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!

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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.

I have been using this traffic generator tool called iframe-x.net on one of other site for some time now. The website is supplying malware as of yesterday. I was running their code and now google has reported me that, through my website malwares are being downloaded to the users’ computer without consent.

So that means, I have to clean my site and ask google to review it again. Till then my website will be shown as malware “This site may harm your computer”. Well that’s a bad thing to happen. so if you use this service and google hasn’t notified you about this, you better remove the iframe-x code from your webpage to avoid all the complications and loose visitors.

Here is the screen shot of the message shown:

if your website is already infected, you can ask for a review at google webmaster tools section.

The war started as soon as android started getting its publicity. I will be writing this article totally unbiased as I have both devices.

So first let me start with the googd things about iphones

1. The elegant look and feel
2. Millions of top notch applications to select from.
3. Siri – Yes, I have to write it separately. This app is simply amazing.
4. The display – Retina display is the best display available for any mobile device. It has The highest resolution.(But the display from Galaxy s2 is a close match for this one)
5. Camera – One of the best mobile camera available. (Same Galaxy s2 is almost the same + it has high profile 1080p recording)
6. User interface, IOS interface is simply awesome.
7. The audio quality, and battery back up.
8. The multi touch keyboard in iphones, nothing can even be compared to this one.

The good things about Android Phones

1. The number of devices available, lots of choices.
2. Samsung Galaxy s2(amoled+) has almost as good display as iphone 4s(Retina), almost better camera compared to iphone 4s ie, high profile, 1080p Video Recording & 2MP Front Camera.
3. Highly customizable Operating system.
4. Social networking integration with OS.
5. The regular updates for the android OS makes it more updated and user friendly.
6. Web and Data Speeds (Both the T-Mobile Galaxy SII (12.6 Mbps) and the Motorola Droid Bionic (11.6 Mbps) are faster compared to the AT&T iPhone 4S delivered speeds 5.3 Mbps but averaged 2.2 Mbps.)
7. Multi tasking is more flexible in Android.
8. Gives more control over the images and videos from the camera.
9. Almost all audio/video formats are supported out of the box.

Now Comparison among the goods and bads:

• If you need to install customized os in iphone, no, you can’t just simply do it unless you are a hardcore geek and knows very deep about the iphones. but in android, its not the case, there are lots of customized ROM’s available and you can use the step by step instructions from the ROM developer(which are freely available in forums like xda-developers.com). These customized ROMS will make your phone simply awesome.
• Now the overclocking ability. Almost all the phones comes under clocked, even the iphone. So if you want to unleash the power hidden in your phone, you can do that in android devices. But in iphone, even if its jailbroken, the overclocking is still too much difficult to an average user to try it.
• The android mobiles are almost brickable. even if it is bricked you can unbrick it using some tools and tutorials(that means it never truly bricks).
• The file management in the android is somewhat better compared to the iphone. You just need to plug it into you system and drag and drop the files you would like in the device. But in iphone, you will need itunes for doing this.
• You can choose to open a particular file in different different applications in android, in iphone i guess this option is not available(at least I haven’t seen it).
• Androids office applications and organizer is no where compared to that of iphone. its just unmatchable.
• The music player is also better in iphone, with all that organizing and syncing options out of the box.
• The quality of the application in app store is also better compared to the android market.
• The mobile assistant SIRI, is one of those applications, which makes iphone is worth buying.
• Almost all android mobiles have removable batteries, while iphone cannot do so.
• Android mobiles are available in different hardwares, so if you want more CPU power or Grpahics Processor power, you can gofor those kind of mobile like Samsun Galaxy S2. HTC Sensation etc. And if you need one mobile within some budget also, you can choose a lower end mobile, like Motorola Defy which itself has a Processor better than that of IPhone 3GS.

Result: So in my opinion, Android wins the war for most of the people. The choice of available models for android makes it a winner. But not for everyone. Android is more like an open ground, on which you can build things and customize around. But IPhone is more like a closed house, on which for everything there will be a limit. If I have to choose one, I will choose android set as I like to go and build/configure stuffs. But if you are one among those people who want an elegant look and royal feel, you may go for an iphone device which will be the perfect choice for you. Iphone will never disappoint you.