Choose The Right School For A Journalism Career

Nowadays, many people choose journalism as their career, because they feel that, it is one such profession that would give them the freedom in terms of office attires, work schedule and even in speaking their minds. It is best to understand the industry very well before you finally decide on taking journalism as your career. Finishing a degree in journalism does not only gives one the best credential to back him or her when applying for a position in a newspaper or certain publication but it can also help the person a lot in terms of growing and in enhancing his or her skills. And to earn the right credentials that will help you succeed in your dream, it is ideal to enroll yourself in a journalism school.

Though many journalism colleges offer various programmes related to journalism career, the one i consider best is the 9.9 School of Convergence, that offer's the course "Diploma in Applied Journalism". It has been started by 9.9 Media, and since 2001, the school has been excelling at providing a real-world education in journalism that has led to many rewarding jobs. The people behind this successful school are Dr. Pramath Sinha, Dr. Eric D Saranovitz, Pooja Kothari, Gunjan Aggarwal and Bejoy Suri.

The prime objective of this school is to provide a real-world education and that the Diploma in Applied Journalism is an effort in the same direction. The course aims to equip aspiring journalists with the core skills required for success in their profession- high quality and consistent reporting, writing and editing skills. Admissions for the course are open for the session starting September 20.

The most obvious advantage of this programme lies in its structure. Unlike other diploma programmes that require 1-2 years after graduation, the Diploma in Applied Journalism can be done while studying and/or working. The classes will be a weekend affair with classes held on Sundays, so that it does not clash with academic or professional commitments. For any queries regarding the course - admission process, fee etc. contact 9.9 Media School of Convergence

Made in China : iPhone Nano

Internet world has been abuzz about Apple launching iPhone Nano for quite sometime. Every few months, grapevines suggest Apple working on a Nano version of iPhone. In fact, only last month a new patent filed by Apple again fueled iPhone Nano rumors. But all these so far remain mere speculations, with no official confirmation.

However, in faraway Shenzhen (China) an iPhone Nano has actually hit the shelves. The made in China iPhone Nano is widely available in the country including on online stores (may be you can check our own grey markets too!). These iPhone Nano models available from several Chinese companies offer several high-end features and come at an attractive price tag.

Here’s looking into the Chinese avatar of iPhone Nano.

Display and dimensions
* Display: 2.4 inch touchscreen LCD, 260 thousand color; 240 x 320px

* Dimensions: 105x55x10mm (LxWxH)

* Language: English, Chinese (Simplified)

* MP3 & MP4 player

* FM radio

Camera & connectivity
* 5 MP Camera, with video recording;

* ROM: 512MB

* Data Transfer: USB cable/ card-reader/Bluetooth (file transmission, voice, stereo)

* Lithium batteries


Miscellaneous features
* Supports caller’s picture option, group ring tone; 64 chord ring tone

* Telephone directories: 300 groups of contacts

* Messages: Supports both SMS and MMS (150 messages, MMS)

* Schedule power on/off: Supports auto start/close

Pricing and colours
* Standby time: 220-260 hours

* Talk time: 120-180 minutes

* Colours available: Black and silver

* Price $90




Source : TOI

Ex-employees sue HP on unpaid incentives

Three former Hewlett-Packard Co salespeople sued the printer maker alleging they were denied tens of thousands of dollars in commissions because of a malfunction in the company’s order-management system.

As many as 50,000 current and former salespeople haven’t received commissions and bonuses because of problems with the software system that tracks sales, called Omega, according to a lawsuit filed with federal court in San Francisco.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest maker of personal computers and printers, said on August 5 that about 2,000 members of its global sales team of 23,000 were affected by the Omega glitch. The company was working to fix the problem, spokeswoman Gina
Giamanco said then.

The complaint was filed by Shaun Simmons, a former sales representative who says he’s owed at least $30,000 in commissions, and two other former salespeople. All three reside in Colorado. They seek to represent all Hewlett-Packard salespeople who didn’t get paid and recoup their bonuses and commissions.

Barry Dunn, a Colorado attorney representing the former HP workers, and Christina Schneider, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard, didn’t immediately return voice-mail messages seeking comment after regular business hours.

The case is Jeffrey Johnson v Hewlett-Packard, 09-03596, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

Hackers cripple popular social-networking sites Facebook and Twitter

Twitter and Facebook suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation about a coordinated campaign against the world's most popular online social networks.

The attacks, which came a month after the White House website was targeted in a similar online assault, left millions unable to carry out daily routines that have assumed an increasingly central part of their lives.

The incidents also underscored the vulnerability of fast-growing Internet social networking sites that have been heralded as powerful new political tools to counter censorship and authoritarianism.

Twitter, which allows people to broadcast short, 140-character text messages over the Internet, became a key form of communication in Iran amid the protests and clampdown that followed the country's disputed June elections.

In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company preferred not to speculate about the motivation of the malicious attack that knocked the site offline and made it inaccessible for several hours earlier in the day.

"Twitter has been working closely with other companies and services affected by what appears to be a single, massively coordinated attack," said Stone.

Members of Facebook, the world's largest Internet social network with more than 250 million active users, saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles. Like Twitter, Facebook said the problems appeared to stem from a so-called denial of service attack, a technique in which hackers overwhelm a website's servers with communications requests.

Once access to Twitter had been restored, many of the site's users posted short messages lamenting the disturbance.

"now I know Im addicted to Twitter...I wasnt rite all day," Twitter user hotlilNINA posted.

Speculation swirled on the Internet that other sites, including Google, had also come under attack, after relatively lesser-known site LiveJournal said it, too, had been targeted by hackers on Thursday. But those rumors could not be confirmed.

Google said in an emailed statement that it was in contact with some non-Google sites that were impacted by Thursday's attacks to help investigate.

"Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services," the statement said.

Anti-social attacks
Motives for denial-of-service attacks range from political to rabble-rousing to extortion, with criminal groups increasingly threatening to hobble popular websites that don't pay demanded fees, according to security experts.

In July a wave of similar attacks disrupted access to several high-profile U.S. and South Korean websites, including the White House site. South Korea's spy agency said at the time that North Korea might have been behind the attacks.

Twitter's newfound fame makes it an easy target for hackers, said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security research firm Gibson Research Corp.

The number of worldwide unique visitors to the Twitter website reached 44.5 million in June, up 15-fold year-over- year, according to comScore data.

Security experts said a single group could have been behind the problems on Twitter, Facebook and the other sites as hackers evolve their ability to attack multiple sites at once.

"History would tell us that it's probably the same attacker or group of attackers that is launching both attacks," said Kevin Prince, the chief technology officer of security services provider Perimeter eSecurity.

While there are ways for websites to protect themselves from denial of service attacks, Prince said the defenses were expensive, whereas mounting an attack was a relatively simple feat for hackers.

Twitter said in a blog post later on Thursday that its site was back up, though it said certain users would experience degraded service while it recovers completely.

Some Twitter users appeared to be taking the incident in stride.

"It's just an annoyance. Remember Twitter was down in 2007 and 2008 all the time," said Robert Scobble, a commentator on the technology industry who boasts 93,000 "followers" on Twitter, referring to a period when Twitter's rapid traffic growth occasionally led to several service disruptions.

For lawyer Zabi Nowald, it was just another day -- Twitter or no Twitter -- as he headed to work in downtown Los Angeles with a laptop in one hand and a Blackberry in the other.

"None of my friends do Twitter; none of my employers do," said Nowald, 27. "It affects my life zero. I lost something I never had."

Microsoft to hire 400 Yahoo employees

Microsoft Corp will hire at least 400 workers from Yahoo Inc if government regulators approve the companies' proposed Internet search partnership, and Yahoo will receive $150 million to cover any unexpected costs during the switch to new technology.

The details emerged in a regulatory filing that elaborated on an agreement announced last week. Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said then that an unspecified number of its 13,000 employees would be offered jobs at Microsoft after the Redmond, Washington-based software maker assumes control of the search results and search advertising on Yahoo's Web site.

The transition is supposed to begin early next year, assuming the alliance is approved by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe.

Microsoft will pay $50 million annually during the first three years of the 10-year contract to supplement the revenue that Yahoo will receive from the ads appearing alongside its search results. The $150 million in guaranteed payments weren't mentioned last week.

The filing said Yahoo can use the $150 million to pay for unforeseen transition costs. Yahoo's stock has fallen by about 15 per cent since it unveiled the Microsoft deal, largely because announced terms didn't include a large upfront payment.

The disclosure probably won't ease the disappointment much, given analysts had anticipated Microsoft paying $1 billion to $2 billion for access to Yahoo's search engine.

Most of the revenue from the Microsoft deal will flow from ad commissions. Yahoo will receive 88 percent of the search ad revenue during the first five years of the contract. After that, Yahoo's commission will range from 83 percent to 93 percent, depending on whether it still handles some of the ad sales in the partnership.

The main reason Yahoo decided to turn over its search engine to Microsoft was to save money. If Yahoo wants to save even more on technology, it
has the option of adopting Microsoft's online mapping service replace of its own, according to the filing.

Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz has already made it known she isn't impressed with Yahoo's online maps. As it is, transferring 400 workers to Microsoft would prune Yahoo's current payroll by about 3 per cent.

Yahoo will lay off some workers if the Microsoft deal goes through, Bartz said last week. Tuesday's filing didn't provide any layoff projections. Although it also has been jettisoning workers because of the recession, Microsoft finished its latest fiscal year end in June with 93,000 employees -- an increase of about 2,000 people from the previous year.

Microsoft is counting on the Yahoo partnership to help it reverse years of losses in its online operations and siphon some traffic -- and ad sales -- from Internet search leader Google Inc.

Yahoo's search engine is the second largest, making it the quickest way for Microsoft to gain ground on Google. Even so, Microsoft and Yahoo combined have less than 30 percent of the US search market compared to 65 percent for Google, according to comScore Inc.

To keep Yahoo happy, Microsoft will have to produce ad revenue per search that is within a certain percentage of Google's industry-leading rate. If Microsoft doesn't hit the target, Yahoo can abandon the partnership before the contract expires.

The filing didn't specify how close Microsoft has to come to Google's revenue per search. Microsoft estimates that Google gets 7 cents in ad revenue for every search, while Yahoo gets 4.3 cents and Microsoft gets 3.9 cents, according to a PowerPoint slide Microsoft mistakenly posted online.

iPhone vulnerable to hacking

Security experts have uncovered flaws in Apple Inc's iPhone that they said hackers can exploit to take control of the popular device, using the tactic for identity theft and other crimes.

Users need to be warned that their iPhones are not entirely secure and Apple should try to repair the vulnerability as soon as possible, they said at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, one of the world's top forums for exchanging information on computer security threats.

"It's scary. I don't want people taking over my iPhone," Charlie Miller, a security analyst with consulting firm Independent Security Evaluators, said in an interview.

Miller and Collin Mulliner, a Ph D student at the Technical University of Berlin, also discovered a method that allows hackers to easily knock a victim's iPhone off a carrier's network.

It prevents users from making calls, accessing the Internet and exchanging text messages, they added. They said the information they presented at Black Hat will give criminals enough information to develop software to break into iPhones within about two weeks.

They said they warned Apple of the flaw in the middle of July, but that the company has yet to fix it. "Apple's credibility and reputation could get hurt if they don't respond. Positive buzz is good; negative buzz is much more harmful," said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research.

About 4,000 security professionals were in attendance, including some who are really hackers. While experts ferret out software flaws to fix them and protect users, hackers use the same information to devise pranks or commit crimes.

The researchers showed the audience how to break into iPhones by sending computer code via the phone's SMS system. Mobile phones use SMS to send and receive text messages along with software upgrades. They said that the phone's users cannot detect that it is receiving the malicious code.

It is not illegal to disclose ways to hack into computer systems, though it is against the law to use it to break into them. When asked why they would hand over such information to criminals, security experts said they felt it was necessary to alert the public that iPhones were just as vulnerable to attack as personal computers.

"If we don't talk about it, somebody is going to do it silently. The bad guys are going to do it no matter what," Mulliner said.

They have successfully tested the hacks on iPhones running on networks of four carriers in Germany along with AT&T Inc in the United States. They said they believed the methods will work with iPhone carriers around the world.

The two said they used a similar method to break into phones running on Google Inc's Android operating system. Google patched the flaw after they notified the company of the vulnerability.

Think twice before pressing Ctrl+C

Everytime you do a harmless keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C in your computer, the text you copy online may be stolen on the web.

This copied data is accessible on the Internet when you visit websites that use a combination of javascript and ASP or any server-side-language like jsp, php, from which the data that you copy can be transferred to another server. Most websites are javascript enabled.

Not convinced? Try copying some text and just visit sourcecodesworld.com/special/clipboard.asp, a website that provides free source codes and projects. You necessarily need not even press the ‘paste’ button.

The ‘paste’ happens automatically. The website just provides an example of what could potentially happen to you, especially if you have copied your credit card details, bank details or any other sensitive information.

First 1 TB mobile hard drive

The external storage solutions provider Western Digital has introduced two laptop drives with record capacity: Scorpio Blue 1 Terabyte (TB) and the Scorpio Blue 750 Gigabyte (GB).

So far, the largest laptop hard drive available in the market was 500GB and the largest desktop hard drive in the market is 2TB.

The new WD laptop drives are the first to use 333GB per platter technology.

The Scorpio Blue hard drive supports the SATA2 (3Gbps) standard. However, it has a thickness of 12.5 millimeters, as opposed to 9.5 millimeters in other 2.5-inch drives.

The Scorpio Blue 1TB drive comes with the company's WhisperDrive that uses algorithms to produce one of the quietest 2.5-inch drives available.

The new drives will be in WD's new My Passport Essential SE Portable USB drive.

The suggested retail price for the WD Scorpio Blue 1 TB drive is $249.99 and for the 750 GB version it is $189.99. Both come with a three-year limited warranty.