This is an interesting survey which I feel to share wid you all.

Here are the key findings:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing "arms race," with the "crackers" who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
• "Next-generation" engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

It seems there will nt be much difference left between a human being and a machine as well..

Folks! the stuff I have brought for you this time is something which may not be of everyone’s concern. Yet, I personally feel that everyone of you who is reading this blog post do have a facebook account. Using a facebook has always been fun and informative as well but the notifications it gives always haunts me. Do you constantly have like 99 new notifications, marked with the little red button at the bottom right in your Facebook account? Would you like to only receive important notifications, such as comments from friends, and skip the stuff various applications send you? Teso bhaye read on.

This isn’t a new feature though, but I thought why simply endure thousands of notifications and updates from applications and pages when you don’t exactly want them. So, I believe, it’s a better idea to simply turn them off. Here are a couple of ways to do it.

Click on the red “Notifications” button at the bottom right corner in Facebook. Click on “See All.” On the right, you’ll see a long list of every application that sends you notifications, and you can turn them off by unchecking them. Be careful, Facebook’s own applications which are probably useful to you, such as feed comments, are also on the list, so you’ll probably want to leave them checked.

An screenshot of the notification panel which you can see when you click “See All”.

That’s all! Enjoy your fresh new, unnecessary notifications free Facebook.

Is this funny!!

Many of you might be interested to know exactly when you will be able to get your hands on RTM, but folks, when you can have access to Windows 7 RTM entirely depends upon who you are! Who you are in the sense, whether you are ‘ Microsoft Partners(Independent Software Vendor and Independent Hardware Vendor)’ & Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) or Business Customers or simply an enthusiast. Microsofties have categorized these group of people into different names and have already declared few important dates on when they would be getting the RTM code.

All the Partners & OEMs i.e ISV (Independent software vendor) and IHV (Independent hardware vendor) Partners will be able to download Windows 7 RTM from Microsoft Connect or MSDN on August 6th. Similarly, the TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers will also have access through their respective TechNet or MSDN portals on this day.

Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members will be able to download Windows 7 RTM through the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal on August 16th while Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers will have access downloading it starting August 23rd.

Sad but true, I do not fall under any of the categories above. But, as a Microsoft Student Partner and a technology enthusiast, I have been enjoying the Windows 7 beta release and the latest Release Candidate. Now, I have a doubt if I would be able to enjoy RTM too as for this is the final build which will be appearing in software vendors by 22nd October, 2009.

It is said, ‘Where there is will, there is a way’. Let me check out this time, if there is a way for me, since I am no less willing to test RTM as well.

Microsoft Security Essentials(MSE) is expected to tackle viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans as I have told you this in my earlier blog post about this product. It is crystal clear that MSE is gonna be absolutely a free Microsoft product, however, Microsoft will not give Security Essentials to everyone who wants it, that is to say, PCs running a copy of Windows which is "non-genuine", cannot download a copy of the security software. Further, this is a basic antivirus, antispyware program that has a simplistic interface and consumes less memory and disk space than commercial security applications like those from vendors such as Symantec and Kaspersky.

While OneCare, which was Microsoft’s earlier security tool and now in the verge of it’s scrapping, offered a Managed Firewall, PC Performance Tuning, Data Backup and Restore, Multi-PC Management, and Printer Sharing, MSE is rather closer to Forefront Client Security, Microsoft’s antivirus product for the enterprise.

The important Features and performances of MSE are:

• Remove most-prevalent malware
• Remove known viruses
• Real-time anti-virus protection
• Remove known spyware
• Real-time anti-spyware protection

During the MSE installation, Windows Defender is actually disabled as it is no longer needed with MSE installed. Below you can see two screenshots, with the first showing MSE when everything is perfect while the second shows that a threat has been detected.

I have some more technical details here for you as well. To grasp the deeper insight it’s essential to know that MSE’s engine is actually identical to the one that comes with Forefront Client Security. In fact, Microsoft uses the same engine for all of its security products(as said in my previous blog post). Thus, engine updates to MSE will be delivered at the same time as they are delivered to Forefront. Signature updates, on the other hand, can be delivered at different times and frequencies than Microsoft’s other security software like windows defender. New virus signatures for MSE will be downloaded automatically on a daily basis.

One of the most interesting features for MSE is Dynamic Signature Service (DSS). Like, when MSE detects that a file is making suspicious actions (such as unexpected network connections, attempting to modify some crucial parts of the system, or downloading known malicious content) and there is no virus signature for it, MSE will send a profile of the suspected malware to Microsoft’s servers. If there is a new signature for it, one that has yet to be sent out to the MSE client, MSE will be told how to clean the file. It should be emphasized that this communication will only occur for malware found that is not in the current signatures. This is a completely new feature and indeed the next version of Forefront will also use DSS.

Of course, security aside, the next most important part of security software is undoubtedly the performance. Since MSE doesn’t include many of the features of OneCare, this is an area that Microsoft has a chance to excel in. In fact, the company includes three features in MSE to keep it light: CPU throttling (the system will remain responsive to the user’s tasks), idle-time scanning (scans and updates use a low-priority thread and only run when the PC is idle), as well as smart caching and active memory swapping (virus signatures not in use are not loaded into memory).

Your fundamental system requirement for MSE to function properly in your machine are:

• For Windows XP, a PC with a CPU having clock speed of at least 500MHz and at least 256MB of RAM
• For Windows Vista and Windows 7, a PC with a CPU having clock speed of at least 1.0GHz and at least 1GB of RAM
• VGA (display): 800×600 or higher
• Storage: 140MB of available hard-disk space
• An Internet connection is required for installation and to download the latest virus and spyware definitions.

Yes, the other important thing I  want to leave here is that, the genuine validation is required during the installation of MSE. Microsoft Security Essentials requires validation, which means that it won’t be available to anyone using a pirated copy of Windows. But it won’t require registration or personal information of any kind. In fact, not even your Windows Live ID in the name of your personal information is required.

So, the only thing you need is , you agree to the EULA (which you agree for each and every software you use), then validate, download, and you’re done!

Now, lets wait together for Microsoft to make this product to be available for Nepal as well.

Extracted from my personal diary

August 20, 2005:

A day when Kathmandu saw a perfect sunshine from the east in the morning. Days of this sort are almost common for the Kathmanduites but rightfully it was different for me. We were eight of us and probably I was the youngest in the group. Rest of the friends being members of the then eminent slow rock music band AXIX. A 4-days long trip to Gosaikunda, which is nearly 80 km west to Kathmandu valley was fabulous. 

We started our journey early but reached our first day destination i.e. Dhunchhe, the headquarter of Rasuwa district via a van at 9 in the evening. We all admired the natural magnificence of the hills, rivers and water streams which went by our way. That is, to be more precise, we were already inside Langtang National Park by now. We rented a hotel, ate everythin’ whatever they served, along with a goblet of ‘Tumba’ (a famous local hard syrup) and rested till east glowed warm.

Then, our expedition actually started completely by foot. The adventurous trekking which was too steep upward was astonishing and in the name of support, we just had a stud stick but yeah it did serve our purpose. The voyage continued consistently exactly in the same manner till dusk but to our utter dismay, we could not make it to our final destination. We were too tired to step forward…and as we rolled our eyes around and to our amazement the place appeared us as the ‘skeleton island’ in ‘King Kong’… hehe! yeah really! the place was too spooky for us…

We camped at a safe site and waited for the next daybreak. Our trekking expedition continued with same zeal among us and …and eventually, we reached our final destination ‘Gosaikunda’ at 12 noon sharp.

We were in cloud nine to learn that we reached an altitude half the height of Mt. Everest.

What??? Half de’ height of Mt. Everest!!!

Hehehe…We laughed n we almost cried.

It was a perfect journey with perfect fun…

Folks, It’s a pleasure letting you know that Microsoft is getting ready to release a long-anticipated free anti-virus called ‘Morro’ for the personal computers. But, until now no date has been fixed  on its rolling out process. But, a trial version or a beta product is speculated to be posted at its website very soon. “Morro” will be able to provide the essential protections that consumers need without overusing system resources, and will help more consumers have better protection against online threats. You know it or not but the current subscription service, Live OneCare which is not a free service, is ending its run on 30 June 2009.

Morro is being developed by Microsoft’s Forefront security team and is based on the Forefront antivirus/anti-malware engine. The reason Microsoft is going from a paid subscription service to a free one is to make sure that Morro is installed on all consumer PCs, especially those whose users find it hard to afford or do not show interest to run antivirus/anti-malware software, that it will be able to better secure the entire Windows ecosystem. This anti-malware application will offer protection against viruses, spyware, root kits and Trojans.

The working mechanism for Morro will be such that it will function by routing all of a users Internet traffic to a Microsoft datacenter, where the Morro application will process the traffic and identify and block malware in real-time, by examining all of the rerouted traffic.

Do you think that this protection solution will work out in this world of technology where numerous types of other anti virus systems are already available? May be this is a tough task to answer for Microsoft but because the consumption of standard anti-malware is very low around the world, particularly in underdeveloped nations like Nepal, the availability of basic protection for anyone who wants it is all the more important.

Well, Morro will be architected for a smaller group that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs and it will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems only.

This makes a very fantastic use before deploying something to the real production servers. In the other hand, It also saves reconfiguration time so that we can increase up our convenience and efficiency without wasting much time.

Please, make note that above  interface is a screenshot of Microsoft Virtual PC environment.

Windows Virtual PC (Beta) is the latest Microsoft virtualization technology that allows us to run many productivity applications on a virtual Windows environment, with a single click, directly from a Windows 7-based PC.

You may want to download Windows Virtual PC (beta) here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=65E1C5EB-DF9B-415F-B2D6-27F6EF5DCEB9&displaylang=en 

(Please, make sure that your PC has Windows 7 RC installed in it. Windows 7 beta do not support this feature.)

You may also want to download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en

FCS Security demands a huge network( Min. 250 computers interconnected under a domain) of clients and server based computers. In such a case, learning FCS in real world scenario for FCS configuration is nearly impossible. So, here, in such a condition, making use of Virtual PCs  is the best solution and that was what we did during the whole Bootcamp sessions.

I wanted to share with you (of course the forefront part is not possible here!) on how exactly we made use of virtual PC to serve our purposes.We were actually working on desktop PCs with Windows XP platform having sound hardware configurations. But, for the whole sessions, Windows server 2003 was our ultimate platform. So, how? …..Yes exactly! We made use of Virtual Machine with server 2003 setup in it. Everything went great, we had no problems running it.

After that, we wanted to create few more virtual machines to run on the same platform. It wasn’t easy though. But,Thanks to our trainer, Mr. Udhyan Timilsina, who was already ready with the tools in hand. So, what we did was we simply ran other ready to use virtual PCs to serve our client server requirements.

Now, it was more like a fun than cramming to learn. We configured a whole lot of server and client virtual PCs including the servers that deployed Microsoft exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. We needed time to learn, explore the panels and customize security policies. And, we did it all without having to worry for the chances to lose system database as we were working on virtual PCs. For a Server in Sydney to a client terminal in Cairo;), everything was made possible through virtual PC. Creating a virus in client machine, quarantining it and then applying various policies including to send an email notification to the Server was absolutely fun for a single trainee using a single computer.

Kudos to Virtual PC!

As you know,

Kirchoff’s Current Law (KCL):
At every node, the sum of all currents entering a node must equal zero.

Kirchoff’s Voltage Law (KVL):

The voltage law says that the sum of voltages around every closed loop in the circuit must equal zero.

 

Exercise:

Please apply Kirchoff’s Current and Voltage laws to the following figures.

 

Solve it! I need the solution…:)