Wednesday, September 29, 2010

PHP Tutorial - 23 - Adding Tables to MySQL Database


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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

How to get bought by Google, Facebook

If you've been hoping a giant like Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Cisco will scoop up your company, here are some tips: Don't e-mail Steve Ballmer directly, don't tell wild stories about how great your company is, don't use the press to start a bidding war and don't sign perpetual contracts with customers.

These are a few tips that executives in charge of acquisitions at the companies told the tech community in Seattle at the TechNW conference on Monday. Despite the struggling economy, they are all continuing to make strategic acquisitions.

One of the worst transgressions, most of the executives agreed, is lying to a potential acquirer about your company. Some "come in and tell insanely wild stores about the deal they were about to sign," said Rob Adams, senior director of corporate development at Cisco. The number of people who do that is surprising, he said. But it's an instant deal breaker.

"When I ask if you have open-source software in your product don't say no if you do," said Marc Brown, Microsoft's managing director of corporate development. He expects a bit of exaggeration from startups, but there's a fine line between overselling your company and lying, he said.

Other tips from the executives included advising startups to be mindful of the kinds of contracts they sign. Facebook's Mike Brown, manager of corporate development, has seen plenty of contracts between companies he's interested in and their customers that are perpetual. Facebook often wants to "gracefully wind down" customer deals after making an acquisition, and such contracts make that very challenging, he said.

He's also seen contracts that may stretch the intent of terms-of-service deals with providers. Sometimes small companies can get away with that. "But when Facebook considers acquiring the company that puts us in a precarious position. We have a target on our chest for litigation," he said. Read the rest here


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A real-life 'Iron Man' suit (photos)


To celebrate the release of the hit film "Iron Man 2" on DVD and Blu-ray, engineers at the Salt Lake City, Utah, facilities of defense contractor Raytheon Sarcos have unveiled images showcasing a real-life exoskeleton very much like the one featured in the movies. The suit is called the XOS 2.

Wearing the suit is actor Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Phil Coulsen in the "Iron Man" movie



Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10004983.html?tag=mncol#ixzz10qRpIVDK

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Does science education need a dose of danger?

QUEENS, N.Y.--Under the shadow of the Cold War-era Titan II and Atlas rockets set up outside the New York Hall of Science, this weekend's World Maker Faire extravaganza was, more than anything, a tribute to the more colorful fringes of hands-on innovation, science, and engineering. And the "makers" who populated its tents and booths wanted nothing more than to get the thousands of children in attendance interested in physics, engineering, biology, and even metalwork.

The kids were enthralled. This was not the kind of science you saw in a textbook: there were exploding chemistry experiments, flame-throwing robots, model rockets, lessons in laser cutting and soldering, and a perpetual whir and hum of jet engines that made one man comment, "Sounds like a large vuvuzela." Parked in the middle of the outdoor exhibits was the BioBus, a repurposed school bus that's now loaded with microscopes so that kids can learn about cell biology, including a tissue sample donated by comic television pundit Stephen Colbert.

Even the most offbeat exhibits, staffed by costumed hipsters and artists whose look was far more Burning Man than Bunsen burner, played up the importance of science education. "Can I get a big shout-out for math?" artist Mark Perez asked to a crowd of hundreds of eager children and parents who were about to watch him orchestrate the Life Size Mousetrap, a 50,000-pound feat of mechanics that took Perez a decade and a half to build and which spent the weekend using a two-ton safe to smash a taxi.



Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20017676-36.html#ixzz10qL5l6Oh

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8 HabITs Of Successful ITIL Experts

Are you on a path to become an ITIL V3 Expert? You are not alone. Many consultants, practitioners and job seekers look at this certification as a means to improve their work and IT opportunities. How can you successfully prepare yourself for the long and arduous road to certification? Follow these simple habits of the successful ITIL Expert.



HabIT #1: Remember Your Foundation
It may be months even years since you took your foundations course. If you show up to an intermediate course, you are expected to remember the concepts taught to you in your foundations course. If you don't remember the content, review it prior to class. You should not be struggling to remember common and simple concepts. Instead you are building upon the foundation of knowledge you already learned.

HabIT #2: Choose Your Path Wisely
Nothing is more frustrating than sitting in a class you just paid a lot of money to take only to find that it doesn't meet your needs. The capability courses are very focused on a process approach at a detailed level. If you are the Change Manager you want to take the Release Control and Validate course that focuses on only on Change Management but also on all the other processes that have significant relationships and dependencies with Change. The lifecycle courses are focused on how to manage and successfully implement the phase of the lifecycle. They focus on principles, policy and structure of a successful implementation. Two different focuses, two different core sets of material - make sure you take the right class.

HabIT #3: Forget Bridging Over
A bridge course does little to prepare you for a successful career or in how to leverage V3 successfully. It basically fills in the gaps but leaves huge holes in understanding. If you need a quick fix, it is the cheapest path to take. But if you truly want to know the material and plan on leveraging the information to consultant to design and implementation, forget the bridge and start from scratch.

A strategic approach to security is required to ensure compliance with industry requirements

Security Tips To Boost Compliance

HabIT #4: Choose Your Trainer
Trainers come in all shapes and sizes. I have learned from the masters who have very little teaching ability but a lot of practical experience. I have also worked with those who know ITIL out of the book but have no idea how to implement it in an environment. You want a guide to ITIL that can challenge you to learn the material but at the same time provide you with an
environment where you also learn how to analyze and apply the concepts successfully in your work.

Download the rest of Julie's Eight HabITs of the Successful ITIL Expert whitepaper on the HDI Service Management Conference site.


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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Dell unveils Inspiron One 23" all-in-one desktop; $799

Dell has added the Inspiron One to its line-up of all-in-one desktop PCs, and the company seems self-assured that the One boasts features that will “set it apart” from the competition.

The Inspiron One is primarily an entertainment machine, especially given a unique user interface just for creativity and organizing media content.

Enter “Stage,” which is divided into three sections: music, audio and video. All three platforms intend to offer a quicker way to organize and access content with a few extra touches in each sector. For example, PhotoStage allows for direct uploading to Facebook and Flickr, while VideoStage connects to CinemaNow for direct renting and purchasing of movie titles.

Some of the other specs packed into the rather compact Inspiron One PC include the full HD 23-inch LED-backlit LCD, Wi-Fi, a DVD drive, a webcam, and HDMI connectivity.

Dell is a bit light with the specs in the announcement, so it is difficult to determine whether or not this machine really does stand apart from other all-in-one PCs in the same arena. But we won’t have to wait that long to judge as the Inspiron One will be available this weekend, starting at $799. found over here


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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

19 Gadgets That Changed The World

Every so often, a device comes along that changes the way we live our daily lives and things are never the same again. With today's digital technology, such devices may come more frequently than in the past, but our list revolutionary gadgets extends back two centuries.

read the rest here

feel free to add to the list in our comments section

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Scientists using lasers to cool and control molecules

Ever since audiences heard Goldfinger utter the famous line, “No, Mr. Bond; I expect you to die,” as a laser beam inched its way toward James Bond and threatened to cut him in half, lasers have been thought of as white-hot beams of intensely focused energy capable of burning through anything in their path. Now a team of Yale physicists has used lasers for a completely different purpose, employing them to cool molecules down to temperatures near what’s known as absolute zero, about -460 degrees Fahrenheit. Their new method for laser cooling, described in the online edition of the journal Nature, is a significant step toward the ultimate goal of using individual molecules as information bits in quantum computing. read the rest here


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Sunday, September 19, 2010

Avaya's new portable isn't a tablet, it's a 'desktop video device'

Avaya had barely announced its new portable video device on Wednesday when just about everybody started calling it the Flare Tablet.

Actually, it's officially a "desktop video device" -- a moniker that didn't impress Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. "For such a cool device, I'm not sure Avaya could have found a name that was more lame than that," he said in a blog post.

Avaya isn't terribly concerned by the nomenclature debate, according to a spokeswoman. That's because calling the 11.6-in. touchscreen device the "Flare" puts the focus on the user interface, which is just what Avaya wants. (That interface, by the way, is formally known as the Avaya Flare Experience.)

Why emphasize the interface? To "give the form factor a back seat," the spokeswoman explained.


rest here


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Microsoft's IE9 off limits to most Windows PCs

Microsoft may have a tough time building significant market share for its new Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser because eligible users are in the minority.

Several analysts agreed that Microsoft has its work cut out for it, at least in the short term, because IE9 won't run on Windows XP, the aged-but-still-dominant operating system.

Microsoft omitted the still-popular XP from the supported OS list because, among other things, IE 9 speeds up page rendering and composition by tapping the graphics processor in newer PCs. Windows XP lacks support for the Direct2D API, which IE9 uses to accelerate content rendering.

The decision means that only a subset of machines will be able to run IE9, either in its preview or final form, until those systems and Windows XP are replaced by new hardware and Windows 7.

rest here



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New self-assembling photovoltaic technology can keep repairing itself to avoid any loss in performance.

Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.

One of the problems with harvesting sunlight is that the sun’s rays can be highly destructive to many materials. Sunlight leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it. But plants have adopted an interesting strategy to address this issue: They constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun’s energy are, in effect, always brand new. rest here
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Saturday, September 18, 2010

Gorilla vs. Gorilla


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Gorilla vs. Gorilla


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Gorilla Attack


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Friday, September 17, 2010

The HRP-4 humanoid robot unveiled

Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have unveiled their new humanoid robot HRP-4 which is an upgrade on their older robots. The new humanoid stands 151cm tall and is much thinner than its predecessors. For Japan, HRP-4 is another step forward towards creating useful mechanical worker to combat a forthcoming shortage in the labor force and care for a fast aging population.

Other than terrestrial uses, let me remind you that the Japanese also plan on developing humanoid robots for exploring the Moon.

Going back to HRP-4, we should note that it is not a machine developed just for nice demos. Its creators are serious about making it available commercially to universities and other research institutes that can afford its $300,000 price tag. According to the recent press release, HRP-4 will go on sale as early as January 2011. I should mention that the HRP-4 will sell for $100,000 less than Willow Garage’s PR2. However, the price difference probably reflects that other than the obvious difference between the two robot, i.e., legs versus wheels, there are many differences in the number and types of sensors, overall hardware, and software.

Time will tell if the humanoid HRP-4 will be a success or not. In the meantime, we can all marvel at its slim design and skills in the video found here


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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Intel Reveals Sandy Bridge Processor Details

Intel says laptops and desktops powered by the company's next-generation microarchitecture, which merges graphics and x86 cores on a single die, will be available early next year.


Codenamed Sandy Bridge, the 32-nanometer processor, which goes into production later this year, will also be the first to support new vector graphics. Details of Sandy Bridge were released Monday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.


read it all here


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Mobile Football Madness: Best Apps For The Gridiron

College football season is in the first quarter and the NFL season about to kickoff. Take your football experience mobile this fall by arming yourself with the best mobile apps for following your team, be it fantasy or real, and staying in the game no matter where you roam. Here's 20 of the best.

hat tip Information Week

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Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs

Mark your calendars! Sept. 9 is hereby declared Debugging Day. It's been associated with removing bugs for more than 50 years now but is rarely formally celebrated. So let's start the tradition this year.

It all began with a log entry from 1947 by Harvard University's Mark II technical team. The now-classic entry features a moth taped to the page, time-stamped 15:45, with the caption "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay" and the proud boast, "First actual case of bug being found."

make sure you read the whole thing. any major bugs not listed can be posted in the comments section.


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Monday, September 13, 2010

Hot Tech Jobs 2010: Look to Mobile and the Cloud

After analyzing research reports from Gartner and IDC, eWeek concludes that this year's hottest job titles will be mobile application developer and cloud computing software engineer. More
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Sunday, September 5, 2010

IT Certification Becoming More Specific as Economy Recovers















5 hot IT certification picks for 2010


Certifications have always been beneficial to IT job seekers, but lately there's increased emphasis on vendor- and technology-specific training as the economy begins to recover and companies look to plug talent holes in their IT organizations.

"There are great opportunities in technology, but there is increased competition for jobs," says Ray Kelly, CEO of certification provider Certiport. "I have never seen a time like today where there is such a focus on certifications. More
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Seven Hot Tech Skills That Employers Need

Constant buzz surrounds some of the hottest areas of IT, especially as newer technologies and strategies such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), software as a service (SaaS) and virtualization continue to emerge. The savviest IT professionals, however, understand that it’s not just the headline-grabbing specialties that can provide solid career prospects. Wireless administration, networking, and other core specialties are equally hot, and consistent demand exists for those experienced in these areas.

Here are a few areas of IT that should remain bright for the foreseeable future:more


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Friday, September 3, 2010

The Best Websites to Find a Job in Your 30s and 40s

The Best Websites to Find a Job in Your 30s and 40s
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Should You Search Social Media Sites for Job Candidate Information?

Aug 31, 2010 -

Social media is becoming a great way for recruiters to announce job openings and find qualified candidates. The conversational nature of social media allows you to interact with potential applicants and learn more about their professional backgrounds, experiences, and goals. That being said, it also opens the door to learning a lot about applicants that you might not discover during a traditional interview. Read More


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