Code Name Vista

Hello folks, here I am back to throw some light on new and emerging technologies. This time it is the so long waited Windows Vista(code name longhorn actually). So there are a few things that u need to know once you are upgrading from a previous version of Windows to Vista.

Firstly there are two specifications of Vista namely Vista Capable PCs and Premium Ready PCs. The requirements for each specification are different, for Vista Capable PCs the minimum requirement is:

• A processor with a minimum speed of 800MHz
• 512MB of RAM
• A graphics system capable of supporting DirectX 9 (SVGA 800×600)
• 20GB hard drive (with 15GB free)

Similarly the requirements of Premium Ready Pcs are:

• A processor with a minimum speed of 1GHz (x86 or x64)
• 1GB of RAM
• A GPU that supports DirectX 9 and the following:
  - WDDM (Windows Vista Display Driver Model) Driver
  - 128MB of video RAM
  - Hardware support for Pixel Shader 2.0
  - 32 bits per pixel
• 40GB hard drive (with 15GB free)

To be able to run the new Aero user interface you need a lot more graphics card power than you do for the standard interface (this is because Aero uses DirectX and this means that the majority of the work is carried out by the GPU on the graphics card as opposed to the CPU). You can choose to run Windows without Aero also (and business systems need not ever use it).

Before going for Windows Vista make sure to check your system compatibility at the microsoft's site. Follow the link by Clicking Here. Just download the upgrade adviser and check your system's status. And just be aware of all those low-end PCs which were marked Vista Capable, because they might not even support the slick "Aero" user interface or Flip 3D and media center support. In fact Microsoft has been through a bit of trouble due to that, coz Dianne Kelley sued Microsoft for selling PCs with tag "Vista Capable PCs" which can just run the basic version of Vista. In order to be able to fully leverage these features customers will need to have bought a "Premium Ready" PC in order to run Vista Home Premium or higher.

The most important thing is that, due to a lot of vulnerabilities present in the current version of Windows Vista, you need to run update from your vista machine to download and install all the patches and fixes. For instance the recent Cursor flaw. The vulnerability is caused by an unspecified error in the way Windows 2000, XP, and Vista handles animated cursors on a Web site. Successful exploitation can result in memory corruption when processing cursors, animated cursors, and icons. So Microsoft has released a patch for it last week. The vulnerabilities like this are expected to appear for another half a year. So my suggestion is buy a authenticated and genuine version of Windows Vista and don't forget to download updates regularly.

Something New on SEO

Hey people,
I am back with something in by bag for you. This time I am going to present some good search engine optimization techniques, which are not discussed anywhere. Well these tips and tricks basically are concerned with the way to manage and publicize the content of your site.

Before going with it, I would recommend you to read my previous post of Basic Optimization techniques discussed in a post named 'SEO with Google' (posted on someday of March 07). Here I present you with some advanced tips as follows:

1. Write a lot. Try writing articles about your industry and emphasizing your products and services. The search engine bots (crawlers) are hungry for good content on famous sites. Try posting your articles on websites of good rating. Some good sites to post articles are http://goarticles.com , http://ezinearticles.com or maybe even Wikipedia. The links directed to your site will increase traffic as well as improve your search engine ranking because they will act as quality back links.
2. Selecting the right keywords is the most important task to be performed while optimizing and submitting to search engines. Adding very specific keywords help generate good business. Getting a good rank at a specific keyword is much more payable than just getting a bad rank at general keywords. Obviously, the person searching for something specific is more likely to bring business to you than the person landing to your site by searching something very general. So try to focus on the keywords and think a lot before submitting your site to the search engine.
3. Well if you are looking for global market, then you might be having site in different languages too. If not then you are missing a large amount of visitors because as much as 65% of the people browse and search in language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in more than 35 different languages.
4. Another way of publicizing your content is by taking part in different forums, creating your own blogs and posting links on these forums and blogs. Also you can post the page of your sitemaps instead of just posting the homepage or something. this will help the search engines to directly crawl through your site.
   
5. With increasing number of search engines, each having different layout of a sitemap, it has become difficult for the webmasters to create and manage different sitemaps together. Though not a perfect one but a close approximation of all sitemaps can be made by using ROR sitemap. It uses XML feed to describe the site.These sitemaps are structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text search with structured information to better interpret the meaning of your site, in other words, the search engine can better understand your site. To start with it, follow the link: http://www.rorweb.com/rormap.htm
6. To improve the pagerank, try including a no. of internal links. While writing the content for your site, try including links to other articles within your site which are relevant to the keywords described in the articles. These internal links also contribute to a higher ranking because of the anchor(<a href="..">) text that is used.

Well that's it for today. I'll describe some other tools and tips in some of my other posts. I think that these tips should help you improve the search engine ranking of your site. Please do comment if you face any problem with page ranking. I'll be glad to help you out.

Microsoft - Tellme wat's up?

Microsoft - the world's leading software technology home and the source of income of the world's richest man and the cofounder of Microsoft Corporation itself. With its headquater at Redmond, Washington, USA, it has crossed the revenue of 45 bn USD. Most of you might be knowing that it started its business with the launch of MS DOS in mid 1980s and after that it has launched a no. of outstanding operating systems and thereby capturing the market and not looking back since then.

The owner of the two most used products in the world - Windows OS and MS Office, Microsoft left its competitors way behind. But for past 4-5 years, things are getting warmed up again. The newest and the biggest dot com company in the race is Google whcich has given 'Web' a new meaning. So to stay in the race Micrsoft is trying a lot to improve its reach on the web. Its new and customised MSN and Hotmail are some of the steps for the same.

Other competitors include Linux, Unix and Mac OS which pose a serious threat to the market dominance of MS in operating systems. Linux - an open source operating system has brought a revolution in the market. In fact now most of the Servers work on Linux due to its less complexity and more reliability which makes it easier to provide higher uptime.

Also the upcoming applications like Open Office and Google docs and spreadsheets, are posing threats to the Microsoft's Office dominance. Still surviving all these stuff, MS is the biggest software company at present.

So the current talk of town - the Tellme deal of Microsoft, is finally confirmed with the annoucement of Microsoft to integrate with Tellme. Tellme networks is a speech recognition company. Its present work include voice recognition on cellphone devices, including fetching of data using it. Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft Business Division said that this deal would improve the speech technology of MS and would bring immediate and long term value to their customers. Tellme's technology is used by large companies such as FedEx, American Airlines and American Express to power their automated telephone systems.

During the conference call, Raikes and Tellme's CEO McCue noted that half of all directory assistance call are made using Tellme's technology, meaning that one in three Americans use its technology each year.

So probably this might become a way to heat up the competition against its rival companies by providing the services through mobile phones on large scale. It is a huge step towards integration of voice and data and improvement in mobile search technologies all over. Lets hope to get something big coming up from them later by this year.