Microsoft launches women’s safety app

HYDERABAD: Microsoft India today said it is introducing Guardian, a new safety application (app), available exclusively for Windows phone users in India.

Incidents such as ‘Nirbhaya’ prompted the global IT giant to come out with an app aiming at protecting women, Microsoft-IT India managing director Raj Biyani said.

Explaining its features, Biyani said Guardian enables users to switch on a ‘track me’ feature in the app that lets friends and family track them in real time using Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and Bing Map APIs. Guardian users can call for help through an ‘SOS’ alert button and also connect to security agencies, police and hospitals easily via this app in times of distress.

The app was developed over six months by a group of enthusiastic Microsoft employees in India, within the Microsoft Garage. Microsoft Garage is a global employee innovation initiative that gives Microsoft employees an outlet to explore ideas in their free time, Biyani said.

“Our employees wanted to do something to enable people to feel safer in our cities. So they used their spare time to develop Guardian. It is a robust personal security app with more safety features and capabilities than any other comparable app available to Indian smartphone users today,” Biyani told reporters after launching the app.

To use Guardian effectively, users need to add the names of friends, family members and security groups to the settings and in an emergency situation, the app can be used to alert them, via the SOS button. All the user has to do is tap the SOS button, a Microsoft official said.

“The phone then sends a distress SMS to all buddy mobiles, notifying them of the emergency along with location details. At the same time the SOS button also sends emails to buddy email IDs and posts to private Facebook groups, if registered,” the official said.

Guardian uses Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and Bing Map APIs extensively and can help security authorities and medical teams track the user. The phone can be traced even if it is broken. The application is capable of one touch video recording that may be used later as evidence, the official added.

- Source : http://techie.jobsplane.in/2013/12/microsoft-launches-womens-safety-app/

Interesting And Lesser Known Facts About Google!

Google is indeed an inseparable part of everyone's life today. let's accept that we all are curious to know interesting things about the company, which has brought big things like, Google search and Android. So, we bring to you 40 interesting facts to bring you closer to 'our favourite' Google!

                         


1. The Google Guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met first in 1995 at Stanford University when Sergey was asked to show Larry around the school. Google was first created as a private company on 4 September, 1998, and its first initial public offering was held on 19 August, 2004.

2. A Google employee is termed as a Googler, while they like to call a new employee “Noogler.”

3. Based on Alexa, Google is the Internet’s most used website globally.

4. Google aims to organise the world’s information and “make it universally accessible and useful.”

5.The earlier version of Google which was developed at Stanford could only analyse 30-50 pages a second. Today, the count has increased to millions of pages per second.

6. Google was sued by a former Google sales executive, Christina Elwell, on the grounds of job discrimination, when she was pregnant with quadruplets. The court granted Google's request to move the case to arbitration rather than to a public trial.

7. Creators Page and Brin thought if of naming Google as "What Box." However, Brin thought that it sounded similar to "wet box," which sounds like some kind of porn.

8. Critics opine that the Internet might still be in its pre-Hellenistic Age sans Google.

9. During the Egyptian crisis in 2011-2012, Google launched its special service, which allowed people with no Internet to send tweets by dialing a phone number and dropping a voicemail. The voicemail was automatically translated as messages on Twitter.

10. Facebook users spend the most minutes on the Internet, with over 250 billion minutes in a month. This data is for the month of May 2011. Microsoft and Google came in second and third with 204 billion and 200 billion minutes, respectively.

11. A fellow graduate Sean Anderson asked Page and Brin to name their site as 'Googolplex'. Page thought they should shorten it to 'Googol,' which means number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Anderson mistyped 'Googol' as 'Google,' which was an available name. The name reflects Google’s mission to organise the massive amounts of information on the web.

12. Google CEO Eric Schmidt got into controversy when he told Google users that the future of the web is headed towards complete transparency and no anonymity. He said that if Google looked at a person’s messaging and a person’s location, it could predict where a person will go. Additionally, according to Schmidt, if a person has just 14 photos on the Internet, Google could accurately identify the person.

13. Schmidt raised eyebrows when in a 2011 interview, he said that he doesn’t think people want Google to answer their questions, rather they want Google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”

14. Google is criticised by its competitors that it manipulates its search results, it uses others’ intellectual properties, it consumes big amount of computer energy, and for monopoly, antitrust, and restraint of trade issues. The company is also criticised for promoting sexism and ageism.

15. Google has on-campus daycare centers for the children of the employees. These are based on a philosophy called Reggio Emilia, which is a self-directed learning program. In 2008, the company realised that they are spending $37,000 on each child per year, where as getting a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford costs $34,000 a year.

16. Google has reduced its tax rates by billions of dollars by intelligently taking advantage of offshore tax havens such as Ireland and Bermuda. Top corporate income tax in the U.S. is 35 per cent. Where as in Ireland, it's only 12.5 per cent, and in Bermuda it’s zero.

17. Google Inc.’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, a fellow computer science graduate student at Stanford. He was hired September 1998. He currently serves as director of technology at Google.

18. Google was originated at the Stanford School of Engineering with an attempt to catalog and analyse the World Wide Web. The process first ran at Stanford with the user name “google.stanford.edu.”

19. Google, on an estimate, generates approximately 20 petabytes of user-generated data every day. 1 petabyte is approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

20. Google hires goats to eat brush and reduce fire hazard in fields at their California Mountain View headquarters.

21. About 1 million computers are used for Google's operation and about 1 billion search requests are handled every day.

22. Google is a dog-friendly company as per its Code of Conduct. They state in a quirky way, that it is a “dog company...as a rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out.”

23. Google’s first-ever Twitter post was: “I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010."in February 2004. Which is binary for “I’m feeling lucky.”

24. Google started the tradition of April Fool jokes in April 2000, when it brought the “MentalPlex,” which said Google has ability to read a person’s mind as he visualises the search results he wants.

25. If you use are using Google Calendar, "Google knows more about you than your mother." Google know your schedule, all the books you’ve read on Google Books, all the videos you have watched on YouTube. Google also remember all your search queries, the date and time of every request, your IP address, your SMS messages, your browser and its set language, the cookies used for advertising services, and third-party application data. Scared yet?

26. In the year 1998, the Google's homepage used a Yahoo like exclamation mark in its logo.

27. In the year 2007, the Forbes magazine showcased Google as the best place to work in the U.S.

28. In the year 2007, Google with NORAD decided to follow Santa Claus on Christmas Eve using Google Earth in 3D.

29. In the year 2010, Google accepted that in the previous three years, they have mistakenly collected the data sent by people over unencrypted wi-fi networks.
30. In January 2003, the American Dialect Society said that the word 'Google' is the is the most useful Word for 2002.

31. In June 2006, Google was added as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

32. Google received a record 75,000 job applications for 6,000 openings in one week in February 2011.

33. Remember “Googolplex,” which was earlier being considered by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as the name of the company, which means 10 to the power of googol. The name was later adopted the for their corporate campus in Mountain View, California.

34. Page and Brin decided that the total number of words on the homepage of Google should not exceed 28.

35. Not willing to leave the school to devote time to their new search engine, Page and Brin tried to sell google.com for $1 million to AltaVista. Fortunately, Alta Vista was shut down and Google had by then surpassed other search engines.

36. The “Chief Culture Officer” is actually a job title at Google and his or her main job is to retain the unique culture of the company, which includes flat organisation, lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment, and keeping Googlers happy.

37. The authors of 'A Billion Wicked Thoughts' crunched some data from Google, Bing, and Yahoo! ranking the most popular sex terms used for search. The top 10 terms were: 1. youth (13.5 per cent) 2. gay (4.7 per cent) 3. MILFs (4.3 per cent) 4. breasts (4 per cent) 5. cheating wives (3.4 per cent) 6. vaginas (2.8 per cent) 7. penises (2.4 per cent) 8. amateurs 9. mature 10. animation.

38. Google was pressurised by the U.S. government to provide Google usage records for further investigations into online pornography.

39. Googleplex have Google bikes parked throughout the campus that employees can hop on and ride. None of these bikes are locked and employees can simply take them whenever they need them. Google is also known for its "20 per cent time," which states that one day a week employees can take simply to work on something that interests them.
40. After introducing “Did you mean...” feature, Google's site traffic doubled.

7 Apps To Help You Run Windows Programs On Another OS

So you have switched to another operating system, but still miss some of your favourite programs on Windows? Here are 7 app to help your run Windows program on your current platform!

We agree that popularity of Linux based OSes are spreading like wildfire, and many others are opting for Mac OS as well. But let's face it, Windows is still the most used operating system for desktops and laptops. And if you are also a Windows user who is willing to switch to another platform but is held back by your favourite Windows applications, here's a good news. There are certain different methods available to bring your Windows applications to your current OS.

One option is to go for dual booting on Linux or you can simply install the following apps. These applications will allow you to install and run your favourite Windows applications on Linux operating systems line GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, BSD and even on platforms like Mac OS X.

1. Wine

 Started in 1993, Wine is an open source project. The project is developed and maintained by the community under the coordination of Alexandre Julliard.
The already popular app is compatibility layer between Windows programs and the operating system. It converts Windows API calls to POSIX calls, thus allowing integration of Windows applications to POSIX-compliant OS (Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and BSD). Rather than an emulator or virtual machine, it is a reimplementation of Win32 API.
The app basically supports Windows XP, but support for newer versions of Windows is actively included in its new releases. Wine supports 32-bit architecture; support for 64-bit architecture is still under development. It allows you to run programs like MS Office, Windows Media Player, Adobe Photoshop, Max Payne, and several other games and applications.

2. CrossOver 

 CrossOver is the commercialized and supported version of Wine for Linux and Mac OS X. The proprietary software comes with out-of-the-box support for many commercial Windows applications like MS Office, MS Outlook, MS .NET Framework, Adobe Lightroom, DirectX, etc.

You can also play games like Counter Strike, Diablo, StartCraft, Half Life, World of Warcraft via this. Though Wine is a free alternative, CrossOver, provided by CodeWeavers, is a better choice for professionals and organizations who want to run particular software on Linux or Mac OS X.

3. Play On Linux

While Wine and CrossOver both provide support for a lot of applications with Wine, you are required to customize settings for the particular app, and for CrossOver you have to fork out money for it. PlayOnLinux is a nice alternative for both.

PlayOnLinux is a graphical front-end for Wine compatibility layer. It simplifies the installation of Windows apps and especially games on GNU/Linux by auto-configuring Wine. It provides wrapper shell scripts to specify the configuration of Wine for any particular software. It also uses an online database of scripts to apply for different programs, and a manual installation can be performed if the script is not available.

4. Wine Bottler

WineBottler is an app packager, which means it packages Windows-based applications into Mac app-bundles. The name suggests that it is connected to Wine, which is basically how you can run Windows programs with it on your Mac. To use it, install it. That’s it.

Click the Install button in WineBottler and it will take care of the rest. It comes with handy scripts that take care of downloading, installing, and configuring an application for you. WineBottler can pack your Windows .exe software into Mac .app package and convert .exe or .msi into an app. It even provides options to install special dependencies.

5. PlayOnMac

Like PlayOnLinux, PlayOnMac is a graphical software built on top of Wine. It aims to ease the installation of Windows programs and games on Mac OS.

You can use PlayOnMac to easily install many apps and games on Mac OS, without the need of making changes to Wine’s configuration for that particular program. PlayOnMac takes care of Wine’s settings so that you don’t have to configure them manually, and you can enjoy using the software or game.

6. Q4Wine

Q4Wine is a QT4 graphical user interface for the Wine compatibility layer. It’s available for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. It helps you to manage Wine prefixes and installed applications in an easy-to-use graphical interface.

Q4Wine lets you easily handle tasks for creating and managing Wine prefixes, controlling Wine processes, making backup of prefixes, and many more tasks that would otherwise not be as easy to handle.

7. Wineskin

Wineskin, which also uses Wine to run Windows applications, is a porting tool. It allows you to port Windows applications in Mac application bundle wrappers, which can then run on Mac OS X and even shared with other Mac users. It works with Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion.

Wineskin uses a customized version of X Window System, known as WineskinX11, to provide the graphical user interface for Windows programs on the Mac OS X. Once you have created a Mac application bundle of any Windows program, you can easily run it on your Mac OS X just like any other native software. For more info, check out the documentation.

Creating Your Own Run Commands. .

There is no doubt that Microsoft Windows is the most widely used operating system in all parts of the world. Apart from being simple to use, it is quite rich in features as well, which makes our lives quite easy.

The Run command available on Windows operating system is one such power packed feature that lets you to open a document or an application instantly with the help of just 1 command. So, rather than clicking several icons or using multiple commands, you can use the Run command to open any program or document instantly.

 But, do you know how to create your own run commands? Well, it is really easy, which involves just few steps. Through this article, I will help you understand how to access your favorite applications by creating custom Run commands.

Open Run Command

 Before I show you how to create your own Run commands, let’s take a quick look on how to open Run Command. First of all, you need to open the Run window by just pressing the Windows Key along with the R key, i.e. Windows + R. Now, you have to type the name of the program that you desire to open up or execute. Unfortunately, not all programs can be accessed through this method. So, let me show you how to create Run commands that do not come as inbuilt commands.

Step 1.  The first step is to select the software or application for which you want to make custom Run command. For example, let us consider Google Chrome as the example here. Remember, you can choose any application other than which is already there in the Run command.

Step 2.  In the second step, right click on the desktop of your computer system and make a new shortcut. 

Right click > New > Shortcut

Step 3. As you select the Shortcut option in the 2nd Step, it will open up a dialog box. And, the dialog box will ask you path of the application or software for which you want to create the Run command.

Step 4. Now, you need to browse through the files and choose the one that shows “chrome.exe”. Well, it is quite obvious that all the executable files can be found in the C drive (or wherever the Operating System has been installed), inside the folder “Program Files”.

For example, “C:\Program Files\Google Chrome\chrome.exe”

Step 5. Once you are done with Step number 4, just click on “Next” button and simply provide a relative name to that shortcut. Remember, the same name will be used later in the Run command. 

 For example, “GC” for Google Chrome

Step 6. Now, click on the “Finish” button. Once it is done, an icon related to that application or software will show up on your computer’s screen. It means that the process of creating shortcut has been done successfully.

Step 7. In this step, just cut and paste that recently made shortcut icon into your computer’s root drive, in its Windows folder. For example, C:\ Windows , Make sure you are the administrator of the computer or have its password.

Step 8. Now, you are done with the set up and can run the application through Run Command. Just go to Run and enter the keyword “GC”, and Google Chrome will begin executing.

How To Play Java Games On PC

Java games are very popular after Android apps and games. Number of people owning a java(j2me) enable mobile phone are good in number because Java enabled phone are cheap and affordable.It was not possible to play java games on your pc but after the launch of KEmulator.

What Is Kemulator ?

This software is a mobile game emulator which can emulate java mobile games and apps of ‘jar format’ on your Windows PC. It supports OpenGL Graphics Acceleration and MIDP 2.0.

How it works

 Kemulator Lite acts as a mobile phone on your PC. This tool allows users to transfer its mobile Java games to their desktop without installing them, you only have to run this program and select your phone operating system. KEmulator Lite loads JAR files and supports any type of Java game in order to offer users the possibility of playing any application. This utility has multiple graphic engine support, both in 2D and 3D being able to run even the strictest games. This program is also a video recorder in which you will be able to capture videos in AVI format and keep sequences of your favourite games. You can also save images of games.

Download Kemulator :

It is important that the latest version of JAVA JRE (also called JAVA Runtime Environment) should be installed on your PC. If not, then you can download JAVA JRE from below links:

Java Runtime Environment Latest Version (32-bit)

Java Runtime Environment Latest Version(64-bit)

You can download the latest version of KEmulator for your Windows PC from the download link given below:

Free downloadKEmulator(v0.9.8)

Size: 2.51MB

Minimum System Requirements : 

OS: Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7/8 

RAM:256 MB

Graphics: OPEN GL

Extra Plugins: JAVA JRE

How To Install :

1. Run the executable file downloaded from the above link to start the installation wizard.
2. Click Next button to continue and then it is better to change the destination folder to a drive other than ‘C’, because it runs better in other drives and crashes rarely.
3. Then complete the installation by going through the installation wizard and get ready to launch your favourite J2ME Applications on your PC.

How To Launch Java Games :

In the Midlet of the menu bar click Load Jar and then browse for the java application or game you want to launch.

Limitation of emulator :

It is not possible to run those apps which uses internet or which need to access phone data/memory.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE I3, CORE I5, CORE I7...??

-> Core i3:

•  Entry level processor.

• 2-4 Cores * 4 Threads

•  Hyper-Threading (efficient use of processor resources)

• 3-4 MB Cache

• 32 nm Silicon (less heat and energy)

-> Core i5:

•  Mid range processor.

•  2-4 Cores

•  4 Threads

•  Turbo Mode (turn off core if not used)

•  Hyper-Threading (efficient use of processor resources)

•  3-8 MB Cache

•  32-45 nm Silicon (less heat and energy)

-> Core i7:

• High end processor.

• 4 Cores

•  8 Threads

•  Turbo Mode (turn off core if not used)

•  Hyper-Threading (efficient use of processor resources)

• 4-8 MB Cache

•  32-45 nm Silicon (less heat and energy)

Top 5 upcoming programming Languages and their Books and Tutorials.

we bring to you the top 5 upcoming programming languages and their books and tutorials.

1. Dart

Dart is an open-source Web programming language developed by Google. It was unveiled at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, 2011 October 10–12. The goal of Dart is "ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform." Dart is intended to address JavaScript's problems (which Google's engineers felt could not be solved by evolving the language) while offering better performance, the ability "to be more easily tooled for large-scale projects" and better security features. Google works on Dart to help it build more complex, full-featured client-side Web applications.

It will help the Web applications to hold thousands of lines of codes and it has all the potential to become the new vernacular of Web programming.

Similar to JavaScript, Dart uses C-like syntax and keywords. The only difference is that while JavaScript is a prototype-based language while objects in Dart are defined using classes and interfaces like we do in C++ or Java.

References

Dart for Hipsters
Dart: Up and Running
What is Dart?
Dart in Action

2. Ceylon

The Ceylon Project is an upcoming programming language and SDK, created by Red Hat. It is based on the Java programming language and when it is released, will run over the Java Virtual Machine.

The project is described to be what a language and SDK for business computing would look like if it were designed today, keeping in mind the successes and failures of the Java language and Java SE SDK. The project has been referred to by industry analysts as a "Java killer", though Gavin King of Red Hat himself reject this term. King is best known as the creator of the Hibernate object-relational mapping framework for Java. He likes Java, but he thinks it leaves lots of room for improvement. No Ceylon tools yet although King says to expect a compiler this year. Ceylon is still not ready to anchor a large project as of now but it's worth an early look.

References:

Ceylon-lang refernence
Ceylon - the language and its tools

3. Go

Go, which is popularly known as Golang, is an open source, compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent system programming language. It was first designed and developed at Google Inc. beginning in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.

The language was officially announced in November 2009 and is now used in some of Google's production systems. Go's "gc" compiler targets the Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, and Microsoft Windows operating systems and the i386, amd64, and ARM processor architectures.
It is a general-purpose programming language suitable for everything from application development to systems programing. In that sense, it's more like C or C++ than Java or C#. Although Go is still a work in progress and the language specifications might change in future but you can start working with it today. Google has made tools for the same.

References:

An Introduction To Programming In GO
Programming in Go
The Go Programming Language Phrasebook
Effective Go Tutorial

4. F#

F# (pronounced F Sharp) is an open-source, strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language encompassing functional, imperative and object-oriented programming techniques. F# is most often used as a cross-platform CLI language, but can also be used to generate JavaScript and GPU code.

F# is developed by the F# Software Foundation, Microsoft and open contributors. An open source, cross-platform edition of F# is available from the F# Software Foundation. F# is also a fully supported language in Visual Studio. Other tools supporting F# development include Mono, MonoDevelop, SharpDevelop and the WebSharper tools for JavaScript and HTML5 web programming.

F# originated as a variant of ML and has been influenced by OCaml, C#, Python, Haskell, Scala and Erlang. Microsoft has already created the F# compiler together with the core library available under the Apache open source license. One can start working on it right away for free and even use it on Mac and Linux systems (via the Mono runtime).

References:

Programming F# 3.0, 2nd Edition
Expert F# 2.0
Programming F#

5. Fantom

Fantom is a general purpose object-oriented programming language created by Brian and Andy Frank that runs on the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), JavaScript, and the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) (.NET support is considered "prototype" status). Its primary design goal is to provide a standard library API that abstracts away the question of whether the code will ultimately run on the JRE or CLR. Like C# and Java, Fantom uses a curly brace syntax. The language supports functional programming through closures and concurrency through the Actor model. Fantom takes a "middle of the road" approach to its type system, blending together aspects of both static and dynamic typing.

Fantom is open source under the Academic Free License 3.0 and is available for Windows and Unix-like platforms (including Mac OS X).

References:

Getting Started With Fantom
Guide To Evaluating Fantom

Computer Devices & their Inventors

• Key board— Herman Hollerith first keypunch devices in 1930’s

• Transistor— John Bardeen, Walter Brattain & Wiliam Shockley ( 1947-48)

• Integrated Circuit— Jack Kilby & Robert Noyce( 1958)

• Trackball— Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff (1952)

• Computer Mouse — Douglas Engelbart (1964)

• Microprocessor – Intel 4004 Computer Microprocessor-Faggin, Hoff & Mazor(1971)

• Floppy Disk— Alan Shugart &IBM

• RAM— An Wang at Harvard University’s Computation Lab and Jay Forrester at MIT.1951

• Laser printer— Gary Starkweather at XEROX in 1969.

• Hard Disk— The IBM Model 350 Disk File by IBM in 1956(was the first hard disk drive and was part of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer that IBM started delivering in)

• First PC— the IBM 5100 Portable Computer by IBM

• First laptop— Grid Compass 1100 (called the GRiD) and was designed in 1979 by a British industrial designer, Bill Moggridge.

How Search Engines Works ?

Step 1 - Search Engines make use of software's called SPIDERS, which comb the internet looking for documents and their web addresses.

Step 2- The documents and addresses are collected and sent to the search engine's indexing software.

Step 3- The indexing software extracts information from the documents, storing it in a database.

Step 4- When you perform a search by entering keywords, the database is searched for documents that match.

Step 5- The search engine assembles a web page that lists the results as hypertext links.