If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It looks like an iPad, only it’s a fraction of the cost: India has unveiled the prototype of an Ipad clone that costs only $35. The basic touchscreen tablet is primarily for students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011.

If the Government can find a manufacturer, the Linux operating system-based computer would be the latest in a string of “world’s cheapest” innovations to hit the market out of India, which is home to the US$2127 compact Nano car, the US$16 water purifier and US$2000 open-heart surgery.

What does the ipad clone do?

The tablet can be used for functions such as word processing, web browsing and video-conferencing. It has a solar power option too – important for India’s energy-starved hinterlands – though that add-on costs extra.

“This is our answer to MIT’s US$100 computer,” said Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte – co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab – unveiled a prototype of a US$100 laptop for children in the developing world. India rejected that as too expensive and embarked on an effort to develop a cheaper option of its own.

Negroponte’s laptop ended up costing about US$200, but his nonprofit association, One Laptop Per Child, plans to launch a basic ipad clone for US$99. Sibal turned to students and professors at India’s elite technical universities to develop the US$35 tablet after receiving a “lukewarm” response from the private sector. He hopes to get the cost down to US$10 eventually.

Mamta Varma, a ministry spokeswoman, said falling hardware costs and intelligent design would make the price tag plausible.

Ipad Clone Hardware and software Savings

The ipad clone does not have a hard disk, but instead uses a memory card, much like a mobile phone. The tablet design cuts hardware costs, and the use of open-source software also adds to savings. Varma said several global manufacturers, including at least one from Taiwan, had shown interest in making the low-costipad clone.

The project is part of an ambitious education technology initiative by the Indian Government, which also aims to bring broadband connectivity to the nation’s 25,000 colleges and 504 universities and make study materials available online. The ministry says nearly 8500 colleges have been connected and 500 web and video-based courses uploaded on YouTube and other portals.

So what do you think? Would you ditch Apple for a cheap ipad clone that is good enough or do you need all the features of the real thing?

I was just watching a video from Logitech at their site about the 5.1 surround sound speaker system that they will be releasing next month.

The video is really intriguing to see because it looks like these speakers will be loud and they will also be able to hook up to a standalone DVD player or TV as well as to your computer. Also the jacks on the back of the sub will give us all control over what kind of connections we have to hook up.

One of the features which is I think normal that they are pushing is that you can turn up or down the subwoofer, even my old 4.1 computer speakers do this so that is not all that impressive.

What will be great is that I can plug this into the itouch or iphone at home and it will simulate 5.1 sound which will be great but even better is if I watch a video in my bedroom then I can also watch it in surround without having a receiver in my bedroom.

Oh and the clincher for me is that it is listed for $99. which is way cheaper than I would even hope for. The selling point has to be that it will just be portable surround sound.

I get emails from training facilities at work all the time but today I got this interesting article from Global Knowledge talking about the most important IT skills right now. In reading this list I know that in real life these are critical skills for all enterprises. See how you score for these top 10 skills. I have some work to do I see.

There are many skills that IT Pros should know about in doing their day-to-day jobs. That is one of great benefits of being in the IT industry – learning new platforms and products as they are released. The following list has many of the most common ones that most IT Pros should have. While there are ten skills listed, they are not in an ordered ranking. Depending upon the size of the IT infrastructure and environment, some of these might not be applicable.

1. Troubleshooting

Is this a skill, an art, or both? If you ask any seasoned IT professionals, they will tell you that troubleshooting skills are important, very important – and not something that can be readily taught. The difficult part is that troubleshooting is a specific skill set that many corporations simply do not have the time or money to invest. Troubleshooting skills could make or break your career. Not having the required troubleshooting skills could become a RGE (resuming generating event), or it could become a career enhancer when you are able to fix a mission-critical server. All of this being said, one would think that there would be more emphasis on teaching and sharing troubleshooting skills; unfortunately, this is not the case. This is one skill that must be learned only after mastering a particular platform or program. continue reading…

I just yesterday downloaded the first beta for Firefox 4 and it seems like quite a new redesign. There is a all new layout and this thing is really fast. Lots of articles around which makes me think that I am not the only one that is really interested and excited about a new Firefox release. Lifehacker has an article about features, as well as an article about the new Firefox 4 layout, and Mashable also has some info on the new beta release.

I am sure we will see lots more about Firefox 4 but I was busy also playing with extensions in Firefox 3.6 yesterday and I found that with my 15 or so extensions running everything was slowed down from launch time to page load time so I disabled all but a small core and everything seemed to be a lot better.

One thing that I would like to see is a breakdown of the performance hit before I download and install an extension for Firefox. A kind of  cost associated with a plugin to decide if I am willing to sacrifice a second or two or 10 of page load time to have that extra functionality. We all go through times with Firefox where we are adding lots of cool extensions and then just leaving stuff on that we do not really use until the next time that we get excited about extensions again.  One of the real reasons that Google Chrome is so fast is that most of us are not adding extensions to it as fast and have a more pure browser with lots of speed still.

I am never one to be quick to the purchase technology but I finally a few weeks ago got a Lenovo S10 Netbook. We have all heard about netbooks and how they are the future or if you listen to Steve Jobs crap on them he will call them nothing compared to an iPad. Anyway I bought a shiny new Lenovo at WalMart a couple weeks back.

So why did I want a netbook? I have a work laptop, a desktop in my basement and access to my wifes laptop and another desktop in my daughters bedroom. No shortage of computing power, oh yeah my wife and I also own an iPhone and an iTouch as well. Well the simple answer is portability. I do not want to be carrying around a mouse, big balky laptop and a power supply and for a short jaunt away from the kids and wife I can have wifi as well as a way to type up blog posts, surf, or just collect some thoughts together.

My Lenovo S10 is good but average for a new gen netbook. The Lenovo has a 10 inch screen, 160 gig drive, 1 gig ram (upgradable to 2 gigs) and a 3 cell battery that lasts about 3 hours or so (for 45 bucks I could get a 6 cell on ebay though). The other great thing about the Lenovo S10 is that it was only $279 at WalMart and that is cheap for any computer and this thing is a real computer to me.

So here are my initial observations about using this Lenovo S10 Netbook: continue reading…

I have been running Windows 7 for a while and then today on one computer I found that search is gone in Windows 7.

I had looked through my services and tried opening My Computer and in the address bar where Windows search was on the right side I could not see any sign of it.

Finally I just found a fix. I have no idea how I lost search in Windows 7 but if you go to:

1. Control Panel
2. To Programs and Features,
3. click on the “Turn Windows Features on and off” in the left pane

You will find the settings for build in features in Windows 7, this is different than our desktop computer services it is more features of the Operating System that are either available or not.

Look near the top and you will find the Indexing Service and make sure you check it, go down to the bottom and you will find Windows Search (check that on too), and then hit the OK button.  After it chugs along for a minute it will have you reboot and search will be back.

I think the ADD meds have really started to kick in. I had a problem with probably some pretty simple solutions using software but instead I used IT skills and a piece of Unix software ported to Windows.

Here is the problem. We have a computer in a remote subnet, remote city actually and we did not know anything but the city name. In the past I have used for pay type programs and I even just found a piece of freeware called Free IP Scanner (which works great) but I wanted to see what else was out there and more importantly what these tools probably do in the background.

First I needed to find out where this subnet was. I knew of a printer there so I just added the printer to my machine and went to properties –> ports and got the IP address of that printer (10.20.7.29). Now I knew my subnet. I still needed to find the IP of the computer of the subnet.

I wanted to use a variation of ping on my Windows XP computer but there did not seem to be an option so instead I did a search on Google and found a Unix messageboard and a blog post talking about nmap. Nmap is not part of native windows networking built in like Ping or NSlookup, or NetStat so I had to download and install the Windows version of Nmap and that went smoothly. After the install there is a new windows program called Zenmap and in there you give parameters and it will run the code against the command line that nmap installed. Just to let you know there are a few things in addition that nmap for Windows installs including scripts and a Python interpreter to get this Unix/Linux app to work in Windows and run the commands needed. Be very aware though that nmap is for more than just scanning subnets, it can do a lot for you in terms of seeing info about all remote hosts on a subnet or a machine in particular.

So now I just had to figure out what to do about how to scan the subnet. I looked at some nmap documentation and as you can see above is was as simple as putting in 10.20.7.1-255 and although the syntax seems strange for that IP range it does work. The cool thing was that it gave me the code in a box underneath that it was going to run to get the addresses (nmap -sP -PE -PA21,23,80,3389 10.20.7.1-255).

So in the box I was able to find two printers and the computer. and after I had the computer IP I just used RDP to remote to the machine and on the drop down box for the domain it gave me the computername.

This has to be the longest stretch of time that it has taken me in a long time to do an apparently simple IT task. I am sure I could have just walked over to our network guys and found the name in just a couple of minutes but that was not the goal of this exercise, I wanted to search around and find not tools and methods of getting information. This was a lot of work I guarantee to get a computer name but I love that I now have nmap to rely on and I got to flex my brain muscles a bit.

We all get mad waiting for apps to open or for menus to come up in Windows. You don’t have to suffer with slowness in fact I can tell you how to speed up your computer.

First of all to speed up your computer you  need to make sure that there is no extra files loaded and that everything is going well on startup, then you need to clean out any spyware or adware. Finally you need to clean the registry. If all else fails you may need to get more memory or a faster computer but that really is the last resort…I am certainly cheap so I do not like to spend money speeding up a slow computer.

So here are my top 5 ways on how to speed up your computer.

1. Run MSCONFIG – msconfig is a utility that has been around since Windows 95 at least and is still available in Windows 7. To run msconfig you just need to open a command prompt (start and then find run) and then it will open up a windows with a few tabs depending on the version of Windows that you are running. Just go over to the startup tab. You are going to see things in there like windows messenger, adobe acrobat startup, Google update, java update and quicktime as well as anything else that looks like it is not importnat to the running of your computer. continue reading…

I keep seeing stories today about Google Wave opening up to everyone. Still in beta? Anyway when Google launched Google Wave it looked like it was going to be an email game changer type app and I would love to know how widely used it has been, I know i dropped using it after the first week.

Google Wave is supposed to be a lot more collaborative than email including having small groups sharing a wave conversation and then splitting off parts of the convo for another specific topic.

If you have not tried wave then by all means go to Google and get an account now and then send me a wave message. My wave account is billthetechguy@googlewave.com

I don’t know if you are like me but whenever I use a laptop I will use the touchpad, unless of course there is a mouse around. I use a Dell laptop at work and of course at my desk there is always a mouse so I do not need the touchpad. And wanted to know how to How to disable the touchpad

Have you ever tried to log in to Windows or to work in Word and you accidentally hit the touchpad and have to go back to the mouse to reset where you were? It is very irritating and if you are using a mouse anyway then why not How to disable the touchpad? Well there is an easy way to fix this.

How to Disable the touchpad

Go to the control panel in your Dell laptop and go to mouse settings. There will be a tab called “Device Select” in this tab you can set it to disable the Touchpad and Pointing Stick when you have a USB pointing device (read as mouse) plugged in.

This method to How to disable the touchpad is flawless and helps to stop the touchpad on the laptop from getting in the way when you are using a mouse anyway