of months - as low as 10 months for those using Intel’s vPro technology.
“Yes, it’s tough economic times but those IT departments who can, are continuing to refresh because they are worried about security, and newer PCs can reduce their operational costs,” Rob Crooke, head of Intel’s Business Client Group, told a press briefing.
Mr Crooke avoided comment on whether many businesses were awaiting Windows 7, Microsoft’s next operating system, before upgrading. He speculated that the one-third that were not upgrading as usual either “had no cash, or the industry, including ourselves, had not had the chance to explain to them the benefits.”
Figures released by Mercury Reseach on Monday night, on microprocessors sold in the first quarter, suggested conditions were bottoming out for Intel and its rival AMD.
Units declined 8.3 per cent on the fourth quarter and 9.1 per cent compared to a year ago, but this compared to an 18 per cent sequential decline in the fourth quarter.
Intel lost nearly 4 percentage points of market share to AMD - down to 78.2 per cent from 82.1 per cent in Q4, as enterprise spending was weak and AMD performed better in the consumer PC segment.
Notebook sales were also weak and units of Intel’s Atom processor, which has powered the netbook category, were down 33 per cent from the fourth quarter, at 5.6m units.
Architecture Student Proposes Bacterially-Grown Wall Across the Entire Sahara Desert
The bacterium, bacillus pasteurii, turns sand into firm sandstone structures very quickly, and the proposed wall could house a sort of lengthy oasis of water and vegetation, to be used by refugees for housing. It's trying to kill two enormous birds with an equally enormous stone: Combating desertification and providing mass amounts of housing for those who need it. The proposal won a prize for sustainable agriculture, but nothing this outrageous is without its problems.
This kind of bacterial change has been performed in very small environments, but has never been tried in as large a scale as the Sahara Desert. Besides the practicality of the project, there are also environmental concerns: This massive a change to the ecosystem could cause problems we can't even foresee, from species extinctions to water shortages. Not to mention a problem that wasn't brought up in the article: How do we get this thing to stop making sandstone? I'm pretty sure experiments with ice-nine didn't turn out so hot.
But for sheer ballsiness on a grandiose scale, this idea is hard to top. Check out more photos and mockups here.Darwin's Radio: Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio
About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.
What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures, and hey've published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.
A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV - one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.
Nonsense mutations are caused when random DNA code shows up in the middle of a gene, preventing it from beginning the process of manufacturing proteins in the cell. Venkataraman and her team decided to investigate this gene further, doing a series of tests to see if the retrocyclin it produced would keep HIV out of human cells. It did.
At last, they knew that if they could just figure out a way to reawaken the "junk" gene that creates retrocyclin in humans, they might be able to stop HIV infections. The researchers just needed to figure out a way to remove that nonsense mutation and get the target gene to start manufacturing retrocyclin again.
Here's where things really get interesting. The team found a way to use a compound called aminoglycosides, which itself can cause errors when RNA transcribes information from DNA to make proteins. But this time, the aminoglycoside error would work in their favor: It would cause that RNA to ignore the nonsense mutation in the junk gene, and therefore start making retrocyclin again. In preliminary tests, their scheme worked. The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.
After more research is done, the researchers believe this might become a viable way to make humans immune to HIV infection.
What intrigues me, beyond the amazing idea of an AIDS vaccine, is that aminoglycosides have the potential to unlock the uses for other pieces of junk DNA. In Darwin's Radio, certain portions of these "non-sense" sequences, remnants of prehistoric retroviruses, have been activated by aminoglycosides
In the novel, humans start rapidly evolving after their junk DNA re-awakens in response to stress. Could we induce instant mutations, or gain other new immunities by using aminoglycosides on our junk DNA?
Download Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 - Outlook Gets a Performance Boost
With SP2 installed, your Microsoft Office 2007 programs can read & write documents in the ODF format without requiring external plug-ins. The service pack also adds the Save as PDF functionality by default to all programs that are part of the Office 2007 suite.
Here’s a complete list of changes and issues that have been fixed through Service Pack 2 (SP2) of Office 2007. It’s a major upgrade (with 600+ fixes) and Jane Liles says that Outlook 2007 with SP2 is 26 percent faster on a set of common e-mail tasks and users will experience considerable speed improvements on common Outlook operations like launching, synchronizing and searching.
Download Microsoft Office 2007 SP2
Office 2007 SP2 is available for download through Windows Update or you can follow the direct link to the SP2 installer on the Microsoft Download Center. The file name is office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe and it’s around 290 MB in size. You may also order a slipstream copy of Office 2007 SP2 on a DVD here.
This release will also update stand-alone viewers for Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2007 so even if you are using an older version of Office, you may still want to checkout this update.
Outlook 2007 also includes fixes related to slow IMAP access so that may be good news for users who check their Gmail emails on Outlook via IMAP. For POP access, Outlook now downloads the newest mail first instead of the oldest mail. SP2 also fixes a number of issues related to RSS feeds in Outlook 2007.
Fastest Camera Ever Built Uses Lasers
The camera works by illuminating objects with a laser that emits a different infrared frequency for every single pixel, allowing them to custom-amplify a signal that would otherwise be too dim to see.
“We have invented a new type of imaging technology that overcomes the fundamental limitation between sensitivity and speed,” said Keisuke Goda, an optoelectronic specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s the world’s fastest camera.”
High shutter speeds enable moving objects to be clearly photographed. The less time a camera’s optical eye is open, the less time a subject has to move. But this comes at a price: less light enters the camera, causing the image to be underexposed. That’s why sports photographers use high-powered strobe lights.
Workarounds include the use of extra-sensitive chemicals in traditional films, or amplification of signals captured by the photoelectronic light sensors of digital cameras. But film is relatively limited in its range, as are digital cameras. At the speed of Godas camera, there isn’t enough light to magnify.
“The camera has a built-in optical image amplifier that overcomes the tradeoff between sensitivity and speed,” he said. “It could be especially useful for microscopy. On the meta-microscale, even slow-moving objects require a high temporary resolution, because your field of view is so small.”
When reflected light hits the camera’s sensor, each pixel picks up its dedicated wavelength, and is given an electronic boost of a matching wavelength. That amplifies the original dim signal, composed of just a few photons, until it becomes visible. This can’t be done in a conventional digital camera, because the sensor doesn’t know what the original wavelengths were.
For now, STEAM can only produce images composed of just 3,000 pixels, a far cry from the multi-million-pixel cameras used by consumers. But Goda’s team intends to develop a multi-megapixel camera that can take 100 million pictures per second, with a frame rate of they’re hoping to up this to mega-multipixel mode competitive with standard digital camers, taking 100 million pictures per second, with a shutter speed of just one-trillionth of a second.
Apple plots course for middle of mobile
Apple seems almost ready to bridge the gap between the iPhone and the Macbook with a new type of mobile computer.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)Is the world finally ready for the mobile minitablet?
It's become quite clear over the last several months that Apple is ready to bridge the mobile computing gap, with plans to develop a device that fits somewhere in between the iPhone and the MacBook. A recent Wall Street Journal article proclaimed that during his medical leave, CEO Steve Jobs has been working on that midsized mobile device, bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook.
And just this week, BusinessWeek reported that Apple is developing a "media pad" that would let users watch videos on a larger screen than an iPod Touch or Amazon Kindle, but on a device that's more portable than notebooks and lacks a keyboard.
The personal computer industry has long tried to make such a device a reality, but apart from some early success for the Kindle, no one has managed to convince the public that the attempts released to date--such as the Ultra Mobile PC--are worth buying. Instead, PC companies looking for increased mobility are finding ways to shrink the notebook PC as opposed to a finding a new way to use computers.
As far back as 2000, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was evangelizing Tablet PCs, but a combination of price and uninspired software doomed that category to niche status. Intel and Microsoft then turned the hype machine to the UMPC (later rebranded MID, or Mobile Internet Device), which several years later aren't exactly flying off store shelves.
More recently, PC companies have embraced Netbooks, small inexpensive mininotebook computers that are designed for basic Web surfing and e-mail. Netbooks, however, are further depressing the PC industry's gross margins and attempt to cram a full-fledged notebook user interface into a small package, and it doesn't seem that Apple is all that crazy about this category.
But Apple has developed a few unique ideas for mobile computing over the past two years that have resonated with designers, developers and users; namely, the iPhone OS and the App Store. So, is the timing finally right for the tweener computer?
BusinessWeek reported that the iPad (name stolen from Silicon Alley Insider for its brevity) would be about the size of the Amazon Kindle, but with a screen that covers a greater portion of the surface. The Kindle is 7.5-inches long, but the screen is just 6 inches; by comparison, the iPhone sports a 3.5-inch display, while the smallest MacBook uses a 13.3-inch display.
Previous attempts at making keyboard-less devices with 7-inch or 8-inch screens--such as UMPCs and MIDs--haven't captured the public's imagination. Microsoft and Intel had high hopes for the concept in 2006, which was also known as Project Origami inside Microsoft. Samsung made perhaps the best-received UMPC, but that wasn't saying much, and interest in the category quickly faded after the launch of the iPhone.
The main issue with UMPCs was a lack of compelling software. They were designed to run Windows XP, which itself wasn't designed to run on a device with such a small screen and limited methods of input. And at launch, Windows Vista was actually a step backward in terms of its suitability for mobile devices.
Samsung's Q1 was perhaps one of the best UMPCs/MIDs, but it never amounted to much in the market.
(Credit: CNET)Intel tried to shift MIDs to Linux to get around the resource problems of Windows Vista, but its partners have yet to gain any traction. And neither attempt was able to galvanize third-party developers into creating applications designed specifically for a mobile platform.
Apple's iPhone OS, however, was designed for a small-screen mobile environment. Installing the iPhone OS 3.0 on the iPad would allow Apple to preserve the user interface from the iPhone and iPod Touch and keep the device simple: a more complicated (and power-hungry) operating system isn't needed for a computer like this.
This would also allow Apple to take advantage of the App Store, giving the iPad thousands of applications at its disposal right from launch. One potential problem with that approach is that developers will have to rewrite their iPhone applications to adapt to the larger-size screen on this new device, said Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory, creators of Twitterific.
Hockenberry, who is very confident that Apple has such a device in the works, doesn't think this will be a huge obstacle, but developers will have to gauge whether the extra development effort is worth their time. One thing Apple could do is set aside a separate section of the App Store for iPad-optimized applications, while finding a way to run older iPhone applications in some sort of compatibility mode.
"It wouldn't be hard for Apple to have a "Classic" environment on a tablet that provided a 320x480 window for running one or more iPhone applications," Hockenberry said in an e-mail. "It would be a smart thing for them to do: there are instantly tens of thousands of apps and users are presented with a familiar interface (something that looks a lot like Dashboard in Mac OS X.)"
The iPad could also be the first Apple product to surface with a chip designed by P.A. Semi, which Apple didn't buy on a lark. A custom chip could solve two problems for Apple--the need to keep software compatibility with the ARM-based chips used to run the iPhone while delivering more performance for HD video playback or more robust games that competitors might not be able to immediately match.
What might such a device cost? There are two schools of thought on price.
UMPCs, at around $700, were considered too expensive but because they didn't offer any value, not because of the sticker price itself. It would not be hard for Apple to argue that an iPad with an HD screen, thousands of applications, and a superior mobile browser is worth just slightly more than what people were willing to pay for the original iPhone.
A $699 iPad would slot nicely between the iPod Touch and MacBook in Apple's product lineup and preserve Apple's profit margins, while allowing the company to reduce the price over time if needed similar to the original iPhone.
But Apple could also hook up with a wireless carrier--we'll save the AT&T versus Verizon debate for another day--to subsidize the iPad. The company has reportedly been in talks about distributing MacBooks through wireless carrier friends like AT&T, which already sells 3G-equipped Netbooks with a data plan subscription.
A device such as this would be infinitely more attractive with wide-area wireless networking, as opposed to just Wi-Fi--especially if carrier subsidies bring the price down to around $499, just above the largest iPod Touch. It's hard to see something this big replacing a mobile phone--you're not going to hold one of these up to the side of your head--but there are certainly plenty of headsets available in the world.
This is the last frontier of the promised convergence between computers and communication devices: the midsized device. That shift has already happened to the smartphone, but it seems very reasonable that for many people, smartphone screens are too small for serious computing.
If Apple is indeed working on such a product, it will have to get the implementation right to avoid duplicating the failures of so many other mobile computing aspirants. But by having awakened the public to the promise of basic mobile computing, Apple could be best positioned to capitalize on the need for something more.
