Amazing Computer Drawings

Amazing drawings made on the computer In digital artists instead of the canvas - the monitor screen, and hand them to replace the graphics editors.

Amazing Human Printer

The Human Printer, founded by Louise Naunton Morgan, is a group of artists who uses markers to emulate the printing process. The group reproduces photos by painstakingly printing images by hand - dot by dot, in CMYK or B&W to recreate the halftone printing effect of conventional printers.

As explained on the site, The Human Printer assumes the role of the machine and is therefore controlled and restricted by the process of using CMYK halftone created on the computer. The site even goes as far as to list other Human Printer "models," providing a short description of each one's particular printing style and character traits.

How Can I Turn On Or Turn Off Parental Control In Windows Vista And 7

How Can I Turn On Or Turn Off Parental Control In Windows Vista And 7? If your kids are spending too much time on the computer or playing violent games such as Grand Thief Auto, perhaps it is time to make use of the parental control feature in Windows Vista and 7.

Parental Control In Windows 7

In Windows 7, click on the Windows Button (orb), and type ‘Parental Controls’ into the search box. A list will appear on the start menu, proceed to choose ‘Parental Controls’.

You’ll need administrative access to change the settings, you are able to:

• Control when your kids can use the computer and the duration
• Web filtering has been improved through Windows Live
• Set limits on games based on the ratings

Parental Control In Windows Vista

• Go to Control Panel in Vista by navigating to Start (Windows button) -> Control Panel.
• Click on User Accounts and Family Safety.
• Click on the tab that says Parental Controls.
• The User Account Control warning will pop up – click on Continue at this prompt.
• Select the particular User Account on which you want to enforce Parental Controls.
• Now, you will be taken to a page where you can set the different parameters of the Parental Controls feature. First, to the left, you have select the options for Parental Controls: On, enforce current settings, and Activity Reporting: On, collect information about computer usage.
• After this, go through the four options below – Windows Vista Web Filter, Time Limits, Games, Allow and block specific programs – and adjust the parameters as per your needs.
• Once you are done, click on OK in the Parental Controls window.

As for parental controls in Windows XP, sorry folks, you’ll need a third party software. Previously we wrote a short article on filtering the internet with various free software.

How To Tweak And Speed Up Windows 7 Performance, UAC, And Group Policy

Want to speed up Windows 7 performance? Windows 7 Little Tweaker is a simple and easy to use utility that allows you to enable a few hidden features in Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate. Here are some of the requirements, this application runs on 32 bit and with UAC disabled. Available tweaks:

• Add “Copy To” option in files and folders context menu, so that you can easily copy them to other locations
• Disable “search on Internet” prompt in “Open with” window so that it directly opens the program list
• Decrease menus show delay time, it’ll show the sub-menus fast when you select their parent menu
• Speeds up taskbar thumbnail preview by reducing the mouse hover time delay
• Disable the low disk space check so that you don’t get the annoying low disk space notification in system tray
• Add “Take Ownership” option in files and folders context menu so that you can easily take ownership of files and folders in case you want to replace them for customization purpose
• Set Windows to automatically end task of programs which are either hanged or taking longer time than expected to exit
• Speed up the Explorer navigation by disabling network printers and network scheduled tasks
• Disables (Turn Off) Annoying UAC (User Account Control) and suppress UAC consent prompt dialog

Here is no install process, just unzip to any folder and run it.By highlighting a row from the tweak list, you will get an explanation about this tweak inside the information window.

How To Encrypt And Protect Your Files Or Folders In Windows

How to hide or lock your secret folder and files from others? Do you know that Windows has a build in encrypt feature? Have you ever wonder how can you able to simplify the encrypt or decrypt process in right click context menu instead of going through these hassle steps? Try the following step by step tutorial:

Open notepad
Copy the following string and paste it into notepad
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced]
“EncryptionContextMenu”=dword:00000001

Save the notepad as “Encrypt.reg” with Save as type is “All Files”
Double click the registry file, continue with UAC prompt and click OK to confirm you wish to perform the action
The only trouble is, this encrypt works without a password, meaning to say someone else who has access to your computer could easily decrypt your files and folder. It only works to prevent unauthorized access if there is a hard disk swap or a transfer of file to another computer.

Caterpillar invades your workspace and connects your USB gadgets

A big bug has arrived and offers connections for up to four USB gadgets that you have. It won’t turn into a butterfly before it’s managed to fulfill its duty.

A Caterpillar-shaped USB hub is certainly a unique one to have on your work desk. It’s kinda cute, neither ugly nor scary with spikes. The two eyes should be the LEDs that will blink when USB signals flow through it. For only $10, you can get it from USBFever.

World's most powerful supercomputer becomes operational

World's most powerful supercomputer becomes operational

The world's fastest and most powerful supercomputer, named Novo-G, has become operational at the University of Florida.

Novo-G gets the first part of its name from the Latin term for "make anew, change, alter" and the second from "G" for "genesis." A "reconfigurable" computer, it can re-arrange its internal circuitry to suit the task at hand.

Applications range from calculations with data from space satellites to other supercomputers, said Alan George, professor at the University of Florida's (UF) National Science Foundation Centre (NSF) for high-performance reconfigurable computing.

"It is very powerful technology, but it is also very complicated technology," George said. "We don't want this important technology to be accessible only to experts."

Traditional computers use so-called "fixed logic devices" to perform a large variety of tasks. But this jack-of-all-trades approach requires a substantial amount of overhead in space and energy, no matter what work needs to be done.

On the other hand, special-purpose computers can be built to perform certain tasks very well but are not flexible. Reconfigurable computers make the best of both worlds, George said.

That is because they can rearrange their internal circuitry like Lego blocks, creating the most appropriate architecture for each assignment.

As a result, a reconfigurable computer can be from 10 to 100 times faster than other computers its size while using five to 10 times less energy.

Although the concept has been proven, reconfigurable computers remain at the research stage and are not easy to use. One of the main goals of the NSF Centre is to pioneer techniques to make reconfigurable computers more accessible.

How Companies got their Names

Apple Computers
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filling a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 o’clock
CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.
Compaq 
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.
Corel
The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland Research Laboratory.
Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders- Stanford graduate students Sergey Bin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’
Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing email via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters ‘html’ – the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.
Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Intel 
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ of ‘Padmasana’. Kap0or used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.
Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA(Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle(the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.
Sony
It originated from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX- based OS for the computer.
Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Yahoo stands for Yet Another Hirarchy for Officius Oracle.

40th Birthday of Computer Mouse

By Claudine Beaumont

It was only meant to be a prototype. But 40 years after the computer mouse first scrolled its way into the public consciousness, new touch-screen technology could be about to consign the mouse to the annals of history.

The computer mouse was the creation of Doug Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute in California, who needed a simple way of controlling their computers. The result was a carved wooden block mounted on wheels, with a long cable trailing out the back. One researcher nicknamed it a mouse, and the moniker stuck.

"We thought that when it had escaped out to the world it would have a more dignified name," said Mr Engelbart. "But it didn't."

The mouse made its debut at a presentation in San Francisco in 1968 to show off a working network computer system. Before the invention of the mouse, people working on computers used a light pen, similar to those wielded by radar operators during the war, to navigate around on screen. The research team at the Institute set about finding an alternative, and went through a range of designs before finally settling on the mouse.

"We set up our experiments and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before," said Mr Engelbart. "It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes. Five or six of us were involved in these tests, but no one can remember who started calling it a mouse. I'm surprised the name stuck."

The mouse was developed by Xerox during the 1970s, and the first commercial product was released in 1981 with the launch of the Xerox Star computer system. But it wasn't until Apple acquired the license for the mouse for $40,000 from the Standford Institute that the technology really took off. The Apple Macintosh, launched in 1984, used the mouse to good effect, and is the machine widely credited with kick-starting the home computer revolution. The mouse became the default input method on most computers for the next two decades.

However, it faces stiff competition from new technology such as gesture control and touch-screen interfaces. Apple's iPhone mobile phone has shown people the power and potential of touch-screens, and the Nintendo Wii demonstrates the simplicity of natural gestures. Companies such as HP have already started building computers that rely on touch-sensitive monitors rather than a mouse, and Microsoft, too, is experimenting with new user interfaces. Its Surface computer is a touch-screen tablet which responds to natural hand gestures, touch and physical objects.

"I very much doubt we'll be using a mouse in 40 years' time," Steve Prentice, an analyst at Gartner Research, told the Observer.

Mr Engelbart, 83, did not make a fortune from his creation, however. The patent he had on the device ran out shortly before Apple launched it to a wider audience, meaning he received no royalties for his invention. However, in 1998 he finally received recognition for his innovative design when the then president, Bill Clinton, awarded him the National Medal of Technology for creating the foundations of modern computing.

Courtesy: telegraph.co.uk

The 10 Stupidest Tech Company Blunders

'This iPod thing will never catch on' -- and 9 more unbelievable (in hindsight) missed tech opportunities.

Some of the biggest high-tech deals never happened. Some of the most promising products and services never came to be. Why? Because the people and companies involved didn't realize what they were letting slip through their fingers or they simply couldn't foresee what would happen afterward.

Change just a few circumstances and there might not be an Apple or a Microsoft today. Yahoo might be the king of the search hill, with Google lagging behind. You might be reading this on a Xerox-built computer via a CompuServe account while listening to your favorite tunes on a RealPod.

People say hindsight is 20-20. If so, our vision is acute. Here are our picks for the biggest missed opportunities in the history of technology.

1. Yahoo loses Facebook

In 2006, Facebook was a two-year-old social network that most people thought of as a digital playground for Ivy League brats. In the world of social networks, MySpace's 100 million members totally swamped Facebook's 8 million. So when Yahoo offered to buy Mark Zuckerberg's baby for a cool $1 billion -- nearly twice what Rupert Murdoch had spent for MySpace in 2005 -- people said, "Take the money and run, Mark." In fact, the then-23-year-old and Yahoo shook hands on a deal in June 2006.

Then Yahoo posted some bad financials and its stock dropped 22 percent overnight. Yahoo's CEO at the time, Terry Semel, reacted by cutting the purchase offer to $800 million. Zuckerberg balked. Two months later Semel re-upped the offer to $1 billion, but by then it was too late.

Today, Facebook boasts some 250 million registered users and is worth roughly $5 billion to $10 billion, depending on who's counting. Three years and two CEOs later, Yahoo is still struggling to survive.

2. Real Networks punts on the iPod

People think Apple CEO Steve Jobs invented the iPod. He didn't, of course. Jobs merely said yes to engineer Tony Fadell after the folks at Real Networks rejected Fadell's idea for a new kind of music player in the fall of 2000. (Fadell's former employer Philips also turned him down.)

By then, MP3 players had been around for years, but Fadell's concept was slightly different: smaller, sleeker and focused on a content-delivery system that would give music lovers an easy way to fill up their "pods." (Jobs is famous for driving the design of the iPod.)

Today that content-delivery system is known as iTunes, and Apple controls some 80 percent of the digital music market. Fadell worked at, and eventually ran, Apple's iPod division until November 2008. Real Networks is still a player in the streaming-media world, but its revenues are a fraction of what Apple makes from iTunes alone. (Photo: Courtesy of Apple)

3. Sony and Toshiba agree to disagree over HD

Few format wars have been as costly to their participants as the fight over a new high-definition disc standard. In one corner stood Blu-ray, championed by Sony. In the other corner was HD DVD, led largely by Toshiba.

From 2002 onward, the two sides wrangled, each signing up allies to support its own competing, incompatible format. In 2008, Sony slipped the knife into Toshiba by paying one of its biggest backers, Warner Brothers Studios, a reported $400 million to drop HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray.

Interestingly, the same parties had battled in the mid-1990s over a new high-resolution format for movies. Back then, they settled their differences, combining the best of both specs into something called Digital Versatile Disc, better known as DVD.

The missed opportunity to come out with a single HD format sacrificed years' worth of sales for every company involved. Had the two sides joined forces in 2002, high-def discs would be the dominant delivery medium for movies and shows now. Instead, today DVDs still outsell Blu-ray titles by 10 to one, and the future belongs to streaming media and video on demand.

4. Digital Research: The other Microsoft

This one is a classic. In 1980, when IBM was looking for somebody to build a disc operating software for its brand-new IBM PC, Microsoft was not its first choice. In fact, none other than Bill Gates suggested that Big Blue approach Gary Kildall of Digital Research, author of the CP/M operating system.

The legend is that Kildall blew IBM off to go fly his plane. The real story is that Kildall was flying to deliver a product to another customer, leaving his wife to negotiate with IBM. Dorothy Kildall didn't like parts of the deal IBM was proposing and sent the executives packing.

Big Blue went back to Gates, who with his partner Paul Allen, whipped out MS-DOS, based on Tim Paterson's QDOS (the Quick and Dirty Operating System), which was itself based on CP/M. IBM ended up offering both Microsoft's DOS (for $60) and a version of CP/M ($240) to buyers of the original IBM PC. The cheaper product won.

Before DOS, Microsoft's biggest products were versions of the BASIC programming tool. After DOS, well … you know the rest. Would Microsoft have grown into the monolith it is today without the IBM contract? We'll never know.

5. Xerox goes in an Alto direction

Here's another classic tale. More than a decade before the Macintosh and Windows PCs, before even the MITS Altair, there was the Alto, the world's first computer with a window-based graphical user interface. Invented at Xerox PARC, the Alto had a mouse, Ethernet networking and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) text processor.

But in 1973, the personal-computer market didn't exist, so Xerox didn't really know what to do with the Alto. The company manufactured a few thousand units and distributed them to universities. As legend has it, in 1979 Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, saw the Alto and incorporated many of the Alto's features into Apple's Lisa and Mac computers. Shortly thereafter, Xerox finally realized its mistake and began marketing the Xerox Star, a graphical workstation based on technology developed for the Alto. But it was too little, too late.

6. Recording industry plays the same old tune

Perhaps no other industry has missed more tech opportunities than the music business.

In 1999, Shawn Fanning's Napster made it incredibly easy for people to share music online. The record companies reacted by suing Napster for contributing to copyright infringement. Then-Napster CEO Hank Barry called for the music industry to adopt a radio-style licensing agreement that paid royalties to artists for music distributed via the Net. His calls fell on deaf ears.

Napster fans quickly moved on to other peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Gnutella and Grokster, and music "pirates" became the Recording Industry Association of America's public enemy No. 1.

In 2000 MP3.com launched a service that allowed members to upload songs from their own private CD collection and stream them to any PC. The recording industry sued MP3.com for copyright infringement and eventually won. MP3.com was sold and changed business models.

Add to all that the RIAA's suits against Grokster, Morpheus, Kazaa and some 30,000-odd music "pirates." Talk about your broken records.

Today, of course, music-subscription businesses and streaming services such as Pandora dominate digital music. Had the record companies partnered with Napster, MP3.com or any of the other file-sharing networks instead of suing them, they might control digital music sales today -- without nearly as many problems with piracy.

7. CompuServe blows its chance to dominate the Net

Look at today's interactive, social-media-obsessed, user-content-driven Web and what do you see? A spiffier version of CompuServe circa 1994. But instead of dominating the online world, CompuServe got its butt kicked by AOL and that company's 50 billion "free" CDs.

In the early 1990s, the CompuServe Information Service had "an unbelievable set of advantages that most companies would kill for: a committed customer base, incredible data about those customers' usage patterns, a difficult-to-replicate storehouse of knowledge and little competition," says Kip Gregory, a management consultant and author of "Winning Clients in a Wired World." "What it lacked was probably … the will to invest in converting those advantages into a sustainable lead."

Then AOL came along, offering flat-rate "unlimited" pricing (versus CompuServe's hourly charges), a simpler interface and a massive, carpet-bombing CD marketing campaign. Organizations that had an early presence on CompuServe forums moved over to the Web, which CompuServe's forums were slow to support. In 1997, AOL acquired CompuServe and "CompuServe classic" was finally laid to rest last June.

CompuServe's failure wasn't due to a single missed opportunity so much as a collection of them, says Gregory. "I really believe [CompuServe is] an important example that reinforces a critical lesson -- never stand on your heels in business."

8. Newspapers fail to read the writing on the wall -- Craigslist

Newspapers are dying, and by nearly all accounts (certainly, all newspaper accounts), Craigslist's fingerprints can be found all over the crime scene. People have blamed the mostly free online ad service for cutting the legs out from under classified advertising, one of the newspaper industry's cash cows.

As recently as 2005, classified ads brought more than $17.3 billion into U.S. newspapers' coffers. Since then, the use of classified ad sites like Craigslist (as well as Amazon, eBay and Google) has more than doubled, according to the Pew Research Center, while classified ad revenues have been halved.

If a consortium of newspapers had bought out Craigslist back in 2005, when classified ad revenues were flying high, things could be quite different today. But first they would have had to persuade Craigslist creator Craig Newmark to sell.

In a January 2008 interview with InfoWorld, Newmark said that his company's role in the collapse of the newspaper industry has been greatly exaggerated -- mostly by newspapers. "I figure the biggest problems newspapers have these days have to do with fact-checking," he remarked.

9. The Google before Google

In the mid-1990s, the hottest search-engine technology wasn't the work of Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos or Hot Wired; it was the Open Text Web Index. Much like Google today, Open Text was lauded for its speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness; by 1995, Open Text Corp. claimed that it had indexed every word on the roughly 5 million documents that constituted the Web at that time. That year, Yahoo incorporated Open Text's search technology into its directory.

But two years after partnering with Yahoo, Open Text abandoned search and moved into enterprise content management. A year later, Google made its debut. The missed opportunity? Not realizing how big search was going to be.

"If anything made Open Text special, it was that they came closer to having Google-like technology than anyone else in their time," says Steve Parker, a communications consultant who helped publicize Yahoo's launch of Open Text's search technology. "With a three-year lead on Google, you have to consider whether Google would have been forced to burn cash at a much faster pace and if they might have run out of time to overtake the market leader. If things had gone differently, that might have been good enough to get [Open Text] to king of the hill."

10. Microsoft saves a rotting Apple

Ten years ago Apple was in serious trouble. Mac sales were being eroded by cheaper clones from Power Computing and Radius. The company was running low on cash, its stock was trading for around $5 a share and it was hunting for a new CEO to replace Gil Amelio.

Then Apple received a much-needed infusion of cash -- $150 million -- from a seemingly unlikely source: Microsoft, which also promised to continue developing its Mac Office suite. The deal was negotiated by then-Apple adviser Steve Jobs, whom the Macworld Expo faithful booed at the deal's announcement. Shortly afterward, Jobs took over as Apple's "interim" CEO. We all know what happened after that.

If Microsoft hadn't missed its opportunity to let Apple wither? We'd be struggling to play WinTunes on our WinPhones. The online music and video markets would be stagnant -- or worse, controlled by Hollywood. And we'd be longing desperately for better alternatives to Windows.