Infosys set to join TCS in 1,00,000-employee club

A key milestone is just weeks away. The country's showpiece software giant, Infosys, is set to cross the one-lakh-employee mark, catching up with industry leader Tata Consultancy Services.

While the twosome together would be within kissing distance of worldwide headcounts at IBM or Accenture, the two global leaders are also putting pressure at home with their own aggressive hiring. Infosys now has 82,000 employees on its rolls, but clearly sights 100,000 after job offers made in 1,050 engineering colleges across India.

"We have given 18,000 offers. This shows our confidence in the business.
We will soon employ in excess of one lakh people in India," TV Mohandas Pai, director, human resources, Infosys told reporters in Mumbai. IT and business process firms together employ 20 lakh workers in India.

While IBM has 3.68 lakh employees and Accenture has 1.
72 lakh people on its rolls spread worldwide, TCS and Infosys have most of their employees based in India. Thanks to lower costs in India, IBM and Accenture have been expanding in India, prompting a war for talent that is yielding fruits for employees and mid-level managers.

Infosys is overhauling its manpower strategies to battle attrition. Under the new performance-linked pay structure, the difference in compensation between average and top performers would be 35 to 40 per cent.

This difference earlier was 15-20 per cent. "Our attrition is 13.
4 per cent and we want to get it in single digits," says Nandita Gurjar, group head, HR, Infosys. The company is planning to go for stringent employee assessment standards.

"We are tightening our assessment of top performers. We would also introduce variable pays for middle and senior-level management," said Pai.

Infosys has embarked on a hiring spree when there have been retrenchments in the IT sector due to a slowdown in the US economy (which contributes 70 per cent of Indian IT companies' revenues). "Headcount addition is in line with their guidance and shows the business confidence despite question marks over the US economy" said Apurva Shah, an IT analyst with Mumbai-based brokerage Prabhudas Lilladher.

Opinion: A new kind of Web — don't miss these 11 sites

Check out these examples of how the Web is evolving to present information in new ways

Call them Web 2.0 sites or mashups — or come up with your own trendy term. Whatever you call them, there are sites popping up all over the Web that process information in new ways rather than just present it.

Some of them work with information you supply, letting you manipulate, track and share data, such as your schedule or your to-do list. Others, so-called mashups, draw data from different sites and reassemble it to make something new. They're all part of how the Web is evolving beyond just a bunch of point sources for information. Here are 11 examples that show what the new Web can do, from helping you organize your life to adding some personalized fun to it.

Personal assistants
GrandCentral

You can use GrandCentral to sort and filter incoming calls and direct them to ring some or all (or none) of your phones.Click to view larger image.
Ever wish you could exercise the same control over incoming phone calls as you do over e-mail? GrandCentral — now a Google operation — gives you a new phone number and forwards incoming calls to any other number or numbers you specify.
Depending on who the call is from, you can have it ring through to your work phone, home phone, cell or all at once. You can also direct some calls right to voice mail — with different greetings for different callers — and retrieve your voice mail via any browser. Perhaps best of all, you can permanently block calls from anyone you don't want to hear from ever again.

Highrise

Highrise keeps track of your relationship with your customers, providing a place to track and share their contact information, background notes and records of interactions.Click to view larger image.
Highrise is an online CRM tool. Basically, it's an easy-to-use database for contacts, reminders and notes. Because it's online, you can share it across your company or team anywhere there is access to a browser.
Highrise offers a free account for up to two users that can store 250 contacts, a Max account at $149 per month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts, and several levels in between. You can even forward e-mails to a drop box associated with your account, and Highrise adds it as a note on the sender's or recipient's contact page, along with any attached files.

Jott

Use your mobile phone to call in a reminder — for instance, that you need to pick somebody up after school — and Jott will send you an e-mail reminder, plus display it on your Jott home page.Click to view larger image.
Jott is for those times when you're away from your computer — but not from your phone — and you think of something you need to do the next day or want to be reminded of next week. You just call Jott and dictate your message. Jott translates your message to text and e-mails it to you or anyone else whose name and address you've registered.
If the event is in the future, you can tell Jott to send you an e-mail or text message as a reminder. You can also use Jott to post to your blog or to Twitter, or to add tasks to your to-do lists on Remember the Milk (see below) and other such sites.

Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk keeps your to-do list organized and sends you reminders in your choice of formats.Click to view larger image.
Remember the Milk is an online to-do list manager with a clean, straightforward interface that raises it above some of its competitors.
As with any desktop calendar program, you create a list of tasks and set due dates — which you can do with natural-language modifiers such as "tomorrow" or "in two weeks" — and, if you want, set them to repeat according to a regular schedule. You can add tasks by entering them in your browser or by e-mailing them to Remember the Milk.
Where Remember the Milk beats most desktop programs is its ability to send you a reminder via e-mail, SMS or instant messenger. You can also share your lists with family or team members and let them add tasks too, something impossible with a desktop program outside a server environment.

Information visualizers
Pageflakes
You know those portal pages that you can customize with different information sources, such as a Yahoo start page or iGoogle? Pageflakes is the most customizable portal page you can imagine.
The "flakes" on your page can contain almost anything, from the familiar news, weather and sports sites to RSS feeds and blogs, to podcasts, to a Facebook notifier — there are more than 200,000 available flakes at the moment.
You can also load special-interest pages created by other users and publish as Pagecasts, such as the one set up for tracking the recent March Madness basketball tournament.
With Pageflakes, you can customize a personal Web page to follow the news, find new recipes, keep track of your Facebook Pokes and lots more.Click to view larger image.
The fact that there's no user-controlled way to delete your account will be a deal-breaker for some, and understandably so. Hopefully, the developers will take note of what happened to Facebook and build that capability in. But if you like the idea of a personal Web start page, Pageflakes is the best way to get one.

Liveplasma

Pick a band or a movie, and Liveplasma displays related artists. Did you know Herman's Hermits were only two degrees of separation from Donna Summer?Click to view larger image.
Opening a Liveplasma map is like entering a solar system of related musical acts or movies. After you enter the name of a band, for example, Liveplasma generates a field of spheres with your band in the center and other similar bands sprinkled around it.
The size of the sphere relates to the popularity of the artist, and its color conveys how similar it is to your target band. Lines connecting the spheres let you track the connections.
The sorting process is a little opaque, and the database has some holes — entering "Lily Allen" got me a map based on Woody Allen, for example. But it's an amusing way to explore similarities between artists and a visually stunning example of a new way to display information.

WeatherBonk
WeatherBonk will tell you everything you need to know about the weather in Pittsburgh — or anywhere else — including pictures.Click to view larger image.
WeatherBonk, on the other hand, is far from visually stunning, but it'll satisfy anyone who really wants to know what's going on weatherwise.
WeatherBonk pulls data from national weather services such as Weather Underground and the National Weather Service, as well as from numerous personal weather stations run from homes and schools. It displays a screen showing the current forecast, a Google map with temperature data and streams from webcams in your target region. You can even overlay radar and cloud information and animate it. The result ain't pretty, but measured by information per square inch, it's a winner.

Maps mashups
CommunityWalk
You know those little tabs you see when you search in Google Maps for something like "pizza near 90210"? CommunityWalk lets you make your own map with tabs you set by entering addresses or by just clicking on the map.
You can also enter a label and notes for each location. I've used it to make a map of where the members of a local Internet forum live and to plot the locations of a bunch of open houses I wanted to hit one weekend. You can categorize the locations and choose a different icon — basic or silly — for each category. And you can make the map Private; Shared, so that anyone you send the URL to can see it; or Public, which lists it on the site and makes it available to search engines.
With CommunityWalk, you can create your own custom Google map and, if you want, share it with the world. Here jpiehowski shows us where they're biting in Minnesota.Click to view larger image.

Gmaps Pedometer
Want to know how far that walk you took today was? Curious about the distance of your regular morning run? Just go to this site, bring up the Google map of where you do your perambulating and start clicking to place points along your route.
Trace out the route of your morning jog on a Google map, and the Gmaps Pedometer will tell you how much ground you covered and how many calories you burned.Click to view larger image.
The Gmaps Pedometer will calculate the total distance and, if you enter your weight, even give you an estimation of the number of calories you've burned. That's what it's for, but you can use it to measure any distance. I compared the length of the northern and southern borders of Wyoming (they're not the same, you know) by "walking" the length of them on the map.

HousingMaps
HousingMaps combines Craigslist For Rent data with Google maps to help you find a place to live in the perfect neighborhood.Click to view larger image.
So where are all those apartments on Craigslist, anyway? Go to housingmaps.com, choose a city served by Craigslist from the drop-down menu, enter a price range, number of bedrooms and other sorting criteria that Craigslist offers, and you've got a map showing where all the matching listings are located.
You also get a list of all the postings along the side of the map. Click on the icon next to any post to get a pop-up on the map showing title and address, or click on the listing title to go right to Craigslist. It's helpful if you're planning to move to a new house or apartment, but it's also a great way to pass the time dreaming about moving to a whole new city.

Just for fun

Goggles

Fly your little biplane over Nôtre Dame de Paris — or any of several other scenic locations — with the Google Maps plus Flash mashup Goggles.Click to view larger image.
Load the map of your hometown or someplace you just feel like visiting and fly your little Flash-animated biplane around to your heart's content. You can even strafe old workplaces or other locations you have a grudge against.
If you get lost, just dive until you crash into the ground and start over. Goggles opens with a list of 22 locations to start from, including New York and Los Angeles; Helsinki, Finland; Heraklion, Crete; and Mars and the Moon (though I couldn't get maps for the latter two.) There's also a way to set your own start location, though it's a complicated, multistep process. But if you can't find the location you want, just fly there.

Will Microsoft deliver Windows 7 next year?

Recent statements hint at possible arrival of next OS in 2009

Microsoft Corp. has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.
It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched until January 2007. Given Microsoft's recent track record - Vista arrived more than five years after XP -- most outsiders had pegged sometime in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7's arrival.

But News.com reported today that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates answered a question at a business meeting in Miami about Windows Vista by saying "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version."

And during its announcement yesterday that it would extend the availability of Windows XP Home for low-cost laptops, Microsoft said it would retire the operating system only after June 30, 2010, or one year after the release of Windows 7, whichever comes later.

That implies that Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 -- the only codename known at the moment -- though whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and resellers to start installing it, is unknown.

A Microsoft spokeswoman, in an e-mail, said the company "is in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA." She said the company was providing early builds of the new operating system to gain user feedback, but otherwise was not providing further information.

Gates also said that he was "super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways" but didn't elaborate.

What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista's 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical subsystem.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32-bit and 64-bit editions

Screenshots of early betas of Windows 7 are also appearing. Blogger Paul Thurrott yesterday put up screenshots from Build 6519 of Windows 7 released in December, which he said looks like "a slightly enhanced version of Windows Vista."

To prepare its millions of reselling partners, Microsoft needs to start generating excitement about its software months or years in advance.

But if it talks up Windows 7 too much, it runs the risk that large companies -- Microsoft's most profitable customer segment -- will hold onto their Windows XP machines and skip Vista entirely in favor of Windows 7.

That appears to be happening. A recent enterprise survey by Forrester Research Inc. showed that only 6.3% of enterprises were running Vista at the end of December, with most of the upgrades coming at the expense of aging machines running Windows 2000, not XP. The vast majority of the 100 million copies of Vista that Microsoft has sold so far have gone to individuals and small businesses purchasing new PCs.

The least-loved version of Windows has long been Windows Millennium Edition, a buggy minor upgrade that was superseded by XP within a year of its release. Despite its far greater -- some would say, too great -- technical ambition, Vista may end up lumped together with ME as one of the blips on Windows' long-term road map.

Six steps to a faster broadband connection

How to test your speed, troubleshoot any problems and tweak your system for optimum performance

If you're serious about the Internet, chances are you spend anywhere from $30 to $99 per month for a broadband Internet connection. But regardless of how much you pay, are you getting all the speed that your ISP promised you? And does your connection persist reliably without dropping out frequently or requiring modem reboots? With our quick guide, you can squeeze every last kilobit-per-second (kbit/sec.) of throughput out of your broadband modem and keep your connection running smoothly.

1. Test Your Connection Speed
Before you start tweaking, get a baseline reading of your downstream and upstream connection speeds at Speedtest.net. If possible, measure the speeds at different times of day, especially during the hours when you use the connection most frequently, and at least once after midnight or 1:00 a.m. (when competition for bandwidth is likely to be at its lowest level).

2. Update Your Firmware or Get a New Modem
If your cable or DSL modem is more than a couple of years old, ask your Internet service provider for a new one. The exchange will probably be free; and if there is a fee, you can usually waive it by agreeing to a new one-year contract. The latest cable modems meet the DOCSIS 2.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) standard. If you have a 1.1 modem and a high-throughput plan, you'll likely experience a large speed increase just by swapping modems.
Even with a brand-new modem, make sure that you have the latest firmware installed. I upgraded my two-year-old Efficient Networks 5100b DSL modem from firmware version 1.0.0.39 to 1.0.0.53, and immediately saw my Speedtest throughput increase from 5.3 mbit/sec. to 5.9 mbit/sec., just a hair below the 6 mbit/sec. that I'm paying for. Cable providers such as Comcast usually push new firmware to modems, so there's no need for most cable modem users to perform upgrades themselves.

To update your DSL modem, you'll have to connect to its Web interface, which means that you'll need to know the IP address of the modem on your local network. This information should be in your user manual; alternatively, you can find default settings for most modems on the Internet. The address will probably look something like 192.168.100.1 or 192.168.0.1. Enter this character string into your browser, and the Web interface should come up. You'll likely have to sign in, using either a security code printed on the bottom of the modem or a default username and password (unless you previously changed it). Write down the log-in information for future reference.

Once you've logged in, check the firmware number on the status page, and see whether a newer version of the firmware is available on the manufacturer's site. If it is, download this more recent firmware to your PC, and then find and run the firmware update procedure from the modem's browser utility. Reboot, rerun Speedtest, and see whether your data is traveling faster. Besides boosting transfer speeds, using a new modem or updated firmware can solve a host of nagging connection issues, such as intermittent dropouts.

3. Check Your Modem Parameters

While you're updating the firmware, check some key parameters. First, the maximum allowed speeds (both downstream and up) should match your service plan. If they don't, your ISP didn't set your service up properly. Give your ISP a call and ask it to fix the setup remotely.
Second, look for signal-to-noise ratio (or SN margin) and line attenuation, both measured in decibels (dB). The lower the signal-to-noise ratio, the more interference you have, and the greater the number of packets that will need to be re-sent because they didn't come through the first time. For this reason, a noisy line can dramatically cut throughput. Line attenuation measures the drop in voltage that comes with splitting the signal (especially for cable modems) and with long runs of cable or older wiring. Excessive signal loss will cause a drop in throughput.
For DSL modems, anything above about 50 dB for line attenuation is poor, and 20 to 30 dB is excellent. For signal-to-noise ratio, 7 to 10 dB is marginal, and 20 to 28 dB is excellent. My modem's SN margin registered at 12.5 dB, barely reaching the good range, and its line attenuation reading was 30.5 dB, which rates as very good. Note that acceptable ranges may vary depending on your service level and modem type (faster connections need to be cleaner), so check with your cable or DSL provider to see what numbers you should look for.

4. Troubleshooting Line Quality
If your off-peak Speedtest numbers didn't measure up to your plan's specifications, and if you found poor signal-to-noise or line attenuation numbers, it's time to troubleshoot your wiring. Excessive noise may cause intermittent dropouts, too.

Your first task is to determine whether the signal is already degraded when it reaches your house or whether your own wiring is at fault. To test this, move your cable modem as close as you can to where the wire first splits. If possible, take a laptop and power cord for your modem outside to the junction where it connects to the house. Retest and see if things improve. If they don't, call your cable company. If your own wiring looks to be at fault, reduce the number of splits that occur before the wiring reaches your modem, and/or replace the wire itself, which may be faulty. The ultimate solution for cable modems is to create a split directly after the junction box, and then run a clean new cable directly to your modem, using the other split for all of your TVs (which are less affected by noise).

For DSL modems, noisy inside wiring tends to be due to the other phone equipment on your line. This interference is supposed to be controlled by the filters placed between the wall jack and each device. Make sure that they are all in place. If you still have too much noise, the best solution is to install a "DSL/POTS splitter" immediately after the phone box, where the wiring comes into the house, and then run a dedicated "homerun" wire straight to the modem. This arrangement will completely isolate your modem from the regular phone wiring--and the new wire should help too. If you don't want to do this job yourself, you can ask your cable or phone company to perform both tasks for a fee.

Finally, improper grounding can be a source of noise, especially on cable. Make sure that all of your TV equipment is plugged into properly grounded outlets, with polarized plugs oriented in the right direction, and without any three-prong-to-two-prong adapters. If you have an electric outlet tester, use it to check for excess voltage on your cable wiring. An electrician can find and fix any grounding problems, which are safety concerns as well.

5. Optimize Software Settings

Now that your cable or DSL line is as clean as you can make it, you're ready to tweak your system and applications for maximum performance, too. For optimizing network performance parameters in Windows XP or Vista, we like TotalIdea Software's Tweak-XP Pro Premium and TweakVI Premium. Both programs simplify optimization without requiring you to understand Registry editing or hidden Windows settings. Both packages include dozens of tweaks in addition to network and browser adjustments. The Pro version of Network Magic, an excellent network monitoring utility, includes optimization capabilities as well.

System-level optimization is less important in Vista than in XP, since Vista tunes your TCP stack dynamically. In fact, Vista users can probably get away with just optimizing specific applications, especially their browsers. To speed up Firefox page displays, try Firetune or Fasterfox. Both are free and one-click easy. Fasterfox adds a few more customization options for expert users. Both tweak low-level Firefox settings such as cache memory capacity, maximum simultaneous connections, and "pipelining" (performing multiple data requests simultaneously)

6. Accelerate Your Downloads

Frequent downloaders can save huge amounts of time by using a download manager like our favorite, FlashGet. FlashGet creates multiple simultaneous download links, and then puts the file together afterward. All you do is click or drag download links to the FlashGet window; the program does the rest. It integrates with Internet Explorer and Firefox using a companion utility called FlashGot.

10 broken technology ideas -- and how to fix them

Here are 10 high-tech ideas that sound good but don't work out so well in practice

Sometimes a technology idea is too good to be true. A flexible keyboard, Internet voting and watching feature films on your smart phone are examples. Today, these concepts are still evolving, but they're broken right now. I'll tell you why and what could be done to fix them once and for all.

1. Ultracompact PCs

Call them whatever you want: ultramobile PCs (UMPC), mobile information devices (MID) or subnotebooks. I call them small PCs, and they are almost indistinguishable from a good smart phone. For example, the BlackBerry 8820, with its built-in GPS capability and excellent e-mail client, is a better device than the Samsung Q1 Ultra, described by the company as an "ultramobile personal computer." The only real difference is that you squint less with the Q1. But most people don't use a Q1 for gaming or writing long business documents. As Jon Stewart pointed out at the Oscars, small-screen video is not fun on a device such as the iPhone.The Apple iPhone is a smarter, sexier, more useable computer than just about any MID, such as the new Toshiba prototype. Meanwhile, there's more power in the OQO, than a regular UMPC, but the screen is just as tiny. I figure that in less than three years, Apple will release a successor to the iPhone that works more like a Mac and will become the first company to make a true pocket computer -- one that runs any Mac OS X application natively, with a mini-DVI port.

2. Satellite Internet
My main problem with satellite Internet providers is their fair use policies, which penalize users who download too much by throttling their speed back to almost nothing, and then slowly adding more speed over a 24 hour period. Both WildBlue and HughesNet do this, and they claim it helps all users. However, the Internet is not just for e-mail and simple browsing anymore, it's a pipeline for television, network back-ups, remote access and a myriad of other activities -- not to mention Web apps and streaming media. Other ISPs -- such as Charter Communications and Qwest-- don't throttle your speed at all. Others, such as Comcast, may use "network management" techniques such as throttling BitTorrent traffic, but they aren't as aggressive as the satellite providers.

Another issue is that the stationary modem that you need for satellite Internet is a bulky device and uses coaxial cable that most people need a technician to install. Also, the required antenna is bigger than a wheel rim, but there's no reason it couldn't be reduced to a size that works with your laptop. Yet I like the satellite concept because it could make the Internet much more ubiquitous across large swathes of the U.S. Satellite Internet has slowly increased in speed, starting out at only 512Kbit/sec. and currently at about 1.5Mbit/sec. If the technology and speed improve, it could be a solid option.

3. Contact managers

I'd like to retrieve the lost hours spent building up a contacts database. Not long ago, I stopped meticulously entering names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails and now rely on other methods. For example, I search Gmail.com for names and addresses. When I want to send a new e-mail, I just type a portion of a name to get the full address, type the message, and send.
For names not in my Gmail archive, I use an online address book such as YellowPages.com or LinkedIn.com. However, a good contact manager could work like the iPhone: It would see phone number in an e-mail and allow me to right-click and add the name and phone number to a database automatically within Gmail. The database would be smart enough to know if a phone number already matches an existing name, and it would weed out duplicates automatically. I'd never have to type in contacts, because this "auto-database" would work as easily as a mobile phone, support any e-mail client and work in the background. Some contact managers come close -- such as Now Up-to-Date & Contact -- but it still involves a manual process.

4. Digital streaming adapters

They have names like Apple TV, Netgear Digital Entertainer and Sonos, but they all do the same thing: move music, video and photos from your PC in the office to the HDTV in your family room. They are supposed to solve a persistent dilemma: a PC just doesn't work with a television. A keyboard and mouse are meant for a desk, not a sofa. These adapters add another appliance to an overcrowded entertainment center bulging with DVRs and game consoles. Putting the digital media adapter in the TV, like this MediaSmart TV, makes sense -- less clutter in your entertainment room.

The fix? Put them right into the television itself. Hewlett-Packard Co. started this with the MediaSmart TV, but I'd like to see it as a standard feature that is more open -- not just based on Windows Media Extender, but supporting any media format over Wi-Fi.

5. Video on a phone

A phone screen is too small for video, and even the iPod Touch can cause eye strain when you watch a two-hour feature film. I'm convinced that anything you only do once or twice in dealing with new technology and find it hard to do -- like load a smart phone with video clips or swap contacts with your laptop over Bluetooth -- is just a novelty and often not worth the effort. I will likely never do it again; it's not worth the time. Even the iPhone is a poor movie viewer unless you are desperate for a Jason Bourne flick on the bus. But solid-state memory is finally getting cheaper, and it makes sense to load up a mobile device with movies.

What I'd like to see is Bluetooth built into HDTVs so that I can beam a high-resolution movie from my phone or projector in the phone (like the Pico technology being developed by Texas Instruments Inc.) or a mini-DVI port.

6. Web 2.0
For the past two years, the promise of the Semantic Web -- a concept where the Web is smarter and lets you tag information for better searchability -- has reached a crescendo that is finally coming down to earth. I believe there is no clear definition of Web 2.0 or any sites that fit easily into that box. Instead, Web 1.0 is in a constant state of evolution. Imagine Amazon.com in its infancy -- over the past 10 years, it has been updated with hundreds of new features as Web technology has steadily advanced. Web aggregators like Pageflakes point to a day when HTML may be replaced by something much more powerful.

What I'm hoping for is a whole new framework for the Web: a wholesale HTML replacement, something like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that's faster and more reliable. Or, I'd like to see sites like Pageflakes expand even more so that Web 2.0 dies altogether and gives way to Internet widgets running on a true Internet operating system.

7. Electronic books

A promising technology, or a snake-oil sales pitch? E-books like the Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader could eventually reduce our reliance on paper books. I must admit the crisp 120DPI screens look remarkably like printed material. In some ways, the Web is a gigantic e-book with an endless amount of information -- even if some of it is unreliable (see Wikipedia.org). Yet, nothing beats a printed book: you can find your place instantly with a dog-ear, it's practically disposable, you can loan it to anyone, and it causes very little eye strain. Yes, you can load one of 90,000 books on the Kindle and check your e-mail in between chapters of the latest Stephen King novel. But before an e-book reader becomes a major hit with consumers, it must cost about the same as a real book. I'd like a throwaway e-book that's a plastic sheet with electronic ink (like the newspapers in Minority Report) and costs about $30.

8. Internet voting

I like the idea of Internet voting because the easier you make the process, the more people who will vote. Right now, the concept is in a preliminary stage because fingerprint readers or some other form of biometrics hasn't become ubiquitous or foolproof. I have noticed that just about every enterprise laptop has a fingerprint reader. In the same way that Hollywood studios don't trust the Internet for delivering movies unless they are crippled with digital rights management, voting also needs some extra precautions to ward off fraud. The idea will finally work once all displays are multitouch (which might be sooner than we think), facial recognition is common and secure, and there is some way of encrypting the connection to assuage any doubts.

9. Video blogs

My main issue with video blogs is that they don't seem well suited for the Web. I'd watch "Rocketboom", "Mahalo Daily" and "WebbAlert" every day if I had the time. Often, with WebbAlert, I scan through the links -- it usually has a really good summary of the previous day and posts in my RSS reader before just about anyone else -- instead of watching the video blog. The Web is made for instant information (see Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.), and I have a hard time discerning how a video blog is really that different from a 2-minute update on G4 or CNN. Yes, there's the idea that a video blog has a "long tail" -- there can be a video blog for just about any taste, how to do underwater yoga, stuff that would never make it on a mainstream channel -- suited for any taste, but the farther you go out on the tail, the lower its quality seems to be. Where is this all going? I'd like to see satellite television providers like Dish Network and DirecTV offer more-flexible plans. I'd watch a video blog station for 10 minutes if it could hold my attention over breakfast and The Wall Street Journal.

10. Flexible keyboards

Flexible, foldable keyboards like the Brando or the Eleksen ElekTex sound like a good replacement for a standard keyboard and could help mobile users type faster when traveling with smart phones. Sure, they are mobile and new, but typing on a fabric keyboard like this Eleksen model is a real pain. In practice, it's almost impossible to type fast on these roll-away models. Is there a way to improve on a standard keyboard? Microsoft and Logitech International keep trying, adding extra buttons and features. (I have settled on the Microsoft Wireless Laser Keyboard 6000 V2 with its slight key curvature.)

I doubt we will be typing on multitouch screens any faster, judging by my speed on the iPhone. Speech recognition, even if it understood every word perfectly, still makes it hard to edit your mistakes. The Laser Keyboard is hinting at a true evolution: Eventually, all keyboards will become more tactile, with more responsive keys, a more ergonomic feel -- and someone may figure out how to make them fold up. Have I missed any technologies, or do you disagree with any of my choices? Let me know in the comments section at the end of this article.

The 10 most important technologies you never think about

You couldn't get through your day without them

The late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

We certainly live in a magical world. We're surrounded by technology, yet we seldom stop to consider the amazing advances that we've come to rely on every day. Whether we're surfing the Web, making a call on our mobile phones or watching a DVD movie on our big-screen TVs, we take our modern conveniences for granted.

Here, then, is a peek inside the magician's hat at 10 technologies that are keys to our digital age. Without realizing it, you've probably used at least one -- if not all -- of them already today. But whether you're aware of them or not, without these technologies our world would be a very different place.

Unicode

We use computers for every kind of communication, from instant messaging to e-mail to writing the great American novel. The trouble is, computers don't speak our language. They're all digital; before they can store or process text, every letter, symbol and punctuation mark must first be translated into numbers. So which numbers do we use? Early PCs relied on a code called ASCII, which took care of most of the characters used in Western European languages. But that's not enough in the era of the World Wide Web. What about Cyrillic, Hindi or Thai?

Enter Unicode, the Rosetta Stone of computing. The Unicode standard defines a unique number for every letter, symbol or glyph in more than 30 written languages, and it's still growing. At nearly 1,500 pages and counting, it's incredibly complex, but it's been gaining traction ever since Microsoft Corp. adopted it as the internal encoding for the Windows NT family of operating systems.

Most of us will never need to know which characters map to which Unicode numbers, but modern computing could scarcely do without Unicode. In fact, it's what's letting you read this article in your Web browser, right now.

Digital signal processing

Digital music, digital photos, digital videos -- it's easy to forget that we live in a fundamentally analog world. Computers can cope with all that we see and hear only through the application of highly complex mathematics, a field known as digital signal processing (DSP). Wherever you find digital media, DSP is at work, facilitated by a whole subcategory of specialized chips and circuits. DSP algorithms correct for errors while your optical drive reads the music off a CD. They're at work again as you compress the audio into an MP3 file, and again when you play it back through your surround-sound speakers.

DSP is to digital media as gears and springs are to a pocket watch. It works its magic below the surface: invisible, yet totally essential. It's safe to say that without it, virtually none of the digital technologies that we take for granted today -- from DVDs to mobile phones, ink-jet printers to DSL broadband -- would be possible.

Managed code

Programming is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Modern operating systems are like onions, with layers upon layers of subsystems to interconnect and manage. Worse, bugs and unnoticed security flaws, even ones that may have once seemed trivial, can be serious threats in the Net-connected era.For a growing number of developers, the solution is to use platforms designed to relieve some of the burden. Programs written for such managed-code environments as Java and Microsoft's .Net don't run on the bare hardware the way traditional programs do. Instead, a virtual machine acts as an intermediary between the software and the system. It's like a robot nanny for computer programs, silently taking care of memory management and other housekeeping drudgery while keeping an eye out for potential security violations before they happen.

To an end user, a managed-code program may seem no different than a traditional one, but software that runs in a virtual machine makes for a more reliable, stable and secure computing experience. And with .Net rapidly becoming the preferred platform for Windows development, managed code may soon be the norm, rather than the exception.

Transistors

Later this year, Intel Corp. plans to unveil the world's first integrated circuit to contain 2 billion transistors. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors we can put into integrated circuits will double approximately every two years. That's a lot of transistors -- but what do they all do?Simply put, the transistor may well be the greatest invention of the 20th century. It's really nothing more than a voltage-controlled switch, but that humble description hides incredible power. Linked together in various ways, transistors can form circuits that are the basis of every type of digital logic, right up to the CPUs that power our modern PCs and servers.

What makes today's chips so powerful is the industry's ability to cram components ever closer together. The transistors on the processor inside your PC might be only about 100 atoms across, and improvements in manufacturing technology will keep them shrinking -- at least, for the time being. Someday, optical chips or even quantum processors may replace current chip designs and outperform them many times over. For now, we'll have to content ourselves with continuing to improve upon an oft-ignored technology that has served us for 50 years and counting.

XML

Though you may never have encountered it directly, XML is everywhere. Now in its tenth year, it has become virtually the lingua franca of data exchange. XML stands for "extensible markup language" -- extensible because developers can add to it to suit the needs of particular applications. But what makes it really valuable is the fact that it's a language, much like HTML. Unlike some data formats, XML files aren't just streams of incomprehensible numbers. XML is designed to be read by humans as well as machines. A developer who "speaks XML" can look at a document written in an unfamiliar XML dialect and still understand what it's trying to say.

This powerful combination of features makes XML incredibly useful for all kinds of applications. But perhaps its biggest coup was Microsoft's decision to switch to XML-based file formats for Office 2007. As it turns out, you actually may have XML documents sitting on your desktop right now, without realizing it.

Nonvolatile RAM

Isn't it strange? Your pockets stay the same size, yet you can carry more and more in them every year. In 1956, IBM's first hard drives used disks that were 2 feet wide. It's hard to believe that today's microscale drives use essentially the same technology. Incremental advances, such as the discovery of giant magnetoresistance and the invention of perpendicular recording heads, have produced staggering results. Between 1990 and 2005, magnetic hard drives increased their storage capacity a thousandfold, putting even Moore's Law to shame.

But even with those astounding improvements, hard drives hit a wall when it came to portable devices. They were still too big and too fragile for many gadgets. Enter solid-state drives based on nonvolatile RAM. The technology has been used for storage since the 1970s, but it remained phenomenally expensive until manufacturing processes caught up with the demand. Now it is everywhere -- in MP3 players like the newest Creative Zen and in digital cameras, cell phones and even some laptops.

Manufacturers aren't sitting still; cutting-edge technologies such as "racetrack memory" could lead to solid-state storage that is smaller, faster and more reliable than ever.

Lithium-ion batteries

When we were kids, our toys came "batteries not included." With our grown-up, high-tech toys, on the other hand, the battery is often one of the most important features. As essential as mobility has become to how we use technology, it simply wouldn't be possible if our choices were still limited to D, C and AA. The invention of lithium-ion batteries was the key. The earliest rechargeables were made with lead -- hardly a prescription for portability. But because lithium is the lightest metal, lithium-based batteries can store more energy at a given weight than any other variety. Lighter batteries mean smaller, lighter devices; beginning in the 1990s, you could actually put a phone in your pocket.

Running time remains an ongoing challenge, but researchers have no shortage of solutions. In addition to improved lithium-ion batteries that use nanotechnology, a number of battery alternatives are slowly coming to market, including ultracapacitors and fuel cells. In fact, pardon me for saying that battery technology is poised for its next big explosion -- and personal technology is sure to advance because of it.

Voice over IP

You've made a few Skype calls, and you've looked into digital phone service from your broadband provider, but that's as close as you've gotten to voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology. Or so you think. In truth, VoIP is revolutionizing the telecommunications industry, blurring the lines between voice calls and digital networks. Those prepaid calling cards that offer rock-bottom international rates? VoIP makes them possible. Similarly, a growing number of businesses use VoIP behind the scenes to eliminate long-distance charges between branch offices.

Routing calls over the Internet circumvents traditional telephone company charges, and fewer fees and taxes mean lower prices. Digital calls are easier to direct and manage, which makes them attractive even to traditional telephone companies. Don't be surprised if soon the land line you've lived with forever is replaced by an all-digital alternative -- though you'll likely be none the wiser.

Graphics acceleration

Thought your fancy video card was only good for gaming? Think again. Its graphics processing unit (GPU) is really like a second, highly specialized CPU. When it comes to certain kinds of complex math, its performance puts your desktop CPU to shame. Until recently, all that power went to waste when you weren't chalking up frags. But computer scientists are finding novel ways to use GPU acceleration to speed up applications off-screen, as well. For example, a Stanford University project -- which uses many PCs around the world acting together as a supercomputer to assist protein-folding-related disease research -- can offload calculations to the GPU to multiply its performance many times.

Because the kind of calculations used to draw 3-D graphics are also applicable to many other problems, GPU acceleration is potentially useful for a wide variety of applications, from math-intensive science and engineering to complex database queries. Newer, even more complex chips -- such as nVidia Corp.'s Aegia physics engine -- can do even more. No wonder nVidia has begun working on chips for the workstation market.

Increasingly, your PC's performance won't depend on the speed of any single chip. As Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel get into the game, expect future desktop CPUs to incorporate CPU and GPU capabilities into a single, multicore package, bringing the best of both worlds to gamers and nongamers alike.

High-speed Net access

Where would we be without fast Internet access? It's easy to forget that just 10 years ago, most of us were still using ordinary modems. The broadband revolution ushered in streaming video, MP3 downloads, Internet phone calls and multiplayer online gaming. And we owe it all to TV. In the 1980s, cable companies were promising 500 channels of round-the-clock programming. Cable was poised to become the most important wire into the house, but the telephone companies had an ace up their sleeve. A new technology could push high-frequency signals over ordinary phone lines, which previously had been good only for low-bandwidth voice calls. The telephone companies saw this as an opportunity to offer video on demand and to compete with the cable companies at their own game.

Or so they thought. The plans of the telcos for video on demand dried up by the mid-1990s, but the technology remained. Now called Digital Subscriber Line, it had morphed into a high-speed household on-ramp to the Internet. The cable companies followed suit with a comparable technology, and the broadband speed race -- for both DSL and cable -- began in earnest. Both cable and DSL still use traditional frequency signaling over copper wires, but new breakthroughs are poised to go mainstream. Fiber to the premises (FTTP) promises lightning-fast network speeds, and WiMax will push broadband into territories that wires can't reach today. As for what applications this next broadband revolution will bring -- well, we have only begun to imagine.

RIM's BlackBerry Bold beats Apple to the 3G punch

Bold supports 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS

May 12, 2008 ,Amid swirling rumors about the impending announcement of a 3G iPhone, Research In Motion Ltd. today introduced its slickest, speediest, most powerful and most connected BlackBerry to date: the BlackBerry Bold 9000.

Equipped with support for tri-band HSDPA and quad-band EDGE (which means that it will support the highest-speed GSM-family data networks wherever they are available worldwide), 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth, and both assisted and autonomous GPS, the Bold could prove a formidable challenger to Apple Inc.'s next-generation iPhone on connectivity alone.

It even looks a bit iPhone-esque, with its glassy display area, generally flat profile and rounded corners. Still, the Bold comes configured with a hardware QWERTY keyboard, and it retains the general dimensions of its predecessors, so it's much shorter and somewhat thicker than the iPhone.

The Bold's removable back is covered in black leatherette, and you'll be able to personalize the device by buying replacement backs in different colors: blue, brown, green, gray and red. The redesigned keyboard has guitar-inspired frets -- thin metal strips -- between each row. The keys themselves are sculpted to help users avoid fingertip slippage. The device also carries a 2-megapixel camera capable of up to 5x digital zoom.

Fast CPU, high-res display

The Bold's 624-MHz StrongARM processor with full MMX (multimedia extensions) is the most powerful CPU on a handheld to date. Tthe BlackBerry Curve, in contrast, uses a 312-MHz chip without MMX. The Bold's extra power enables the device to handle full-motion video on its 480-by-320-pixel, 65,000-plus-color display (that resolution is double the Curve's at basically the same screen size). In a demo at PC World's offices last week, video clips on the Bold looked smooth and exceptionally sharp.

Of course, little commercial video content is available as yet for non-Apple media players. Further, the Bold's screen is diminutive compared with the current iPhone's roomy 3.5-in. display, and it isn't a touch screen. (RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis simply smiled when we asked about reports that the company is working on a touch-screen BlackBerry).
But since the Bold's smaller display holds the same number of pixels as the current iPhone's, images look much higher-resolution on it than on its competitor.

The Bold's 1GB of on-board secure memory (on top of its 128MB of flash) will appeal to BlackBerry's core enterprise community, providing storage for items that companies would rather not make available for transport on a micro SD card. But users who want to carry their music and video libraries on their handsets will be able to do so via micro SD.

Carriers will determine pricing, and RIM had no details on which U.S. carrier will introduce the Bold (though AT&T, with the largest HSDPA network in the U.S., seems a likelier candidate than T-Mobile, which has just begun to roll out 3G service stateside). RIM said that it expects the Bold to be shipping worldwide this summer.

The future of antivirus

Is there a way out of the arms race?

Antivirus software makes Greg Shipley so mad he has to laugh. "The relationship between signature-based antivirus companies and the virus writers is almost comical. One releases something and then the other reacts, and they go back and forth. It's a silly little arms race that has no end."

Shipley, chief technology officer at Neohapsis, a security consultancy in Chicago, says the worst part is that the arms race isn't helpful either to him or his clients. "I want to get off of signature-based antivirus as rapidly as possible. I think it's a broken model, and I think it's an incredible CPU hog."

The question is, where should he go? Antivirus as an industry has modeled itself on the human immune system, which slaps a label on things like viruses so it knows to attack them when it sees that same label, or signature, again. Signature-based antivirus has moved well beyond that simple type of signature usage (though at the beginning, it did look for specific lines of code). In its current, more sophisticated form, it dominates the market for security software, despite some obvious limitations: You don't use it to stop data leakage, for instance, though many kinds of malware are designed to siphon data out of companies. The number of malware signatures tracked by security software company F-Secure doubled in 2007, and while you might cynically expect such a company to say there's more malware out there, 2007's total doubled the number of signatures F-Secure had built up over the previous 20 years.

Even before 2007, there were plenty of people besides Shipley arguing that antivirus was an industry in trouble. In fact, in 2006, Robin Bloor, an analyst at Hurwitz & Associates, penned a report titled "Anti-virus is dead." He argued that malware exists only because antivirus software exists, and said that antivirus software was doomed to be replaced by new forms of software, which he calls application control, or software authentication tools. Such tools whitelist the software we use and won't run anything else without the user's explicit permission.
Antivirus firms think their death is greatly exaggerated, thank you very much -- even those that aren't overly reliant on signatures, like BitDefender, which says that signature-based techniques account for only 20% of the malware it catches.

"Signatures aren't dead -- you need them," says Bogdan Dumitru, CTO at the Romanian firm, which uses behavioral targeting techniques to stop the remainder of attacks. Its main research focus is to develop an "undo" feature that will let users hit by malware reverse its effects. BitDefender hopes to release this feature in 2008.

Meanwhile, Bit9, the application white­listing company highlighted in Bloor's report, uses antivirus software to help build its database -- 22 kinds of antivirus software, in fact. In November 2007, it announced a deal to give access to this database to security software maker Kaspersky Labs. Bit9 officials said that the database will help Kaspersky check new signatures to limit false positives.

It's also true that antivirus makers continue to sell billions of dollars worth of software, despite Bloor's proclamation. Bloor, though, says that "the technique of protecting PCs using virus signatures is now on the wane," and he rattles off a list of whitelisting companies offering software authentication tools -- not just Bit9, but also companies such as Lumension (formerly SecureWave), Savant Protection, Computer Associates and AppSense. And he noted the Kaspersky deal and Apple's use of whitelisting to protect the iPhone.

Not just whitelisting

Antivirus software has its uses. If a system is actually infected by malware, it "may be the least painful way of removing it," says David Harley, administrator of Avien, the antivirus information exchange network, adding, "Whitelisting does seem to be advocated currently as the panacea du jour. I think this relentless search for The Answer, discarding one partially successful solution set for something else in the hope that it will eliminate the problem, is actually unprofessional."
Harley makes that argument because he doubts that any single technology approach will be a 100% solution when it comes to security. He wrote that whitelisting thus is likely a supplemental technology for fighting malware, making it one of a host of newer technologies that have been adopted, including heuristics, sandboxing and behavior monitoring.

Corporate CISOs certainly don't expect to find one answer to their problems. "If you rely on signatures for security, you're pretty much dead in the water," says Ken Pfeil, head of information security for the Americas region of WestLB, a German bank. Pfeil thinks signatures are useful and his firm uses them. But when new malware appears, he often finds it faster to try to break it down himself to understand its potential effects, rather than wait for his vendor to give him an update. His firm has also adopted tools that use heuristics techniques and anomaly testing, to add oomph to its antivirus approach.

That kind of layered approach to software fits with where Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks the market is going. She says that signature-based antivirus is "table stakes" for security software, and techniques like heuristic information processing systems, or HIPS, which look for suspicious actions by software, like an application opening itself from the Temp folder.

Lambert says McAfee is probably furthest along in using HIPS among the big antivirus makers, having had more time than its rivals to new features added via corporate acquisitions.
The downside to these technologies is that none are as simple and alluring as the old signature-based antivirus, which she called a "set it and forget it" technology. She notes that HIPS technologies are difficult to manage and will never be as simple as the old model, though she expects they will get easier over time.

Neohapsis's Shipley says none of these techniques are really new -- he notes that it's been more than four years since McAfee purchased Entercept, for instance. But "what role does it play, and what percentage of things does it stop? I have no visibility into that." Shipley says he plans to bring in Bit9 to look at whether it could really replace his current antivirus software.

Antivirus firms agree that they are becoming something different.

Sophos, for instance, uses several additions to signature-based AV. Sophos examines program behavior -- the modifications a program makes to things like system configuration and files as the program runs. The company has also built in a pre-execution algorithm, a kind of crystal ball to simulate what unfamiliar code looks likely to do.

Richard Wang, manager of Sophos Labs in the U.S., says that while signatures are easy to create, things like pre-execution code are harder and thus take more time. But the payoff is that it can work against multiple strains of malicious software. He said that for the Storm worm, Sophos generated only one signature but has been able to recognize all the variants. Wang describes this type of technique as "almost like a broad-spectrum antibiotic."

Child's play?Interestingly, the OLPC XO (from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation) is another place to look at new AV techniques. The XO uses the Bitfrost specification, developed expressly for this simple computer. OLPC claims that the system "is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market."

The OLPC XO ships in a default mode that is basically locked down but simple for the user to open up. The Bitfrost specification uses a series of built-in protections, including sandboxes or program jails for applications and system-level protections that prevent alterations from code that could do something harmful.

Whether Bitfrost would work in a corporate environment or will be commercialized outside the OLPC project is unclear. But Avien's Harley, for one, thinks that there are psychological reasons why antivirus software is unlikely to go away.

"The idea of a solution that stops real threats and doesn't hamper nonmalicious objects and processes is very attractive. People (at any rate, those who aren't security specialists) like the idea of threat-specific software, as long it catches all incoming malware and doesn't generate any false positives, because then they can just install it and forget about it. Unfortunately, that's an unattainable ideal."

Malicious microprocessor opens new doors for attack

A lot of work to execute... for the moment

For years, hackers have focused on finding bugs in computer software that give them unauthorized access to computer systems, but now there's another way to break in: Hack the microprocessor. On Tuesday, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated how they altered a computer chip to grant attackers back-door access to a computer. It would take a lot of work to make this attack succeed in the real world, but it would be virtually undetectable.

To launch its attack, the team used a special programmable processor running the Linux operating system. The chip was programmed to inject malicious firmware into the chip's memory, which then allows an attacker to log into the machine as if he were a legitimate user. To reprogram the chip, researchers needed to alter only a tiny fraction of the processor circuits. They changed 1,341 logic gates on a chip that has more than 1 million of these gates in total, said Samuel King, an assistant professor in the university's computer science department.

"This is like the ultimate back door," said King. "There were no software bugs exploited."
King demonstrated the attack on Tuesday at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats, a conference for security researchers held in San Francisco.
His team was able to add the back door by reprogramming a small number of the circuits on a LEON processor running the Linux operating system. These programmable chips are based on the same Sparc design that is used in Sun Microsystems' midrange and high-end servers. They are not widely used, but have been deployed in systems used by the International Space Station.

In order to hack into the system, King first sent it a specially crafted network packet that instructed the processor to launch the malicious firmware. Then, using a special login password, King was able to gain access to the Linux system. "From the software's perspective, the packet gets dropped... and yet I have full and complete access to this underlying system that I just compromised," King said.

The researchers are now working on tools that could help detect such a malicious processor, but there's a big problem facing criminals who would try to reproduce this type of attack in the real world. How do you get a malicious CPU onto someone's machine?

This would not be easy, King said, but there are a few possible scenarios. For example, a "mole" developer could add the code while working on the chip's design, or someone at a computer assembly plant could be paid off to install malicious chips instead of legitimate processors. Finally, an attacker could create a counterfeit version of a PC or a router that contained the malicious chip.

"This is not a script kiddie attack," he said. "It's going to require an entity with resources."
Though such a scenario may seem far-fetched, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is taking the issue seriously. In a February 2005 report (download PDF), the DoD's Defense Science Board warned of the very attack that the University of Illinois researchers have developed, saying that a shift toward offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could present a security problem.

There are already several examples of products that have shipped with malicious software installed. In late 2006, for example, Apple shipped Video iPods that contained the RavMonE.exe virus.

"We're seeing examples of the overall supply chain being compromised," King said. "Whether or not people will modify the overall processor designs remains to be seen."