Doors Floors and More

Cited: ABC News

Internet radio services like Pandora and Slacker debuted on the web and have since attracted millions of listeners via smartphones

Pandora was an early app for the iPhone and Slacker formed a partnership with BlackBerry provider Research in Motion. Last December, Tech on Deck discussed dedicated Internet radio options for these services, but higher-end home audio systems can deliver them — and a lot more — to multiple rooms of a home.

Since its debut in 2007, Sonos has led the way in wirelessly delivering audio to multiple rooms at the same time using its own networking standard.

The company has produced compact white boxes called ZonePlayers intended to connect to speakers customers already had or purchased separately, but now has taken the next step in producing a compact all-in-one device that integrates the speakers called the ZonePlayer S5.

Logitech Squeezebox Uses Wireless Wi-Fi Network

The $399 ZonePlayer S5 comes in black or white, and would be at home in a Bose showroom. It produces the most brilliant sound and satisfying bass ever delivered in a natively networked unit with integrated speakers and proves remarkably resilient to distortion at high volumes.

Like other Sonos devices, it can be controlled with Sonos’ own controller or well-designed software that runs on an iPod touch or iPhone. In addition to playing music files on a PC or networked storage device, Sonos has created partnerships with a number of services, including Rhapsody, Sirius XM, Napster and Pandora.

Unlike the Sonos system, the $299 Logitech Squeezebox line uses a standard wireless Wi-Fi network. The Squeezebox Touch supports the Wi-Fi Protected Setup standard, which can make setup as easy as pushing a button on an appropriately equipped router.

Logitech had produced its own (albeit less fancy) screen-based remote a while ago in a product called the Squeezebox Duet. However, the company has now moved the color touch screen into the unit with the Squeezebox Touch. And while Logitech does not provide any free software for an iPod touch or iPhone with which to control Squeezebox playback, two third-party options are available from the iTunes app store for less than $10.

Devices Improve Convenience in Delivering High-Quality Audio

The Touch is a small, slim, lightweight unit that would fit well on most desktops. However, like most of the Squeezebox line save for the larger Squeezebox Boom and less expensive Squeezebox Radio, it lacks integrated speakers, so it must be connected to external speakers or an amplifier.

The Squeezebox user interface has always been solid and logical, if not as smooth as Sonos’. It is also a little slow, but not as much as the touch user interfaces on Sony’s recently released $199 Dash, which includes speakers. Also, like the Dash, the Squeezebox Touch supports playback of the Slacker Internet radio service, a curious omission from the Sonos lineup.

Sonos S5 lowers its entry price and improves convenience in delivering high-quality audio to multiple rooms using the Sonos system while the Squeezebox Touch enhances the user experience would have been primarily a product of getting music to one room at a time.

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My Take: I suppose if you have money, this is fantastic. I can barely afford to buy a cheap surround sound system for my home. But it would be great to be able to play of CD copy and listen to it everywhere in a home. It would definitely take the need of CD duplication out of the equation. You only need one CD to listen to and not one for each room.

That is almost like having answering service. Your phone is answered no matter what room you are in. Then again, you have to be able to afford a answering phone service as well. Maybe if I was a Bergen County CPA, I wouldn’t have to worry about money. Then I would be able to do Bergen County tax preparation and make even more money.

I bet New York tax planning accountants make a lot of money. I know that NY tax return preparation accountants make the big money because they work for the big corporations. Then again, I am off topic what we are talking about is found in every room in the house.

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Search Engine Placement

National Positions, Network Solutions, Findlaw and many other SEO companies have offered a first page guarantee. If you’re looking for a SEO service that offers first page guarantees, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The bottom line “fact” is that no one can control the search engines or the results displayed to searchers, nor does ANY SEO company. What this service can control is the techniques applied to your website in an effort to get you placed as high as humanly possible, and nothing more. The only thing you are guaranteed is the best SEO services available on the Internet.

VA Maids and Carpet Care

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Cited: AP

“Intel Inside” just might have a new meaning after all. Consumers may find inside their television, cell phone and car Intel Corp. chips and security software. This may be true for any device that could one day connect to the Internet as well as require a computer chip.

And with its deal to buy McAfee Inc. for $7.68 billion, the world’s No. 1 semiconductor company now wants to sell you security software as well — in all those places.

The all-cash deal announced Thursday, August 19, marks the biggest acquisition in Intel’s 42-year history, an expensive example of Intel’s commitment to sell more than chips for personal computers and servers. It is the sixth biggest deal globally between two technology companies over the past 3½ years, according to Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor’s.

But the deal is also a reminder of Intel’s inconsistency in finding new ways to grow. The company is an infrequent acquirer with a history of dabbling in, and retreating from, markets outside its core business. It once even had a toy division that made microscopes and other gadgets — a project Intel eventually gave up because of poor sales.

Once the deal closes, as expected, McAfee would help Intel improve the security of its chips, which are currently inside about 80 percent of the world’s PCs and servers. It also would open a new revenue stream for Intel, which plans to sell McAfee’s software alongside its chips for PCs and other Internet-connected devices.

Joint products from the companies won’t appear until next year. When they do, the most noticeable result for consumers would likely be sales pitches for security software in unexpected places.

“Everywhere we sell a microprocessor, there’s an opportunity for a security software sale to go with it,” Intel CEO Paul Otellini said on a conference call with analysts. “It’s not just the opportunity to co-sell, it’s the opportunity to deeply integrate these into the architecture of our products.”

The price Intel is paying — $48 per share — represents a 60% premium over McAfee’s August 18 close of $29.93.

McAfee shares surged $17.08, or 57%, to close on August 19 at $47.01. The last time McAfee’s stock was that high was during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s.

The announcement worried some Intel investors because it takes Intel so far afield of what it’s best at, which is making microprocessors, the “brains” of computers. Intel shares fell 63 cents, or 3.2%, to $18.96.

Some analysts questioned the wisdom of buying McAfee when Intel could have gotten many of the same technical gains by continuing the two companies’ partnership. Intel said it has been working closely with McAfee for the last year and a half to improve the security of both companies’ products.

Others praised the deal as giving Intel an edge over other chip-makers in markets where Intel is weak, such as cell phones, where chips that use less power than Intel’s are more popular.

Analyst Tristan Gerra with Robert W. Baird & Co. said the deal addresses rising security concerns among makers of non-PC computers and gives Intel “significant security advantages” over chip-makers who have to rely on third parties for the security software they bundle and sell to device makers.

Intel’s chips already have a significant amount of security features. McAfee’s technology should help strengthen those features and fine-tune them for the new devices that Intel is targeting — even if consumers don’t buy additional security software.

Intel doesn’t need the bump from McAfee immediately, having booked its biggest quarterly net income in a decade in the April-June period. But just as PC makers are desperate to broaden their reach as phones and other devices replace certain types of computers, Intel wants to make sure its chips end up inside the next generation of Internet-connected devices.

Intel said the deal would hurt earnings slightly in the first year the companies are combined, or help earnings slightly if certain costs and one-time items connected to the acquisition are excluded.

Both boards unanimously approved the deal. It still needs approval from regulators and McAfee shareholders, but analysts do not expect problems. Intel did not say when it believes the deal would close. Both companies are based in Santa Clara, Calif.

Intel has traveled this road before.

Before McAfee, Intel’s biggest acquisition was its $2.14 billion takeover of Level One Communications in 1999, part of a multibillion-dollar spending spree during the dot-com heyday to beef up Intel’s lineup of communications chips. That effort ended with Intel selling most of those businesses in 2006 for $600 million.

The sell-off illustrated a broader purging by Intel as its finances were suffering under an assault from a scrappy, smaller rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and its encroachment on Intel’s turf in server chips. AMD also found another way to hurt Intel: Its complaints about Intel’s sales tactics got Intel in trouble with antitrust regulators around the world.

Intel is fighting a record $1.45 billion antitrust fine in Europe and separate cases in South Korea and New York State. Earlier this month, it squashed the harshest antitrust case it has faced yet by settling with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Last year it also settled with AMD for $1.25 billion.

McAfee and Intel both had revenue last year in the amounts of $1.93 billion and $35.13 billion respectively. Intel has the most employees of almost 80,000 and McAfee has just over 6000 employees.

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My Take: I only have one question. Does this mean that the security software will get better? I used to use McAfee security software and stop because every time I turn around I had a virus. I now use a different virus program and rarely get a virus. Any New York computer service can tell you what I was told and that is McAfee is easy for hackers to crack. In one NY computer support group, I read about the same thing.

I’m sure that if you have a NJ IT consulting services they would be able to tell you more about this than I can. One thing I do believe in, never believe everything you read. Best thing is to research and in this instance you should contact New Jersey IT services or someone to confirm. I am sure that you really don’t want to have to resort to data recovery services because you got a virus.

One thing I do recommend, as any computer support group or service would recommend, back your system up! Back up to either to a removable hard drive or use remote backup services. Data recovery is not something you really want to go through because it can cost depending on the size of your system.

You might also consider colocation facilities. From what I understand colocation pricing is a very competitive and you should find a good rate. You might want to look into getting a colocation quote so that you have an automatic backup of your system.

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Cited: Reality Times

A forecast that was put out recently included some important observations on housing but did not get the attention it deserved by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. He spoke to the economic club of New York describing well-known problems standing in the way of economic growth. In particular the double digit unemployment and consumer confidence that is shaky week-by-week at best.

But buried away in his speech he said: Housing in the coming year is going to be a relative bright spot - a helpful driver of national economic growth, rather than the wet blanket it’s been for the past couple of years.

Think about that: Home sales and new home construction, at least according to the Fed, are likely to stimulate the economy in 2010 — enough to generate jobs and help avoid a double-dip recession.

That forecast just happens to track nicely with another that came out last week: Fannie Mae issued its projections for the coming year — and predicted that housing sales will jump by 11 percent — even in the face of a slow recovery for the economy as a whole. Meanwhile, scattered reports from hard-hit local real estate markets suggest that there may be some reasons for guarded optimism.

For example, research firm MDA DataQuick’s latest report on sales and prices in southern California, including the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernadino and Orange, found that October sales were up nearly three percent over September, and that prices are rebounding as well.

October sales in San Bernadino were 11% higher than September. In Ventura, they were up nearly 10%. Median prices for the six counties were up almost 2% for the month, but were still 6.7% below where they had been in October of 2008. Now, as is almost always the case, not all the news is on the up side. New home starts dropped by a surprisingly large, seasonally-adjusted 10.6%, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.

For those in the real estate and construction industry . . . Success in construction and building contracting requires that you deliver accurate construction cost estimates and proposals to your customers, and execute in the field according to your construction cost estimate. This means you need construction estimating software to accomplish the task accurately. But being accurate in your construction estimate is not enough, you must also have enough volume of work, and therefore volume of new proposals to pay your overhead, keep your best employees busy, and to have enough left over to pay yourself. Having good estimating software ensures your payment.

A lot of the decline came in multifamily housing apartment starts — a volatile month by month index — which plummeted by 35%. But there’s no sugar coating here: starts of single family homes dropped by 6.8%, which was enough of a negative to spook Wall Street.  The magic potion for home buyers this week is mortgage rates that are dropping again further into the upper 4% range. Fixed rate 30 year loans have averaged 4.8% and the popular 15 year loans averaged just 4.3% according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. This was thrown into the mix at the end of November, no wonder Wall Street a spooked.

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My Take: I think I can understand why housing would stimulate the economy, it would make more jobs available to people. More jobs means paychecks and that means people can afford to purchase homes. By building more homes, they create jobs. Workers would be needed to install granite kitchen counters, plumbing, electrical, etc.

Of course, more housing in Bethesda would mean that they would need Maryland house cleaning services, which would also create more jobs in the cleaning industry. Of course those services would have to make sure that they knew how to clean granite slabs properly. I am sure that they would know how to do it. One thing is definitely for sure that maid services MD are always needed as they are everywhere.

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Employment Problems

A law firm with New York employment lawyers specializing in enforcing the rights of employees in an effort to preserve a fair, equal and just employment environment represents plaintiffs in all phases of litigation in all forums including New York State and federal courts, arbitration, and before both state and federal administrative agencies. Sometimes when an employee is fired for the wrong reasons and then a LI civil rights lawyer is needed.

Christmas Videos

There is a service that specializes in duplicating, replicating, labeling and packaging CD/DVD media. Companies cannot compete with their prices and speed because they use the most cutting edge technology to produce a massive amount of product at a daily rate. That means this Christmas you can make all the video you want and be able to get a DVD copy made for every relative at a reasonable price. That means you would be able to get the same West Coast DVD duplication that big companies get.

Warmth and Style

Porches are a great place to start when decorating, an antique rocker or primitive chair gives it a nice touch that invites your guest to sit and relax. Next add an old wood crate or keg as an accent piece that doubles as a plant stand. Finish it off with a hand painted welcome slate and be sure to include some primitive décor as well. Then as you step inside the door, a braided rug will help to warm that cold tile foyer floor. Next add a primitive piece of furniture such as a hall console, adorned with a candle or a lamb for rustic lighting and added warmth.

Cited: TechNewsWorld

A new family of multicore processors for cloud computing, enterprise networking, multimedia and wireless infrastructure functions have been targeted by Tilera for upgrading. These chips will have 100 quarters according to the company. The new design uses a dynamic distributed approach instead of piling on more memory to avoid the data traffic jams that often plague massively multicore designs. Tilera is a multicore processor specialist will be manufacturing the first-ever 100 core processor in its TILE-Gx family, which will have four processors, with 16, 36, 64 and 100 cores. The processor is aimed at cloud computing, enterprise networking, multimedia and wireless infrastructure.

The 100-Core Processor

Tilera’s processors are based on its iMesh architecture, which can scale to hundreds of RISC-based cores or more on a single chip. RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing.

The 100-core Tilera processor will have 200 terabits of mesh bandwidth, Bob Doud, Tilera’s director of marketing Download Free eBook - The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales, told TechNewsWorld. This will solve the main problem to scaling up the number of cores on a processor — bandwidth.

“You can put 1,000 cores on a chip, but if you can’t feed it from memory, all those cores are fetching data all the time and will suck up all your memory,” Carl Howe, director of anywhere research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld. The 100-core processor will also have 32MB of cache, Doud said. This will be a combination of L1 and L2 cache.

Instead of piling on core memory, Tilera uses a dynamic distributed approach. “Our caching technology is very scalable — instead of having big centralized caches as Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) More about Intel has, we distribute the caches among the tiles and we let tiles look into each others’ caches in a coherent manner,” Doud explained. “You can’t just keep piling on bigger and bigger caches.”

Tilera’s “Cache for Home” technology does load balancing among caches, either across all the cores in a chip or in clusters of cores.

Mesh architecture is used most widely in wireless mesh networking. Each node in a mesh network can act as an independent router, whether or not it is connected to another network. This allows for continuous connections and reconfiguration around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached.

“Think of it as the Internet on a chip,” Doud said.

Tilera’s chips have five meshes, Doud explained. One’s for memory, one’s for I/O (input/output), one’s for cache coherency and two are in the user space. Mesh networking lets processors scale up their cores. It may let processors scale up to 1,000 cores, Doud said.

Tilera’s processors are built on the concept of a tile, which consists of a processor core, a cache and a switch. The switch lets each tile mesh with its neighbors on all sides. “We draw the analogy of the Internet on a chip because each of these switches can route packets up, down, left and right, and they’re scalable, whereas buses and rings don’t scale,” Doud said.

All the tiles are homogeneous and users can allocate them as desired to any task, Doud said. In essence, then, the tiles form a pool of resources which can be called up or returned to the pool at will. This is similar to the concept of maximizing the use of existing resources that lies at the heart of virtualization.

About the TILE-Gx Family

The TILE-Gx family is being fabricated using the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)’s 40-nanometer process.

TILE-Gx processors operate at up to 1.5 GHz with power consumption ranging from 10 to 55 watts. The chips have integrated high-performance DDR3 memory controllers. Each chip has either two or four 72-bit controllers running at speeds of up to 2,133 MHz with error-correcting code (ECC) support.

The processors have hardware acceleration engines on-chip. These Multistream iMesh Crypto Accelerator engines deliver up to 40 GB/second encryption and 20 GB/second full duplex compression processing. This is tightly coupled to the iMesh for low latency and wire-speed throughput.

Wire-speed throughput is enhanced by multicore programmable intelligent packet engines. These provide wire-speed packet classification, load balancing and buffer management. The engine is flexible and programmable in the C language. It delivers 80 GB/second and 120 million packets per second of throughput for packets with multiple layers of encapsulation.

For enhanced security, the chips contain a high-performance true random number generator and public key accelerator. These enable up to 50,000 RSA handshakes per second. Samples of the TILE-Gx36 processor will be available in the fourth quarter of 2010. The other processors will be rolled out in the following two quarters.

The More the Merrier

Tilera is not the first company to scale up the number of cores and a chip even if it is promising a 100 core processor. Intel demonstrated processors with multiple cores and 2007.

“Back in 2007, Intel demonstrated other processors with many, many cores,” Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst of computer platforms research at iSuppli, told TechNewsWorld. “The Intel Tera-scale was discussed as having 80 cores.”

That, Doud said, was just a laboratory experiment. “The 80-core Tera-scale prototype used only floating point cores,” he explained. “We believe Intel is probably four years away from having 100 cores.”

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My Take: I am not tech head. All this information sounds very impressive to me, but I really do not understand. What I think this 100 core chip is going to do is speed up computers. However, I could be completely wrong. I am lucky if I can change light bulbs let alone fix a computer. Even so, I would love to have a faster computer. I would love to have something other than Vista as well. Maybe at Christmas time I will get a faster computer as a reward for arguing with the halogen light bulbs.

I know that many businesses that utilize call center software will be thankful for faster computers as well. For businesses, a faster computer would make it easier for them to satisfy consumers when they have a problem. A faster computer would provide a business with a contact center that would improve their business. In fact, even data centers would benefit from a faster processor.

It would allow a business that utilizes a server colocation to access their data on a faster basis and improve business. For example, a New York company using a colocation would not have a delay in accessing data because the system works faster.

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Airport Security

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Spyware and Virus Removal

Sometimes the problem just lies with one device like a desktop, laptop, or gaming console; this laptop repair service can isolate the issue and get you back on the internet. They do stock wireless routers and adapters with us in case we need to replace one. They can troubleshoot your existing dial-up or broadband internet connection and/or help you configure a new one. They can also help share the connection with multiple computers and/or devices using a router. Sometimes the problem just lies with one device like a desktop, laptop, or gaming console. That means they can do a virus removal tool isolate the issue and get you back on the internet.