Surface tablet keynote

If you missed the keynote then now you have the chance to check it out. I am personally quite impressed about the touch cover, which I didn't like from the pictures. The overall quality of the device seems superb, I love how thorough Microsoft has been when developing this product.
But does the RT version come with desktop mode also or are the ones in the end of demo pro versions?

I thought it will be unavailable on RT.

My next PC will be surface :)

Google data centers revealed

Now you can have peek inside those mysterious data centers that Google has built. Seems like they have a deal with Stormtroopers to guard their data. Scroll down for a video!

10. Georgia, USA

These colorful pipes send and receive water for cooling our facility. Also pictured is a G-Bike, the vehicle of choice for team members to get around outside our data centers.

9. Iowa, USA

Our Council Bluffs data center provides over 115,000 square feet of space. We make the best out of every inch, so you can use services like Search and YouTube in the most efficient way possible.

8. Georgia, USA

Blue LEDs on this row of servers tell us everything is running smoothly. We use LEDs because they are energy efficient, long lasting and bright.

7. Iowa, USA

Inside our campus network room, routers and switches allow our data centers to talk to each other. The fiber optic networks connecting our sites can run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. The fiber cables run along the yellow cable trays near the ceiling.

6. Oklahoma, USA

A rare look behind the server aisle. Here hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the server racks into a cooling unit to be recirculated. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of our servers.

5. Iowa, USA

Hovering above the floor in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the scale of our data center there begins to take shape. Huge steel beams both support the structure and help distribute power.

4. Georgia, USA

Thousands of feet of pipe line the inside of our data centers. We paint them bright colors not only because it's fun, but also to designate which one is which. The bright pink pipe in this photo transfers water from the row of chillers (the green units on the left) to a outside cooling tower.

3. Mayes County, Oklahoma

Each of our server racks has four switches, connected by a different colored cable. We keep these colors the same throughout our data center so we know which one to replace in case of failure.

2. The Dalles, Oregon

In an unoccupied area, motion-sensors automatically switch off the main lighting to save power. The result is the dazzling glow of the world's data filtered through multicolored LEDs. It's like holiday lights year-round.

1. Hamina, Finland

Server floors like these require massive space and efficient power to run the full family of Google products for the world. Here in Hamina, Finland, we chose to renovate an old paper mill to take advantage of the building's infrastructure as well as its proximity to the Gulf of Finland's cooling waters.

Video 

Google Chromebook released

Google Chromebook by Samsung

Have you already seen the launch announcement of a new product by Google?
There is a new product on the market - the Chromebook, tagged at 249$
This seems like a perfect product for your grandparents that need to edit only a few documents and do some internet surfing.

Here are the specs:

• Model Number: XE303C12
• Display Size: 11.6-inches
• Display: 1366x768 resolution; 200nit brightness
• Weight: 2.43 lbs (1.1.kg)
• Less than 0.8 inches thick (17.5 mm)
• Battery Life: over 6.5 hours
• Processor: Samsung Exynos 5250
• Memory: 2GB
• Storage: 16GB SSD (Google is including 100GB free online storage)
• Webcam
• Ports: 1 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0, combo headphone/mic jack, secure digital memory slot
• HDMI Port
• Bluetooth 3.0™ Compatible
• Speaker: 1.5W speaker X 2
• Keyboard: Full-size Chrome keyboard
• Wireless: 802.11 abg/n 2x2
• MSRP: $249 USD / 229 GBP

And here you can see the Chromebook being used by one of the Google employees.

Google earnings Q3 2012

Did you know about Google's this years Q3 earnings? They topped at $14.10 billion in revenue, $2.74 billion in operating income.

A great slogan for Apple fanboys and -girls

Microsoft Surface with WinRT prices revealed

Well, the day has come, pre-ordering of Microsoft Surface is open and the prices have been revealed.
To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed in the prices. In this article we look into US prices.
Don't be fooled, these devices are bundled with WinRT version and have ARM processor and no real PC power nor access to desktop programs or desktop itself, like Windows users have today.
For the real PC tablets we have to wait probably until next year 1st or 2nd quarter.

How much do they cost?

Only the 32gb tablet without any extras would be 499$. To get the "touch" cover for it you have to pay extra 100$
Now if you are not into touch keyboard cover and want to go with real typing keyboard cover then replace latter with 120$ (or 130$ for black model that matches your tablet color).
Probably you want a cover anyway so you basically can choose between 599$ tablet with touch keyboard or 619$ or 629$ with real typing keyboard (depending on your color preference).
I strongly believe that it is still a good to have an option to buy the tablet without the cover (developers clap their hands for this)

What about the storage options?

The metro programs are quite small (because there are no super-duper HQ programs yet in MS Store). But if you think about it, 32gb is probably not enough to store your movies and music. Probably you would like to double the storage and go with 64gb version which costs 699$ (and comes with the touch cover).
That's 100$ extra on top of the 599$ device. Isn't that a lot of money for extra 32gb?
Let's compare... If the devices have SSD inside, you can get 120gb laptop SSD drive from amazon right now, if you want to compare. If you sum 32gb with 120gb you get 150gb.
There are no other options besides 32 and 64 gigabytes right now.


All these prices are for US. In United Kingdom, the 699$ model would cost over 900$ (if converted).

What could be better?

To beat Apple's iPad, I think the options provided will not be sufficient and the Surface will remain in shelves until the prices drop or something get's better than iPad (For example if the tablet is equivalent to regular PC by processor and/or operating system).

They would have to come out with a lot better options like:

• 32gb version (no cover) for super cheap price like 300$ or less (for devs to make more apps)
• 64gb retail version with cover for 449$
• 120gb top notch version with cover for 649$

Also, there should be more color options for personalizing the experience (Probably will happen after general availability)

The platform has not proved itself yet and it is quite hard to do so with no decent customer base and programs in the store.

I really like the concept of Windows 8, Windows phone 8 and Metro for touch devices but the high priced hardware provided is not helping this technology to get into the masses...

I would like to go with the cheapest option myself and start experimenting with the platform because there is no real reason why to buy Surface right now. There are no really useful apps for Metro (besides those bundled by Microsoft, but I can access my calendar, mail, IM and other stuff like that even without this tablet).

Pre-Order now!

If you are interested in pre-ordering this great (but high priced) device and live in the US - click here

For other countries - click here (Expect even more higher prices than US)

More information and a video about the Surface

What do you think about the device itself or the pre-order pricing? Leave a comment!

Teaser

Teaser

Take a wild guess what's popping up after you press play...

Are you anticipating?

If you want to read more about the topic, there is an excellent article in here.

Cyber warfare was declared against Estonia and it has started.

A threat to be taken seriously

Anonymous group of hackers have threatened Estonian people to launch a full scale cyber war against their government and business infrastructure. The war was supposed to start on Friday, 12th of October 2012.
A week ago similar threat was addressed to Swedish government and people and some attacks followed, temporarily taking down several sites.

Here is the video about anonymous group declaring cyber war against Estonia:

During the day there were some attempts to DDOS the national police webpage but it had little success. Server administrators were ready for it and replaced the full webpage with a dummy that displayed only critical information like contacts, phone numbers and such. After a short period of being under attack, all normal content reappeared and all the advanced information queries were possible again.
The attack caused a lot of anticipation for something far more serious to happen. So something else happened. There was a case of breaking in to part of Estonian Road Administration's web page, specifically a registration page for an event that happened in 2010. The password hashes of around 50 accounts were published to internet with names and e-mails of the account holders.
Yesterday there were four attacks. Which first was directed against Estonian National Broadcasting company, the government site Eesti.ee and two of the largest opposing political parties.

Agitators identified

The Estonian Information System’s Authority was actively monitoring the network traffic before and during the incident and a few attackers have been already identified, most of them being underage kids. Probably the knowledge gained in the cyber defence trainings at CCDCOE helps to build up any countermeasures. If any further attacks occur they will probably be tracked back to the root. Not even 7 proxies should help :)

Here is a quote about the readiness for such situation, an announcement made in NATO's communication summit in Bucharest:

“Provide a capability to assist allied nations, upon request, to counter a cyber attack”

What other targets were successfully hacked into is still a mystery. According to news portals, nothing serious happened and all the attacks were neutralized.

Overall the day was usual as any other, businesses were running smoothly. The outcome of the whole situation might actually be positive, because all institutions reviewed and reinforced their IT security.

Friday is not over yet but most of the people have gone to spend good time in town to forget the minor incidents that happened during the day.

There is something for all of us to learn - Keep your servers up to date at all times and have a backup plan for case of cyber warfare, there might not be a warning before the next attacks...

Since now, Estonian homepage is up and running :)

Estonia, a country of IT

Estonia is a small country in eastern Europe with population little over 1,3 million people. Member of European Union and NATO, which latter has built Cyber Defence Center in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia.

Among other achievements, Estonia ranks first in both State of World Liberty and Internet freedom.

Read more about Estonia from Wikipedia.

Update @ 23:30

Seems like the few single attacks have stopped. Also some news have been posted, where a Cyber Defence Centre researcher Rain Ottis expresses his opinion: "the majority of Anonymous members don't understand the reasons behind the attack". That being because the goals of the movement differ a lot from the current event. The harm was done by kids with tools they got from random facebook event. It is probably not a good idea to download all kinds of crap that can quite easily infect your own computer, so it's best to inform everybody not to follow any invitations to join the rebellion.
Good night and stay safe.

Don't forget to comment!

Apple got their slide-to-unlock patent updated

Apple has patents for their slide-to-unlock technique, seems like it wasn't strict enough so they made it "better" or actually more broader, to make their competitors life more complex.

Before they had patent for:

"Continuously moving the unlock image on the touch-sensitive display in accordance with movement of the detected contact."

This is now updated and notes about predefined path and location are gone now. Imagine how Android phones get locked right now? They don't have predefined path and location can also vary, but the image is still drawn over the screen. Would this infringe the new patents? Yes, it would.

We are facing even more patent wars from Apple and even more money will be burnt by lawmaking than R&D. In this stupid war all the innovators lose, because they get dragged into court. For example take the case with Apple's Siri. A technology company named Vlingo got into lawsuits because they didn't want to get eaten by Apple. The voice recognition software developed by them was somehow infringing Apple's patents before Siri was even made. After the financial damage done to the company, the owner was forced to sell his business. Mission complete.

I think it's time to start boycotting Apple products, because of their awkward understanding of business ethics. So don't upgrade to iPhone 5, stay with your current instead - they don't have much difference anyway :)

Microsoft training videos about Windows 8 and its new Start screen

If you are a windows user, then this might be something for you.
Everybody knows that Windows 8 is ready and it has a totally new Start screen that is not Gangnam, but Metro style.

Actually it's pretty easy to use and totally cool for tablets (or surface, if you prefer). Although it seems impossible at start, it actually is possible to use all of it's features on a regular PC with mouse and a keyboard.

Here are the videos you might want to check out...

For PC-s with touch screen:

For PC-s without touch screen:

And a bit about customizing the Start which is pretty darn important step:

And something that I'm not used to yet:

If you haven't, you can learn more about keyboard combos from here.
I will simplify it for those non-native English speakers, who don't know what fullstop is. Just find the period sign ( . ) [not a tit] in between comma and shift .
Make sure you know all the shortcut combinations (even the old from Win7) before jumping into Metro world. They help a lot!


Have fun with Windows 8!
I am personally anticipating for Windows phone 8 now :P

Java coming to the microcontroller world

That's right, it will soon be possible to write "microcode" in Java.
Like it or not...
That should bring us more developers on embedded devices with ARM processors.

Find Oracles press release from here

More more information about Java ME Embedded from here

I personally feel that there is now one more reason to learn Java!

Delete files and folders older than 90 days

A rough start for a blog.

Don't expect for long stories about romantic walks outside or whine about evenings when my dog pooped on the floor.

There you go, some powershell right in your face!

Problem

Folder has tons of items inside and all the files are irrelevant after 90 days.
Irrelevant files need to be deleted.

Solution

I have been using different approaches to do this task. Today my colleague asked for a script that deletes files older than 90 days. Didn't want to give him the "temporary script" I had used before, so I converted it to be oneliner. Here it is:

Get-ChildItem -Path "PUT PATH HERE" -Include "PUT FILTER HERE" -Recurse | where {$_.LastWriteTime -le $(get-date).AddDays(-N)} | Remove-Item

 So you could have it remove all files located in "c:\temp" that have ".txt" extension that have not been updated in past 90 days with the command below:

Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\test" -Include "*.txt" -Recurse | where {$_.LastWriteTime -le $(get-date).AddDays(-90)} | Remove-Item

Conclusion

It is a good idea to remove the last "| Remove-Item" at start and try running it in Console. Review the list of files that would get deleted, if the results get piped to Remove-Item commandlet.

To execute commands as task, you can use the -command parameter for powershell:

-Command "write-host TEST; pause;"

You might want to add these arguments also:

–Noninteractive –Nologo

Read more about running powershell tasks with scheduler from here

Please leave comments if you find this useful or think that this could be achieved in better way.