Posts Tagged ‘Operating’

Seven hidden tricks about your operating system

February 13th, 2012

WINDOWS 7

CREATE A WIRELESS HOTSPOT

With some free software, you can convert your Windows 7 laptop (or desktop with a Wi-Fi card) into a wireless router to share internet with others. Just get Connectify (connectify.me) or Virtual Router (virtualrouter. codeplex.com) to enable this feature. Connectify and Virtual Router will not work on older editions of Windows.

VIRTUAL WINDOWS XP

There are several reasons why you would want to run Windows XP virtually within Windows 7. Maybe you have programs that only work in XP or maybe you’re nostalgic. Whatever your reasons, you can download the necessary files from goo.gl/DCOSq.

WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER

Windows Media Center (built into Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions) offers more than just multimedia. It offers a 10 foot interface so that you can connect your PC to a TV and enjoy your content on a larger screen. Plus, it displays album art nicely and can stream all sorts of free content.

LAUNCH APPS QUICKLY

Users of older editions of Windows probably don’t know that with Windows 7, you can launch programs by just typing their name. Just click the Start button, start typing the name of the program you want to launch and the results will appear in real time as you type. Just highlight the correct one and hit the enter button.

PLAY NICE WITH XBOX

If you have a Xbox 360 connected to the same network as your Windows 7 PC, you can use Windows Media Center (WMC) to stream photos, music and videos. On the Xbox, note down the 8-digit key from the WMC section in Apps. In WMC, click Tasks > Add Extender and enter the 8-digit key. Now you can access content on the Xbox.

PLAY GOD FOR YOUR PC

There are various settings available for Windows 7, sometimes in various places (like control panel, personalisation, network settings menu and so on. With God Mode, you can have all settings in one place. Create a folder & name it GodMode. {ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. More info at goo.gl/qdMFT.

THE PROBLEM STEPS RECORDER

Sometimes when something goes wrong with your PC, you could spend all day trying to figure out the problem. Instead, use the Problem Steps Recorder to record what’s going wrong and send it to someone more knowledgeable for a quick diagnosis. Click the start button and type PSR to bring up the Problem Steps Recorder (psr.exe) – click on ‘Start Record’ and run through the problem again.

MAC OS X LION

GET THE DICTIONARY MEANING

If you want to get the dictionary meaning for a particular word, simply take the cursor over the word and double tap the trackpad using three fingers. The text will get highlighted in yellow and a pop up box will show you the dictionary definition and synonyms from the built in thesaurus.

SEARCH SPECIFIC FILE TYPES ONLY

While searching using the search box in Finder, type ‘kind:’ followed by the first alphabet of the file type you are searching for (example, type P for PDF or D for DOC). A drop down menu will show you a list of various file types to choose from. Select the file type you are looking for and then type in the name of the file to search.

REMOTELY WIPE DATA

If you have setup an iCloud account on OSX Lion, just by logging in to your account from another system, you can send a remote wipe command. This is useful to remotely wipe all the data from the hard drive in case of theft. Note that FileVault encryption service should be activated for this to work.

ADD DIGITAL SIGNATURES TO A PDF

Open a pdf file in the Preview application instead of Adobe Reader and press Shift + Command + A to bring up the annotations toolbar. Click on Signatures and select ‘Create signature from iSight’. Now, sign on a blank piece of paper and hold it up in front of the webcam – it will save your signature digitally. Whenever you want to include your signature in a PDF, just select it from the toolbar and insert it on the page.

PREVIEW YOUR SEARCH RESULTS

When you search for anything in OS X Lion using the desktop Spotlight search icon in the top bar, you can get a preview of the search results. Simply move the pointer over one of the search results and it will show you a quick look panel with a preview of the particular file’s contents. Note that this works with documents and images only.

LAUNCHPAD WALLPAPER STYLE

By default, LaunchPad displays the installed applications over a blurred image of your desktop wallpaper. If you don’t like that look, then simply press ‘Control + Option + Command + B’ to switch between various background effect styles.

SECURE EMPTY TRASH

Hold the Command button on the keyboard and then alternate (right) click on the Trash icon on the icon dock. The pop up menu will display ‘Secure Empty Trash’ instead of just ‘Empty trash’. The benefit of Secure Empty Trash is that the deleted files cannot be recovered by anyone using basic data recovery tools. Note that using the Secure Empty Trash feature takes more time to empty the trash than normal.

Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/seven-hidden-tricks-about-your-operating-system/articleshow/11866800.cms?curpg=1

Samsung May Combine Bada Operating System With Tizen Software

January 18th, 2012

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s largest smartphone maker, said it may combine its Bada mobile- phone operating system with the Intel Corp.-backed Tizen software under development.

“We are carefully looking at it as an option to make the platforms serve better,” Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung said in a statement today.

The comments follow a Forbes report that said efforts to merge Bada with the open-source Tizen operating system are under way, citing Tae-Jin Kang, senior vice president of Samsung’s content-planning team. Tizen will support mobile applications written with Bada’s software after the integration, the magazine reported on its website.

Samsung, the biggest seller of mobile devices running Google Inc.’s open-source Android software, uses Bada in some of its lower-end smartphones.

Executives from companies including Intel Corp., Samsung, NTT DoCoMo Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc formed the Tizen association on Jan. 1 to support development of the open-source software. The software development groups LiMo Foundation and Linux Foundation said in September they will jointly develop Tizen for use in a range of devices from mobile phones to televisions.

Source:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-01-17/samsung-may-combine-bada-operating-system-with-tizen-software.html

Oracle VM 3.0 launch – the hypervisor battle heats up

August 25th, 2011

The battle over the virtual machine software market, also known as the hypervisor market, has just heated up a notch. Oracle has leaped onto the field with guns blazing hoping to take down the almighty at VMware. Oracle joins Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, the Xen open source community, the KVM open source community in the effort to take on the leading supplier of virtual machine software, VMware. In this announcement, Oracle is trying to one-up VMware in a number of key areas.

What did Oracle announce?
Oracle announced Oracle VM 3.0, Oracle’s own distribution of Xen virtual machine software. It also announced the Oracle VM Storage connect to improve how virtual servers interact with storage.

Here’s how Oracle describes the key features of Oracle VM 3.0:

Storage Connect plug-in framework: lets administrators transparently manage virtualization and attached storage arrays together through Oracle VM Manager while fully leveraging their investments in advanced storage functionality, such as deduplication and fast clone. Plug-ins are being developed by Oracle for its Pillar Axiom SAN storage system and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, and by other and leading storage providers, including Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, and NetApp.
Centralized network configuration and management: enables configuration of all server and VM networking from the Oracle VM Manager GUI, including advanced options such as bridging, bonding, VLANs and multi-pathing.
Improved ease-of-use: new features including server and storage discovery help speed infrastructure set-up while a new, dynamic “real-time” HTML user interface and comprehensive event tracking capabilities facilitate management over time.
Advanced, policy-based management capabilities: automates dynamic resource scheduling and server power management to improve application quality of service and reduce cost and power consumption in support of “green IT” initiatives.
Open Virtualization Format (OVF) industry standard support: enables customers to use Oracle VM Manager to import OVF based software assemblies to accelerate application deployment.
Snapshot analysis
Since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, we’ve seen an increased emphasis on a complete stack of Oracle products including the following:

A family of systems
An operating system (Linux)
A virtual machine software product (Oracle VM)
Development environment
Management tools for the entire Oracle environment
Database engine
Applications
I find myself reminded of IBM in the early 1970s.

When surveyed, Oracle’s customers and partners have complained about Oracle’s tactics in trying to take over the complete IT environment in its customer’s data centers. Oracle has dropped support of its products on some competitive systems, has said that it will not test and support opposing virtual machine technology and now appears to be attacking VMware straight on on the eve of VMware’s bash, VMworld.

Oracle’s VM 3.0 clearly is designed to out gun VMware in a number of key areas: management, connections with storage, scalability, and, of course, support of Oracle’s applications and tools. Will this be enough to turn VMware hypervisor customers into Oracle hypervisor customers? I don’t think so. We’ll need to read more customer success stories, learn more about whether Oracle VM really out performs VMware, and learn if Oracle’s hypervisor support is really enterprise-class.
Since Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, the Xen open source community, the KVM open source community and a few others are also charging up the hill towards VMware, it is going to be an interesting battle.

It appears to me that all of this direct competition is going to force VMware to do the following things:

Revise its recently revised pricing strategy to more directly deal with the competition
Revise its terms and conditions (I’ve been hearing people talk about the VMware Hypervisor tax on their organization. Could Oracle’s announcement force a change?)
Support policies for operating systems, third party applications and third party tools
Let’s see what VMware does next week. I’ll be at VMworld and will post what I learn.

Source:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/oracle-vm-30-launch-the-hypervisor-battle-heats-up/3665

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