Browse Articles
Monday, 19 October 2009 11:04 AM
Granville and Auburn areas down!
There is currently an issue which relates to the infrastructure of Telstra that is affecting Internet and phone services in the Granville and Auburn area. We do not know the extent of the outage; however, we have been in contacted with a few other businesses that have the same issue in the area.
The current update from Telstra for the issue to be resolved is by close-of-business tomorrow, Tuesday 20/10/2009.
If you need to contact TechFlare Solutions about any issues during this time, please call 1300 556 382. We have a contingency in place for now, and will try out utmost to keep services running as per normal.
We will keep you updated on the issue. Thank you all very much for your patience and understanding.
Filed Under:
Friday, 3 April 2009 3:42 PM
The new Acer G4 24-inch LCD monitor has an eye-catching exterior. There is no getting around the fact that it has orange panels. Though the look of this impressive monitor will not be to everyone's tastes, it is a refreshing change from the usual drab designs that other companies have been churning out. The monitor is designed for graphics-intensive applications or games, so when I finally upgraded from my 6 year-old 17-inch (non-widescreen) LG monitor, I noticed a BIG difference.
Some of the technical specifications of this monitor are:
• It boasts a 50,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio (whatever that means)
• VGA, DVI (HDCP) and HDMI signal connectors
• 2ms response time
• 1920 x 1200 resolution
• Acer CrystalBrite Technology
Pros: Large widescreen, supports true HD resolution, sharp colours
Cons: Price (>$620), looks may not be to everyone's liking
This is the type of monitor that you will either love or hate...and I love it!
Filed Under:
Monday, 30 March 2009 9:53 AM
For those of you who do not know, the government has been running a trial with some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to censor inappropriate material. Basically, they have the ISPs stop users from navigating to certain websites. These inappropriate websites are stored on a blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The records on this list essentially remains a secret.
I would not normally touch anything remotely political with a 10-foot pole, however, censorship across Australian networks is not a good thing. I am not saying that the idea itself is bad, far from it. The problem is that there are so many intrinsic issues related to this. Firstly, there may well be legal ramifications to censoring content. Then you have to think about the fact that the filter will actually slow our networks down (in some cases quite significantly) even more than they currently are. The additional cost for filtering will be likely be passed down to users. There are numerous other issues, and you can click here to read just one of the many blogs that are popping up on the Internet and protesting about the censorship.
iiNet is Australia's third largest ISP, and has recently withdrawn from the trial. Click here to read more about it. As you can see from the article, the blacklist is far from perfect. Here is another article on the controversial blacklist.
For a more objective overview about Internet censorship in Australia, click here.
Being a parent myself, I understand that other parents would want the Internet to be a safe place for their children. However, I believe that censorship by the government is not the right direction. It should always start in the home, with the parents.
Filed Under:
Thursday, 8 January 2009 10:13 AM
Original article taken from Sydney Morning Herald.
Ten prophecies for the digital millennium
A summary of the main trends in IT, from the rise of the supernet to the threat posed by intelligent machines.
Recently I was asked to speak at a conference about what's going to happen in IT predictions in the next 10 years. It's always hard to tell the future, but here goes anyway - 10 predictions, in no particular order. I have mentioned most of these ideas in various columns during the past year or two. So treat this, my last column for the year, as sort of a summary of what I believe to be the trends in IT as we near the end of the first decade of the digital millennium.
1. The internet will become the "supernet"
The internet has been around since 1969, but it's only 15 years since it has become the web - easy to use, easy to navigate, with billions of web pages and billions of users.
We have already reached the point at which most devices connected to the internet are mobile - phones, cars, even household appliances. That trend will continue, with the move to "embedded computing", where the internet links objects as well as general-purpose computers.
2. The decline of the PC
This is a consequence of the first prediction. PCs will not die - indeed, they will become massively more powerful, but they will become only one of many types of computing device. Mobile phones and "thin clients" will be much more popular ways of connecting to the supernet.
3. The rise of software as a service
Again, a consequence of the rise of other types of computing device. Data and processing and applications are moving off fixed computers - or even mobile computers - and on to the web.
This is increasingly being called "cloud computing" as all processing takes place in the "cloud" that is the internet. An important example is the craze for "software as a service", in which applications reside elsewhere and are accessed through a web browser.
4. The decline of copyright
Regular readers of this column will know this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Copyright and most intellectual property laws are now an anachronism. Attempts by record companies and film studios and book publishers to stop people copying digital media are doomed to failure.
Technology is forcing big changes to business models.
5. The greening of IT
Computers contribute about as much to carbon emissions as do aircraft - about 2per cent of the world's total. Many users and vendors are working out clever ways to reduce this figure - virtualisation, data centre consolidation, thin clients and telecommuting. All worthy stuff. But the real greening of IT comes when the power of information systems is harnessed to increase efficiencies throughout the organisation, in logistics, in manufacturing and in power distribution. IT is also an integral part of the carbon footprint monitoring and measuring process.
6. The threat from intelligent machines
Look up "The Singularity" in Wikipedia or somewhere. The term, invented by American writers Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, refers to the time in the near future when machines become more intelligent than humans and start replicating themselves. Who then will be the dominant life form on the planet?
7. Increased importance of technology for the aged
The population is ageing. The proportion of people disabled by the illnesses of old age is growing rapidly. Digital technology has a big role to play in helping people live independently and in keeping them out of expensive and soulless institutions.
The rise of so-called "e-health" is a big trend in this direction - use of technology to remotely monitor people's vital signs, to provide diagnoses at a distance and to supplement communications systems.
8. The decline of IT as a speciality
A hundred years ago it seems someone predicted that if telephony job opportunities continued to grow at the same rate, within a generation everybody in the world would be a telephone operator. Well, with automatic dialling, everyone is. Somebody else once predicted a similar thing about computer programmers. Today we all program computers, by the very act of using them. There are fewer specialists, but many more generalists.
9. The death of newspapers
Newspapers as we know them are in decline. Are you reading this in hard copy or online? Around the world, newspapers are shutting down or moving to the web. Blogs are replacing the mainstream media.
The profession of journalism, and the way we consume media and get our news, is being transformed. I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but there's no doubt it's happening.
10. The growth of internet TV
TV is going digital. At the same time, internet bandwidth is quickly increasing, and most of the data it carries is video.
Many kids simply don't watch TV any more - they download stuff. All sorts of people are offering all sorts of video content on the net, from legitimate TV stations seeking another distribution medium to amateurs on YouTube and elsewhere.
The existing pay TV model of expensive content over a proprietary distribution medium has only a few years left. And "free-to-air" will become "free-to-internet".
Call me at the end of 2018 to see how all this has panned out. And do have a Merry Christmas.
Click Here to view the original article.
Filed Under:
Wednesday, 26 November 2008 10:01 AM
Click
here to view the original article at cnet news.
Microsoft hopes 'Milan' table PC has magic touch
At first glance, Microsoft's secret project looks like a 2007 version of the sit-down arcade game Ms. Pac Man.
But if this machine were running the game, you could just take your finger and flick away the monsters chasing the heroine.
Microsoft on Wednesday is taking the wraps off "Milan," more than five years in the making and the first in what the company hopes will be a long line of "surface computers." The Microsoft Surface tabletop PC, for which the company has created both the hardware and software, offers shades of the technology seen in the sci-fi thriller Minority Report. The whole unit is controlled entirely through touch; there's no mouse or keyboard.
To paint, people can pick up a paint brush or just dip their fingers in virtual paint cups. Sharing photos is similarly intuitive. A stack of pictures can be easily sorted through and shared. To resize a photo, just stretch two fingers apart. Pivot the fingers and the image rotates. More than one person can be interacting with the computer at a time.
"It's very approachable," said Pete Thompson, the former T-Mobile executive who runs Microsoft's surface-computing business. "You just want to touch it."
Although consumers will be able to touch it later this year, most won't be able to buy a surface computer any time soon.
The expensive components required to allow multiple users to touch the device simultaneously give it a price tag approaching $10,000. As a result, Microsoft isn't targeting homes initially, though it hopes consumers can own their own Milan within three to five years. For now, Microsoft is focusing on getting the products into public spaces in the hospitality arena--hotel lobbies, restaurants, and casinos, to name a few.
The company's initial customers are cellular carrier T-Mobile, which will use the units in its retail stores; hotel operator Starwood, which owns brands including Sheraton and Westin; casino owner Harrah's and slot game maker IGT. Each of the initial partners should have a few initial machines up and running around November, Thompson said.
Thompson said the roll-out approach is similar to that taken by the tech industry with plasma displays, which were used in trade show booths for years while they were still too costly for the home.
Sheraton Vice President Hoyt Harper said Microsoft's tactic is pretty savvy, noting that many guests who might see the product in a Sheraton lobby could easily be among those who will buy one when it finally does go on sale widely. "I think that's one reason they chose us," he said.
Harper said the computers fit perfectly into his company's efforts to turn its hotel lobbies into destinations rather than merely places people stop on their way somewhere else. That, he said, makes them easily worth their high price tag.
"How can you not take advantage of something that could materially change the guest experience in the lobby?" Harper asked. Initially, Sheraton plans to have three Milan machines at hotels in New York, Boston and Chicago, with two in each lobby and one in the club lounge. If that means folks are lining up, he said, all the better.
"It will be a nice problem to have," he said.
Another consideration, in addition to cost, is how well Milan holds up to wear and tear. Harrah's CIO Tim Stanley wants to make sure the machines are built to last before he starts placing them in casinos on the Vegas strip.
If he puts one in the Pure nightclub, for example, "they might dance on (the) table," he said. "Can it handle that?"
At its core, Milan is powered by a fairly standard high-end Vista PC with an off-the-shelf graphics card, 3GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2GB of memory. To make the touch screen work, Microsoft crams a lot of other stuff into its tabletop unit. Underneath the roughly textured scratch-proof and spill-proof surface covering the top of the unit, five infrared cameras sense fingers or other objects touching the surface, while a DLP projector turned on its side generates the screen image people see.
To show off the technology to the public, Microsoft has written a few demo applications, such as the paint and photo apps, as well as a program in which specially tagged clear tiles make up a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of a still image, however, the tiles are part of a moving video (it's harder than it sounds to put together).
But Microsoft has hooked up its partners with a handful of software companies it has certified to write Milan-compatible programs. The company isn't making the technology widely available to developers, though it may do so down the road.
Microsoft is not alone in the arena of multitouch computing. NYU professor Jeff Han wowed the crowd at the March TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference with a similar technology and has launched a start-up, Perceptive Pixel, to commercialize it. Apple has also gotten patents in the area and has talked about the use of multitouch in its upcoming iPhone.
Still, Thompson said he isn't worried about infringing anyone else's technology.
"Our legal team feels really good about our IP situation," Thompson said.
The Milan effort began during a series of conversations between Microsoft researcher Andy Wilson and hardware designer Steve Bathiche. The team presented the idea in 2003 to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and started working on prototypes.
Microsoft itself has launched other ventures in this area, largely through Microsoft Research, which has been demonstrating projects in this realm for years. It even licensed a derivative of the touch technology to a medical-imaging company last year. Another version, dubbed PlayAnywhere, is a mobile take on surface computing, using a can-size projector and camera to allow any flat space to be turned into a computer.
As for Milan, the software maker hopes to get the technology into lots of other areas, such as the education market, in addition to into consumers' hands. Although the initial customers are getting the same tabletop design, Microsoft says the product will eventually come in other shapes and sizes, including vertical, or stand-up units.
It's the interface that makes the difference. Not only is it easy to use, but unlike traditional computing, it's not an isolating experience.
"We're all connected through MySpace.com and have all these virtual worlds and virtual friends but we don't do a lot of socializing like this," Thompson said, pointing to several chairs seated around the Milan device.
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under:
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 11:17 AM
Click
here to view the original article.
What Is 'Photosynth'? Microsofts's 3D Photo Mapping Tool
The first official project/product from Microsoft's Live Labs is called "
Photosynth." What is it? It's hard to describe succinctly. It appears to be kind of mashup of things: photo sharing, visual search, mapping and 3-D.
To me, at least conceptually, it's pretty exciting. Here's a
video overview from Microsoft. (The video is something of a commercial for Live Labs, but also showcases Photosynth as a very provocative product.)
Earlier this year I did a longish post on Google Earth as an alternative search/browsing paradigm: the "Geobrowser." Google and Microsoft are now in something of a mapping arms race that has little to do with consumer or advertiser demand. And Microsoft, notwithstanding Google Earth's impressive features and developer community, believes it has the edge.
To see what's really interesting about Photosynth and its implications one needs to step back. The Internet began as a text-based medium and is now becoming more and more visually rich. The growth of image search and the meteoric rise of online video are just two examples of this. Online, multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds like Second Life are other examples of emerging, visually immersive online environments.
People have difficulty imagining what search will look like five years from now. But it may in fact be that we collectively look back in a decade or so and see today's text-based search as a quaint precursor to a much more engaging and multi-dimensional search paradigm - literally in 3-D.
According to the video Photosynth was a collaboration among groups at Microsoft, including the Virtual Earth team. The crew at Virtual Earth wants to build a rich, "immersive" visual environment that ties the real and the online worlds together.
Photosynth represents the merger of photosharing, community, search and 3-D mapping, with just a touch of gaming thrown in. Effectively it's an alternative web-search paradigm based on visual imagery. This type of approach doesn't replace the need for text-based search entirely but it could substitute for today's search in a substantial number of cases (especially for anything local or travel).
The vision of creating a "photorealistic" virtual world online is extremely ambitious. But ultimately I believe it's possible - and very exciting. The application will reportedly be available for download later this year.
Original article posted by Greg Sterling at August 2. Click
here to view the post.
Filed Under:
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 10:27 AM
To view the original article at Google, click
here.
What is Android?
Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. This beta version of the Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.
Features
-
Application framework enabling reuse and replacement of components
- Dalvik virtual machine optimized for mobile devices
- Integrated browser based on the open source WebKit engine
- Optimized graphics powered by a custom 2D graphics library; 3D graphics based on the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification (hardware acceleration optional)
- SQLite for structured data storage
- Media support for common audio, video, and still image formats (MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, PNG, GIF)
- GSM Telephony (hardware dependent)
- Bluetooth, EDGE, 3G, and WiFi (hardware dependent)
- Camera, GPS, compass, and accelerometer (hardware dependent)
- Rich development environment including a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, and a plugin for the Eclipse IDE
Android Architecture
The following diagram shows the major components of the Android operating system. Each section is described in more detail below.
Applications
Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.
Application Framework
Developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. The application architecture is designed to simplify the reuse of components; any application can publish its capabilities and any other application may then make use of those capabilities (subject to security constraints enforced by the framework). This same mechanism allows components to be replaced by the user.Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems, including:
-
A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, including lists, grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser
- Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data
- A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graphics, and layout files
- A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar
- An Activity Manager that manages the life cycle of applications and provides a common navigation backstack
For more details and a walkthrough of an application, see Writing an Android Application.
Libraries
Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application framework. Some of the core libraries are listed below:
System C library - a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices
Media Libraries - based on PacketVideo's OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG
Surface Manager - manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D and 3D graphic layers from multiple applications
LibWebCore - a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view
SGL - the underlying 2D graphics engine
3D libraries - an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer
FreeType - bitmap and vector font rendering
SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications
Android Runtime
Android includes a set of core libraries that provides most of the functionality available in the core libraries of the Java programming language.
Every Android application runs in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine. Dalvik has been written so that a device can run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM executes files in the Dalvik Executable (.dex) format which is optimized for minimal memory footprint. The VM is register-based, and runs classes compiled by a Java language compiler that have been transformed into the .dex format by the included "dx" tool.
The Dalvik VM relies on the Linux kernel for underlying functionality such as threading and low-level memory management.
Linux Kernel
Android relies on Linux version 2.6 for core system services such as security, memory management, process management, network stack, and driver model. The kernel also acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the rest of the software stack.
Click
here to view the original article.
Filed Under:
Monday, 20 October 2008 11:19 AM
Original article taken from
Sydney Morning Herald.
AUSTRALIA'S insatiable appetite for up-to-the-minute TV viewing from the United States and Britain is costing networks hundreds of millions of dollars due to an explosion in online piracy.
Per capita, we have become the most prolific downloaders of television contraband from the internet, a new report by the Australian Institute of Criminology found.
The incidence of Australian piracy has trebled in eight years. Only British households watch more pirated programs.
The report, Intellectual Property Crime And Enforcement In Australia, noted the industry now loses about $45 million annually due to illegally copied content. But this rises to nearly $200 million when tax losses and secondary revenues such as advertising are factored in.
Faster, cheaper broadband connections and new software making downloading easier are behind the boom, the researchers found.
But it has also been driven by an impatient demand for must-see US and British shows, which has prompted Seven, Nine and Ten to fast-track episodes of popular programs.
As a result of illegal downloading , numerous hit programs - including The Mentalist, Californication, Supernatural, NCIS, House, The Amazing Race and Heroes - are now aired within days of their release overseas.
Australian networks are also giving internet-savvy viewers the opportunity to legally download programs from their own websites. Fans of the cancelled series McLeod's Daughters can download the show from Nine's site. Ten provides downloads including Neighbours and Good News Week.
A Channel Seven spokesman said: "Television is successful because it reflects consumer demands and fast-tracking of some programs from the United States to counter any impact from downloading is one strategy.
"Our key strategy is one of creating and producing programs you can only see on Seven, such as Sunrise, Dancing With The Stars and Packed To The Rafters."
Overseas programs that are not fast-tracked are being left in the dust. The finale of Dr Who series four ran locally last month on the ABC as one of its best-rating shows but for downloaders the episode was old hat six months ago.
The Cartoon Network last week announced its November 22 launch of the long-awaited Star Wars franchise animation, Clone Wars, but it is already available on the internet.
Even hit TV shows scheduled for US prime-time broadcast can be copied in New York and ready to download in Sydney before they legitimately go to air in LA three hours later, because of the cross-country time difference.
Leading internet monitor Envisional said users with the right software can leave their home PCs to scan and download the latest available releases.
The study concluded more than one in five Australians have watched or purchased a pirated film or TV show.
Click
here to view the original article.
Filed Under:
Thursday, 2 October 2008 2:05 PM
Original article located at: The Official Google Blog
At Google, we have a saying: "launch early and iterate." While this
approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to
our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit
"send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source
browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for
everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find
it
here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So
why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value
for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
All
of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We
search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare
time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all
using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began
seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started
from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that
the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive
applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What
we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for
web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.
On
the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and
simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a
tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications
that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome
is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want
to go.
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a
browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By
keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one
tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue
sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also
built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next
generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's
browsers.
This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far
from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader
discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work
building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it
even faster and more robust.
We owe a great debt to many open
source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've
used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others
-- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as
well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive
the web forward.
The web gets better with more options and
innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes
to making the web even better.
Click here to view the original article.
Filed Under: News
Wednesday, 30 July 2008 4:57 PM
Read the full article from Brisbane Times...
GOOGLE has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world - the NSW Department of Education - away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product.
The NSW Director-General of Education, Michael Coutts-Trotter, said the department had exploited its size to get the best deal for students and teachers, who will each receive customised Gmail accounts.
"Our new email contract was so big that global players like Google were prepared to put together a world-class package of services for the children and young people in NSW public schools," he said.
The acting Minister for Education, John Hatzistergos, said the new system would cater for 1.3 million users and be in place by the end of the year.
The $9.5 million, three-year contract with the Google partner SMS Management and Technology will displace the department's previous $30 million contract with Microsoft partner Unisys, which ran over five years.
Although Google offers Gmail to education providers free, SMS Management and Technology said there were significant costs associated with providing tight security and integrating the email system with the department's existing portal.
"This will be one of the biggest Gmail deployments in the world," said its spokesman, Matthew Kaufman, who said Macquarie University had also recently signed up for Gmail.
The US-based information technology analyst Matthew Cain, from Gartner, said it was no secret why Microsoft and Google are "assiduously courting" the .edu community with free email services.
"If the vendors can get students to sign up for email accounts, the hope is they will then use those accounts for life," Mr Cain said. "Students, alumni, staff and faculty all represent a highly desirable demographic that advertisers will pay top dollar to reach."
The department's chief information officer, Stephen Wilson, said there would be no advertising on the new email accounts, which would be supported by tough filtering and security software.
Students will be able to log on from home. But whereas each had access to 35 gigabytes of memory on their account previously, they now have six gigabytes.
"I think we are the largest single-enterprise user of Gmail," Mr Wilson said.
"[The deal is] a first in Australian education and a lot of other states are very interested."
Click here to view the original article...
Filed Under: News
Previous Page >