Apple today announced that under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter’s metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating the risk of electric shock.

Apple has received reports of detached prongs involving a very small percentage of the adapters sold, but no injuries have been reported.

Customer safety is always Apple’s top priority so it has voluntarily decided to exchange every ultracompact power adapter for a new redesigned adapter, free of charge. For more details on the exchange program please Click here.
www.apple.com/support/usbadapter/exchangeprogram

Digg - 250 GB Challenge & 5 Tools To Monitor Your Bandwidth [Giga Om]

[nytimes]
Comcast, one of the country’s largest Internet providers, said this week that it would place limits on customers’ broadband usage.Beginning Oct. 1, Comcast will put a 250 gigabyte-a-month cap on residential users. The limit will not affect most users, at least not in the short-term, but is certain to create tension as some technologies gain traction.

A Comcast spokeswoman, Jennifer Khoury, said 250 gigabytes was about 100 times the typical usage; the average customer uses two to three gigabytes a month. Less than 1 percent of customers exceed the cap, she said.

Many Internet providers reserve the right to cancel the service of the most excessive users. The 250-gigabyte cap is Comcast’s way of specifying a longstanding policy of placing a limit on Internet consumption, and it comes after customer pushed for a definition of excessive use.

Malware has managed to get off the planet and onto the International Space Station (ISS), NASA confirmed today. And it's not the first time that a worm or virus has stowed away on a trip into orbit.

The attack code, which space news site SpaceRef.com identified Monday as "W32.Gammima.AG," infected at least one of the laptops used on the station, an international effort headlined by the U.S. and Russia.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Kelly Humphries declined to identify the malware, saying only that antivirus software detected a worm on July 25.
The first public report of malware about the ISS was logged on Aug. 11. In NASA's daily status report on the station, the agency said that Sergey Volkov, the ISS commander, was "working on the Russian RSS-2 laptop" and "ran digital photo flash cards from stowage through a virus check with the Norton AntiVirus application."A week later, on Aug. 21, Volkov "checked another Russian laptop, today RSK-1, for software virus by scanning its hard drives and a photo disk."

The next day, Volkov transmitted antivirus scanning results from the laptop to Earth, and U.S. astronaut Greg Chamitoff scanned another computer for possible infection. NASA also said in Friday's report that all laptops on board the ISS were being loaded with antivirus software.

"All A31p laptops onboard are currently being loaded with [the] latest [Norton AntiVirus] software and updated definition files for increased protection," said NASA.
source:Computer world

The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned an iPhone ad because the agency said the claim that the handset can access "all parts of the Internet" is misleading due to the lack of Flash and Java support.

The commercial in question shows a person using the touch screen to flick through various Web pages.
"You never know which part of the Internet you'll need," A voiceover in the ad said. "The 'do you need sun cream' part? The 'what's the quickest way to the airport' part? The 'what about an ocean view room' part? Or the 'can you really afford this' part? Which is why all the parts of the Internet are on the iPhone."

Two viewers complained that the ads were misleading because the handset does not have Flash or Java support, which are integral to popular sites like YouTube.

In response, Apple said the ad was meant to highlight the difference between surfing the Web on an iPhone and on a normal mobile phone, which often restricts users to simplified, WAP-versions of Web sites. The phrase "all parts of the Internet" referred to site availability, not every aspect of functionality on these sites, Apple said.
Source: Information Week

With 10 weeks to go before the election, the amount of news coverage surrounding John McCain and Barack Obama is set to skyrocket (as if it hadn't already). In order to help you parse through all the chatter, Google has set up a special Web site where mobile phone users can find the latest headlines.

Google appears to be throwing everything it has at the upcoming presidential election. It is using multiple avenues and products to provide coverage. Google believes that plenty of people will be interested in accessing news from their mobile phones. So it set up a "one-stop-shop" for mobile phone users to get what they need.

The site is located at m.google.com/elections.

The products that it is tailoring to election coverage are mobile Search, News, Reader, YouTube, and Maps. Read
source:www.informationweek.com

From New York Times

Space tourists are getting their own ride. Space Adventures, a Virginia company that arranges passage for wealthy explorers to ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station, plans to buy a Soyuz flight all its own in 2011, with the option of buying more.A new investor is likely to occupy one of the two available seats on Space Adventures’ 2011 flight: Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google. He made a $5 million investment in the company that will serve as a deposit on a future flight.
more...

Reuters

At a news conference in New York, Anderson announced the creation of an Orbital Mission Explorers Circle of members who will each contribute $5 million to help finance the company's first private mission to the space station.

Previously Space Adventures has bought seats on Russian space agency missions to the orbiting ISS. It now plans to build its own Soyuz rocket for private missions that could start as soon as the second half of 2011.

The $5 million down payment gives members first option on a seat on the mission. Anderson said he was looking for five more wealthy people to be founder members of the Explorers Circle.

But he said he was determined that private space exploration shouldn't be just for the very rich.
more...

Cnet news

"I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Brin said in a statement.

Space Adventures' new club was formed to help kick-start a new effort by the company to fund its own rockets and missions to the International Space Station. Previously, Space Adventures, which has been around for 10 years, has bought seats aboard already scheduled Russian missions to the International Space Station for its clients. Now it will build its own rocket for its own missions. The inaugural flight with its own Russian-built Soyuz rocket is scheduled for 2011, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said at a press conference here Wednesday.
more...

In the first of its kind in the history of Indian science and medicine, the health minister A Ramadoss has ordered a test. In a recent study at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), rats were subjected to radiation from mobile phones. They were found to have damaged DNA and a very low sperm count. This were leading reduction in size of testis and infertility. The Union health ministry now wants to find out whether cellphones could have same adverse effects on our health. A study earlier had found out that if cell phones are kept in the pockets of your pants, the infertility levels could be higher. The excessive growth of telecom in India is prompting the medicine industry to investigate into such matters and whether in long term, they could affect the health of people.
This 5 yr study will be conducted by JNU's School of Environmental Sciences and AIIMS ( neurology, obstetrics and gynaecology,biochemistry)

Google has intorduced Gmail labs that helps you decide the way you use your email. They have added some very cool features and some very basic features in their labs. The following are the 13 things they've added to their labs. You can click on the settings links and then click on the labs tab to enable some these cool basic features.

1. Quick Links
• Adds a box to the left column that gives you 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You can use it for saving frequent searches, important individual messages and more.
2. Superstars
• Adds additional star icons. After enabling this feature, you can choose which icons you wish to use in the "General" Settings page. This I think is the best feature of the Labs
  
3. Pictures in chat
• See the pictures of your friends in chat.
4. Fixed width font
• See you email in a fixed font and size
  
5. Custom keyboard shortcuts
• Customize your keyboard shortcuts. A good feature.
  
6. Mouse gestures
• Use your mouse to navigate with gestures. Hold right-click and move the mouse to the left to go to a previous conversation, move it to the right to go to the next conversation, and move up to go back to the Inbox view. Works best on Windows.
7. Signature tweaks
• Places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the "--" line that appears before signatures. Can't use this and the "Random signature" Labs feature at the same time.
8. Random signature
• Allows you to send random quotes, in your signature. This cannot be used in sync with signature tweaks.
  
9. Custom date formats
• you can use a 24-hour clock (14:57) or show dates with the day first (31/12/07).
10. Muzzle
• This feature saves screen space by hiding the status message of your friends. This is a good feature.
11. Old Snakey
• That old snake game. This is just a "Overweight feature". If you wanna play a game, play a better one on a gaming website. This feature I think is unnecessary, so i call it overweight, or excess fat.
  
12. Email Addict
• Gives you a break time by simply putting your gmail account on standby. By doing this you become invisible to your friends.
  
13. Hide Unread Counts
• Hides the unread counts from your inbox and labels
  

Source: Gmail

Microsoft on 20 th may (Tuesday) let their advertisers display the banner ads to mobile users of Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail.

This move by Microsoft is a after following other companies who had started supporting mobile ads.

The Mobile users in France, Spain, U.K. and U.S. will see these banner ads while using the Microsoft services.

Google had made an announcement in April, inviting AdWords advertisers to display their banner ads.
Google, initially displayed tonly text ads on mobile phones.

Yahoo, Third Screen (owned by AOL) and AdMob, are among other companies that display ads (banner) on mobile phones.

Adobe Systems Inc, the maker of Photoshop and Acrobat software, started public trials of its next-generation design software on Tuesday.
Registered owners of Creative Suite 3, however, will be allowed to use these betas until the release of CS4, which currently has no release date. However, unless Adobe has some kind of registration system built into those betas, they may need to be installed on production systems alongside CS3.
The beta software is available for free download.

Beta programs are near-final versions of software that its makers allow users to try out in a bid to discover bugs before the products go on sale. Some software makers conduct their betas publicly while others do so in secret, requiring users to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Adobe has yet to start public trials of the CS4 versions of other programs in the CS4 suite, which includes Photoshop and Illustrator.
Adobe's popular Web design and development tool Dreamweaver received a couple of noteworthy updates, including a Related Files toolbar, a Code Navigator, and a Live View Mode. The related files toolbar provides instant access to files used within a page, whether XML, JavaScript docs, or HTML; and the code navigator function allows code updates to be performed in several places with a single entry. Live View Mode is based upon the open source Webkit browser engine which also powers Safari. With this tool, a live preview of projects can be viewed within Dreamweaver.

In future the MacBook Air will use lower-cost solid-state drives and the new generation of flash storage will reduce from a higher price today.Today, a consumer pays dearly for a solid-state drive (SSD). For example, for only 64GB of SSD storage on the MacBook Air, a consumer must pay a premium of about $1,000 over the 80GB hard disk drive model. But the cost per gigabyte of solid-state drive storage will drop as notebook PC makers like Apple switch to solid-state drives with capacities above 100GB based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology. Adoption by notebook PC makers is expected to start in the third quarter, according to industry sources.

All Solid State Device manufacturers have moved from the single-level cell (SLC), which is used in products like the MacBook Air, the ThinkPad X300 and HP 2510p to MLC technology.Intel is also set to move into the high-capacity SSD market on the back of its multilevel cell technology.

"Compared to the price you're paying today for a 64GB drive. You'll get a 128GB of storage for less than half the price (of the 64GB drive)," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a supplier of MLC-based solid-state drives. The drives based on MLC technology offer better performance than hard disk drives. The current SSD manufacturers such as Samsung and Toshiba have also moved from single-level cell to multilevel cell.

MLC is a more sophisticated technology than current SLC. Its advantages are not only lower cost but higher capacity. Instead of the relatively small-capacity 64GB SLC-based drives being offered today in notebook PCs, manufacturers are targeting MLC-based drives ranging up to 256GB by the end of this year or early next year.

MLC NAND flash is a flash memory technology using multiple levels per cell to allow more bits to be stored as opposed to SLC NAND flash technologies, which uses a single level per cell. Currently, most MLC NAND stores four states per cell, so the four states yield two bits of information per cell. This reduces the amount of margin separating the states and results in the possibility of more errors. MLC NAND has the benefit of being cheaper due to the denser storage method used, but software complexity can be increased to compensate for a larger bit error ratio (BER).
The disadvantage is more complexity, which can result in lower performance. "Inherently, MLC is slower and inherently (has) less write cycling endurance," Intel has stated in the past.

Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities, sees it that way too. "You lose some speed and you lose some reliability when you move to MLC," he said. "Errors per cell with MLC is an order of magnitude worse than SLC, which isn't that great to begin with," Cohen said.

The higher BER requires an algorithm that can correct errors up to five bits and detect the condition of more than five bad bits. The most commonly used algorithm is Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem

A Single-Level Cell, SLC, memory card stores one bit in each cell, leading to faster transfer speeds, lower power consumption and higher cell endurance. The only disadvantage of Single-Level Cell is the manufacturing cost per MB. Based on that, the SLC flash technology is used in high-performance memory cards.

A Multi-level Cell, MLC, memory card stores three or more bits in each cell. By storing more bits per cell, a Multi-Level Cell memory card will achieve slower transfer speeds, higher power consumption and lower cell endurance than a Single-Level Cell memory card. The advantage of Multi-Level Cell memory card is the lower manufacturing costs. The MLC flash technology is used mostly in standard memory cards. The Multi-Bit Cell, MBC, is a similar technology to the Multi-Level Cell but stores only two bits per cell. Intel and STEC say they mitigate the reliability problem and boost performance with proprietary controller chips. "We spend 85 percent of our time grappling with this reliability issue" when talking to customers, said Wilkison. "NAND (flash memory) will forever have limitations. It will be subject to a finite number of program and erase (record and delete) cycles," he said.

"There's a lot of background operations happening to manage the media. Moving the data around to make sure you're evenly wearing down the drive. You're not necessarily pounding on one specific spot and then killing a (memory) cell prematurely," Wilkison said. "This is all controller intelligence."

The kind of technology to optimize the longevity of the drive is generally referred to as wear leveling. Error detection and error correction technologies are also used, Wilkison said.

Wilkison said he believes these techniques result in solid-state drives that are just as reliable as hard disk drives. And he expects a surge in adoption of solid-state drives in notebooks. Whereas today there is only one notebook model per company that comes with a solid-state drive, the number of models offered with such drives will increase exponentially in the second half of the year, he said.


There will still be a "price delta" between hard disk drives and solid-state drives but that will continue to come down with MLC technology, he said. Reports have cited Intel pricing as approaching $1 per gigabyte.

Solid-state drives have no moving parts. Hard disk drives, in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, solid-state drives avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of hard drives. Therefore, solid-state drives are generally faster and in some respects more reliable.

Microsoft security advisory: Blended Threat from Combined Attack Using Apple’s Safari on the Windows Platform

Microsoft

Microsoft on May 30, 2008 issued an advisory that warned windows users to not use apple's safari web browser until a patch is available that could stop the attackers to hack computers.
Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) issued a security advisory, which it called a "blended threat".
It is caused by a combination of a bug in Apple's Safari Web browser and the vulnerability in the way the Windows XP and Vista handle executable (exe) files on the desktop. This allows the remote execution of malicious code on all supported Windows XP and Vista when the Safari web browser for Windows is installed. This bug was disclosed 2 weeks ago by a researcher Nitesh Dhanjani.

Safari lacks an option to require a user's permission to download a file. Attackers, could populate a malicious site with a code that Safari that would automatically download to the desktop, which is the default location.

Nitesh Dhanjani

A combination of the default download location in Safari and how the Windows desktop handles executables creates a blended threat in which files may be downloaded to a user’s machine without prompting, allowing them to be executed. Safari is available as a stand-alone install or through the Apple Software Update application.

An attacker could trick users into visiting a specially crafted Web site that could download content to a user’s machine and execute the content locally using the same permissions as the logged-on user.

Microsoft

Google adsense is up and ready for RSS feeds and will be launched next week to a limited set of publishers on feedburner. According to the blogpost by steve on 30th may on feeburner weblog, he said that the publishers will get to see the CPM based feedburner ads and also will see the contextual advertising by google, which will add to their inventory. All you need is an adsense account.

He also adds that " You can slice, dice, mix, or mash your tracking across feed units and content units, or keep them totally separate "
Steve is confident of the "chocolaty goodness that will come from ongoing integration effort with Google" and so am I.
The contextual advertising by google has been a big hit and publishers with a good number of subscribers are going to benefit from this service as it is a cpm (cost per 1000 ads served) based service.

Google adsense has been for quite a while now and when ads will be there in RSS feeds there wouldn't be a place left for the reader to read ad free content. Earlier services like google reader gave a clean approach for reading content and the ads by feedburner were didn;t give a bad look either. I too use adsense for generating some pocket money . The "mix and mash" would actually crash the purpose of RSS feeds.

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.

Wikipedia

The standard and the ease of reading the RSS format will disappear and then will come a mix and mash and the ads. This integration with google is good, but what I suggest is that let there be one server of ads and since Google's adsense is far more advanced than that of feedburner, let Google rule the roost. Everything in the world is not about money, we need some aesthetics. Anyways I hope the mix and mash is proper and feedburner, which is going to come under the umbrella of google ads. It is a good news of for all (because if the money). I just a bit concerned over the aesthetics and the nature of service which will be under adsense

Video games have been known for the gripping and entertaining powers. The more involved you get in a game, the better it is. This is what basically GTA series by rockstar games was all about. Now comes Nintendo, planning to make a mark and satisfy the mothers who were not happy with the GTA 4 after the MADD(Mothers against drunk driving) controversy. This strategy seems perfect. Satisfy those who were not satisfied by the last popular game.
The game's novel appeal is delivered through an electronic Wii balance board controller, sold in a bundle with Wii Fit for $90. The board, with multiple sensors, measures a player's weight and turns steps and shifts in balance into moves on screen.

Players can chart their weight and body mass index over time and work to improve them by engaging in about 40 activities including yoga, aerobic step routines, strength and training exercises, and balance games. The balance board can track the progress of up to eight players, so users can encourage each other toward their respective goals.

The Live Mesh service that Microsoft unveiled Tuesday night is a peek of what Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has been working on all these months

In announcing Live Mesh, a broad software, services and development platform that aims to use the Web as a vehicle to synchronize and share data and content among devices and people,Microsoft has finally admitted that the PC is no longer the central element of everyone's computing experience.

Read the whole post here

Microsoft said it has finished work on the third and final service pack for its Windows XP operating system and that the update will be available for public download on April 29
Read the complete post here

The 16 Features of the Adobe Online photoshop

1. Crop & Rotate
2. Sharpen
3. Soft Focus
4. Auto Correct
5. Exposure
6. Highlight
7. Red-Eye Removal
8. Touchup
9. Saturation
10. Distort
11. Fill Light
12. Hue
13. White Balance
14. Black & White
15. Tint
16. Sketch

Also read

Pros and cons of Adobe Photoshop Express

Online photo enthusiasts can now get an additional tool for getting their photos fixed.
Given the brand name,the Adobe Photo Express can give a hard time to other online photo-editing services.

I'd like to discuss here a few possible pros and cons of this service

Pros

• variety of image adjustment and filtering tools
• Adobe Photoshop Express emphasizes photo sharing and online galleries
• includes links to social networking
• Also linked to photo sharing sites Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa
• At some point, Adobe Photoshop Express should be available as a desktop application(Apple's iPhoto)
• Aiming at photo hobbyists

Cons

• Not likely to be meaningful to its professional Photoshop CS3 customers
• service offers up to 2 Gbytes of online storage(not sufficient for professionals)
• Professional photographers often use hundreds of gigabytes of storage and use third party photoshop plugins that aren't available
• limits uploads to 10 megabytes and 4000 pixels in height and width

Also read

Features of Adobe Photoshop Express

Adobe announced the commencement of public beta testing for its free online Adobe Photoshop Express photo editing service and community.

Click here to visit the Adobe Photoshop Express

Motorola has decided to split into two publicly traded companies

---

Motorola has been under pressure from investors and will now split into two units.

1.Handling handsets and accessories
2.wireless broadband networks and enterprise-level communications services

The Mobile Devices business will handle the designs, manufacturing, and sales of mobile handsets and accessories, and will license a portfolio of intellectual property.

The Broadband & Mobility Solutions business will handle voice and data communication solutions and wireless broadband networks for enterprises and governments. It will also handle IP video, cellular, and high-speed broadband network infrastructure, and cable set-top receivers.

CEO of Motorola : Greg Brown

CEO Greg Brown said that the decision to separate the Mobile Devices and Broadband & Mobility Solutions businesses will follow a review process undertaken by the management team and Board of Directors, together with independent advisers.

What could happen after the split

This split could mean that we could expect Motorola's market to grow four fold since each of the companies will focus on their operations and hence create a market for themselves.

This article has sourced some information from cnet news
Read the cnet news article

Also try

• Atheeb Awards Motorola $165 Million Nationwide WiMAX Contract for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
• Motorola introduces the Mobile TV device the Mobile TV DH02