Windows 7 Laku Dipasaran

Penjualann Windows & buatan Microsoft tergolong fabtastis sejak diluncurkan bulan lalu. Jepang adalah pasar terbesar kedua setelah AS bagi Microsoft. tidak disebutkan besaran angka penjualan dijepang. namun, fitur Windows 7 itu memberikan kecepatn pada pengguna komputer, termasuk pada saat start-up. Hal ini membuat Microsoft mendominasi pasar dan pernah menimbulkan gugatan bahwa perusahaan meninggalkan kompetisi.

LA OSK 4

buat temen2 q yg mau LA OSK 4. yang tentang program Flip Flop n cara kerja dr gambar FF. tp mohon sedikit diedit lg bagi yang bukan perulangan.
silahkan klik disini

Bank Trojan botnet targets Facebook users

On the heels of one fake Facebook e-mail scam, a researcher warned on Wednesday of another such campaign in which users of the popular social network are being tricked into revealing their passwords and downloading a Trojan that steals financial data. 

In the latest scam being blasted to e-mail in-boxes, a legitimate-looking Facebook notice asks people to provide information to help the social network update its log-in system, said Fred Touchette, a senior security analyst at AppRiver. When the user clicks the "update" button in the e-mail, they are directed to a fake Facebook log-in screen where their user name is filled in and they are prompted to provide their password. (news.cnet.com)

 
When they provider that information, victims are taken to a page that offers an "Update Tool," but that is actually the Zeus bank Trojan that is designed to steal financial and personal data, Touchette said. 

Users of smart phones that have the Facebook app installed can also easily be duped because the phishing e-mail appears as an actual Facebook notification complete with Facebook icon, he said. The message is received in the e-mail in-box on the phone as well as under the Facebook notification section in the app itself, he added.

There are likely to be a lot of victims given how many e-mails the scammers are sending. AppRiver has captured about 6 million e-mails in its filters and noticed that the messages were coming in at a rate of 30,000 a minute at one point, according to Touchette. That's about 10 times the usual botnet e-mail message rate, he said.

More details are on the AppRiver blog. 

On Tuesday, researchers reported that a different botnet, Bredolab, was distributing fake "Facebook Password Reset Confirmation" e-mails that included a Trojan. As of late Wednesday night, security provider Cloudmark said it had seen more than 730,000 of the Bredolab-related e-mails.

To protect against such phishing attacks, people should be extremely cautious about clicking on links in e-mails and they can mouse over the link to see if the domain is a legitimate domain, Touchette said. 

Meanwhile, Facebook users should easily be tipped off that the latest scam is just that, a scam, he said. "Facebook doesn't need all of its users to update their accounts in order for them to make changes to their site," he added.

If there is any question about the legitimacy of the e-mail or the link, users should close the e-mail and go directly to the site to check for important notices to customers, he said.

Intel's next-gen memory closer to reality

Researchers are two steps closer to creating a mass-market version of technology called phase-change memory that could change how computers of the future are put together. 

Intel and Numonyx, the chipmaker's joint venture with STMicroelectonics that's focused on flash memory, announced Wednesday they've built a new type of phase-change memory chip they hope will help fulfill the technology's promise for small size and large capacity. 

Its 64-megabit capacity isn't momentous on its own--Numonyx announced a 128Mb device in 2006 and Samsung said in September it's producing a 512Mb chip. But what is significant are two major advances in making the decades-old idea practical. 

First, the researchers built a grid of wires into the chip so a computer can easily control the writing of a 1 or 0 in each of the 64 million memory cells. Second, they announced their manufacturing process lets them stack several layers atop each other so memory can be packed more densely in a given volume. 
 
Storing numbers in a computer hardly is new, so why could phase-change memory, which records ones and zeros by changing the molecular state of a particular type of glass, be a big deal? 

In short, it could combine the conventional computer memory's high speed with flash memory's low cost, low power demands, and high capacity. Having lots of fast memory on hand could simplify computer hardware and software that today must reckon with a hierarchy of storage technologies that trade off performance for capacity. 

Operating systems today must constantly work to keep important information in memory while relegating the rest to "virtual memory" stored on hard drives--or, these days, an intermediate layer in the hierarchy, solid state disks made of flash memory. Deciding what goes where is complicated, and priorities change from one moment to the next. 

"At Intel, we see this as an important milestone in enabling a future class of memory where you can combine attributes of memory semantics and storage semantics, potentially collapsing the technologies into one memory type," said Al Fazio, Intel's director of memory technology development, discussing the technology Wednesday. "The research is very promising in delivering that." 

For another thing, phase-change memory could get around difficulties of shrinking current memory technologies to ever-smaller sizes. And for another, it could lower the power consumption, reducing waste heat and extending battery life. 

A long history
But be sure to temper that promise with a long history. 

Phase-change memory is a decades-old idea. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, of Moore's Law fame, wrote a paper on the idea in 1970. It's made some headway since then: phase-change technology is used to store data on rewritable DVDs and CDs. 

Intel and Numonyx aren't alone in trying to commercialize the technology. Start-up Ovonyx also is working on it, as are IBM, Samsung, and Philips Electronics. But as the years of labor show, it's been difficult bringing phase-change memory to market. 

Fazio and Greg Atwood, senior technology fellow at Numonyx, took pains to say their companies' work on the technology began in earnest at the beginning of the decade. 

"Significant new memory technologies are really quite rare," Atwood said. "There are many hurdles in introduction of new memory. Ten years is not an unreasonable time frame." 

Arguably, Atwood said, there only are three forms of memory developed since the 1960s, he said: dynamic random access memory (DRAM) that's the mainstay of computer memory, the more expensive static dynamic random access memory (SRAM) that's often integrated on processors, and electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), of which flash is one variety. 

Adding phase-change memory, sometimes called PCM, PRAM, or ovonics, therefore would be quite a departure in the history of computing. 

How's it work?
Phase change memory stores 1s and 0s in a tiny patch of glass material that can be changed from one state to another--specifically, so its molecules are arranged either in a crystalline pattern or an amorphous jumble. It's conceptually similar to water being either a liquid or an ice. 

In addition, Intel announced "multi-level" phase change memory in 2008 that adds two intermediate states, a move that means a single cell could hold two bits of data instead of one--the binary numbers of 00, 01, 10, or 11. That effectively doubled the 128Mbit capacity of the prototype chip to a 256Mbit chip, Intel said. 

The stacking technique could increase memory density further, though there are limits, Atwood said. 

"In principle, we can stack as high as we choose. In practice, every layer of memory has an additional cost," he said, requiring more processing and increasing the risks that defects will lower the yield of useful chips produced from a production batch. "There's no reason why we couldn't stack four layers for example, or potentially more." 

Though the researchers are excited about stacking, the 64Mbit prototypes uses only a single layer of memory cells. "The first layer is the hardest layer," Fazio said. And today's flash memory is only one layer thick. 

Like flash but unlike conventional computer memory, phase-change memory is nonvolatile, which means that once data is written, it stays put even if the power is switched off. That doesn't just preserve data when a device is off; it also means that unlike DRAM, power isn't required to keep the data in memory. 

Ever smaller
Intel was cagey about just how closely packed its latest memory cells are. But the company expects to achieve the same density of memory cells as flash memory--then go beyond it eventually. 

Flash memory today requires relatively high voltages--about 20 volts--to store its data, Fazio said. But high voltage and small distances are hard to put together, a fact that imposes limits on flash memory. 

Today's flash memory features measure about 30 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Because of the voltage issue and the fact that the difference between a 1 and a 0 is just "a handful of electrons," it's getting harder to shrink flash memory technology. 

Phase-change memory, though, can get much smaller. "Research in the industry has shown that to be stable down to 5 nanometers and lower," Fazio said. 

The new wiring grid helps keep up with the shrinking trend by providing a way to get at the data even as cells get smaller. 

All this is important for the computer industry, which has struggled with the challenges of data storage. 

Once upon a time, memory and processors worked at closer speeds, but they've diverged over the years, which means processors often must idle while the memory system fetches data the CPU has requested. System architects have responded by building a hierarchy of storage systems--different levels of SRAM cache memory on the chip or right next to it, DRAM that's one level removed, and hard drives a step beyond that. 

Today's flash memory, which is faster than a hard drive and cheaper than conventional memory, is changing that arrangement. It's already revolutionized the portable device market with enough capacity for lots of songs, videos, and photos. Now it's begun arriving in high-end laptops with solid-state drives that offer longer battery life, higher performance, and greater ruggedness. And servers are on the cusp of major changes with the incorporation of flash memory. 

But flash memory is sluggish compared to conventional memory. If phase-change memory meets its high-performance promise in coming years, expect more profound changes for computing systems. (news.cnet.com)

Music search is Google's newest tune

LOS ANGELES--Already the far-and-away leader in search, Google wants to be a big player in music discovery, too.
 

The pop-up MySpace player that will appear when clicking the 'play' button in a Google search.
(Credit: MySpace) 

The search giant teamed up with News Corp.'s MySpace and streaming service Lala for the Wednesday debut of the new Google music search feature at the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood. With the new music search, which had been internally code-named "OneBox" when news of the project broke earlier this month, search queries pertaining to something like a song, artist, lyrics, or album will bring up links to streaming songs from iLike and MySpace, as well as links to artist information on Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody. The lyrics search is provided through a partnership with Gracenote. 

"It is directly embedded and integrated into Google search. There's no special button to push," R.J. Pittman, director of product management for search properties, said in a phone interview with CNET News. Currently, due to licensing and availability issues, the music search is U.S.-only.

There also won't be direct download links in Google: those will be handled through Lala and MySpace. "We push all the music engagement and commerce down through the partners," Pittman said.

Additionally, if a relevant music video is available, the MySpace window that pops up when someone clicks on the "play" button in search results will display a link to that video through MySpace's new music video portal. That's interesting, considering music videos are some of the most popular content on Google's own YouTube--but YouTube video results will continue to show up independently of the new music results in Google searches.

Financial terms of the partnerships aren't yet clear. "Everyone's keeping their own revenues and we're not messing with anything," Lala founder and Chairman Bill Nguyen told CNET News. But MySpace Music President Courtney Holt was a bit more tight-lipped, saying "we're not discussing the financial details."

The MySpace deal is a little more complicated to begin with, though. Google had been in talks with music start-up iLike about integration into music search, but then iLike was acquired by MySpace in a deal that closed earlier this month. Indeed, a statement from Holt says that "this relationship was secured and implemented by the iLike team." But iLike founder Ali Partovi (who's currently on board MySpace's music team) explained that the partnership now has "MySpace branding, (and) MySpace content licensing." Through the integration of iLike's technology, it'll also have concert notifications if someone searches on Google for a band that's currently on tour. 

"I think MySpace, along with (Apple's) iPod, is one of the most trusted brands in music, one of the most resonant to consumers," Partovi said. MySpace is also reported to be in talks with Microsoft to power a music feature on MSN.

Music search is something that Google could really dominate. According to traffic firm Experian Hitwise, 6 percent of Google's top 1,000 search-related terms deal with music, and already 30 percent of traffic to sites that Hitwise classifies under the "music" umbrella comes from Google.

Considering Google's reach, it's a big win for both MySpace, currently struggling to redefine itself as a pop culture powerhouse rather than a social network through its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and Lala, which also has a new song-gifting deal with Facebook. "We think (Google's music search) going to have a thousand percent increase in our sales, an order of magnitude more," Lala's Nguyen told CNET News.

This also means that music-related search results are getting a sheen of legitimacy on Google. With official partnerships, Google's most prominent music search results will be from sites that have licensing deals in place with the major labels, rather than potentially pirated content. Google's history with the music industry is spotty at best: it's had to strike its own deals with the major record labels, and relations haven't always been positive. Music search puts it all into order, partners in the deal say.

"Instead of ending up with a pirate site and a page with a bunch of ads or random lyrics sites, you wind up with a play button," Nguyen said.

Updated 4:30 p.m. Just after Google and Lala made the announcement official (in what was probably not a conincidence) Yahoo released a blog post designed to point out that they've been offering this kind of music search for a while. "We've made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers," said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search. (news.cnet.com)