Apple is building a car

The Guardian revealed last week that Apple is looking for a secure vehicle test track facility near SiliconValley. Therefore confirming the rumours that Apple is working on building a self-driving car. However, an article in The Verge warns Apple fans not to hold their breath. The development cycl e time from concept to production, for established car manufacturers, is in excess of 5 years. Apple has no experience in this market and consequently may be expected to take longer. Of course this may be like Apple Maps where Apple belatedly realised they strategically couldnt gift location support to Google and their established mapping product. Google, of course, has been developing driverless cars for ages. Apple has perhaps realised it cant leave this market segment to Google or risk just partnering with one car manufacturer.

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The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test

I blogged a few months back about the increasing problem of dead links (known as link rot) on research web sites. Not surprisingly this problem is not isolated to academic websites. An article by Rob Miller in TechChrunch, called "The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test," makes the case for a a digital Library of Congress to preserve and protect all of the content on the internet to counter this growing problem. Preserving the integrity of the web for posterity cannot he (and others) argue be left to content publishers or non-profits like the Internet Archives Wayback Machine or the British Librarys UK Web Archive. The web is such a vital information source to us all know it must be preserved for future historians.

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TYBSC IT Sem V Internet Security IS Question Papers 2003 2009 Mumbai University

Below is the collection of TY BSc IT Sem V Internet Security Question Papers of Mumbai University.
Click on the corresponding links to download the papers.
If you have any Question papers to share, click here to publish in this site.

Question Papers below are submitted by : Sarita Prajapati

• Internet Security October 2003
• Internet Security 2004 oct
• Internet Security 2004
• Internet Security May 2005
• Internet Security November 2005
• Internet Security November 2006
• Internet Security May 2006
• Internet Security 2007
• Internet Security April 2008
• Internet Security October 2008
• Internet Security April 2009

Click here to Download Question papers of other Subjects

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Is your English prefect

Even those of us who write professionally for a living often make typos, such as letter transpositions (did you spot "prefect" in the title instead of "perfect", and sometimes our grammar is less than perfect. All of us can use a little help. Ive always recommended that my students use spell and grammar checkers built into software like Microsoft Word. However, as we increasingly create documents in the cloud, in browser-based software, that option is not available - enter Grammarly. If youre a regular reader of this blog you know that I dont often promote products, but Im impressed with this. Grammarly once installed as a browser extension sits in the background watching every word you type. It then underlines words that may be misspelled or easily confused with similar words, either by spelling or meaning. Hovering the cursor over the word brings up suggestions that you can accept or reject. Grammarly also has OS X and Windows apps and an MS Office plug-in (Win only). Highly recommended. 

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BASIC is 50 years old

Dartmouth University has announced that: "At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born." They created a whole website, BASIC at 50, to support this anniversary and events to support it. If youre a computing purist you probably despise BASIC, but you cant deny its influence - I first programmed using BASIC on a BBC Micro computer. However, one of my older colleagues believes the history of BASIC is not as simple as Dartmouth makes out saying "Dartmouth always had a good press office."


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Tate Britain Is Offering Everyone Remote Tours Using Robots

One of my favourite art galleries recently offered remote tours of its exhibitions by robot after hours. Wired reports that "Since at least the 1960s, weve romanticized night time visits to art museums. In From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, published in 1967, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a 12-year-old runaways chosen hideout destination." I really wish Id been able to take a tour and I hope other museums take up this idea. In the meantime this video will have to suffice.



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USB device is not detected or is malfunctioning

It’s not easy to troubleshoot a USB device, since they are usually plug-n-play devices. If your OS is Windows XP, it’s very easy to install and begin using a USB device; Windows XP has its own native drivers. But if your drive is not detectable, then the issue is probably hardware related. You could try the following steps to solve this issue:

1. Sometimes the problem is solved by simply unplugging it and plugging it back firmly. It can be a case of loose connection.
2. Try restarting your computer with the drive plugged into the USB port.
3. Some times there is a voltage drop across the USB port which also can be responsible for the problem. Simply wait for few minutes it will be detected automatically.
4. If all these attempts are useless, go to the "Device Manager"- Right click on my computer icon desktop and click on "Manage >> Device Manager".

• Expand the Universal Serial Bus Controller List.
• You can see an exclamation mark. Right-click on it and then click on "Uninstall".
• Now, Right-click on "Universal Serial Bus Controller" and click on scan for hardware changes. Now your USB device must be detected.

If all these attempts have not solved your problem, then probably you device is malfunctioning.
Visit microsoft help for more. Click here.

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Simple is better Making your web forms easy to use pays off

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila and Mirjam Seckler, User Experience Research at Google

Imagine yourself filling out a long and cumbersome form on a website to register for a service. After several minutes of filling out fields, coming up with a password, and handling captchas, you click the submit button to encounter your form filled with red error messages. Suddenly the “close tab” button seems much more tempting than before.

Despite the rapid evolution of the Internet, web forms, with their limited and unilateral way of interaction, remain one of the core barriers between users and website owners. Any kind of obstacle or difficulty in filling in online forms can lead to increased frustration by the user, resulting in drop-outs and information loss.

In 2010, a set of 20 guidelines to optimize web forms was published by researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland, including best practices aimed to improve web forms and reduce frustration, errors and drop-outs. For instance, guideline no. 13 states that if answers are required in a specific format, the imposed rule should communicated in advance; or no. 15 that states that forms should never clear already completed fields after an error occurs.

To investigate the impact of applying these rules, we conducted a study and presented our results at CHI 2014: Designing usable web forms: empirical evaluation of web form improvement guidelines. In the study, we examined a sample of high traffic online forms and rated them based on how well they followed the form guidelines outlined by the 2010 publication. We then selected three different online forms of varying qualities (low, medium and high), and improved them by applying the guidelines, with the high quality form needing less modification than the medium and low quality forms. We then tested both the original and improved forms extensively with 65 participants in a controlled lab environment.

In our study, the modified forms showed significant improvements over the original forms in the time users needed to complete a form, an increase in successful first-trial submissions and higher user satisfaction. As expected, the impact was highest when the original form was of low quality, but even high quality forms showed improved metrics.

Furthermore, user interviews with participants in the study revealed which guidelines were most impactful in improving the forms:

• Format specifications (e.g., requiring a minimum password length) should be stated in the form, prior to submission. The application of this guideline had a large positive impact on user performance, subjective user ratings and was also mentioned frequently in user interviews.
• Error messages must be placed next to the erroneous field and designed in a way users are easily able to fix the problem. Doing this reduced form-filling time and increased subjective ratings.
• Most frequently users mentioned that it was key to be able to tell apart optional and mandatory fields.

Example Guideline: State format specification in advance

 Example Guideline :Place error message next to erroneous fields

Example Guideline: Distinguish optional and mandatory fields

Putting field labels above rather than adjacent to the fields in the form led also to improvements in the way users scanned the form. Using eye-tracking technology, our study shows that users needed less number of fixations, less fixation time and fewer saccades before submitting the form for the first time.

Scan path for an original and improved form

From our study, we conclude that optimizing online forms is well worth the resource investment. With easy to implement actions, you can improve your forms, increase the number of successful transactions, and end up with more satisfied users. Google is currently working on implementing these findings on our own forms.

We wish to thank our co-authors at the University of Basel, Switzerland for their collaboration in this work: Silvia Heinz, Klaus Opwis and Alexandre Tuch.

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POP mp3 is downloaded when using facebook chat

This is nothing but the new message sound. It is not a virus or bug.
To disable it, just Click on options and Un-check "Play sound for new messages"
Thats it, now enjoy chatting.

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What is Recycler Folder and How to remove it

You mus be wondering, Is recycler a virus? Is it a windows folder? why is it not deletable?
This article will give you a clear detail of this issue.
If you have used Windows for quite some time now then you must have seen this folder called RECYCLER. But many people don’t know what this folder is and what is it doing in the drive?

What is Recycler folder?

The Recycler folder is used only on NTFS partitions and is referred to as a location where all the deleted files go after they have been deleted by the user.

Now you may be wondering if it contains the deleted files then why we have the Recycle Bin.
When a file is deleted it goes to the Recycle Bin but when the Recycle Bin is emptied, the files are stored in this Recycler folder. This is the reason why we can still restore the deleted data in the Windows.

Difference between Recycle Bin and Recycler:

Recycle Bin stores the file that are deleted from the computer until it is emptied completely whereas the Recycler folder contains a Recycle Bin for each user that logs on to the computer.

Recycled Folder:

This is something different than the Recycler folder as Recycled is same as Recycle Bin. That is both Recycled and Recycle Bin are just two different names for the same memory location.

How to delete Recycler Folder:
Recycler is a read only folder and that is why it gave error if you tried to delete it. To view the folder, go to Tools -> Folder Options -> View tab and uncheck the option of Hide Protected operating System Files.
Now just right click on the folder, go to Properties and unselect the option of Read Only. Now it can be deleted.

Recycler Virus:
There has been identified a virus with the same name that is Recycler.exe which should not be confused with the Recycler folder.

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How the internet of things is changing sport

Weve heard a lot about the internet of things in the last few years, smart fridges and home thermostats for example, but its having an effect in places you might not expect, for example sport. An article by Stephen Pritchard in The Guardian titled The internet of things is revolutionising the world of sport describes the fascinating new ways its being applied, from golf clubs that monitor your swing to the Connected Athlete project. Fascinating stuff.

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This is how Game of Thrones will end

This is an "off topic" post, but like many Ive become addicted to Game of Thrones and have spent some time trying to figure out how it may end and I think Ive cracked it. Im going to share my theory with you. Although it seems that Daenerys Targaryen wants to claim the 7 Kingdoms for herself she has shown that every time she comes across slaves she frees them and she abhors suffering and oppression. Her growing army fights for her as free men because they want to, not because they are her subjects. In the North the Wildlings are free, they bend the knee to no Lord. So Heres what I think will happen (note: I cant be precise on the detail but Im sure of the general theme). The surviving Starks, led by Bran, with magical Warg powers, will defeat the White Walkers. But to do this theyll need to team up with the Wildlings. I suspect Jon Snow will be instrumental in forming that allegiance. Meanwhile Daenerys and her army will attack the south. Eventually a combination of the two "free" armies will defeat the Lanister, Tyrel, Frey, Baratheon, et al Lords. The point you need to understand here is that this is a revolution. Free people are overturning the corrupt, decadent, self-serving, self-appointed nobility. Instrumental in this will be various characters of common birth who have no allegiance to a Lord, or who have come to believe their Lords are corrupt: Davos the Onion Knight (a smuggler made good), The Hound (Sandor Clegane), Gendry (the bastard of Robert Baratheon). I also think that Tyrion Lanister and Arya Stark have shown commitment to the oppressed. I dont know if any of these characters will survive but they will all fight for the revolution. The final ending will be at the Iron Throne, just as we think Daenerys Targaryen is about to claim the thrown of the 7 kingdoms she will command that one of her dragons (maybe all three if they still survive) melt it down with dragonfire. Shell then give an uplifting speech on how now all people are free. The End. The Game of Thrones will end with no throne. In support of my theory is the fact that the author George R.R. Martin was a conscientious-objector during the Vietnam War. He doesnt believe people should be forced to fight wars for the rich and powerful.

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The blog is back with IDEAS

The blogger lecturing in Scotland

Im back from three weeks in Europe: attending a conference in Cork and visiting several Scottish universities (Napier, Robert Gordon, and Abert ay). I was hosted in Scotland by Prof. Susan Craw of the IDEAS Research Institute. In paprticular they have some very interesting research projects in Smart Information Systems, which would translate well into New Zealand. Whist in Aberdeen I also gave a public lecture on Alan Turing and the Artificial Brain that was very well attended.

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A picture is worth a thousand coherent words building a natural description of images

Posted by Google Research Scientists Oriol Vinyals, Alexander Toshev, Samy Bengio, and Dumitru Erhan

“Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven”
“A group of people shopping at an outdoor market”
“Best seats in the house”

People can summarize a complex scene in a few words without thinking twice. It’s much more difficult for computers. But we’ve just gotten a bit closer -- we’ve developed a machine-learning system that can automatically produce captions (like the three above) to accurately describe images the first time it sees them. This kind of system could eventually help visually impaired people understand pictures, provide alternate text for images in parts of the world where mobile connections are slow, and make it easier for everyone to search on Google for images.

Recent research has greatly improved object detection, classification, and labeling. But accurately describing a complex scene requires a deeper representation of what’s going on in the scene, capturing how the various objects relate to one another and translating it all into natural-sounding language.

Automatically captioned: “Two pizzas sitting on top of a stove top oven”

Many efforts to construct computer-generated natural descriptions of images propose combining current state-of-the-art techniques in both computer vision and natural language processing to form a complete image description approach. But what if we instead merged recent computer vision and language models into a single jointly trained system, taking an image and directly producing a human readable sequence of words to describe it?

This idea comes from recent advances in machine translation between languages, where a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) transforms, say, a French sentence into a vector representation, and a second RNN uses that vector representation to generate a target sentence in German.

Now, what if we replaced that first RNN and its input words with a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained to classify objects in images? Normally, the CNN’s last layer is used in a final Softmax among known classes of objects, assigning a probability that each object might be in the image. But if we remove that final layer, we can instead feed the CNN’s rich encoding of the image into a RNN designed to produce phrases. We can then train the whole system directly on images and their captions, so it maximizes the likelihood that descriptions it produces best match the training descriptions for each image.

The model combines a vision CNN with a language-generating RNN so it can take in an image and generate a fitting natural-language caption.

Our experiments with this system on several openly published datasets, including Pascal, Flickr8k, Flickr30k and SBU, show how robust the qualitative results are -- the generated sentences are quite reasonable. It also performs well in quantitative evaluations with the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU), a metric used in machine translation to evaluate the quality of generated sentences.

A selection of evaluation results, grouped by human rating.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes it’s the words that are most useful -- so it’s important we figure out ways to translate from images to words automatically and accurately. As the datasets suited to learning image descriptions grow and mature, so will the performance of end-to-end approaches like this. We look forward to continuing developments in systems that can read images and generate good natural-language descriptions. To get more details about the framework used to generate descriptions from images, as well as the model evaluation, read the full paper here.

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Techvana the New Zealand Computer Museum is now open!

We have a new computer museum! The  project to create the Techvana  computer museum in Auckland is making good progress. The museum has occupied its premises at 105 Cook Street, Auckland and for the near future is open from 12 to 5 on weekends. Visitors are most welcome.
The museum is built around the collection of Mark and Katie Barlow – much of their collection is on display. Many of the computers and game-machines are in working order and may be tried-out.


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What Is a Drawing Program

While a lot of people see drawing as something done with a pencil and a piece of paper, many illustrators choose to use drawing programs that can be purchased and installed on their computers. These programs are economical and more convenient in many ways.

Identification

1. 
   Image by Flickr.com, courtesy of Blake Patterson
   Your computer can be used to create illustrations using drawing programs.
   Drawing programs allow users to create drawings using a computer. These drawings are saved in file formats that can be opened by other programs. These images can usually be printed by a printer.

History

2. The first vector program, Adobe Illustrator, was created in 1987. The first raster program, Adobe Photoshop, was created in 1990.

Input

3. Drawing programs use a variety of input devices to create the art, such as scanners, tablets, webcams, mouses and keyboards.

Types

4. Drawing programs are raster or vector. Raster images are made out of small pixels colored differently. Vectors are made out of lines and points. Vectors are more difficult to edit and take up more space than raster images, but they can be resized without ruining the resolution of the image.

Benefits

5. Drawing programs allow users to create drawings that can be mass produced and that do not degrade in quality. Large quantities of drawings can be stored on a computer and money can also be saved over time, since drawing supplies do not have to be replaced.

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What Is Output

Simply put, output is anything that comes out of a computer. It is what the computer returns after processing information. Output can be visual or audible and does not need to be meaningful.

Types

1. The types of output can include binary data, text, pictures, video or sound.

Output Devices

2. Output devices include the computer monitor, printer and sound cards. Each output device provides a different type of output.

Computer Monitors

3. The computer monitor is the most widely used output device. It displays output as text, images and video.

Printers

4. A printer is an output device that provides text and image output in a hard copy format.

Sound Cards

5. Sound cards provide output as sound, including, but not limited to, voice and music.

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What is the best video camera for shooting computer tutorials

I want to make a video tutorial of me doing some stuff with software.





This is for my colleagues, I am showing them how to do a file format conversion.





What would be the best (value for money) digital video camera for this purpose?





I have checked out the stuff from ebay but would never make a purchase without consulting yahoo answers.What is the best video camera for shooting computer tutorials?
Well, if that is the case then I wouldnt suggest a camera for you at all but rather a program and a microphone. Let me explain, there are freeware programs out there but Im not sure on what website for sure, first try downloads.com , but they record the output of your video card and turn it into a file that you could edit later. Whatever you do on the screen would be recorded. Then you could add a sound of your voice into the video saying whatever it is that you are doing. If you used a camera to record the computer monitor then it would turn out to be bad quality and be more expense then it is worth.

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What is Linux

Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix standards. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and worked steadily until 1994 when version 1.0 of the Linux Kernel was released. The kernel, at the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the GNU General Public License and its source code is freely available to everyone. It is this kernel that forms the base around which a Linux operating system is developed. There are now literally hundreds of companies and organizations and an equal number of individuals that have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel. More information on the kernel can be found at our sister site, LinuxHQ and at the official Linux Kernel Archives. The current full-featured version is 2.6 (released December 2003) and development continues.

Apart from the fact that its freely distributed, Linuxs functionality, adaptability and robustness, has made it the main alternative for proprietary Unix and Microsoft operating systems. IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other giants of the computing world have embraced Linux and support its ongoing development. Well into its second decade of existence, Linux has been adopted worldwide primarily as a server platform. Its use as a home and office desktop operating system is also on the rise. The operating system can also be incorporated directly into microchips in a process called "embedding" and is increasingly being used this way in appliances and devices.

Throughout most of the 1990s, tech pundits, largely unaware of Linuxs potential, dismissed it as a computer hobbyist project, unsuitable for the general publics computing needs. Through the efforts of developers of desktop management systems such as KDE and GNOME, office suite project OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla web browser project, to name only a few, there are now a wide range of applications that run on Linux and it can be used by anyone regardless of his/her knowledge of computers. Those curious to see the capabilities of Linux can download a live CD version called Knoppix . It comes with everything you might need to carry out day-to-day tasks on the computer and it needs no installation. It will run from a CD in a computer capable of booting from the CD drive. Those choosing to continue using Linux can find a variety of versions or "distributions" of Linux that are easy to install, configure and use. Information on these products is available in our distribution section and can be found by selecting the mainstream/general public category.

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