What can V4S do for me?

What can V4S do for me?

Think of V4S as your Internet voicemail for Skype™.

Anywhere you have access to the Net, from any device with a streaming audio player, you can play and manage the voicemails V4S has taken for you.

V4S will take voicemails for you no matter where you are – at your main PC, logged onto Skype from a PDA, clubbing, whatever. V4S can also send you email or SMS alerts containing a link to new messages as they come in.

Even from devices that don’t have a streaming audio player (like some mobile phones), you can still check to see what messages you have.

V4S – your free Internet voicemail for Skype. Always with you. Always free. As Skype should be!

Why would I use V4S instead of Skype Voicemail?

For one thing, V4S is FREE. For another, it’s more convenient!

Even better, V4S gives you access to all your Skype voicemails from EVERYWHERE. Also, V4S can send you email and/or SMS alerts when you get a new message so you’ll know right away when an important call comes in. Finally, because the voicemail plays in a media player, you can easily rewind and fast-forward.

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Take your cable channels with you on the road

In 2002, Blake Krikorian and his brother Jason were beside themselves. Their beloved San Francisco Giants were in a pennant race, yet Blake and Jason, two Silicon Valley engineers, were traveling so much that they missed many of the games on television.

Desperate, they signed up for a service that offered live audio and video of the games over the Internet, only to find that subscribers from San Francisco could not watch Giants games because of blackout restrictions.

The idea for Slingbox was born. The Krikorians decided to find a way to let cable and satellite television customers watch what was on their home televisions while they were on the road. After several years developing the product, their company, Sling Media, released its first boxes in July.

"I was paying $80 a month to Comcast, and I have a broadband pipe in my house and all these other displays," Blake Krikorian said. "So why can't I just watch the TV coming into our house?"

Just as TiVo and other digital video recorders ushered in the concept of "time shifting" a few years ago, the Slingbox promises to make "place shifting" a reality for households. By letting consumers connect with their cable or satellite hookups when they travel, Slingbox has the potential to splinter further the way television is watched.

For instance, even people living far from their hometowns could get a Slingbox, allowing them to watch their local television in another city or even country. Sling Media does not endorse this use of its device for fear of antagonizing cable and satellite companies, which may see it as illicit sharing.

Merry Xmas

I love you

Penn-State Philips CMOS transistor model adopted as industry-wide standard for future nanometer chip design

Penn-State Philips CMOS transistor model adopted as industry-wide standard for future nanometer chip design: "The PSP (Penn-State Philips) model will now become the industry standard for simulating the behavior of future generations of CMOS transistors produced at the 65-nm technology node and beyond."

By allowing designers to accurately predict circuit performance before committing their designs to silicon, this new standard will enable the optimal use of CMOS chip technology in real-world applications. In addition, the standard will facilitate the exchange of chip designs between design groups and the outsourcing of chip fabrication to silicon foundries by allowing everyone to communicate using the same transistor modeling language. As a result, the chips produced will perform better, be less expensive and appear earlier on the market.

“As CMOS takes on new roles beyond the production of purely digital chips, it is important that the industry has a single model that accurately predicts transistor performance under all circuit conditions, including RF and analog circuit behavior,” said Dr. Reinout Woltjer, Department Head of the Device Modeling group at Philips Research. “By basing the PSP model on the fundamental physics of transistor operation, it provides extremely accurate results over the entire operating spectrum from DC to well in excess of 50 GHz.”

“The PSP model incorporates a number of recent advances in MOS device physics and was made possible by the innovative but practical solution of several long-standing theoretical problems of compact MOSFET modeling” said Dr. Gennady Gildenblat, Professor of Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. “This made it possible to include all relevant physical effects without significantly increasing model complexity – a prerequisite for scalability of the model to ever-smaller device geometries.”

Because it is based on the underlying physics of CMOS transistor operation, the number of parameters needed in the PSP model is significantly less than that required by other models. This not only means that the PSP model enables faster circuit simulation. It also means that the simulation results obtained are more accurate. In particular, it accurately models gate leakage, noise and quantum-mechanical effects that will become increasingly significant to circuit performance as CMOS processes are scaled to nanometer proportions. To allow rapid integration into EDA tools, the model is supported by SiMKit – a professional grade software environment that allows it to be directly coupled into popular circuit simulators.

Wireless USB creeps nearer

DECEMBER 19, 2005 (TECHWORLD.COM) - The wireless replacement for Universal Serial Bus has come a step closer to reality -- and some questions on migration have been answered -- with the release of a reference design from Wisair Ltd.

Wireless USB, which will work at 480Mbit/sec. using short-range ultrawide band (UWB) radio, has been specified by a group led by Intel Corp. and has its standards published online.

Wisair has produced working Wireless USB devices that connecting wireless and existing wired devices. A USB dongle plugs into the PC and gives it Wireless USB powers, while a wireless USB "hub" has sockets for existing USB devices and a wireless USB link back to the PC.

"Wireless USB, naturally, will be native in the PC and in devices eventually, but to support your existing PCs and laptops and all the millions of USB devices out there -- the cameras and hard disks and printers -- you have to start with a wired adapter concept," Serdar Yurdakul, Wisair?s director of marketing told online news site Wi-Fi Planet.

Wireless USB puts the USB protocols on top of an underlying UWB pipe, and the USB standards makers have chosen the WiMedia flavor of UWB which is backed by Intel. Earlier this month, the WiMedia Alliance succeeded in getting its specification published as a formal standard by the ECMA group -- despite its being deadlocked in the IEEE by a rival proposal from Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

As with the debate on underlying UWB standards, the wireless USB issue may not be entirely simple. USB specialist Icron Technologies Corp. has demonstrated its own wireless ExtremeUSB USB 2.0 implementation over Freescale's UWB products.

Meanwhile, just to show that there's still interest in wired USB, we noticed while we were at Icron's site, that it has pushed regular USB up to 10km using fiber optic. Now we're trying to imagine a use for that.

Philips 960 mobile phone

The 960 is the first Philips mobile phone with an integrated Real Music player that allows users to listen to MP3 and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) music files.

It is possible to store up to eight hours of music in the resident memory, and extra capacity can easily be added by inserting an SD/MMC memory card into the phone’s card slot (the card is automatically recognized by the phone). Users can put together an extensive playlist and effectively use their phone as a portable jukebox.

An extremely convenient ‘drag and drop’ feature means individual songs and entire albums can be transferred to and from other media such as portable digital audio devices or PCs via a USB cable or wirelessly by Bluetooth™ or via a WAP connection.

The 960 is also a powerful imaging device. The integrated 2 megapixel digital camera takes excellent quality pictures at up to 1600x1200 resolution. Images can then be viewed in considerable detail on the exceptionally sharp 262K TFT LCD screen, shared with friends via MMS, or transferred to other media such as a PC and even print with a bright colorful quality.

The same applies to the high-quality video clips that can be made with the phone’s video recorder. Shooting at 30 frames per second, the end result has amazing clarity and accurate motion reproduction. As with music files, a memory card can be inserted to increase the capacity for pictures and video clips.

The housing of the 960 has an innovative ‘sliding’ movement that is functional, fashionable and fun. When closed it is at its most compact, yet users can still access all the multimedia features via the interface, centered on a screen-based menu grid. This has animated color icons for everything from entertainment, media player and camera to profiles, settings and connectivity.

The keypad slides out to allow number dialing and text input for messaging. When used as a phone it has a talk time of over four hours and a standby time of up to 300 hours. The attractive metallic finishing and compact design - it weighs just 95g - means the 960 is just as likely to be hung from a neck strap or belt than hidden in a pocket or bag.

Microsoft, MCI to join computer-to-phone calling market

Microsoft teams up with MCI to extend the reach of MSN's instant-messaging service into the crowded global computer-to-phone call market.

The deal will allow consumers to place calls for as little as 2.3 cents a minute -- undercutting rates MCI offers existing customers -- and highlighting the challenge Web-based calling poses to voice-based telephone businesses.

Subscriptions initially will be available in five markets - starting with the United States and then extending to Britain, France, Germany and Spain in the next few weeks, said Blake Irving, vice president of MSN Communications Services.

Once a customer subscribes to the new service, customers will be able to place calls for 2.3 cents a minute to phones in any of the five countries. Prepaid calling time can be purchased from MCI in $5, $10 or $25 increments.

MCI and Microsoft said they are testing the Windows Live Messenger service among 10,000 users, which they expect to expand to include tens of millions of Microsoft instant messaging users within four months. The service will be made available to subscribers in countries worldwide within a year.

The two companies said the new service, to be known as MCI Web Calling for Windows Live Call, will be available through Windows Live Messenger -- Microsoft's recent name change for its MSN Messenger, which counts 185 million active users worldwide.


MCI computer-to-phone computer-to-phone Microsoft Messenger

VOIP 911 calls

A major standard enabling voice-over-IP telecommunications providers to deliver enhanced 911 (E911) service has been approved by a non-profit organization promoting implementation of the three-digit emergency phone number system across the nation.

The board of directors of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) earlier this week approved the Interim VOIP Architecture for Enhanced 911 Services (i2) standard. The approval is considered the first step of a major system redesign around IP.

The standard, which was published Dec. 6, is a transitional measure that allows VOIP calls to be routed via existing legacy systems to 911 call centers known as public safety answering points (PSAPs).

911

Global Warming Photographs

Global warming at the extremes of the earth: Habitats and cultures everywhere react to climate's rapid changes World View of Global Warming

"global warming"

Google adsense server down

Where are my ads? Nothing on adsense inside
No news on Adsense News.

What kind of world is this??? Anyone??
Hmmm... They are back!!!


Aaarrrrgghhhh...They are gone again.
What is happening?

hmmmm... they are back


adsense

Here's who Yahoo! is really going after with VoIP

What's the end game for Yahoo!'s just announced new PC-to-phone VoIP services?It's not as much a strike against Skype as it is against...I'll tell you, but first, some background would be useful. Ever since Yahoo! acquired softphone developer and service provider Dialpad, we've suspected for some time now that Yahoo! has been planning fee-based, PC-to-phone VoIP [...]"

bruna bianco

Bruna bianco translates to tawny white man.
At least babelfish translates it like that. (Italian to English)

Firefox plus Google Toolbar through the AdSense referrals

International publishers can now refer users to Firefox plus Google Toolbar through the AdSense referrals feature. As you connect your users with Firefox to improve their web browsing experience, you can generate earnings - up to US$1 for each new Firefox user who downloads and runs the product for the first time. To add a Firefox referral button to your site today, visit the 'Referrals' tab in your account.

Google Talkabout: Lots to Talk about!

From the googletalk on Blogger: Lots to Talk about!

There are a lot of exciting things in store for Google Talk in the coming months and we thought the best way to tell you about them was to create a blog. We'll keep you posted on new features, happenings in the community, and progress towards our goal of enabling customer choice in Internet communications through open standards and interoperability.

One thing in particular we are really excited about is all the activity in the community around Google Talk. One of our favorite resources is Customize Talk which provides news, tips & tricks, and links to fun add-ons.

In addition to all the add-ons, some clever developers in the community have also documented our voice signaling extensions to XMPP (which we will also formally document soon) and someone even figured out how to make RPC calls using Google Talk ;-)

Thanks for all your great feedback on the product so far, keep the great ideas coming!

Mike Jazayeri
Product Manager

The world's first worldwide wireless personal Internet telephony service

The world's first worldwide wireless personal Internet telephony service is how Vectoria Telecom is promoting its new WiFi-based teliPhone venture. The company, which has also renamed itself teliPhone, says the service can be used in offices and homes featuring a WiFi access point, as well as in any indoor or outdoor, public or private, WiFi hotspot. The service is available now at a basic rate of $16.95 per month, excluding the price of the wireless IP phone. The monthly service includes 60 minutes of long distance calls anywhere in the continental U.S. and Canada. All additional minutes are charge at the rate of $0.029 per minute. The service provides the usual VoIP goodies, including voice mail, caller ID, and an online account management system.

Microsoft OneCares about you

Microsoft OneCares about you: "Microsoft is testing the waters of personal security with a public beta release of OneCare Live. Should you take the plunge, and should Symantec and McAfee be scared? "

Review: Wireless LAN Analysis Tools

Review: Wireless LAN Analysis Tools: "Despite the hype, security isn't the only bogey plaguing wireless networks. We tested 12 portable wireless LAN analyzers designed to troubleshoot a wide array of everyday problems at the physical- and data-link layers."

Philips 102-inch Candeo LED display on sale in US

Philips 102-inch Candeo LED display on sale in US: " It seems logical that the bigger you make a display, the bigger the pixels have to be, but what?s with the 384 x 216 resolution on Philips? mammouth 120-inch Candeo flat-panel LED? At first we thought that this was a typo, but the spec sheet for the Candeo line shows exactly that res for the 6.75-millimeter pixel pitch model (6-120i), along with a 256 x 144 resolution for the 10.125-millimeter model (10-120i), which must make the pixels as big as postage stamps. Anyway, we assume that these 40-square foot models are mostly meant for commercial use, and not for pushing incredibly downscaled 1080p through your home theater (even though they do contain digital inputs). Another clue about the target audience for these behemouths is the pricetag, which hovers around $100,000 no matter which pixel pitch you prefer. Although these models aren?t officially being released until CES, several have already found their way onto US store shelves, with at least three of them being eyed up by NBA players.[Via I4U]

Flaws found in RealNetworks media player

Flaws found in RealNetworks media player: "Two RealPlayer flaws could let attackers commandeer Windows PCs running the software, eEye Digital warns."

Bugs

Bugs: "Ferry Halim's Orisinal site is a wonderful showcase for his imaginative, pastel-shaded and simple-to-play games. Bugs is the latest - a pleasant combination of bubble-blowing and insect-stomping.http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/bugs.htm"

Second sample of Windows attack code posted

Second sample of Windows attack code posted
2 December 2005, Source: IDG Computerworld

For the second time this week, hackers have posted a sample of code that could be used to attack a Windows machine that has not been updated with the most recent Microsoft. security patches.

On Tuesday the French Security Incident Response Team website posted a sample of a maliciously encoded image file that could be used by attackers to grind a Windows PC to a halt.

This latest example exploits a critical vulnerability in the way that Windows processes files saved in the Windows Metafile graphics format. Metafile is a graphics format used by CAD (computer-aided design) software. Files that use this format have either a .wfm or .emf extension.

"The crafted metafile from this code when viewed in Internet Explorer raises the CPU utilisation to 100%," the FrSIRT advisory states.

The advisory did not say which versions of Windows are at risk from this software, but it noted that the code had been tested on Windows 2000 Server, Service Pack 4. The Windows Metafile problems affect virtually all supported versions of Windows, according to Microsoft's website.

Microsoft believes that this code could be used to effectively rendering a machine unusable, something called a denial of service (DoS) attack, but it can not be used to take over an unpatched computer, the software vendor's public relations agency said in a statement.

Microsoft fixed this Metafile bug in its MS05-053 Security Update, released Nov 8, so customers who have not yet applied this patch are the only ones at risk from this new attack.

Earlier this week, hackers released code that took advantage of a second Windows security hole, which was patched in October. That software exploited a flaw in the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator, a component of the operating system that is commonly used by database software to help manage transactions.

The MSDTC attack software could be used to knock Windows systems out of operation, according to Microsoft's statement. Code that took advantage of this flaw has been in circulation since mid-October, but had not been posted on a public website before this week.

Microsoft is not aware of any active attacks that use either of these malicious code samples, the statement says.