Do you think that a credit card with the computer chip embedded in the plastic will be superior to one that does not have a chip? The smart cards are those that contain chips and they can’t simply match to the supposedly dumb credit cards with the ordinary magnetic stripes across their backs. As the dumb credit cards don’t need a brain of their own, the network offers the necessary smart cards in order to outshine the credit cards. About 13 million magnetic stripe cards are found out in the US and some of them don’t even need a counter to sit on.

A smart card also has a magnetic stripe but the stripe enough provides all the same information like the conventional credit card. To use the smarts, the card needs to be matched with a smart reader and an increasingly large number of sale terminals are equipped for the smart cards.

How does the smart credit card work?

The smart credit card is an innovative financial object that includes all the aspects of secret coding, known as cryptography. The smart credit cards have a microprocessor in-built in the card and in order to use these cards, cryptography is the most vital part. Here are some ways in which you can use such cards.

Both the card reader and the card will implement a series of encrypted sign like the exchanges to confirm that the dealings are from a legitimate counterpart.
The user of the smart card must corroborate his identity each time he makes a transaction in a similar way in which the PIN is used in the ATM.
Once it is established that this is a legitimate counterpart, the entire transaction is carried out in the encrypted form.
The smart cards were first used in France and with time, they’ve emerged as the smartest financial tool that can ensure a transaction. Soon it is believed that they will replace the conventional credit cards due to smart technologies and immense memory processing capacity.

Here I am writing a review for one of the best video converter software I have ever tried.

Look & Feel

The software has got very nice look and feel. the way they’ve worked on the buttons and other graphics are simply incredible. One look at the software and we are a fan of it. The Video Preview window, the button to start the conversion, the option for selecting the presets and the button for customizing the presets, etc everything is arranged very neatly and in a proper way. Overall its very easy on the eyes too.

Feature Sets

First of all I will have to write about the extensive file type support they are having. I would say they support almost all possible file types one person would ever use. AVI, MPEG-1,2, MP4, WMV, ASF, 3GP (3GPP), 3G2 (3GPP2), MOV (QT), MKV, FLV, DVD (VOB, IFO), MOD, DAT, M2T (MTS), VRO, HTML5 (WebM, OGV), MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, AAC, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, etc to name a few.

It has lots of other feature sets such as capturing any frame, converting an entire dvd or a group of files, converting through command line, sharing online, uploading to psp, adding water mark to the videos etc. Along with these options this video converter do have all those options which are common to almost all the other converters. For example, cropping, increasing brightness etc.

There are lots of predefined presets for converting the videos. These number of presets are large enough to include almost all standard video resolutions, and almost all standard devices such as ipad, ipod touch, iphone, microsoft zune, all android devices, samsung, PSP, Nokia, BlackBerry, etc.

This application has one added advantage of making use of the graphics adapter of our system to speed up the whole conversion process. As of now this feature support only for nvidia powered systems. I hope they will add their support also to the other manufactures’ graphics adapters soon. For now I say I am quite more than just satisfied for these options.

There is also an option to add the converted videos or audios directly to the itunes library using this application.

Overall Verdict

The application developers have done a very good job in my opinion. They have created a masterpiece with almost all the options one could include in a video converter. For now they are providng this tool for free as a 30 day trial version. I hope you download this video converter and check it out.

This is a forum promotional contest. The user with the highest number of posts will get a 25USD Amazon Gift card free of cost. With this gift card you can buy anything from amazon market place. Music, Toys, Books, applications, videos cds, dvds etc.
The winner will be declared on Jan 01 2012 and will get the giftcard by email within one week. So why wait, start your posting as early as possible.

Conditions are as Simple as these:

• Your posts should make sense and must be useful to others.
• You have to have at least 15 posts to enter in this contest.
• You will have to reply to this post with your real name to enter in this contest.
• No double posts

And btw thanks for Participating!

Click Here For Details

Hard disk failure is major cause of the data loss nowadays.  There are lots of reasons for this. If taken a little care you could avoid the data loss. Hard disks are simply another hardware which will have wear and tire after prolonged use. It is the one thing that works almost always in a computer system. And some time our wrong doings can cause a harddisk failure. Here I am providing some details on the types of harddisk failures and the reasons for the issue.

Reasons: 

• No proper shutdown.
• Using computer without a secondary power supply such as UPS and power fluctuation.
• Connecting the computer to plug which doesn’t have proper earthings(to have a proper ground connection).
• Prolonged use. These are mechanical devices, so it will eventually fails one day or the other. After years of use, its performance will degrade because of the worn out parts.
• Extreme heat.

these are the main reasons for a harddisk to fail. While some of these can be avoided not all. Like the ensuring a secondary power source, if the primary fails, will ensure a linger life for the hard disk. Also the system should be properly shutdown always. If the harddisk is being written and the power goes suddenly, may create bad sectors in the harddisk. And you have keep the computer in a cold place. This is not just for the harddisk, all the components with electronic circuit board, will malfunction and eventually fails if it is continually operated in a hot environment.

Now Once you suspect your harddisk is failed, turn off your computer immediately and stop working on it. You better consult any data recovery agencies before you do anything with it unless the data is not important for you. It is important that you know the signs the harddisk shows once it starts to fail. Now I will list down some common signs here to recognize a harddisk failure.

Signs:

• Some weird noises from inside your computer, so first make sure its not the fan which is producing the sound.
• Disappearing or corrupted Files. Some times it will show you the “file access is denied” message. You need to further investigate if this happens. Sometimes there are chances for a user to deny the access from other users. If you are the only user and you haven’t done that, check your computer for malwares/viruses.  If this also doesn’t resolve the problem it can be a sign for hard disk failure.
• Computer shuts down suddenly, hangs very often, these all are signs for a harddisk failure.
• If your computer(in Windows OS) shows a prompt for disk check very often while booting, there could be some problem. So complete the check and read the information, you might get some clues regarding the problem.
• Hard disk producing too much heat, is a sign of hard disk failure.

When I first saw Apple’s Siri in action, I was incredibly amazed. It was the perfect anything can get. A Perfect Virtual assistant. You can chit chat to it, ask for suggestions, ask for weather predictions(in a weird way and it will reply with the most accurate answer) and lots more. the possibilities were endless. Now I realized the bad news, just like all other apple products, it can only be used with an apple product. That meant it will never come to any other devises unless its from apple. I was sad, so sad, that I wanted to buy one iphone. But I didn’t, not because I didn’t like Siri that much, but because I don’t quite like Iphone or any IOS devices.

But as I am writing this post about someone cracking the Siri, I am happier than ever. That means, now the technology is out there, its free from the apple’s prison. The guys from Appilidium has done it very well. Now I guess more and more people will try to accomplish the impossible, and one day it may even succeed. Yes I meant one day it may come to android/windows device.

As per the techcrunch post, the tl;dr is this.

 tl;dr breakdown:

• By connecting Siri to a local router and then dumping data as it came through, they realized that Siri was sending all of its data to a server that we’ll refer to as “Guzzoni”.
• All trafic sent to Guzzoni was sent through the HTTPS protocol. With the “S” in HTTPS standing for “Secure”, this traffic wasn’t subject to simple packet sniffing. So they had a new idea: make a fake Guzzoni server, and see what came through on the other end.
• After a good bit of ridiculously clever SSL certificate trickery, they got Siri sending commands to their fake server. With each command comes the “X-Ace-Host” string, which appears to be unique to each iPhone 4S.
• After figuring out how Apple was compressing (read: not encrypting) the data, Applidium was able to decompress it and parse out a rough sketch of exactly what was being sent (including which audio codec Apple was using), and what Siri expected in return.

You may read the whole post from this link directly from the guys who cracked it. There they have given a  collection of tools by which you might even try this whole thing by your own.