The World of Computing and Solutions

Sony wants to outdo Microsoft in just about every aspect. The company has taken more time to perfect its technologies, but it’s debatable whether some are really ready for prime time. In an address at the Tokyo Game Show in mid-September, Sony international game chief Ken Kutaragi criticized PC’s for having “bigger and bigger operating systems” and for losing their “real-time responsiveness”. he said that in the future PS3 will be able to do numerous nongame functions, such as personalized agents for shopping and search.

NEW GUI, NEW WAYS OF BROWSING:
Sony’s Kaz Hirai, president of the U.S. game division, added that the PS3’s Web browser will offer a different kind of experience. Hirai noted that the browser will enable a user to open a page and then set it aside on a portion of the widescreen TV. the user will then able able to open the subsequent Web pages across the center of the screen.
“When you see this in action, it chances the experience of static Web pages”. “We’ve always said that we are the first and foremost about entertainment. We are not necessarily looking to replace the PC, which is primary a productivity tool in the den. the PS3 is geared for entertainment in the living room in the home. We ar not overtaking the PC,”, he said.

The PS3 will have a graphical user interface that resembles the “Cross Media Bar” on the PlayStation Portable. With that interface, the user can quickly scroll through a variety of functions for various kinds of entertainment.

SUITABLE, YET MIND BLOWING GRAPHICS:

Sony’s $599 verion of the box will offer 1080p HD resolution and HDMI connectors. That will enable it to cram about twice as many pixels onto a screen than the Xbox 360.
The machines two teraflops of floating-point performance - twice that of the Xbox 360 - will drive the 3D experience. The bulk of compute cycles are provided by nVidia’s RSX graphics Chip.

Hirai says you’ll notice the details in human faces, which will look so real that you’ll be able to tell from a game character’s face whether he’s lying or telling the truth.

SONY CHOOSES BLU-RAY:
Sony’s Blu-ray HD storage differentiates the PS3 from the Xbox 360. Blu-ray discs store 50 gigabytes of data, compared wtih 9GB on an Xbox 360 DVD Disc and 30GB on Microsoft’s add-on HD DVD accessory. But it also adds several hundred dollars of cost. That’s why the high-end PS3 will debut at $599 for a version withh an 60GB hard drive, 5.1 dolby surround sound, built-in Wi-Fi, and slots for memory cards. The Cheaper $499 version comes iwth 20GB hard drive. Sony recently decided to add an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connector to the 1080p HD resolution it.

PlayStation 3:

Pricing: $499 (with 20GB hard drive); $599 (with 60GB hard drive,Wi-Fi, memory stick, SD, Compact-Flash slots)
Release Date: November 17th 2006.
Floating-point Operations: 218 GFLOP’s or about 2 TFlop’s
Main Memory: 256MB XDR RAM
Graphics Memory: 256MB GDDR3 VRAM
Microprocessor: Cell Broadband Engine, or “The Cell”
Description of cores/processing elements: PowerPC-based core at 3.2Ghz. One VMX Vector unit per core. Seven DSP’s (or SPE’s) at 3.2Ghz. Seven 128b 128 SIMID GPR’s. Seven 256KB SRAM for DSP’s. 512KB Level 2 cache.
Graphics Chip: RSX at 550MHz
Hard drive: 20GB or 60GB
Controller Type: Support for up to seven wireless game controllers or USB 2.0 ports
HD Support (HDMI, resolutions): 2 channels, Blu-ray support, upto 1080p

Question: I have a Microsoft Word 2003 document that is formated like a dictionary. The entries are various in words and abbreviations. The format of the entries in the document is like those words found in the Random House Webster’s Unabridge Dictionary. The entries are not sorted. I would like to sort the entries in accordance with the initial highlighted word. How can I do this?

Answer: The problem here is that Windows Word can not figure out how to sort your text. It’s not tabular so you can’t sort the columns. And sorting by paragraph wont work either because that would separate the individual lines of each entry. What you’ll have to do is reformat the text so that each entry is a single paragraph. Right now each line ends with a hard carriage return, making each line its own paragraph. You need to replace all but the terminating carriage return with a “new line” charater that starts a new line but doesn’t end the paragraph.

You need to retain the double carriage returns that represent the blank lines between entries. To do this, use Find/Replace to replace ^p^p with a marker string that appears nowhere in the document, for example, #$%. Next, use Find/Replace to replace ^p with ^l. This replaces the hard carriage return at the end of each line with a new-line character. Use find/Replace once more, this time to replace #$% with ^p. Now each entry is a separate paragraph. Select Table | Sort from the menu and perform a simple paragraph-based sort.
At this point your dictionary entries will be in sorted order, but they wil have lost some of the formatting.

Press Ctrl+A to highlight all the text. select Format | Paragraph from the menu. Set a hanging index to define the indentation for all lines after the first line in each paragraph.

You now have a document that closely resembles your original, except that it can be sorted now. When you add a new definition, remember to press Shift-Enter (this inserts a new-line character) at the end of all lines except the very last one in the definition.

Question: is there a way in Microsoft Word 2003 to search for only curly quotes, or straight quotes?

Answer: the solution is plain and weird. In the find dialog, click the More button and then check the box titled, Use Wildcards. Enter a regular double-quote in the Find what box. When Use Wildcards is checked, it will only find the regular, straight quotes.

To find the curly quotes, leave the Use Wildcards box checked and enter this in the Find what box: [“”]. That is, open square bracket, left curly quote, right curly quote, close square bracket. To enter the left curly quote, make sure that NumLock is on, hold down the Alt Key, tap out the numbers 0147 on the keypad (not the top-row numbers) and release the Alt Key. For the right curly quote, again hold down the Alt Key, and enter 0148 and release the Alt Key. Or you may find it easier to just copy and paste the curly quites from the document itself. While in the Use Wildcards mode, Word searches for any characters found within the square brackets, so you will find both left and right curly quotes this way.

Question
With all the current emphasis on new worms, Trojan horses, viruses, and other malware, I have a quesion about Microsoft Outlook Express. I’ve shut off the preview pane to prevent someone from owning my PC, but evey time I’m purposely viewing my e-mail and elect to delete it, the next message in my queue opens up. I really want the application to go back to the inbox view. I haven’t a clue how to do that, nor have I found anything in the Help file. Any idea how I can make that happen? My Windows XP is fully upto date.

Answer
By turning off the preview pane and deleteing the suspect mail without opening it, you greately reduce the possibility that an HTML-based message could exploit some security flaw and compromise your system. You also foil any attempts to snag private information that’s sorted in the Web browser cookies using a “web bug” image.
It’s true that when you delete the current message, the next message in the queue will take its place. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: Scan your list of messages starting at the bottom. Delete any that don’t look right and read the ones from your known correspondents. If you delete the last message in the list, you’ll go back to the Inbox view, as requested. And if the mesage you deleted is not the last, the one that takes its place will be one that you’ve already approved, since you’re working up from the bottom.

Question
In my Microsoft Word, the default automatic font colour was changed from Black to Blue. How do I change it back to Black?

Answer
Generall text gets its colour from your system’s colour scheme or desktop theme. Most likely, you may of happen come across a nice looking theme to use and chose to install it on your PC System, without really realising the full extent of the changes it makes globally throughout the workings of application runs.

The changes however do not affect your printed documents, they always default to Black unless otherwise chosen by the user - and of course if you’re using a colour printer, otherwise black text is the only thing you’re going to see. lol

Right click on the Desktop, choose Properties, and click the Appearance tab. If you’re using Mircosoft Windows XP, click the Advanced button. There’s a list of items shown; scroll down to the one named Window at the bottom and select it. You’ll see two coloured boxes shown. The upper one is the default window background colour and the lower one is the default text colour. Just click the lower coloured box and choose Black. Now click OK and, if you’re using Windows XP, click OK again to accept the change. Now it’s all fixed!

Whether they call them canaries, monkeys, or guinea pigs, more security companies are using virtual PCs to protect users.

Miners learned to love the humble canary. After a mine fire or explosion, miners would descend with the birds to possibly dangerous areas. The canaries’ high metabolism made them the first succumb if significant amounts of carbon monodixe or methane were present, thus giving miners warning of unsafe areas so they could escape alive.

Security companies are now applying the same theory into the online world.
Using thousands of virtual Pcs, systems whose processors, memory, and hard drives are all emulated in software, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, Mircosoft’s research arm, and other groups have automated the process of going into the unsafe areas of the Web. If a site hosting malicious code compromises one of the virtual PCs, the site’s address is recorded for further investigation, the virtual machine is erased, and a new virtual machine is set up in its place. Pretty neat stuff eh?

Some security companies refer to the virutal PCs as canaries or guinea pigs, or by the technical term, client-side honeypots. Microsoft calls them honeymonkeys in reference to the million-monkeys theorem. The theorem says that a million monkeys typing random characters on a million typewriters for an infinite period of time can evenutally produce the complete works of William Shakespeare…lol

Though it’s unlikely that a million monkeys could every write a Shakespares’ play, they most certainly could help to secure the Web. Today, tens of thousands of virtual machines are crawling the Internet, clicking on untrusted links, getting compromised, being deleted, and the doing it all over again. How cool is that?

Various Companies are pursuing different plans for the technology. Mircosoft uses its honeymonkey system to research threats to Windows and map out the links connecting to malicious Web sites - a part of the Internet that its researchers refer to as the ExploitNet. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor ues the resulting database of bad sites as one component of its Web site ratings, accessible through free plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Easy, cheap virtualisation software is the key to the technology. Mircosoft and SiteAdvisor both run thousands of virtual PCs with management servers capable of cataloging sites. The virtual PC, which almost always runs Mircosoft Windows, appears to malicious software to be a normal, albeit vanilla, PC. The latest Trojan horses, spyware, and the Web viruses infect the virtual system without detecting that it is really a sterile environment that will quickly be deleted. How sweet is that.

Yet the attackers are adapting to security methods such as virtual PCs. Some are working on ways to detect virtual machines by creating software for exactly that purpose; if a virtual machine is detected, they avoid infecting that system in order to delay exposure. Other attackers are identifying major Web sites that have a type of flaw known as cross-site scripting. This essentially allows an attacker to load malicious code on a victim’s machine from another Web site while the user believes he/she is still browsing safely on the orginal trusted Web site.

Despite the arms race that continues between attackers and defenders, virtual PCs promise to automate the patrol of the Web for malicious Web sites. In the end, we may come to appreciate the automated monkeys of the Web as much as miners appreciated the canary.