May all your troubles last as long as your New Year resolutions.

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The Many Stories of The Rescuing Hug

Reflecting on God's gift of salvation & all of the blessings God has bestowed on us. Wishing everyone a very Merry Xmas!

How to extend your smartphone’s battery life

Tips and tricks to make sure your most necessary gadget keeps going as long as you do

No matter what type of smartphone you have, the device can serve as your MP3 player, digital camera, gaming system, and even your TV while you're out and about — as long as you have battery power. If it seems like smarter phones are getting less life out of their batteries... you're absolutely right. Smartphones can help you get a lot done while traveling, but if you're doing a lot on one in a day, you're apt to see your screen go dark long before the sun goes down.
Watching out for a few small things during your day, however, can help extend battery life on your trusty device and make sure you've got enough juice to make it all day and well into the night.

Mixed signals
It takes extra juice for your smartphone to search for a data connection. If you're somewhere where you won't get a signal, like an airplane or subway, putting your phone in airplane mode or turning it off altogether will prevent it from draining your battery. Turning your phone on does require a bit of extra power, so it's best to save shutting it off for times when you plan to leave it off for a while, rather than something like a 20-minute subway ride to work in the morning. Thinking of it as car mode or subway mode instead of airplane mode might just be the mental trick you need!
Likewise, turn off wifi when you don't need it. When it's active, your phone scans for available wifi connections constantly, which kills battery life. If you're using the wifi in a coffee shop or bookstore, remember to disable that connection when you're done to avoid draining your battery while you're on the road.

Your battery bleeds faster when you're inattentive

Focus on the task at hand
Sure, you can have your email open, search for directions to a local restaurant, watch a video on YouTube, and play Angry Birds at the same time — but chances are you're really only focused on one of those tasks. Everything you have open on your phone is using some amount of battery power. Try to focus on doing just one thing at a time on your phone, and close unnecessary applications to keep them from draining your battery. Things like your GPS and the bluetooth connection you use to connect to your hands-free device in the car gobble up a ton of battery power and are of no use to you unless you're doing a few specific tasks. 

Bright future
Bright screens look great but are a huge drain on your phone's battery. To stretch your phone's life, go into the controls or settings and dim the backlight or brightness of your screen. While the dimmest setting might be difficult to read (especially if you're somewhere brightly lit), something toward the middle will extend your battery life without putting too much strain on your eyes. If your phone has an auto-brightness option, using that can be a one-step solution to balancing battery life and ease of reading.
Along those same lines, try to avoid using animated backgrounds on your phone. Remember, the less you ask of your phone, the less it draws on your battery.
Bad vibrations
It takes more battery power for your phone to vibrate than it does to ring. While you absolutely want to have your phone on vibrate (or turned off) when you're at a movie or in a meeting, keeping your ringer on at other times can help extend battery life.
Mandatory nap time
Just as you would with a toddler, the easiest way to make sure your smartphone's battery lasts all night is to give it a nap at some point during the day. If you're headed into a meeting for a few hours, turn off your phone and leave it in your desk. Likewise, if you're out to dinner with close friends or on a date, turn off your phone and focus on your companions. Not only will you look like a better employee and friend for focusing on the people around you in real life, you'll also save that much more juice for later.
Still having trouble?
If you still find yourself running out of battery life before the end of the day, plug into a charging bag or use an external battery pack such as Morphie's JuicePack to strap on some extra power for the road.
This article was written by Emily Price and originally appeared on Tecca
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Analyst: Apple to release redesigned iPhone 5 in summer, just one iPad in 2012

by Joe Aimonetti December 21, 2011 3:45 PM PST

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, in a note to investors, has laid out his predictions for Apple's calendar year 2012. In it he expects a redesigned iPhone 5 to be released in midsummer and only one version of the iPad 3, despite other rumors that Apple could release an expanded lineup of iPad models.

(Credit: Apple)

Munster's note, reported by AppleInsider, suggests that Apple's "base case" scenario will see it selling 142 million iPhone units through 2013, which represents an 18 percent increase in revenue from the previous year. In a "bull case" scenario Apple could sell as many as 162 million units, bumping the revenue increase to 35 percent.

(Credit: Screenshot by AppleInsider)

With Munster predicting only a single iPad model for 2012, his total revenue prediction for Apple remains conservative at 14 percent. However, many rumors have been circulating that Apple could release any number of iPad models, expanding its lineup considerably.
Should Apple release a 7-inch iPad or an iPad 2S, Munster's predictions could prove to be extremely low.
So what should we make of this? First of all, this is merely a prediction. It is entirely possible that Munster has an inside track on some production plans, but more than likely it's just his best, educated guess.
It remains to be seen whether Apple's delay on releasing the iPhone 4S until fall was a calculated shift in production scheduling or simply a product management decision that resulted in a later release date. I would put my money on the former and not expect an update to the iPhone lineup until next fall.
As for the iPad rumors, I'm with Munster (which is fun to say out loud by the way). While Apple could very well release an iPad 2S alongside an iPad 3, I think it is much more likely to remain on its current trajectory of a single model upgrade. It seems as though the Retina Display will certainly make its debut on the iPad this spring, but I doubt Apple is looking to have multiple models or sizes to choose from.
While I do not profess to be a financial analyst by any stretch, Apple has a habit of crushing earnings estimates (especially conservative ones), so if you've been considering putting some money on Apple, now's as good a time as any I would think.
Should Apple wait until fall to release the iPhone 5 or bring it out next summer? Should Apple have more than one model of iPad? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-31747_7-57346730-243/analyst-apple-to-release-redesigned-iphone-5-in-summer-just-one-ipad-in-2012/#ixzz1hGmScPuh

Web is Changing! More proof Internet Headed to App Internet Format.

Google debuts digital magazine for mobile devices

December 8, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO—Google is joining a crowd of companies packaging digital content in a magazine-like format for mobile devices.

The Internet search leader released its version, called "Currents," Thursday. It works on smartphones and computer tablets running on Google's Android software, as well as Apple Inc.'s operating system and its iPhone and iPad.

Currents is late to the competition. It will be trying to catch up to Flipboard, one of the most popular applications on the iPad, and Zite, which is owned by Time Warner Inc.'s CNN. Yahoo Inc. released a similar product called Livestand last month.

Google Inc. says more than 150 publishers have agreed to provide material to Currents. The participating publishers include Forbes, PBS, Huffington Post and AllThingsD.

Details on how Currents' ad revenue will be divided weren't disclosed

IBM buying 'cloud' firm DemandTec for $440 million

The Web is on life support: Forrester Research

December 8, 2011, 7:22 AM

LeWeb11

Forrester Research’s Chairman and CEO George Colony told a room full of Web and social-media enthusiasts Thursday in Paris that they were living on borrowed time.
Colony said that several models of thinking about the Web/Internet space are dead or outmoded.
Colony distinguished between the Web, which he said is a software architecture, and the Internet, which is a larger organizing framework.
He said technology is migrating away from the PC/Desktop model, as well as what he called the Web cloud.
Colony asked LeWeb attendees to consider “what we will hold in our hands 5 years from now.”
Forrester Research thinks the answer to that question is the so-called App Internet, which offers a “faster, simpler and better Internet experience.”
The App Internet market is worth $2.2 billion, according to Forrester Research.
And decision makers at 41% of companies are now moving away from Web-based software toward the App Internet, Colony said.
He also said that Google, whose products are heavily invested in the Web/Internet space, “are wishing they could stop the world right now.”
“They love the web, that’s how they make money,” Colony said.
Still, “every 10 years there’s a vendor that we think is dead that comes back,” Colony said.
In the 1980s it was Intel; in the 1990s, IBM; in 2000, Apple; and going forward Colony said it could be Microsoft, led by their gaming initiatives.
Although he said that would likely require a generational leadership change from the Windows software maker.
Colony said that three companies could emerge as true leaders in the App Internet sector:  Apple, Google (around their Android platform) and Amazon.
He also said that adoption of social media in urban areas was now extremely high and “running out of hours and people.”
Declaring, in effect, that we are socially saturated.
That means “we are in a bubble,” he said, adding that a post-social world was on its way that would “sweep away some of the nonsense like Foursquare.”
A new era of more efficient social enterprise is drawing near, he said.
“Social will thrive but in an evolved form.”

IT Security War Will Be Won or Lost at the Endpoint

Posted by Michael Vizard Dec 5, 2011 12:34:14 PM

The State of Endpoint Security
The amount of time IT organizations are spending on security issues is starting to have a significant impact the rest of IT operations.

The battle between good and evil in terms of security is starting to shift locations. Instead of being primarily focused on the network perimeter, it’s starting to become clear that the new definition of the network perimeter involves the client device.

Unfortunately, a new study of 688 IT security professionals in the U.S. conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Lumension Security, a provider of endpoint management and security software, shows that IT organizations are losing that battle. The reason for this, says Ed Brice, Lumension senior vice president for worldwide marketing, is that with the advent of mobile computing, removable media devices such as USB drives and a host of new applications that run on those devices, IT organizations are falling behind when it comes to investing in technologies such as application control and mobile device management.

Alas, the survey finds that the bulk of the IT security budget is still being applied mainly to firewalls and anti-virus software running on traditional PC devices. The end result, says Brice, is that when it comes to mobile device security, IT organizations are falling further behind.

The good news is that the survey says that IT security professionals clearly identify mobile devices, removable media and third-party applications as the biggest risks to their organizations. But less than half of those surveyed said they have the “ample resources” they need to minimize endpoint risks, which goes a long way to explaining why future investments in IT security are still fairly limited to a narrow range of technologies even as security technologies continue to get more robust and sophisticated.

In the meantime, the survey makes it clear that many IT organizations are seeing an increase in the number of attacks, which manifests itself in the fact that 41 percent of those surveyed said their networks were less secure than they were a year ago. Hopefully, that fear will be enough to motivate IT organizations to re-evaluate their IT security strategies for 2012 at a time when the very nature of enterprise computing has never been more dynamic or difficult to manage.

Preparing For The Real Costs Of Cloud Computing

By Bob Violino

December 5, 2011 06:00 AM ET

Computerworld - Most experts agree: The cloud is moving past the hype stage and starting to deliver tangible benefits, primarily increased flexibility and agility.

But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which are unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented or are considering cloud services.
While these costs wouldn't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing, they could have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services.

Moving and Storing Data

It can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year to move large volumes of data to public cloud services and to store that data for long periods of time. Many companies might not be aware of the expenses involved.
"A one-time move can [cost] thousands of dollars," says Hernan Alvarez, senior director of IT and operations at WhitePages Inc., a Seattle-based company that provides online contact information for more than 200 million people and 15 million businesses.
Network bandwidth accounts for much of the cost of moving data: Cloud providers might charge upload and download fees. And even though data and systems are being hosted off-site, there are internal labor costs. "People think there are no labor costs [with the cloud], but as you scale up [to] handle workload, there's a complexity with managing large numbers of cloud instances, just like managing a large number of servers," Alvarez says. Another big cost is for long-term data storage in the cloud. "When you consider the data growth rates over the next three years, the life-cycle cost of data can be really high," Alvarez says. "You continue to pay for that every month" when data is stored in the cloud.
But these costs are "only unexpected if you don't fully comprehend the cloud model," he says. "If you think about CPUs, capacity and storage [needs] and chart that over time, you can get a pretty good handle on what the costs are and if you can do it more cost-effectively internally."
WhitePages considered using the cloud for data backup, but after extensively evaluating eight vendors, the company determined it would be too expensive -- as much as three to four times what it would cost to keep data internally, Alvarez says. So the company opted to handle long-term data storage on-site, in its private cloud.
In general, though, using public cloud computing for purposes other than storage eliminates the need to deploy and maintain applications internally. WhitePages has been using public cloud services for about two years and now uses 11 cloud-based applications from Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, ADP, WebEx, Yammer and other providers. This has led to savings that greatly outweigh any of the unexpected costs, Alvarez says

Integrating Apps From Multiple Vendors

Pacific Coast Building Products wants to start using cloud computing in a big way and has evaluated services from several vendors. But the Rancho Cordova, Calif.-based provider of goods and services to the construction industry has limited its cloud usage so far because the economics are not quite there yet, says CIO Mike O'Dell.
Two reasons for this are the difficulty of integrating software from disparate vendors in the cloud, and the fact that Pacific Coast would incur added costs if it tried to handle the integration on its own.
For example, the company uses Microsoft Exchange for email and Cisco's Unity Unified Messaging for voice mail, and it's interested in using both of those applications as cloud services. "Integration between [Exchange and Unity] in the cloud, at least the last time we looked, wasn't there," O'Dell says.
Without integration, users wouldn't have some of the capabilities they have now, such as automatic deletion of voice-mail messages on their phones when they receive the messages via email.
The same sorts of integration challenges exist with larger and more complex applications, such as ERP, O'Dell says.
For example, "for us to put [SAP] in the cloud means we'd have to give up features or spend a lot of money on integration," he says. "Maybe it's just a matter of immature technology, but the integration side is where the hidden costs are. If you don't look at this right out of the gate, you might not be as happy with the economics at the end as you thought you would be."

Testing Software

The need to test software before migrating to the cloud can also result in unforeseen costs.
"We bumped into some expense that we did not expect for testing and debugging a vendor app that had not been run in a cloud configuration before," says Bill Thirsk, vice president of IT and CIO at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
The college was moving a large-scale ERP system onto a private cloud, using servers that the vendor hadn't yet approved. Marist uses its private cloud to provide online services such as registration, billing inquiries and payments to students, faculty and research organizations.
Thirsk says "99%" of the college's ERP migration activities "went very smoothly, and overall we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by using a cloud configuration." But, he adds, "stabilizing the system within a cloud that already supported 900 virtualized servers gave us quite a challenge."
The added expense was to "untangle the maze of what versions [of] the operating systems and databases would work," Thirsk says. "It was [a] matter of changing some code. It took some time and effort to figure out exactly what lines needed to be changed."

Hidden costs can also crop up if applications aren't primed to take full advantage of the capabilities of cloud computing.
"We made the assumption that the ERP programming was sophisticated enough to take advantage of all the processors, memory, caches, storage devices and network connections that the cloud configuration offered," Thirsk says. But it wasn't, and revising the software code required a "considerable amount" of application developer and systems programmer time. "We have seen a 30% increase in performance, but it wasn't free," he says.

Rent and Utilities

IT executives who move systems to the cloud might encounter another unexpected cost if they suddenly find themselves paying expenses that wouldn't normally be their responsibility.
"There are, of course, many costs associated with hosting a system internally, but not all of them, like power and rent, are paid out of my IT budget," says Jonathan Alboum, CIO at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). "With the cloud, these basic infrastructure charges are baked into the overall cost, so I'm now paying for some things that previously didn't come out of my IT budget."
Since the summer of 2010, the FNS has been using an Amazon.com cloud service to host an application that's offered through the agency's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides the benefits that used to be known as food stamps.
The tool, called the SNAP Retailer Locator, provides an online map that helps people find retailers that accept SNAP debit cards. The FNS decided to put the application in the cloud because that setup allowed for a quick launch and was highly scalable, among other reasons.
Since he's using a cloud-based service, Alboum has to pay new monthly costs and take a new approach to budgeting. "Overall, [the cloud] is very manageable and likely results in overall lower costs for the government," he says. "But it is different from what we've traditionally experienced."
It's not a matter of the cloud service costing more than in-house hosting. "I think of this as a cash-flow issue," Alboum explains. "If I'm going to pay monthly costs, I need to have available budget to cover those costs at the time I incur them. In the more traditional model, I would purchase hardware and associated services in a lump sum. The new model is likely less expensive, but requires a change to budgeting practices."
Much about the cloud is still relatively new, and experts say organizations evaluating cloud services need to look at both the costs and potential benefits. In a report on cloud services in April 2011, Gartner noted that IT executives "should take steps to manage inherent risks and unexpected costs during the cloud services revolution."
The cloud model is "immature and fraught with potential hazards," says Gartner analyst Frank Ridder. "Cloud computing is driving discontinuity that introduces exciting opportunities and costly challenges. Organizations need to understand these changes and develop realistic cloud sourcing strategies and contracts that can reduce risk."
The cloud sourcing life cycle includes four main elements: sourcing strategy, vendor selection, contracting, and management and governance, says Ridder, adding, "The life cycle is a critical area to plan and manage, regardless of whether organizations source their IT services through internal or external resources."