Summary: Microsoft may say that Linux isn't enemy number one anymore, but they sure still act like it is.
If this wasn't so sad, it would be funny. After Microsoft recently declared victory over Linux, it turns out that Microsoft appears is still trying to arrange it so that Linux won't even boot on the next generation of PCs that come with Windows 8. Yeah, Linux isn't on your enemy list anymore right Microsoft? Sure.
Matthew Garrett, a Red Hat engineer, gets the credit for spotting Microsoft's latest anti-Linux move. In a blog posting, Garrett explains that Windows 8 logo guidelines require that systems have Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) secure boot enabled. This, in turn, would block Linux, or any other operating system, from booting on it.
There's nothing in UEFI that's wrong. Indeed there's a lot of good in UEFI. It's a 21st century replacement for your PC's basic input/output system (BIOS). Its job is to initialize your hardware and then hand over control over to the operating system.
Where the Microsoft sneak attack comes in, Garret writes, is with the UEFI secure boot protocol:
UEFI secure boot protocol is part of recent UEFI specification releases. It permits one or more signing keys to be installed into a system firmware. Once enabled, secure boot prevents executables or drivers from being loaded unless they're signed by one of these keys. Another set of keys (Pkek) permits communication between an OS and the firmware. An OS with a Pkek matching that installed in the firmware may add additional keys to the whitelist. Alternatively, it may add keys to a blacklist. Binaries signed with a blacklisted key will not load.
There is no centralized signing authority for these UEFI keys. If a vendor key is installed on a machine, the only way to get code signed with that key is to get the vendor to perform the signing. A machine may have several keys installed, but if you are unable to get any of them to sign your binary then it won't be installable.
This impacts both software and hardware vendors. An OS vendor cannot boot their software on a system unless it's signed with a key that's included in the system firmware. A hardware vendor cannot run their hardware inside the EFI environment unless their drivers are signed with a key that's included in the system firmware. If you install a new graphics card that either has unsigned drivers, or drivers that are signed with a key that's not in your system firmware, you'll get no graphics support in the firmware.
Microsoft requires (PowerPoint Link) that machines conforming to the Windows 8 logo program and running a client version of Windows 8 ship with secure boot enabled. The two alternatives here are for Windows to be signed with a Microsoft key and for the public part of that key to be included with all systems, or alternatively for each OEM to include their own key and sign the pre-installed versions of Windows. The second approach would make it impossible to run boxed copies of Windows on Windows logo hardware, and also impossible to install new versions of Windows unless your OEM provided a new signed copy. The former seems more likely.
To sum up: "a system that ships with only OEM and Microsoft keys will not boot a generic copy of Linux."
What does Microsoft have to say about the subject? ZDNet's own Mary Jo Foley asked them and they've got nothing to say about UEFI, Linux and Windows 8. That's reassuring.
Personally, I don't think it's going to happen. I think Microsoft is going to have its hands full getting hardware vendors to buy into Windows 8 in the first place nevermind trying to shove a signed UEFI secure boot protocol down their throats as well. The OEMs know darn well that while not that many companies will switch out Windows for Linux, a lot of them will switch out Windows 8 for Windows 7 or even XP. Will Dell, Lenovo, et. al. Really want to tick off their corporate customers by locking them into Windows 8? I don't think so.
In short, this is 2011, not 1998. Microsoft doesn't get to call the shots to the OEMs anymore. If the OEMs and customers want freedom of operating system choice on their hardware-and they will-Microsoft can't force Windows 8 on them.
This blog contains the information which was once useful for atleast for some situations or was worth reading.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Google busts itself for distributing malware
Who says Google favors its own properties? When the company's Safe Browsing service checked Google.com, it found that 50 pages resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent.
Google is under fire in Washington for favoring its own properties. This week, I ran across proof that on at least one front it doesn't discriminate.
The company's Safe Browsing service uses Google's wide-ranging spiders to look for evidence of malware distribution on the network at large; the findings are used to block potentially dangerous sites.
So what happened when Google inspected Google.com? Here's the Safe Browsing Diagnostic page:
Oh my. Here are some results:
"Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 3 time(s) over the past 90 days."
"Of the 2321615 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 50 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. … Malicious software includes 296 trojan(s), 35 scripting exploit(s), 15 worm(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 5 new process(es) on the target machine."
"Over the past 90 days, google.com appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 11 site(s)…"
"[T]his site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 172 domain(s)…"
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who follows distributors of malware. As I've demonstrated here and here, the bad guys love to target Google search results. And Google search results were the primary vector for the Mac Defender attack that plagued Mac users in May and June of this year.
The notion that malicious software can be downloaded and installed without user consent is chilling, but to put things into perspective, that count represents about 1 dangerous page for every 50,000 in Google's index.
I asked a Google spokesperson for an explanation and received this response:
Google's automated malware scanning systems don't play favorites when searching for malware - they scan and flag Google sites just like any other site. Many Google properties are designed for user-generated content - like Google Sites, Google Docs, YouTube, etc. So Google has developed sophisticated systems to help ensure user-generated content is safe, including our dynamic malware detection system which feeds data to the the Safe Browsing Diagnostic pages.
Whenever we find malware on a Google property we're committed to protecting users. Yes, that may mean adding a Google property to the malware list. But the best way to protect users is to remove the malicious content. Google's Anti-Malware team works closely with other Google teams to quickly clean up user-generated content on Google properties.
Battling malware is a difficult and on-going task. Google's priority is protecting users, and we hold ourselves to a very high standard. Google's Safe Browsing API protects millions of users every day as proof of our commitment.
And how did Microsoft's properties fare? Here are the Safe Browsing Diagnostic pages for Microsoft.com and Bing.com. When I checked earlier today, both sites were found to have hosted malicious software, just as Google did. Microsoft.com showed no evidence of having allowed malicious software to be downloaded and installed without consent. For Bing, however, the result was less than perfect:
Of the 17068 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent.
In Bing's case, the last detection of malicious software was on August 29. By contrast, Google found malicious software on its own properties as recently as this morning.
The moral of the story: Keep your guard up when you search.
Google is under fire in Washington for favoring its own properties. This week, I ran across proof that on at least one front it doesn't discriminate.
The company's Safe Browsing service uses Google's wide-ranging spiders to look for evidence of malware distribution on the network at large; the findings are used to block potentially dangerous sites.
So what happened when Google inspected Google.com? Here's the Safe Browsing Diagnostic page:
Oh my. Here are some results:
"Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 3 time(s) over the past 90 days."
"Of the 2321615 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 50 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. … Malicious software includes 296 trojan(s), 35 scripting exploit(s), 15 worm(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 5 new process(es) on the target machine."
"Over the past 90 days, google.com appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 11 site(s)…"
"[T]his site has hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. It infected 172 domain(s)…"
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who follows distributors of malware. As I've demonstrated here and here, the bad guys love to target Google search results. And Google search results were the primary vector for the Mac Defender attack that plagued Mac users in May and June of this year.
The notion that malicious software can be downloaded and installed without user consent is chilling, but to put things into perspective, that count represents about 1 dangerous page for every 50,000 in Google's index.
I asked a Google spokesperson for an explanation and received this response:
Google's automated malware scanning systems don't play favorites when searching for malware - they scan and flag Google sites just like any other site. Many Google properties are designed for user-generated content - like Google Sites, Google Docs, YouTube, etc. So Google has developed sophisticated systems to help ensure user-generated content is safe, including our dynamic malware detection system which feeds data to the the Safe Browsing Diagnostic pages.
Whenever we find malware on a Google property we're committed to protecting users. Yes, that may mean adding a Google property to the malware list. But the best way to protect users is to remove the malicious content. Google's Anti-Malware team works closely with other Google teams to quickly clean up user-generated content on Google properties.
Battling malware is a difficult and on-going task. Google's priority is protecting users, and we hold ourselves to a very high standard. Google's Safe Browsing API protects millions of users every day as proof of our commitment.
And how did Microsoft's properties fare? Here are the Safe Browsing Diagnostic pages for Microsoft.com and Bing.com. When I checked earlier today, both sites were found to have hosted malicious software, just as Google did. Microsoft.com showed no evidence of having allowed malicious software to be downloaded and installed without consent. For Bing, however, the result was less than perfect:
Of the 17068 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent.
In Bing's case, the last detection of malicious software was on August 29. By contrast, Google found malicious software on its own properties as recently as this morning.
The moral of the story: Keep your guard up when you search.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Installing Opendocman – Problems and Solutions
Opendocman looks like a nifty open source document management system (DMS) from what little I've seen of it. Too bad it suffers from scant documentation, and even scantier installation help (from the forums or online)! I'll try to list some of the pitfalls I encountered, and how to solve them.
1. Uploading to your hosting server and expanding the tar.gz file should be straightforward.
2. After expanding, manually create a MySQL database because the setup.php file in Opendocman requires Grant privileges remotely, something which administrators may not allow.
3. Create a data folder in a private folder not open to browsing from the Internet (called the "root" in the installation README) — typically, this may be called "tmp"/"private"/"var". This is for storing documents uploaded to the repository without allowing unauthenticated users to browse to the documents.
4. Change the config.php file to reflect your database settings.
5. Once installed, login with "admin"/no password, and change your admin settings at "Admin > User".
6. You're good to go!
The two main problems I faced were the creation of a database using setup.php (doesn't work well), and creation of the data folder for storing the repository (needs an absolute path – get it from your server administrator if you do not have it and encounter dataDir problems during installation).
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Is China headed for a crash? Not yet, say observers
China continues to post some of the fastest rates of growth in the world. But even that may not be enough to prevent the world`s second-largest economy from running into trouble. A nation that has raced forward with double-digit gains in gross domestic product in recent years now threatens to shift into neutral, economists say.
The prospect of a hard landing is what concerns many China watchers. Though most say that's not imminent, it's a definite risk as global growth shudders to a halt, with demand for China's exports likely to fall.
"There will be some viable concerns about China drifting towards what would be considered stalling speed," Joseph Lau, the senior Asia economist at Société Générale, says. "Like an aircraft, the risk is that it doesn`t go fast enough, and crashes, resulting in a hard landing."
The country will likely risk verging into that territory over the next couple of years. Lau anticipates growth moderating to 7% to 8% in that period, after growing at an adjusted 10.3% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). "As you drift towards 7% in the next year, that will raise those risk concerns," he says.
Many countries would be thrilled with that kind of growth, but with millions of people moving from the countryside to the cities each year even that level might not match the demand for new jobs.
Lau is more pessimistic than most. He says the rate of growth would need to keep above 6% to avoid such a crash. Anything lower than that would result in what Lau calls a "positive-growth recession." Although the country would be posting economic growth, it wouldn't be enough to sustain a nation that is undergoing serious structural changes as it matures.
The irony is that the slowdown in growth may spell good news for China's economy in the long run. It is partly a product of the nation shifting away from rapid export-driven growth to a more mature industry makeup that's based on domestic consumption.
"That fast growth creates other structural imbalances," Lau says. "A more moderate pace of growth would help shift away from inefficient resource allocation or overcapacity to more productive areas. It will be healthy. It won't seem healthy in the next year or two, but in five or 10 years it will definitely be positive for the structure of the economy."
The IMF continues to predict strong growth of around 9.5% per year through 2016, and other economists are more optimistic about China's prospects. Ashley Davies, the senior economist for emerging markets in Asia at Commerzbank, has raised his forecast for 2011 growth to 9.2%, from an initial 8.7%, after a strong start to the year.
"China is not slowing at anywhere near the rate that people expect over the longer term," Davies says. "The question is when do you reach that turning point when the economy does slow substantially?"
He believes Beijing, with USD 3 trillion in foreign currency reserves, still has the firepower to boost growth if necessary.
That ability could be constrained by China's dramatic response to the global financial crisis, when the country rolled out a massive, 4 trillion yuan (USD 627 billion) stimulus package. That stimulus sent the economy into overdrive, and fueled credit and capacity excesses that Beijing is now trying to address. "They can`t take their foot off the throat of the economy," Davies says.
"The West is suffering from the "pushing on a string" argument-if people don`t borrow you're not going to get growth. But in China if you increase lending it`s taken up very quickly," he said.
Still, rising wages and the consistent appreciation of the Chinese currency have spelled bad news for equities. Chinese stocks have underperformed for some time, with the MSCI China index essentially flat over the last three years, showing an average annual gain of just 0.04%. They're down 11.2% over the last year, through late August, one of the worst emerging-market performances as concerns emerged that local governments were overburdened with debt.
Estimates of the size of local debt range from the official 10.7 trillion yuan to an unofficial figure of 14 trillion yuan. With more than half that debt due to mature by the end of next year, Beijing will need to restructure local debt and prevent a major bank default, HSBC chief economist for greater China Qu Hongbin wrote in a report in August.
But the problem is still manageable, Qu believes, with total government debt in China still at just over half of GDP. That`s considerably lower than the developed world and most emerging countries.
Beijing's continued credit tightening and higher interest rates will curb growth, but aren`t destroying it, the economist believes. "Bottom line: growth in China is moderating, not collapsing," Qu wrote in a report on the country`s manufacturing figures, which showed a slight pickup in August over July. "Inflation, not growth, remains the top near-term macro risk for policy makers."
With such big-picture concerns, though, stock analysts have deeply divergent views on which way the Chinese market is headed. John Tang, the China strategist at UBS, has said that Chinese stocks could still plunge to their 2008 lows, which would imply another drop of 25% to 30%.
But other market watchers have suggested China could be a bargain or even a safe haven.
"Our macro call on the Chinese economy is that it will have a 'sluggish landing' due to the over-investment and over-extension of credit in the past few years," a team of Credit Suisse analysts wrote in a market briefing on Aug. 9. "So, growth will be relatively subdued but not really a 'hard landing.' So investors should consider some bottom-fishing at the current level."
Shanghai A shares had only an 8% potential downside, compared to their 2008 lows, Credit Suisse concluded. Price-to-book ratios have corrected 30 to 40 percent in China since 2009, compared with only a 20% correction in Hong Kong, where shares also have a significant downside of 15 to 20%.
Vincent Chan, a research analyst and one of the authors of the report, notes that the strong growth of last decade also created inefficiencies that are now being corrected.
"Strong export growth helped drive a lot of excess capacity in China as well," he says. With both credit and investment tougher to come by, "the likelihood is that the growth of China will weaken-the old growth model is more difficult to sustain."
Chan notes that official GDP figures are not reliable, with China not following the international standards of breaking down GDP by expenditure. He also calls the official unemployment figures "useless" since the jobless rate always hovers around 4.5%, whatever the condition of the economy.
But he believes moderately slower growth will not threaten China too much. Although some China watchers have suggested growth below 8 percent could lead to social unrest, he doesn`t think that`s too much of a risk.Â
"The country's level of tolerance for lower growth has become higher-I think that`s pretty important," he says. "Growth was a much more important variable five to 10 years ago. Now you don`t really have an unemployment problem, so slowing growth will have a lesser impact."
And even at a slower pace in the next decade, any growth is good when the developed world is in turmoil and moving sideways at best.
"It is likely that China will slow, but at a rate that is enviable for other countries," Davies says.
The prospect of a hard landing is what concerns many China watchers. Though most say that's not imminent, it's a definite risk as global growth shudders to a halt, with demand for China's exports likely to fall.
"There will be some viable concerns about China drifting towards what would be considered stalling speed," Joseph Lau, the senior Asia economist at Société Générale, says. "Like an aircraft, the risk is that it doesn`t go fast enough, and crashes, resulting in a hard landing."
The country will likely risk verging into that territory over the next couple of years. Lau anticipates growth moderating to 7% to 8% in that period, after growing at an adjusted 10.3% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). "As you drift towards 7% in the next year, that will raise those risk concerns," he says.
Many countries would be thrilled with that kind of growth, but with millions of people moving from the countryside to the cities each year even that level might not match the demand for new jobs.
Lau is more pessimistic than most. He says the rate of growth would need to keep above 6% to avoid such a crash. Anything lower than that would result in what Lau calls a "positive-growth recession." Although the country would be posting economic growth, it wouldn't be enough to sustain a nation that is undergoing serious structural changes as it matures.
The irony is that the slowdown in growth may spell good news for China's economy in the long run. It is partly a product of the nation shifting away from rapid export-driven growth to a more mature industry makeup that's based on domestic consumption.
"That fast growth creates other structural imbalances," Lau says. "A more moderate pace of growth would help shift away from inefficient resource allocation or overcapacity to more productive areas. It will be healthy. It won't seem healthy in the next year or two, but in five or 10 years it will definitely be positive for the structure of the economy."
The IMF continues to predict strong growth of around 9.5% per year through 2016, and other economists are more optimistic about China's prospects. Ashley Davies, the senior economist for emerging markets in Asia at Commerzbank, has raised his forecast for 2011 growth to 9.2%, from an initial 8.7%, after a strong start to the year.
"China is not slowing at anywhere near the rate that people expect over the longer term," Davies says. "The question is when do you reach that turning point when the economy does slow substantially?"
He believes Beijing, with USD 3 trillion in foreign currency reserves, still has the firepower to boost growth if necessary.
That ability could be constrained by China's dramatic response to the global financial crisis, when the country rolled out a massive, 4 trillion yuan (USD 627 billion) stimulus package. That stimulus sent the economy into overdrive, and fueled credit and capacity excesses that Beijing is now trying to address. "They can`t take their foot off the throat of the economy," Davies says.
"The West is suffering from the "pushing on a string" argument-if people don`t borrow you're not going to get growth. But in China if you increase lending it`s taken up very quickly," he said.
Still, rising wages and the consistent appreciation of the Chinese currency have spelled bad news for equities. Chinese stocks have underperformed for some time, with the MSCI China index essentially flat over the last three years, showing an average annual gain of just 0.04%. They're down 11.2% over the last year, through late August, one of the worst emerging-market performances as concerns emerged that local governments were overburdened with debt.
Estimates of the size of local debt range from the official 10.7 trillion yuan to an unofficial figure of 14 trillion yuan. With more than half that debt due to mature by the end of next year, Beijing will need to restructure local debt and prevent a major bank default, HSBC chief economist for greater China Qu Hongbin wrote in a report in August.
But the problem is still manageable, Qu believes, with total government debt in China still at just over half of GDP. That`s considerably lower than the developed world and most emerging countries.
Beijing's continued credit tightening and higher interest rates will curb growth, but aren`t destroying it, the economist believes. "Bottom line: growth in China is moderating, not collapsing," Qu wrote in a report on the country`s manufacturing figures, which showed a slight pickup in August over July. "Inflation, not growth, remains the top near-term macro risk for policy makers."
With such big-picture concerns, though, stock analysts have deeply divergent views on which way the Chinese market is headed. John Tang, the China strategist at UBS, has said that Chinese stocks could still plunge to their 2008 lows, which would imply another drop of 25% to 30%.
But other market watchers have suggested China could be a bargain or even a safe haven.
"Our macro call on the Chinese economy is that it will have a 'sluggish landing' due to the over-investment and over-extension of credit in the past few years," a team of Credit Suisse analysts wrote in a market briefing on Aug. 9. "So, growth will be relatively subdued but not really a 'hard landing.' So investors should consider some bottom-fishing at the current level."
Shanghai A shares had only an 8% potential downside, compared to their 2008 lows, Credit Suisse concluded. Price-to-book ratios have corrected 30 to 40 percent in China since 2009, compared with only a 20% correction in Hong Kong, where shares also have a significant downside of 15 to 20%.
Vincent Chan, a research analyst and one of the authors of the report, notes that the strong growth of last decade also created inefficiencies that are now being corrected.
"Strong export growth helped drive a lot of excess capacity in China as well," he says. With both credit and investment tougher to come by, "the likelihood is that the growth of China will weaken-the old growth model is more difficult to sustain."
Chan notes that official GDP figures are not reliable, with China not following the international standards of breaking down GDP by expenditure. He also calls the official unemployment figures "useless" since the jobless rate always hovers around 4.5%, whatever the condition of the economy.
But he believes moderately slower growth will not threaten China too much. Although some China watchers have suggested growth below 8 percent could lead to social unrest, he doesn`t think that`s too much of a risk.Â
"The country's level of tolerance for lower growth has become higher-I think that`s pretty important," he says. "Growth was a much more important variable five to 10 years ago. Now you don`t really have an unemployment problem, so slowing growth will have a lesser impact."
And even at a slower pace in the next decade, any growth is good when the developed world is in turmoil and moving sideways at best.
"It is likely that China will slow, but at a rate that is enviable for other countries," Davies says.
Microsoft's Windows 8: Now it's time for the caveats
Microsoft's Windows 8 made its developer debut and not-so-surprisingly the reaction followed a familiar historical pattern of reaction. In the beginning it's "wow," "looks good," and "can't wait." Then there's the next phase, which includes questions about hardware, deliverables and wild cards. Finally, we get to the realization that Windows 8 is a year away and we're not quite sure how this adventure is going to play out.
Such is life when your development process is as public as you can get. Survey the tech chatter today and it's clear that the reaction to Windows 8 is somewhere between the second and final phases for this round of development.
In a nutshell, Windows 8 looks swell, but is far from complete. There are questions about how the Metro UI will ultimately go over with developers, Microsoft's grand plan to port Windows 8 to the ARM architecture and a big mystery about the hardware side of a Redmond-powered tablet.
Here's a look at the caveats about Windows 8 in order of importance.
The timing. As Ed Bott noted the other day, Microsoft is an odd duck that develops in public. This approach is easily mocked. Daring Fireball's John Gruber said that companies like Apple and Amazon would never preannounce something a year in advance and show off a work in progress warts and all. But that's how Microsoft rolls. The reality is that Windows 8 is probably a year away and that gives others a chance to garner a larger lead. In the PC market, the lead-in to Windows 8 will be the great pause before a sales pop. In the tablet market, a year is an eternity. Harry McCracken noted that the jury is anything but in on Windows 8. Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard said in a research note:
The company did not announce a final timeline for a Windows 8 launch; however, we expect a final version should be ready for holiday 2012.
CBS News' Charles Cooper was a bit more direct about the timing issue:
Give Microsoft's spinmeisters credit for a job well done. They got the desired headlines out of this week's big developer conference where Microsoft offered a long, detailed look at Windows 8. But the most important headline for applications makers - and ultimately consumers - still remains unwritten: When will the product really ship?
The tablet plan. Microsoft's Windows 8 looks like an easy play for the tablet. The problem is that Microsoft had to hand out a large somewhat clunky slate to developers with Windows 8 on it. The ideal: Hand out a Samsung Galaxy Tab with Windows 8 included. Instead, developers played with a 11.6 inch tablet with an Intel i5 and a PC spec sheet. We know that the slate approach flopped so Microsoft needed to go out of its way to put Windows 8—even if buggy at this early stage—on hardware that didn't scream "PC wannabe!" Beta News' Joe Wilcox seemed to like the hardware, but it's doubtful that he represents the target audience.
Such is life when your development process is as public as you can get. Survey the tech chatter today and it's clear that the reaction to Windows 8 is somewhere between the second and final phases for this round of development.
In a nutshell, Windows 8 looks swell, but is far from complete. There are questions about how the Metro UI will ultimately go over with developers, Microsoft's grand plan to port Windows 8 to the ARM architecture and a big mystery about the hardware side of a Redmond-powered tablet.
Here's a look at the caveats about Windows 8 in order of importance.
The timing. As Ed Bott noted the other day, Microsoft is an odd duck that develops in public. This approach is easily mocked. Daring Fireball's John Gruber said that companies like Apple and Amazon would never preannounce something a year in advance and show off a work in progress warts and all. But that's how Microsoft rolls. The reality is that Windows 8 is probably a year away and that gives others a chance to garner a larger lead. In the PC market, the lead-in to Windows 8 will be the great pause before a sales pop. In the tablet market, a year is an eternity. Harry McCracken noted that the jury is anything but in on Windows 8. Wells Fargo analyst Jason Maynard said in a research note:
The company did not announce a final timeline for a Windows 8 launch; however, we expect a final version should be ready for holiday 2012.
CBS News' Charles Cooper was a bit more direct about the timing issue:
Give Microsoft's spinmeisters credit for a job well done. They got the desired headlines out of this week's big developer conference where Microsoft offered a long, detailed look at Windows 8. But the most important headline for applications makers - and ultimately consumers - still remains unwritten: When will the product really ship?
The tablet plan. Microsoft's Windows 8 looks like an easy play for the tablet. The problem is that Microsoft had to hand out a large somewhat clunky slate to developers with Windows 8 on it. The ideal: Hand out a Samsung Galaxy Tab with Windows 8 included. Instead, developers played with a 11.6 inch tablet with an Intel i5 and a PC spec sheet. We know that the slate approach flopped so Microsoft needed to go out of its way to put Windows 8—even if buggy at this early stage—on hardware that didn't scream "PC wannabe!" Beta News' Joe Wilcox seemed to like the hardware, but it's doubtful that he represents the target audience.
ARM port questions. Windows 8 development is running concurrently on x86 and ARM. At this point, the consensus seems to be pointing to x86 first as far as a final Windows 8 product. Windows 8 on ARM, however, is critical. Microsoft needs to get into the tablet game as soon as possible. Windows 8 on ARM can't wait until 2013 since Android will just improve and Apple may be on iPad 4 by then. As noted previously, there's a lot of pent up demand for a Microsoft Windows 8 tablet. I'm just not sure there's that much pent-up demand.
The Wintel meets post-PC era issue. Intel announced that Android will work with Atom chips going forward. Windows 8 will also play well. The big question is whether Wintel can do something more than act like a revved up netbook in a new form factor. The Wintel obits are premature, but so is the idea that Intel and Microsoft can navigate the post-PC era. The burden of proof sits with Microsoft and Intel.
The Wintel meets post-PC era issue. Intel announced that Android will work with Atom chips going forward. Windows 8 will also play well. The big question is whether Wintel can do something more than act like a revved up netbook in a new form factor. The Wintel obits are premature, but so is the idea that Intel and Microsoft can navigate the post-PC era. The burden of proof sits with Microsoft and Intel.
Linux snickers at Microsoft's victory declaration
My compadre Ed Bott does a fine job of digging under the surface of Microsoft's annual report to find that Microsoft no longer considers Linux a serious threat. Who does Microsoft think they're kidding?
Sure, on the desktop, it's a Windows world, but guess what Sherlock; the desktop is declining in importance. The mobile, server, Web and cloud worlds are where the twenty-teens' billionaires will come from, not the desktop. And, guess, who's already in all those spaces large and in charge? Yes, that's right, Linux.
Let's start from the top on where Linux beats Microsoft.
Mobile
The mobile computing world is a dog-fight between Apple iOS and Google's Linux-based Android. Windows Phone 7 is much of a non-player on smartphone as Linux is on the conventional PC desktop. While Apple owns the high-end of smartphones, Android is cleaning up everywhere else.
Until recently, you could argue that nobody, but nobody, really sold tablets except for Apple. That argument doesn't hold water any more. Android now has 20% of the tablet market. I wonder, I really do, if that's why Apple launched its legal attack on the Samsung Galaxy Tab's design in Europe, Is Apple that insecure? Maybe.
Until the last few days, you might also have been concerned about how Google could fight off the endless legal challenges to Android. You need worry no more about that. Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility has given Google all the ammo it needs to win in the mobile patent wars.
Of course, it's always possible that another mobile operating system will win out. Like say HP's webOS, which is, ah, Linux based. Or, there's Intel MeeGo, which is, wow, what do you know, Linux based. You get the picture. One way or the other, tomorrow's mobile operating systems are likely to be Linux operating systems.
Servers and the Web
There are a lot of Windows Servers instances humming away in offices. It's hard to say exactly how many Linux servers are out there since you don't need to buy a Linux server, you can download one, or a hundred and one, for free. Sure, Red Hat, which primarily makes its money from its server offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is well on its way to being the first billion dollar open-source company, but there are probably far more CentOS, openSUSE, Debian, etc, Linux servers quietly and invisibly running. We just don't know. What we can count though are Web servers.
According to Netcraft, Microsoft has only 15.86% of the Web server market in August 2011. Apache leads the pack with 65.18%. In third place, you'll find ngnix with 6.54% and Google takes last place with 4.38%. And what operating system are you most likely to find Apache, ngnix, and Google running on? Yes, you're right in one, it's Linux.
It's not just Web servers though. Supercomputers, the fastest of the fast, run Linux almost exclusively. Cutting edge computing platforms like IBM's Jeopardy champ Watson? Linux again. It's not just computing engineers that turn to Linux though. The world's major stock exchanges also run Linux. Once you're away from the desktop, you're living in a Linux world.
The Cloud
I was privileged to speak recently at a small cloud conference in my hometown of Asheville, NC. Two things surprised me there. First, how many new businesses were already actively using the cloud's scalability to create new business models and, second, how everyone was using Linux on their cloud businesses.
I shouldn't have been surprised. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the most popular of the public clouds, doesn't report on what operating system images people use on it, but The Cloud Market, does scan Amazon EC2 for operating system and other information. According to The Cloud Market's numbers, as of August 15th 2011, Ubuntu Linux had 38.4% of all images; that was followed by generic Linux with 31.5% and then Windows with 13.5%. After Windows, there were numerous other Linux variants. Adding it all up and we're left pretty much with Linux was being used by 86.1% of all cloud users.
So, victory over Linux Microsoft? I think not.
Indeed, even on the desktop, as we turn more and more to using Web browsers for everything, I see Linux winning out in the long run. You've had a great run Microsoft, and you'll still be a power for the rest of this decade, but victory? No, you're just sliding into a long decline and, at the end of it, Linux will still be behind the scenes running everyone's back-room services, their tablets, their phones, and, yes, even their Web browser-based PCs ala Google Chrome OS with Linux-powered clouds keeping it all going.
Sure, on the desktop, it's a Windows world, but guess what Sherlock; the desktop is declining in importance. The mobile, server, Web and cloud worlds are where the twenty-teens' billionaires will come from, not the desktop. And, guess, who's already in all those spaces large and in charge? Yes, that's right, Linux.
Let's start from the top on where Linux beats Microsoft.
Mobile
The mobile computing world is a dog-fight between Apple iOS and Google's Linux-based Android. Windows Phone 7 is much of a non-player on smartphone as Linux is on the conventional PC desktop. While Apple owns the high-end of smartphones, Android is cleaning up everywhere else.
Until recently, you could argue that nobody, but nobody, really sold tablets except for Apple. That argument doesn't hold water any more. Android now has 20% of the tablet market. I wonder, I really do, if that's why Apple launched its legal attack on the Samsung Galaxy Tab's design in Europe, Is Apple that insecure? Maybe.
Until the last few days, you might also have been concerned about how Google could fight off the endless legal challenges to Android. You need worry no more about that. Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility has given Google all the ammo it needs to win in the mobile patent wars.
Of course, it's always possible that another mobile operating system will win out. Like say HP's webOS, which is, ah, Linux based. Or, there's Intel MeeGo, which is, wow, what do you know, Linux based. You get the picture. One way or the other, tomorrow's mobile operating systems are likely to be Linux operating systems.
Servers and the Web
There are a lot of Windows Servers instances humming away in offices. It's hard to say exactly how many Linux servers are out there since you don't need to buy a Linux server, you can download one, or a hundred and one, for free. Sure, Red Hat, which primarily makes its money from its server offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is well on its way to being the first billion dollar open-source company, but there are probably far more CentOS, openSUSE, Debian, etc, Linux servers quietly and invisibly running. We just don't know. What we can count though are Web servers.
According to Netcraft, Microsoft has only 15.86% of the Web server market in August 2011. Apache leads the pack with 65.18%. In third place, you'll find ngnix with 6.54% and Google takes last place with 4.38%. And what operating system are you most likely to find Apache, ngnix, and Google running on? Yes, you're right in one, it's Linux.
It's not just Web servers though. Supercomputers, the fastest of the fast, run Linux almost exclusively. Cutting edge computing platforms like IBM's Jeopardy champ Watson? Linux again. It's not just computing engineers that turn to Linux though. The world's major stock exchanges also run Linux. Once you're away from the desktop, you're living in a Linux world.
The Cloud
I was privileged to speak recently at a small cloud conference in my hometown of Asheville, NC. Two things surprised me there. First, how many new businesses were already actively using the cloud's scalability to create new business models and, second, how everyone was using Linux on their cloud businesses.
I shouldn't have been surprised. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the most popular of the public clouds, doesn't report on what operating system images people use on it, but The Cloud Market, does scan Amazon EC2 for operating system and other information. According to The Cloud Market's numbers, as of August 15th 2011, Ubuntu Linux had 38.4% of all images; that was followed by generic Linux with 31.5% and then Windows with 13.5%. After Windows, there were numerous other Linux variants. Adding it all up and we're left pretty much with Linux was being used by 86.1% of all cloud users.
So, victory over Linux Microsoft? I think not.
Indeed, even on the desktop, as we turn more and more to using Web browsers for everything, I see Linux winning out in the long run. You've had a great run Microsoft, and you'll still be a power for the rest of this decade, but victory? No, you're just sliding into a long decline and, at the end of it, Linux will still be behind the scenes running everyone's back-room services, their tablets, their phones, and, yes, even their Web browser-based PCs ala Google Chrome OS with Linux-powered clouds keeping it all going.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Top 10 mistakes in website designs to avoid
There are many atrocious website design mistakes to make as you build your website with BlueVoda. Mistakes are natural and very constructive if properly fixed and you take away some experience from the mistake but in the online arena, where you don't get a second chance to make a great first impression, it is best not to alienate your users by making any rookie mistakes at all. Here in this article I have outlined some of the very worst website design mistakes you can make against your own users. Don't make any of these mistakes as you build your website with BlueVoda. – You have been warned!.
In compiling this list I have made some additions from my own mistakes over the years – I have fallen prey to several of these and to be honest I have made nearly each of these mistakes at least once; changing my ways has been difficult.
Just rest assured that the practices listed here are very useful.
1) Custom Search Mistakes
If you are using a search feature on your website, you must be careful that it is not being detrimental to your website.
Some of the very literal search engines reduce the user friendliness of your website because they're unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the search terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users but they do hurt everybody.
Another problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document's importance. Much better if your search engine calls out "sure things" at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your services and products.
The ability to search is the user's lifeline when navigation fails or they get lost. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that's what users are looking for.
Google provides a really nice too for searching your website: You can find it here: http://www.google.com/cse/ – just make sure it's not getting in the way of your content in any way. If it is – LOOSE IT!
2) PDF Files for Online Reading
Users very often dislike coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don't work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user's browser window. So long smooth scrolling and hello tiny fonts.
Worst of all, PDF is an great wall of content that's pretty hard to navigate, especially if PDF contains a great deal of content.
PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed; you should reserve it for this purpose (as VodaHost does with "The Secrets to Promoting your Website Online") and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages. Otherwise, offer it as a download. You can do this by putting your PDF in a .ZIP file.
3) Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
As you surf around the World Wide Web, a good grasp of where you have been helps you understand where you are now, since it's the culmination of your journey. In fact, knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in this navigation process. Users can now choose to disregard links that proved pointless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in previous visits.
Most important, knowing which pages they've already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.
To be perfectly honest, I would fall prey to this mistake again and again. I think having the visited links a different color to the un-visited links makes the design of my website unbalanced. To be honest, I think it looks a little ugly.
The important thing is that this is MY problem and in not changing the color of text for visited links I am compromising my visitors enjoyment as they navigate my site. This is another important lesson of website design … Never make your own problems your visitors problems1
These benefits only accrue under one important assumption: that users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don't change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.
Generally, browsers change the color of visited links automatically – just don't change any of the link colors in your CSS or set any of the colors the same as your body text.
4) Text that is not easily readable
A massive unbroken wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. It's intimidating, boring and painful to read in today's world of instant gratification.
Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support "scannability" (), always use the tricks below:
- sub-headings
- bulleted lists
- bold (or highlighted) keyword phrases
- paragraphs that are short and sweet
- an inverted pyramid of text; more at the top, less at the bottom
- a simple writing style, and
- de-fluffed language devoid of marketese
5) Fixed Font Size
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size. Many times, this fixed font size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40.
Respect the user's preferences and let them re-size text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms — not as an absolute number of pixels.
6) Page Titles that the Search-Engines will not like
Search is the most important way users discover websites. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.
The page title is always contained within the HTML <title> tag and is almost always used as the clickable headline for listings on search engine result pages (SERP). Search engines tend to show the first 60 or so characters of the title, so it's truly micro-content.
Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. For your homepage, begin the with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. Don't start with words like "The" or "Welcome to" unless you want to be alphabetized under "T" or "W.", which will be quite a ways down the page.
For other pages than the homepage, start the title with a few of the most salient information-carrying words that describe the specifics of what users will find on that page. Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it's also used as the label for that window in the taskbar under Windows, meaning that advanced users will move between multiple windows under the guidance of the first one or two words of each page title. If all your page titles start with the same words, you have severely reduced usability for your multi-windowing users.
Taglines on homepages are a related subject: they also need to be short and quickly communicate the purpose of the site.
7) Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement
Selective attention is very powerful and Web users, over the years, have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. (The main exception being text-only search-engine ads.)
Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don't study it in detail to find out what it is.
Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. I'm not saying don't use Ads; I'm saying don't make your content look like ads. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads; currently follow these rules:
- banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page
- animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations
- pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph).
8) Going Against Design Conventions
Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don't have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience. For example, if you release an apple over Sir Isaac Newton, it will drop on his head. That's good.
The more users' expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users' expectations, the more they will feel insecure… "Maybe if I let go of this apple, it will turn into a lemon and jump a few miles into the sky."
No matter how good your website is, the truth is that users spend most of their time on other websites and in general this means that they form their expectations for your website based on what they see commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate from what the user expects, your site will be harder to use and users will disappear.
9) Opening New Browser Windows
In many respects, this is a battle of the browsers. Some browsers, (e.g. Firefox) only open up new Tabs rather than new Windows and I really like this; I find it quite useful. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer (the most used browser out there) opens up new windows and opening up a new browser window when a visitor clicks on a link is like a vacuum-salesman who starts a visit by emptying an ash-tray on the customer's welcome mat. Don't fill your users' screen with any more windows, thanks.
Website Designers often open new browser windows with the idea that it keeps users on their site but even disregarding the hostile message implied in taking over the user's machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users may not notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by an unusable Back button.
Links that don't behave as expected undermine users' understanding of your website and their own systems. A link should be a simple hypertext reference that replaces the current page with new content. Users hate unwarranted pop-up windows. When they want the destination to appear in a new page, they can use their browser's "open in new window" command — assuming, of course, that the link is not a piece of code that interferes with the browser's standard behavior.
10) Not Answering Users' Questions – ALWAYS ANSWER USERS' QUESTIONS!!!
Users are very goal-driven as they surf the Web. They visit sites because there's something they want to do — hopefully even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for.
Sometimes the answer is simply not there and you lose the sale because users have to assume that your product or service doesn't meet their needs if you don't tell them the specifics. Other times the specifics are buried under a thick layer of marketing language and bland slogans. Since users don't have time to read everything, such hidden info might almost as well not be there.
The worst example of not answering users' questions is to not list the price of products and services. No Business to Consumer ecommerce site would make this mistake, but it's all over the place in Business to Business ecommerce sites, where most "enterprise solutions" are presented so that you can't tell whether they are suited for 100 people or 100,000 people. Price is the most specific piece of info customers use to understand the nature of an offering, and not giving them it makes people feel lost and reduces their understanding of a product line. The last thing you want is a massive queue of users asking "Where's the price?" while tearing their hair out.
Contact information and the location of your store are also essential to your website. You are not helping your customers in the least if they can't trust your location or are unable to get in touch with you to ask their questions.
Don't make the mistake of forgetting prices in product lists, such as category pages or search results. Knowing the price is very important in both situations; it lets users differentiate among products and click through to the ones which are most relevant to them and their wallets.
"People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster."
Installation of the Moodles
Moodle is a nice opensource software, with a nice interface for the elearning procedures. I use it primary to have training of the people at my office done. It is nice you do not have to go to each and every desk for the training.
Installation using the Source code.
1) download the moodle pack from the website as source code.
2) unzip the folder
3) place the unzipped folder in the htdocs
4) fire up a brower
5) point it to http://localhost/moodle
6) Follow the installation procedure
7) moodle will be installed in minutes.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me if you have any problem.
I have a Xammp server.
Regards,
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Import Excel Data into MySQL in 5 Easy Steps
This is probably nothing new to many, but I spent quite some time to figure it out so I thought I’d post my notes on it.
To import data from Excel (or any other program that can produce a text file) is very simple using the LOAD DATA command from the MySQL Command prompt.
Save your Excel data as a csv file (In Excel 2007 using Save As)
Check the saved file using a text editor such as Notepad to see what it actually looks like, i.e. what delimiter was used etc.
Start the MySQL Command Prompt (I’m lazy so I usually do this from the MySQL Query Browser – Tools – MySQL Command Line Client to avoid having to enter username and password etc.)
Enter this command:
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘C:\\temp\\yourfile.csv’
INTO TABLE database.table
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ‘;’
ENCLOSED BY ""
LINES TERMINATED BY ‘\r\n’ (
field1, field2);
done !!
Very quick and simple once you know it
Some notes from my own import – may not apply to you if you run a different language version, MySQL version, Excel version etc…
TERMINATED BY – this is why I included step 2. I thought a csv would default to comma separated but at least in my case semicolon was the default
ENCLOSED BY – my data was not enclosed by anything so I left this as empty string ”
LINES TERMINATED BY – at first I tried with only ‘\n’ but had to add the ‘\r’ to get rid of a carriage return character being imported into the database
Also make sure that if you do not import into the primary key field/column that it has auto increment on, otherwhise only the first row will be imported
To import data from Excel (or any other program that can produce a text file) is very simple using the LOAD DATA command from the MySQL Command prompt.
Save your Excel data as a csv file (In Excel 2007 using Save As)
Check the saved file using a text editor such as Notepad to see what it actually looks like, i.e. what delimiter was used etc.
Start the MySQL Command Prompt (I’m lazy so I usually do this from the MySQL Query Browser – Tools – MySQL Command Line Client to avoid having to enter username and password etc.)
Enter this command:
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘C:\\temp\\yourfile.csv’
INTO TABLE database.table
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ‘;’
ENCLOSED BY ""
LINES TERMINATED BY ‘\r\n’ (
field1, field2);
done !!
Very quick and simple once you know it
Some notes from my own import – may not apply to you if you run a different language version, MySQL version, Excel version etc…
TERMINATED BY – this is why I included step 2. I thought a csv would default to comma separated but at least in my case semicolon was the default
ENCLOSED BY – my data was not enclosed by anything so I left this as empty string ”
LINES TERMINATED BY – at first I tried with only ‘\n’ but had to add the ‘\r’ to get rid of a carriage return character being imported into the database
Also make sure that if you do not import into the primary key field/column that it has auto increment on, otherwhise only the first row will be imported
ISO
The International Organization for Standardization (French: Organisation internationale de normalisation, Russian: Международная организация по стандартизации, tr. Mezhdunarodnaya organizaciya po standartizacii),[1] widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary industrial and commercial standards. It has its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.While ISO defines itself as a non-governmental organization, its ability to set standards that often become law, either through treaties or national standards, makes it more powerful than most non-governmental organizations. In practice, ISO acts as a consortium with strong links to governments.
Name and abbreviation
The organization's logos in two of its official languages, English and French, include the word ISO, and it is usually referred to by this short-form name. ISO asserts that ISO is not an acronym or initialism for the organization's full name in either official language; rather, the organization adopted ISO based on the Greek word isos (ἴσος), meaning equal — recognizing that the organization’s initials would be different in different languages, the organization's founders chose ISO as the universal short form of its name.[3] However, one of the founding delegates, Willy Kuert, recollected the original naming question with the comment "I recently read that the name ISO was chosen because 'iso' is a Greek term meaning 'equal'. There was no mention of that in London!".
ISO's main products are the International Standards. ISO also publishes Technical Reports, Technical Specifications, Publicly Available Specifications, Technical Corrigenda, and Guides.[9][10]
International Standards are designated with the format ISO[/IEC] [/ASTM] [IS] nnnnn[-p]:[yyyy] Title, where nnnnn is the number of the standard, p is an optional part number, yyyy is the year published, and Title describes the subject. IEC for International Electrotechnical Commission is included if the standard results from the work of ISO/IEC JTC1 (the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee). ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) is used for standards developed in cooperation with ASTM International. The date and IS are not used for an incomplete or unpublished standard, and may under some circumstances be left off the title of a published work.
Technical Reports are issued when "a technical committee or subcommittee has collected data of a different kind from that which is normally published as an International Standard".[9] such as references and explanations. The naming conventions for these are the same as for standards, except TR prepended instead of IS in the report's name. Examples:
* ISO/IEC TR 17799:2000 Code of Practice for Information Security Management
* ISO/TR 19033:2000 Technical product documentation — Metadata for construction documentation
Technical Specifications can be produced when "the subject in question is still under development or where for any other reason there is the future but not immediate possibility of an agreement to publish an International Standard". Publicly Available Specifications may be "an intermediate specification, published prior to the development of a full International Standard, or, in IEC may be a 'dual logo' publication published in collaboration with an external organization".[9] Both are named by convention similar to Technical Reports, for example:
* ISO/TS 16952-1:2006 Technical product documentation — Reference designation system — Part 1: General application rules
* ISO/PAS 11154:2006 Road vehicles — Roof load carriers
ISO sometimes issues a Technical Corrigendum. These are amendments to existing standards because of minor technical flaws, usability improvements, or to extend applicability in a limited way. Generally, these are issued with the expectation that the affected standard will be updated or withdrawn at its next scheduled review.[9]
ISO Guides are meta-standards covering "matters related to international standardization".[9] They are named in the format "ISO[/IEC] Guide N:yyyy: Title", for example:
* ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004 Standardization and related activities — General vocabulary
* ISO/IEC Guide 65:1996 General requirements for bodies operating product certification
[edit] Standardization process
A standard published by ISO/IEC is the last stage of a long process that commonly starts with the proposal of new work within a committee. Here are some abbreviations used for marking a standard with its status:[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
* PWI - Preliminary Work Item
* NP or NWIP - New Proposal / New Work Item Proposal (e.g., ISO/IEC NP 23007)
* AWI - Approved new Work Item (e.g., ISO/IEC AWI 15444-14)
* WD - Working Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC WD 27032)
* CD - Committee Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC CD 23000-5)
* FCD - Final Committee Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC FCD 23000-12)
* DIS - Draft International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC DIS 14297)
* FDIS - Final Draft International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC FDIS 27003)
* PRF - Proof of a new International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC PRF 18018)
* IS - International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007)
Abbreviations used for amendments:[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]
* NP Amd - New Proposal Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 15444-2:2004/NP Amd 3)
* AWI Amd - Approved new Work Item Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 14492:2001/AWI Amd 4)
* WD Amd - Working Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO 11092:1993/WD Amd 1)
* CD Amd / PDAmd - Committee Draft Amendment / Proposed Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/CD Amd 6)
* FPDAmd / DAM (DAmd) - Final Proposed Draft Amendment / Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003/FPDAmd 1)
* FDAM (FDAmd) - Final Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/FDAmd 4)
* PRF Amd - (e.g., ISO 12639:2004/PRF Amd 1)
* Amd - Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/Amd 1:2007
Other abbreviations:[15][16][18][19]
* TR - Technical Report (e.g., ISO/IEC TR 19791:2006)
* DTR - Draft Technical Report (e.g., ISO/IEC DTR 19791)
* TS - Technical Specification (e.g., ISO/TS 16949:2009)
* DTS - Draft Technical Specification (e.g., ISO/DTS 11602-1)
* PAS - Publicly Available Specification
* TTA - Technology Trends Assessment (e.g., ISO/TTA 1:1994)
* IWA - International Workshop Agreement (e.g., IWA 1:2005)
* Cor - Technical Corrigendum (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/Cor 1:2008)
* Guide - a guidance to technical committees for the preparation of standards
International Standards are developed by ISO technical committees (TC) and subcommittees (SC) by a process with six steps:[13][20]
* Stage 1: Proposal stage
* Stage 2: Preparatory stage
* Stage 3: Committee stage
* Stage 4: Enquiry stage
* Stage 5: Approval stage
* Stage 6: Publication stage
Stages in the development process of an ISO standard[12][13][14][17][18][20] Stage code↓ Stage↓ Associated document name↓ Abbreviations↓ Description↓
00 Preliminary stage Preliminary work item PWI
10 Proposal stage New work item proposal NP or NWIP, NP Amd/TR/TS/IWA
20 Preparatory stage Working draft(s) AWI, AWI Amd/TR/TS, WD, WD Amd/TR/TS
30 Committee stage Committee draft(s) CD, CD Amd/Cor/TR/TS, PDAmd (PDAM), PDTR, PDTS
40 Enquiry stage Enquiry draft DIS, FCD, FPDAmd, DAmd (DAM), FPDISP, DTR, DTS (CDV in IEC)
50 Approval stage Final draft International Standard FDIS, FDAmd (FDAM), PRF, PRF Amd/TTA/TR/TS/Suppl, FDTR
60 Publication stage International Standard ISO TR, TS, IWA, Amd, Cor
90 Review stage ISO TR, TS, IWA, Amd, Cor
95 Withdrawal stage
It is possible to omit certain stages, if there is a document with a certain degree of maturity at the start of a standardization project - for example a standard developed by another organization. ISO/IEC Directives allow also the so-called "Fast-track procedure". In this procedure a document is submitted directly for approval as a draft International Standard (DIS) to the ISO member bodies or as a final draft International Standard (FDIS) if the document was developed by an international standardizing body recognized by the ISO Council.[13]
The first step - a proposal of work (New Proposal) is approved at the relevant subcommittee or technical committee (e.g., SC29 and JTC1 respectively in the case of Moving Picture Experts Group - ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11). A working group (WG) of experts is set up by the TC/SC for the preparation of a Working Draft. When the scope of a new work is sufficiently clarified, some of the working groups (e.g., MPEG) usually make open request for proposals - known as "Call for proposals". The first document that is produced for example for audio and video coding standards is called a Verification Model (VM) (previously also called a Simulation and Test Model). When a sufficient confidence in the stability of the standard under development is reached, a Working Draft (WD) is produced. This is in the form of a standard but is kept internal to working group for revision. When a Working Draft is sufficiently solid and the working group is satisfied that it has developed the best technical solution to the problem being addressed, it becomes Committee Draft (CD). If it is required, it is then sent to the P-members of the TC/SC (National Bodies) for ballot.
The CD becomes Final Committee Draft (FCD) if the number of positive votes is above the quorum. Successive committee drafts may be considered until consensus is reached on the technical content. When it is reached, the text is finalized for submission as a draft International Standard (DIS). The text is then submitted to National Bodies for voting and comment within a period of five months. It is approved for submission as a final draft International Standard (FDIS) if a two-thirds majority of the P-members of the TC/SC are in favour and not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative. ISO will then hold a ballot with National Bodies where no technical changes are allowed (yes/no ballot), within a period of two months. It is approved as an International Standard (IS) if a two-thirds majority of the P-members of the TC/SC is in favour and not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative. After approval, only minor editorial changes are introduced into the final text. The final text is sent to the ISO Central Secretariat which publishes it as the International Standard.[11][13]
[edit] ISO document copyright
ISO documents are copyrighted and ISO charges for copies of most. ISO does not, however, charge for most draft copies of documents in electronic format. Although useful, care must be taken using these drafts as there is the possibility of substantial change before it becomes finalized as a standard. Some standards by ISO and its official U.S. representative (and the International Electrotechnical Commission's via the U.S. National Committee) are made freely available
Members
A map of standards bodies who are ISO members
Key:
members
correspondent members
subscriber members
other places with an ISO 3166-1 code who aren't members of ISO
ISO has 162 national members,[2] out of the 204 total countries in the world.
ISO has three membership categories:
* Member bodies are national bodies that are considered to be the most representative standards body in each country. These are the only members of ISO that have voting rights.
* Correspondent members are countries that do not have their own standards organization. These members are informed about ISO's work, but do not participate in standards promulgation.
* Subscriber members are countries with small economies. They pay reduced membership fees, but can follow the development of standards.
Participating members are called "P" members as opposed to observing members which are called "O" members.
[edit] Products named after ISO
The fact that many of the ISO-created standards are ubiquitous has led, on occasion, to common use of "ISO" to describe the actual product that conforms to a standard. Some examples of this are:
* Many CD images end in the file extension "ISO" to signify that they are using the ISO 9660 standard file system as opposed to another file system - hence CD images are commonly referred to as "ISOs". Virtually all computers with CD-ROM drives can read CDs that use this standard. Some DVD-ROMs also use ISO 9660 file systems.
* Photographic film's sensitivity to light, its "film speed", is described by ISO 6, ISO 2240 and ISO 5800. Hence, the film's speed is often referred to as its "ISO number".
* Often, the flash hot shoe found on cameras is called "ISO shoe", as it was originally defined in ISO 518.
Name and abbreviation
The organization's logos in two of its official languages, English and French, include the word ISO, and it is usually referred to by this short-form name. ISO asserts that ISO is not an acronym or initialism for the organization's full name in either official language; rather, the organization adopted ISO based on the Greek word isos (ἴσος), meaning equal — recognizing that the organization’s initials would be different in different languages, the organization's founders chose ISO as the universal short form of its name.[3] However, one of the founding delegates, Willy Kuert, recollected the original naming question with the comment "I recently read that the name ISO was chosen because 'iso' is a Greek term meaning 'equal'. There was no mention of that in London!".
ISO's main products are the International Standards. ISO also publishes Technical Reports, Technical Specifications, Publicly Available Specifications, Technical Corrigenda, and Guides.[9][10]
International Standards are designated with the format ISO[/IEC] [/ASTM] [IS] nnnnn[-p]:[yyyy] Title, where nnnnn is the number of the standard, p is an optional part number, yyyy is the year published, and Title describes the subject. IEC for International Electrotechnical Commission is included if the standard results from the work of ISO/IEC JTC1 (the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee). ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) is used for standards developed in cooperation with ASTM International. The date and IS are not used for an incomplete or unpublished standard, and may under some circumstances be left off the title of a published work.
Technical Reports are issued when "a technical committee or subcommittee has collected data of a different kind from that which is normally published as an International Standard".[9] such as references and explanations. The naming conventions for these are the same as for standards, except TR prepended instead of IS in the report's name. Examples:
* ISO/IEC TR 17799:2000 Code of Practice for Information Security Management
* ISO/TR 19033:2000 Technical product documentation — Metadata for construction documentation
Technical Specifications can be produced when "the subject in question is still under development or where for any other reason there is the future but not immediate possibility of an agreement to publish an International Standard". Publicly Available Specifications may be "an intermediate specification, published prior to the development of a full International Standard, or, in IEC may be a 'dual logo' publication published in collaboration with an external organization".[9] Both are named by convention similar to Technical Reports, for example:
* ISO/TS 16952-1:2006 Technical product documentation — Reference designation system — Part 1: General application rules
* ISO/PAS 11154:2006 Road vehicles — Roof load carriers
ISO sometimes issues a Technical Corrigendum. These are amendments to existing standards because of minor technical flaws, usability improvements, or to extend applicability in a limited way. Generally, these are issued with the expectation that the affected standard will be updated or withdrawn at its next scheduled review.[9]
ISO Guides are meta-standards covering "matters related to international standardization".[9] They are named in the format "ISO[/IEC] Guide N:yyyy: Title", for example:
* ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004 Standardization and related activities — General vocabulary
* ISO/IEC Guide 65:1996 General requirements for bodies operating product certification
[edit] Standardization process
A standard published by ISO/IEC is the last stage of a long process that commonly starts with the proposal of new work within a committee. Here are some abbreviations used for marking a standard with its status:[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
* PWI - Preliminary Work Item
* NP or NWIP - New Proposal / New Work Item Proposal (e.g., ISO/IEC NP 23007)
* AWI - Approved new Work Item (e.g., ISO/IEC AWI 15444-14)
* WD - Working Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC WD 27032)
* CD - Committee Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC CD 23000-5)
* FCD - Final Committee Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC FCD 23000-12)
* DIS - Draft International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC DIS 14297)
* FDIS - Final Draft International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC FDIS 27003)
* PRF - Proof of a new International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC PRF 18018)
* IS - International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007)
Abbreviations used for amendments:[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]
* NP Amd - New Proposal Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 15444-2:2004/NP Amd 3)
* AWI Amd - Approved new Work Item Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 14492:2001/AWI Amd 4)
* WD Amd - Working Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO 11092:1993/WD Amd 1)
* CD Amd / PDAmd - Committee Draft Amendment / Proposed Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/CD Amd 6)
* FPDAmd / DAM (DAmd) - Final Proposed Draft Amendment / Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003/FPDAmd 1)
* FDAM (FDAmd) - Final Draft Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/FDAmd 4)
* PRF Amd - (e.g., ISO 12639:2004/PRF Amd 1)
* Amd - Amendment (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/Amd 1:2007
Other abbreviations:[15][16][18][19]
* TR - Technical Report (e.g., ISO/IEC TR 19791:2006)
* DTR - Draft Technical Report (e.g., ISO/IEC DTR 19791)
* TS - Technical Specification (e.g., ISO/TS 16949:2009)
* DTS - Draft Technical Specification (e.g., ISO/DTS 11602-1)
* PAS - Publicly Available Specification
* TTA - Technology Trends Assessment (e.g., ISO/TTA 1:1994)
* IWA - International Workshop Agreement (e.g., IWA 1:2005)
* Cor - Technical Corrigendum (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/Cor 1:2008)
* Guide - a guidance to technical committees for the preparation of standards
International Standards are developed by ISO technical committees (TC) and subcommittees (SC) by a process with six steps:[13][20]
* Stage 1: Proposal stage
* Stage 2: Preparatory stage
* Stage 3: Committee stage
* Stage 4: Enquiry stage
* Stage 5: Approval stage
* Stage 6: Publication stage
Stages in the development process of an ISO standard[12][13][14][17][18][20] Stage code↓ Stage↓ Associated document name↓ Abbreviations↓ Description↓
00 Preliminary stage Preliminary work item PWI
10 Proposal stage New work item proposal NP or NWIP, NP Amd/TR/TS/IWA
20 Preparatory stage Working draft(s) AWI, AWI Amd/TR/TS, WD, WD Amd/TR/TS
30 Committee stage Committee draft(s) CD, CD Amd/Cor/TR/TS, PDAmd (PDAM), PDTR, PDTS
40 Enquiry stage Enquiry draft DIS, FCD, FPDAmd, DAmd (DAM), FPDISP, DTR, DTS (CDV in IEC)
50 Approval stage Final draft International Standard FDIS, FDAmd (FDAM), PRF, PRF Amd/TTA/TR/TS/Suppl, FDTR
60 Publication stage International Standard ISO TR, TS, IWA, Amd, Cor
90 Review stage ISO TR, TS, IWA, Amd, Cor
95 Withdrawal stage
It is possible to omit certain stages, if there is a document with a certain degree of maturity at the start of a standardization project - for example a standard developed by another organization. ISO/IEC Directives allow also the so-called "Fast-track procedure". In this procedure a document is submitted directly for approval as a draft International Standard (DIS) to the ISO member bodies or as a final draft International Standard (FDIS) if the document was developed by an international standardizing body recognized by the ISO Council.[13]
The first step - a proposal of work (New Proposal) is approved at the relevant subcommittee or technical committee (e.g., SC29 and JTC1 respectively in the case of Moving Picture Experts Group - ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11). A working group (WG) of experts is set up by the TC/SC for the preparation of a Working Draft. When the scope of a new work is sufficiently clarified, some of the working groups (e.g., MPEG) usually make open request for proposals - known as "Call for proposals". The first document that is produced for example for audio and video coding standards is called a Verification Model (VM) (previously also called a Simulation and Test Model). When a sufficient confidence in the stability of the standard under development is reached, a Working Draft (WD) is produced. This is in the form of a standard but is kept internal to working group for revision. When a Working Draft is sufficiently solid and the working group is satisfied that it has developed the best technical solution to the problem being addressed, it becomes Committee Draft (CD). If it is required, it is then sent to the P-members of the TC/SC (National Bodies) for ballot.
The CD becomes Final Committee Draft (FCD) if the number of positive votes is above the quorum. Successive committee drafts may be considered until consensus is reached on the technical content. When it is reached, the text is finalized for submission as a draft International Standard (DIS). The text is then submitted to National Bodies for voting and comment within a period of five months. It is approved for submission as a final draft International Standard (FDIS) if a two-thirds majority of the P-members of the TC/SC are in favour and not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative. ISO will then hold a ballot with National Bodies where no technical changes are allowed (yes/no ballot), within a period of two months. It is approved as an International Standard (IS) if a two-thirds majority of the P-members of the TC/SC is in favour and not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative. After approval, only minor editorial changes are introduced into the final text. The final text is sent to the ISO Central Secretariat which publishes it as the International Standard.[11][13]
[edit] ISO document copyright
ISO documents are copyrighted and ISO charges for copies of most. ISO does not, however, charge for most draft copies of documents in electronic format. Although useful, care must be taken using these drafts as there is the possibility of substantial change before it becomes finalized as a standard. Some standards by ISO and its official U.S. representative (and the International Electrotechnical Commission's via the U.S. National Committee) are made freely available
Members
A map of standards bodies who are ISO members
Key:
members
correspondent members
subscriber members
other places with an ISO 3166-1 code who aren't members of ISO
ISO has 162 national members,[2] out of the 204 total countries in the world.
ISO has three membership categories:
* Member bodies are national bodies that are considered to be the most representative standards body in each country. These are the only members of ISO that have voting rights.
* Correspondent members are countries that do not have their own standards organization. These members are informed about ISO's work, but do not participate in standards promulgation.
* Subscriber members are countries with small economies. They pay reduced membership fees, but can follow the development of standards.
Participating members are called "P" members as opposed to observing members which are called "O" members.
[edit] Products named after ISO
The fact that many of the ISO-created standards are ubiquitous has led, on occasion, to common use of "ISO" to describe the actual product that conforms to a standard. Some examples of this are:
* Many CD images end in the file extension "ISO" to signify that they are using the ISO 9660 standard file system as opposed to another file system - hence CD images are commonly referred to as "ISOs". Virtually all computers with CD-ROM drives can read CDs that use this standard. Some DVD-ROMs also use ISO 9660 file systems.
* Photographic film's sensitivity to light, its "film speed", is described by ISO 6, ISO 2240 and ISO 5800. Hence, the film's speed is often referred to as its "ISO number".
* Often, the flash hot shoe found on cameras is called "ISO shoe", as it was originally defined in ISO 518.
CE Certification
CE marking (also known as CE mark) is a mandatory conformance mark on many products placed on the market in the European Economic Area (EEA). With the CE marking on a product the manufacturer ensures that the product is in conformity with the essential requirements of the applicable EC directives.[1] The letters "CE" stand for "Conformité Européenne" ("European Conformity").
Meaning
Existing in its present form since 1993, the CE marking is a key indicator of a product’s compliance with EU legislation and enables the free movement of products within the European market. By affixing the CE marking on a product, a manufacturer is declaring, on ones sole responsibility, conformity with all of the legal requirements to achieve CE marking and therefore ensuring validity for that product to be sold throughout the European Economic Area. This also applies to products made in third countries which are sold in the EEA.
CE marking does not indicate that a product was made in the EEA,[3] but merely states that the product is assessed before being placed on the market and thus satisfies the legislative requirements (e.g. a harmonised level of safety) to be sold there. It means that the manufacturer has verified that the product complies with all relevant “essential requirements” (e.g. safety, health, environmental protection requirements) of the applicable directive(s) – or, if stipulated in the directive(s), had it examined by a notified conformity assessment body.
However, not all products must bear the CE marking. Only those product categories subject to specific directives that provide for the CE marking are required to be CE marked. CE marked products are bought not only by professionals (e.g. medical devices, lifts, machinery and measuring equipment) but also by consumers (toys, PCs, mobile phones and light bulbs).
Rules underlying CE marking
The manufacturer of a product himself affixes the CE marking to it, but has to take certain obligatory steps before the product can bear CE marking. He has to carry out a conformity assessment, set up a technical file and sign an EC declaration of conformity. The documentation has to be made available to authorities on request.
Importers of products have to verify that the manufacturer outside the EU has undertaken the necessary steps and that the documentation is available upon request. Importers should also make sure that contact with the manufacturer can always be established.
Distributors must be able to demonstrate to national authorities that they have acted with due care and must have affirmation from the manufacturer or importer that the necessary measures have been taken.
If importer or distributor market the products under their own name, they then take over the manufacturer’s responsibilities. In this case they must have sufficient information on the design and production of the product, as they will be assuming the legal responsibility when they affix the CE marking.
There are certain rules underlying the procedure to affix the marking:
* Products that are subject to certain EC directives providing for CE marking, have to be affixed with the CE marking before they can be placed on the market
* Manufacturers have to check on their sole responsibility, which EU directives they need to apply for their products
* The product may only be placed on the market if it complies with the provisions of all applicable directives and if the conformity assessment procedure has been carried out accordingly
* The manufacturer draws up an EC declaration of conformity and affixes the CE marking on the product
* If stipulated in the directive(s), an authorized third party (Notified Body) must be involved in the conformity assessment procedure
* If the CE marking is affixed on a product, it can only bear additional markings under the condition that they are of different significance, do not overlap with the CE marking and are neither confusing nor impairing the legibility and visibility of the CE marking
Self-certification
Depending on the level of risk of the product, the CE Mark is affixed to a product by the manufacturer or authorized representative who decides whether the product meets all the CE mark requirements. If a product has minimal risk it can be self certified where the manufacturer prepares a Declaration of Conformity and affixes the CE Marking to their own product. In doing this the manufacturer has to do several things:
1. Decide whether the product needs to have a CE mark and if the product applies to more than 1 directive it needs to comply with all of them.
2. Choose the conformity assessment procedure from the modules called out by the directive for the product. There are several modules available for the Conformity Assessment Procedures as listed below:
* Module A – Internal production control.
* Module A – Intervention of a Notified Body.
* Module B – EC type-examination.
* Module C – Conformity to type.
* Module D – Production quality assurance.
* Module E – Product quality assurance.
* Module F – Product verification.
* Module G – Unit verification.
* Module H – Full quality assurance.
These will often ask questions about the product to classify the level of risk and then refer to the "Conformity Assessment Procedures" chart. This shows all the acceptable options available to a manufacturer to certify the product and affix the CE mark.
Products which are considered to have a greater risk have to be independently certified by a notified body. This is an organization that has been nominated by a Member Government and has been notified by the European Commission. These notified bodies act as test labs and carry out the steps as listed in the directives mentioned above and then decided whether the product has passed. A manufacturer can choose their own notified body in any member state of the European Union but should be independent of the manufacturer and a private sector organization or a government agency.
Declaration of conformity
The DoC must include: manufacturer's details (name and address, etc.); essential characteristics the product complies; any European standards and performance data; if relevant the identification number of the Notified Body; and a legally binding signature on behalf of the organization.
Product groups
The EC directives for CE marking[4] affect the following product groups:
* Active implantable medical devices
* Appliances burning gaseous fuels
* Cableway installations designed to carry persons
* Eco-design of energy related products
* Electromagnetic compatibility
* Equipment and protective systems intended for use potentially explosive atmospheres
* Explosives for civil uses
* Hot-water boilers
* In vitro diagnostic medical devices
* Lifts
* Low voltage
* Machinery
* Measuring Instruments
* Medical devices
* Noise emission in the environment
* Non-automatic weighing instruments
* Personal protective equipment
* Pressure equipment
* Pyrotechnics
* Radio and telecommunications terminal equipment
* Recreational craft
* Safety of toys
* Simple pressure vessels
Misuse
Proximal location of CE mark and Made in China text. The European Commission is aware that CE marking, like any other mark, is misused. CE marking may sometimes be affixed to products which do not fulfil the requirements and conditions for its affixing or it is affixed to products for which the affixing is not foreseen. There are also cases where, whilst the product is in compliance with the applicable requirements the CE marking itself does not respect the formal requirements, namely the form of the CE marking or the dimensions and proportions prescribed in the legislation.
China Export
The CE symbol has been alleged or believed to stand for China Export or China Electronics because some Chinese manufacturers apply a very similar marking to their products.As Chinese exporters have used the CE logo incorrectly, the matter was raised at the EU parliament in 2008,and the Commission responded that they will look into trade-marking the logo, and are in discussion with Chinese authorities to ensure compliance with European standards.
Legal implications
There are mechanisms in place to ensure that the CE marking is put on products correctly. Controlling CE marked products is the responsibility of public authorities in the Member States, in cooperation with the European Commission. Citizens may contact national market surveillance authorities if the misuse of the CE marking is suspected, or if a product’s safety is questioned.
The procedures, measures and sanctions applying to counterfeiting of the CE marking vary according to the respective Member State's national administrative and penal law. Depending on the seriousness of the crime, economic operators may be liable to a fine and in some circumstances, imprisonment. However, if the product is not regarded as an imminent safety risk, the manufacturer may be given a second opportunity to ensure that the product is in conformity with the applicable legislation, before being obliged to take the product off the market.
Meaning
Existing in its present form since 1993, the CE marking is a key indicator of a product’s compliance with EU legislation and enables the free movement of products within the European market. By affixing the CE marking on a product, a manufacturer is declaring, on ones sole responsibility, conformity with all of the legal requirements to achieve CE marking and therefore ensuring validity for that product to be sold throughout the European Economic Area. This also applies to products made in third countries which are sold in the EEA.
CE marking does not indicate that a product was made in the EEA,[3] but merely states that the product is assessed before being placed on the market and thus satisfies the legislative requirements (e.g. a harmonised level of safety) to be sold there. It means that the manufacturer has verified that the product complies with all relevant “essential requirements” (e.g. safety, health, environmental protection requirements) of the applicable directive(s) – or, if stipulated in the directive(s), had it examined by a notified conformity assessment body.
However, not all products must bear the CE marking. Only those product categories subject to specific directives that provide for the CE marking are required to be CE marked. CE marked products are bought not only by professionals (e.g. medical devices, lifts, machinery and measuring equipment) but also by consumers (toys, PCs, mobile phones and light bulbs).
Rules underlying CE marking
The manufacturer of a product himself affixes the CE marking to it, but has to take certain obligatory steps before the product can bear CE marking. He has to carry out a conformity assessment, set up a technical file and sign an EC declaration of conformity. The documentation has to be made available to authorities on request.
Importers of products have to verify that the manufacturer outside the EU has undertaken the necessary steps and that the documentation is available upon request. Importers should also make sure that contact with the manufacturer can always be established.
Distributors must be able to demonstrate to national authorities that they have acted with due care and must have affirmation from the manufacturer or importer that the necessary measures have been taken.
If importer or distributor market the products under their own name, they then take over the manufacturer’s responsibilities. In this case they must have sufficient information on the design and production of the product, as they will be assuming the legal responsibility when they affix the CE marking.
There are certain rules underlying the procedure to affix the marking:
* Products that are subject to certain EC directives providing for CE marking, have to be affixed with the CE marking before they can be placed on the market
* Manufacturers have to check on their sole responsibility, which EU directives they need to apply for their products
* The product may only be placed on the market if it complies with the provisions of all applicable directives and if the conformity assessment procedure has been carried out accordingly
* The manufacturer draws up an EC declaration of conformity and affixes the CE marking on the product
* If stipulated in the directive(s), an authorized third party (Notified Body) must be involved in the conformity assessment procedure
* If the CE marking is affixed on a product, it can only bear additional markings under the condition that they are of different significance, do not overlap with the CE marking and are neither confusing nor impairing the legibility and visibility of the CE marking
Self-certification
Depending on the level of risk of the product, the CE Mark is affixed to a product by the manufacturer or authorized representative who decides whether the product meets all the CE mark requirements. If a product has minimal risk it can be self certified where the manufacturer prepares a Declaration of Conformity and affixes the CE Marking to their own product. In doing this the manufacturer has to do several things:
1. Decide whether the product needs to have a CE mark and if the product applies to more than 1 directive it needs to comply with all of them.
2. Choose the conformity assessment procedure from the modules called out by the directive for the product. There are several modules available for the Conformity Assessment Procedures as listed below:
* Module A – Internal production control.
* Module A – Intervention of a Notified Body.
* Module B – EC type-examination.
* Module C – Conformity to type.
* Module D – Production quality assurance.
* Module E – Product quality assurance.
* Module F – Product verification.
* Module G – Unit verification.
* Module H – Full quality assurance.
These will often ask questions about the product to classify the level of risk and then refer to the "Conformity Assessment Procedures" chart. This shows all the acceptable options available to a manufacturer to certify the product and affix the CE mark.
Products which are considered to have a greater risk have to be independently certified by a notified body. This is an organization that has been nominated by a Member Government and has been notified by the European Commission. These notified bodies act as test labs and carry out the steps as listed in the directives mentioned above and then decided whether the product has passed. A manufacturer can choose their own notified body in any member state of the European Union but should be independent of the manufacturer and a private sector organization or a government agency.
Declaration of conformity
The DoC must include: manufacturer's details (name and address, etc.); essential characteristics the product complies; any European standards and performance data; if relevant the identification number of the Notified Body; and a legally binding signature on behalf of the organization.
Product groups
The EC directives for CE marking[4] affect the following product groups:
* Active implantable medical devices
* Appliances burning gaseous fuels
* Cableway installations designed to carry persons
* Eco-design of energy related products
* Electromagnetic compatibility
* Equipment and protective systems intended for use potentially explosive atmospheres
* Explosives for civil uses
* Hot-water boilers
* In vitro diagnostic medical devices
* Lifts
* Low voltage
* Machinery
* Measuring Instruments
* Medical devices
* Noise emission in the environment
* Non-automatic weighing instruments
* Personal protective equipment
* Pressure equipment
* Pyrotechnics
* Radio and telecommunications terminal equipment
* Recreational craft
* Safety of toys
* Simple pressure vessels
Misuse
Proximal location of CE mark and Made in China text. The European Commission is aware that CE marking, like any other mark, is misused. CE marking may sometimes be affixed to products which do not fulfil the requirements and conditions for its affixing or it is affixed to products for which the affixing is not foreseen. There are also cases where, whilst the product is in compliance with the applicable requirements the CE marking itself does not respect the formal requirements, namely the form of the CE marking or the dimensions and proportions prescribed in the legislation.
China Export
The CE symbol has been alleged or believed to stand for China Export or China Electronics because some Chinese manufacturers apply a very similar marking to their products.As Chinese exporters have used the CE logo incorrectly, the matter was raised at the EU parliament in 2008,and the Commission responded that they will look into trade-marking the logo, and are in discussion with Chinese authorities to ensure compliance with European standards.
Legal implications
There are mechanisms in place to ensure that the CE marking is put on products correctly. Controlling CE marked products is the responsibility of public authorities in the Member States, in cooperation with the European Commission. Citizens may contact national market surveillance authorities if the misuse of the CE marking is suspected, or if a product’s safety is questioned.
The procedures, measures and sanctions applying to counterfeiting of the CE marking vary according to the respective Member State's national administrative and penal law. Depending on the seriousness of the crime, economic operators may be liable to a fine and in some circumstances, imprisonment. However, if the product is not regarded as an imminent safety risk, the manufacturer may be given a second opportunity to ensure that the product is in conformity with the applicable legislation, before being obliged to take the product off the market.
Geek Qoutes
50. “Some things Man was never meant to know. For everything else, there’s Google.”
49. “Failure is not an option — it comes bundled with Windows.”
48. “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.”
47. “COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.”
46. “Artificial Intelligence usually beats natural stupidity.”
45. “To err is human… to really foul up requires the root password.”
44. “Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.”
43. “If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″ 42. “If Python is executable pseudocode, then perl is executable line noise.”
41. “Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code.”
40. “Why do we want intelligent terminals when there are so many stupid users?”
39. “I can’t uninstall it, there seems to be some kind of ‘Uninstall Shield’.”
38. “See daddy ? All the keys are in alphabetical order now.”
37. “Hey! It compiles! Ship it!”
36. “SUPERCOMPUTER: what it sounded like before you bought it.”
35. “Yo moma is like HTML: Tiny head, huge body.” 34. “Windows Vista: It’s like upgrading from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush.”
33. “The more I C, the less I see.”
32. “Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.”
31. “My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.”
30. “The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.”
29. “Crap… Someone knocked over my recycle bin… There’s icons all over my desktop…”
28. “Relax, its only ONES and ZEROS !”
27. “rm -rf /bin/laden”
26. “I don’t care if you ARE getting a PhD in it ! Get away from that damn computer and go find a woman !” 25. “The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones.” 24. “If brute force doesn’t solve your problems, then you aren’t using enough.”
23. “Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.”
22. “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”
21. Microsoft: “You’ve got questions. We’ve got dancing paperclips.”
20. “I’m not anti-social; I’m just not user friendly”
19. The world is coming to an end… SAVE YOUR BUFFERS !”
18. “If you don’t want to be replaced by a computer, don’t act like one.”
17. “Better to be a geek than an idiot.”
16. “I went to a gentleman’s cybercafe — and they offered me a ‘laptop dance’.”
15. “After Perl everything else is just assembly language.”
14. “The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.”
13. “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
12. “Difference between a virus and windows ? Viruses rarely fail.”
11. “Hacking is like sex. You get in, you get out, and hope that you didn’t leave something that can be traced back to you.”
10. “1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d”
9. “Helpdesk: There is an icon on your computer labeled “My Computer”. Double click on it. User: What’s your computer doing on mine?”
8. “I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.”
7. “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
6. “Computer dating is fine, if you’re a computer.” 5. “Any fool can use a computer. Many do.”
4. “Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.”
3. “Those who can’t write programs, write help files.” 2. “You know you’re a geek when… You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.”
1. “Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.”
Who is General Failure ? And why is he reading my disk ?
Keyboard not found…Press any key to continue.
windows, problems? reboot! linux, problems? be root!
“The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time” – Murphy’s Law
Computers are like Air Conditioners, they stop working when you open Windows.
Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning “can’t configure Debian”
110101010001
010011010010
101010100011
101201010001
011011011100
Dare to be different?
God is REAL, unless explicitly declared INTEGER.
VIRUS!!!!!
The Only program that works perfectly every time…..
Definition of an IT Administrator: The person that prevents you from surfing the web at work while watching streaming porn in their office.
“Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders..”
49. “Failure is not an option — it comes bundled with Windows.”
48. “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.”
47. “COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.”
46. “Artificial Intelligence usually beats natural stupidity.”
45. “To err is human… to really foul up requires the root password.”
44. “Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.”
43. “If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0″ 42. “If Python is executable pseudocode, then perl is executable line noise.”
41. “Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code.”
40. “Why do we want intelligent terminals when there are so many stupid users?”
39. “I can’t uninstall it, there seems to be some kind of ‘Uninstall Shield’.”
38. “See daddy ? All the keys are in alphabetical order now.”
37. “Hey! It compiles! Ship it!”
36. “SUPERCOMPUTER: what it sounded like before you bought it.”
35. “Yo moma is like HTML: Tiny head, huge body.” 34. “Windows Vista: It’s like upgrading from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush.”
33. “The more I C, the less I see.”
32. “Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code.”
31. “My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.”
30. “The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.”
29. “Crap… Someone knocked over my recycle bin… There’s icons all over my desktop…”
28. “Relax, its only ONES and ZEROS !”
27. “rm -rf /bin/laden”
26. “I don’t care if you ARE getting a PhD in it ! Get away from that damn computer and go find a woman !” 25. “The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones.” 24. “If brute force doesn’t solve your problems, then you aren’t using enough.”
23. “Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.”
22. “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”
21. Microsoft: “You’ve got questions. We’ve got dancing paperclips.”
20. “I’m not anti-social; I’m just not user friendly”
19. The world is coming to an end… SAVE YOUR BUFFERS !”
18. “If you don’t want to be replaced by a computer, don’t act like one.”
17. “Better to be a geek than an idiot.”
16. “I went to a gentleman’s cybercafe — and they offered me a ‘laptop dance’.”
15. “After Perl everything else is just assembly language.”
14. “The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.”
13. “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
12. “Difference between a virus and windows ? Viruses rarely fail.”
11. “Hacking is like sex. You get in, you get out, and hope that you didn’t leave something that can be traced back to you.”
10. “1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d”
9. “Helpdesk: There is an icon on your computer labeled “My Computer”. Double click on it. User: What’s your computer doing on mine?”
8. “I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.”
7. “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
6. “Computer dating is fine, if you’re a computer.” 5. “Any fool can use a computer. Many do.”
4. “Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.”
3. “Those who can’t write programs, write help files.” 2. “You know you’re a geek when… You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.”
1. “Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.”
Who is General Failure ? And why is he reading my disk ?
Keyboard not found…Press any key to continue.
windows, problems? reboot! linux, problems? be root!
“The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time” – Murphy’s Law
Computers are like Air Conditioners, they stop working when you open Windows.
Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning “can’t configure Debian”
110101010001
010011010010
101010100011
101201010001
011011011100
Dare to be different?
God is REAL, unless explicitly declared INTEGER.
VIRUS!!!!!
The Only program that works perfectly every time…..
Definition of an IT Administrator: The person that prevents you from surfing the web at work while watching streaming porn in their office.
“Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders..”
Friday, September 9, 2011
Airtel consumer service
Hi,
I had been with the airtel for more then 03 years, but due to negligence in the services and poor commitments, I requested airtel for a disconnection on 13 th July as my prepaid account was expiring on the 25th July (This is well before 07 Days (required as per TRAI Regulations) before the actual date of connection).
Also I received the retention call from the Airtel Side, which I denied and asked for proceeding for the disconnection.
On the 07th August I received the Bill again which was supposed for asking for payment of the bill again for next billing cycle. Which when enquired the appellate person said that i was "retained" which I denied. And asked for instant closing of the account. Also I as had already migrated to some other ISP, I was not using their internet services, but still they persisted that I was using the internet. And from that movement ahead, I am being harassed for calls/msg/mails for payments.
Hence to protect myself Also to have action all the harassment caused by this incident, I had to prepare to file court case.
I went to their office and provide a signed letter a notice , which they had to accept, but still, there were no people who were ready to talk with me.
On visiting Airtel website, there is supposedly a person that called Surendra Sen who should be the actual appellate authority present as per the documents submitted to TRAI. BUT the appellate team accepts that there is no appellate member called as Surendra Sen. So AIRTEL HAS CHEATED THE TRAI? As it is submitting false personnel's details in its documents?
Whenever I call the appellate, I have spoken with nearly all the agents, I ask where can I meet your appellate person as I have to hand over the Notice as required by the Consumer Court directives. but I have never received the reply for the same. The appellate officer says that they have to check for the details in their system. funny?? they sit in the Vega Center swargate...?
Also as per the TRAI mandate, it is essential for the customer to easily connect to the appellate officer. YOu can try, and all you will have an IVR, which will leave you only disappointed and clueless. This is a violation of the TRAI guidelines. ( I have recorded the options and my dialogues with the apellate desks, can provide to whomsoever interested).
Please find some of my communications with the airtel:-
From:
To: appellate.west@airtel.in
Cc:
Sent: 05/09/2011 03:05:18 PM
Subject: Legal Notice by Account
Dear Airtel,
I have been your customer for last 3 years, but due to
non availability of the services and non conformance from the airtel side, I
had requested the Airtel to disconnect the connection on 13 July well ahead of
the 07 days as stipulated by the TRAI Guidance. as my prepaid account had to be
disconnected on 25th July.
But the same has not been done and also I am receiving the calls for Payments
and Bills for the same. I am harassed by your persistent bugging, even when you
were duely informed for the same. My Account still has not been closed Inspite
of the regular followup's and written communications.
FOR THE HARASSMENT AND MY UNNECESSARY TROUBLES, PLEASE NOTE THAT I HAVE
INITIATED THE LEGAL PROCEEDINGS (BASED ON THE LETTER DATED 13TH AUGUST 2011).
AS YOU HAVE NOT REPLIED FOR THE SAME EVEN AFTER THE MANDATORY WAITING PERIOD AS
MENTIONED IN THE CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT SHORTLY YOU MAY BE RECEIVING THE
NOTICE FROM THE NECESSARY JURISDICTION. FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF THE BOTH
PARTIES, PLEASE MENTION THE ADDRESS WHERE TO DIRECT THE LEGAL NOTICES.
Please arrange for a meeting at any location in Pune with the appellate
officers/ Manager on any Saturday.Also I have the recorded the Airtel Appellate
IVR, which actually is preventing the customers from contacting the Airtel
appellate. Also I would like to speak with one Mr. Surendra Sen.
Regards,
Their reply:-
Dear
Thank you for writing to airtel telemedia services and giving us an opportunity to assist you.
This is in reference to your email on 05/09/2011 to our appellate office regarding services for your airtel landline number .
We regret the delay in responding to your email.
To address your concern, we would like to inform you that, we have already registered your concern regarding cancellation with reference number 2639748 and the same is under process.
Further, we would like to inform you that, we have registered your concern regarding billing discrepancy with reference number 3652044 and the same will be resolved by 08/09/11, 12:49 Hrs.
Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience you have faced due to the mentioned episode. We value the relationship built with you and will make sure that an unfortunate incident will not come in the way of this association. We would like to reiterate that we share your anguish and have taken adequate action to ensure the non-occurrence of the same in future.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.
We hope that we have been able to address your query suitably. Please do write in for any further assistance.
Warm Regards,
Pratibha
Appellate Office
My reply:-
From: @gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:21 PM
Subject: Re: LEGAL NOTICE BY ACCOUNT[|BAL|Qrc20509111509535506340|]
To: appellate.west@airtel.in
Dear Pratibha,
Kindly note that I have asked for the address where I can forward the legal notice also I have asked you to arrange a meeting with the appellate/authorized personnel for the discussion of my compensation and signing the receipt for the communications.
The proceedings are essential as we as customers have to pay "installation/activation/processing fees" and of course the "late fees" also bear disrespects of Airtel's Commitments that are made to us during the sales.
Be aware that Airtel has been duely informed for the same and there is ongoing harassment from Airtel Side for payment which is not justified.
(P.s :- Meeting for the same can be arranged on weekends).
Regards,
THEY SIMPLY DID NOT REPLY FOR THE MAIL!! NONETHELESS, I MAILED THEM AGAIN.
From: Mr. @gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: LEGAL NOTICE BY ACCOUNT [|BAL|Qrc20509111509535506340|]
To: appellate.west@airtel.in
Cc: "nodal.west", 121@airtelindia.com
Dear Airtel,
I have not received any reply for the mail below.
With respect to the mail below, Kindly provide a meeting appointment ASAP tomorrow for more further discussion. I have submitted the address of the Airtel as the Vega Center Swargate for the litigation as for now.
Looking forward for your reply!!
Regards,
STILL I AM WAITING FOR THEIR REPLY!! I HOPE THAT SOMEDAY THEY WILL RESOLVE THE ISSUE
I had been with the airtel for more then 03 years, but due to negligence in the services and poor commitments, I requested airtel for a disconnection on 13 th July as my prepaid account was expiring on the 25th July (This is well before 07 Days (required as per TRAI Regulations) before the actual date of connection).
Also I received the retention call from the Airtel Side, which I denied and asked for proceeding for the disconnection.
On the 07th August I received the Bill again which was supposed for asking for payment of the bill again for next billing cycle. Which when enquired the appellate person said that i was "retained" which I denied. And asked for instant closing of the account. Also I as had already migrated to some other ISP, I was not using their internet services, but still they persisted that I was using the internet. And from that movement ahead, I am being harassed for calls/msg/mails for payments.
Hence to protect myself Also to have action all the harassment caused by this incident, I had to prepare to file court case.
I went to their office and provide a signed letter a notice , which they had to accept, but still, there were no people who were ready to talk with me.
On visiting Airtel website, there is supposedly a person that called Surendra Sen who should be the actual appellate authority present as per the documents submitted to TRAI. BUT the appellate team accepts that there is no appellate member called as Surendra Sen. So AIRTEL HAS CHEATED THE TRAI? As it is submitting false personnel's details in its documents?
Whenever I call the appellate, I have spoken with nearly all the agents, I ask where can I meet your appellate person as I have to hand over the Notice as required by the Consumer Court directives. but I have never received the reply for the same. The appellate officer says that they have to check for the details in their system. funny?? they sit in the Vega Center swargate...?
Also as per the TRAI mandate, it is essential for the customer to easily connect to the appellate officer. YOu can try, and all you will have an IVR, which will leave you only disappointed and clueless. This is a violation of the TRAI guidelines. ( I have recorded the options and my dialogues with the apellate desks, can provide to whomsoever interested).
Please find some of my communications with the airtel:-
From:
To: appellate.west@airtel.in
Cc:
Sent: 05/09/2011 03:05:18 PM
Subject: Legal Notice by Account
Dear Airtel,
I have been your customer for last 3 years, but due to
non availability of the services and non conformance from the airtel side, I
had requested the Airtel to disconnect the connection on 13 July well ahead of
the 07 days as stipulated by the TRAI Guidance. as my prepaid account had to be
disconnected on 25th July.
But the same has not been done and also I am receiving the calls for Payments
and Bills for the same. I am harassed by your persistent bugging, even when you
were duely informed for the same. My Account still has not been closed Inspite
of the regular followup's and written communications.
FOR THE HARASSMENT AND MY UNNECESSARY TROUBLES, PLEASE NOTE THAT I HAVE
INITIATED THE LEGAL PROCEEDINGS (BASED ON THE LETTER DATED 13TH AUGUST 2011).
AS YOU HAVE NOT REPLIED FOR THE SAME EVEN AFTER THE MANDATORY WAITING PERIOD AS
MENTIONED IN THE CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT SHORTLY YOU MAY BE RECEIVING THE
NOTICE FROM THE NECESSARY JURISDICTION. FOR THE CONVENIENCE OF THE BOTH
PARTIES, PLEASE MENTION THE ADDRESS WHERE TO DIRECT THE LEGAL NOTICES.
Please arrange for a meeting at any location in Pune with the appellate
officers/ Manager on any Saturday.Also I have the recorded the Airtel Appellate
IVR, which actually is preventing the customers from contacting the Airtel
appellate. Also I would like to speak with one Mr. Surendra Sen.
Regards,
Their reply:-
Dear
Thank you for writing to airtel telemedia services and giving us an opportunity to assist you.
This is in reference to your email on 05/09/2011 to our appellate office regarding services for your airtel landline number .
We regret the delay in responding to your email.
To address your concern, we would like to inform you that, we have already registered your concern regarding cancellation with reference number 2639748 and the same is under process.
Further, we would like to inform you that, we have registered your concern regarding billing discrepancy with reference number 3652044 and the same will be resolved by 08/09/11, 12:49 Hrs.
Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience you have faced due to the mentioned episode. We value the relationship built with you and will make sure that an unfortunate incident will not come in the way of this association. We would like to reiterate that we share your anguish and have taken adequate action to ensure the non-occurrence of the same in future.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.
We hope that we have been able to address your query suitably. Please do write in for any further assistance.
Warm Regards,
Pratibha
Appellate Office
My reply:-
From: @gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:21 PM
Subject: Re: LEGAL NOTICE BY ACCOUNT[|BAL|Qrc20509111509535506340|]
To: appellate.west@airtel.in
Dear Pratibha,
Kindly note that I have asked for the address where I can forward the legal notice also I have asked you to arrange a meeting with the appellate/authorized personnel for the discussion of my compensation and signing the receipt for the communications.
The proceedings are essential as we as customers have to pay "installation/activation/processing fees" and of course the "late fees" also bear disrespects of Airtel's Commitments that are made to us during the sales.
Be aware that Airtel has been duely informed for the same and there is ongoing harassment from Airtel Side for payment which is not justified.
(P.s :- Meeting for the same can be arranged on weekends).
Regards,
THEY SIMPLY DID NOT REPLY FOR THE MAIL!! NONETHELESS, I MAILED THEM AGAIN.
From: Mr. @gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: LEGAL NOTICE BY ACCOUNT [|BAL|Qrc20509111509535506340|]
To: appellate.west@airtel.in
Cc: "nodal.west"
Dear Airtel,
I have not received any reply for the mail below.
With respect to the mail below, Kindly provide a meeting appointment ASAP tomorrow for more further discussion. I have submitted the address of the Airtel as the Vega Center Swargate for the litigation as for now.
Looking forward for your reply!!
Regards,
STILL I AM WAITING FOR THEIR REPLY!! I HOPE THAT SOMEDAY THEY WILL RESOLVE THE ISSUE
Hathway Internet Connection problems
Hi,All,
With respect to testing the hathway connection, in Kothrud, I would like to say please please do not opt for the Hathway Internet.
I am still suffering problems from the slow speed from the Hathway. There is a huge latency problem in the Hathway connection/network. Meaning small websites like google.com or simple pages requires a lot more time, the netmeter will be downloading the website at 2-4kbps and hence it will require a lot more time. But if you keep some thing (large) for downloading then you will be recieving the speed of 51-65kbps only after some time. there is no instant starting of the downloads even from the servers which are known for fast downloads.
I complained to the HATHWAY for the same. following which the technical person, called me and was trying to convince me that there was no problem with the coonection. When asked why the earlier connection use to deliver the pages instantenously, he said it depends on the connection of the internet provider to the internet.
In short, he said that hathway has poor connectivity to the internet.
Nextly I had selected Hathway for uploading files (on the cloud) as Hathway offers the uploading free and counts only the downloads, on the week days. But I was counted for the upload which was larger in the first week and my speed dropped down to 256 kbps dw and up to 128 kbps. (They always have a lower rate of the upload then the download speed) as I had their FUP. They counted the upload for during the FUP which was not mentioned to me earlier.
When I went to their office in Kothrud, I asked the sales personnel whether we were counted for the upload, he said he will confirm the same. Half the office said Yes and Half the office said No.
Their nodal person said please contact the billing team for the same, he has no idea for it.Their appellate person was clueless for the upload and downloads and FUP, he also directed me to the billing team.And worst the billing team directed us to the customer care, who were damn confused.This is a kind of worst service, that I have dealt with.
You can test their service by mailing their appellate desk, there wont be any reply for the same.
Regards,
With respect to testing the hathway connection, in Kothrud, I would like to say please please do not opt for the Hathway Internet.
I am still suffering problems from the slow speed from the Hathway. There is a huge latency problem in the Hathway connection/network. Meaning small websites like google.com or simple pages requires a lot more time, the netmeter will be downloading the website at 2-4kbps and hence it will require a lot more time. But if you keep some thing (large) for downloading then you will be recieving the speed of 51-65kbps only after some time. there is no instant starting of the downloads even from the servers which are known for fast downloads.
I complained to the HATHWAY for the same. following which the technical person, called me and was trying to convince me that there was no problem with the coonection. When asked why the earlier connection use to deliver the pages instantenously, he said it depends on the connection of the internet provider to the internet.
In short, he said that hathway has poor connectivity to the internet.
Nextly I had selected Hathway for uploading files (on the cloud) as Hathway offers the uploading free and counts only the downloads, on the week days. But I was counted for the upload which was larger in the first week and my speed dropped down to 256 kbps dw and up to 128 kbps. (They always have a lower rate of the upload then the download speed) as I had their FUP. They counted the upload for during the FUP which was not mentioned to me earlier.
When I went to their office in Kothrud, I asked the sales personnel whether we were counted for the upload, he said he will confirm the same. Half the office said Yes and Half the office said No.
Their nodal person said please contact the billing team for the same, he has no idea for it.Their appellate person was clueless for the upload and downloads and FUP, he also directed me to the billing team.And worst the billing team directed us to the customer care, who were damn confused.This is a kind of worst service, that I have dealt with.
You can test their service by mailing their appellate desk, there wont be any reply for the same.
Regards,
Hathway Password Policy
Hi All,
I have received confirmation regarding the password and username, which are to be used for the loging in to the internet from Hathway...
As per the procedure, we have to login to the hathway web portal http://login.hathway.com and the feed the password, login id and then the internet service will start.
This is a very bad move from the hathway as this will not allow any of the domestic users to share the internet using the router.
On repeated asking the hathway people they say it is for the security purpose, this is shit as you have the MAC id of the modems, and only the authorized mac ids are allowed on the network. There is no need of the "more security".
This move will also restrict the use of the sharing large files over the net (read torrents).
Also these people will be able to view how many people are there on the a internet connections.
I am beginning to regret the Hathway for the internet speed and the poor service they provide.
I wish that these broadband people provide a simple clean fast source of the internet cheap enough but without any such rules.
Regards,
I have received confirmation regarding the password and username, which are to be used for the loging in to the internet from Hathway...
As per the procedure, we have to login to the hathway web portal http://login.hathway.com and the feed the password, login id and then the internet service will start.
This is a very bad move from the hathway as this will not allow any of the domestic users to share the internet using the router.
On repeated asking the hathway people they say it is for the security purpose, this is shit as you have the MAC id of the modems, and only the authorized mac ids are allowed on the network. There is no need of the "more security".
This move will also restrict the use of the sharing large files over the net (read torrents).
Also these people will be able to view how many people are there on the a internet connections.
I am beginning to regret the Hathway for the internet speed and the poor service they provide.
I wish that these broadband people provide a simple clean fast source of the internet cheap enough but without any such rules.
Regards,
HOWTO: Installing lighttpd, PHP, and MySQL on Windows XP
I recently had to change computers at work because of a hardware failure. Unfortunately, my new one is a somewhat less capable. The biggest issue is the lack of RAM (only half a gig? That’s practically useless! And what’s up with Dell getting rid of PS/2 ports?). Anyway, I had an older version of XAMPP running on the old one for internal use and found that Apache can be a bit of a memory hog. Also, I was using the Python plug-in and it seems like they stopped development on that. I had no particular reason to stay with XAMPP anymore.
It was time to try a different web server, one that was a little less weighty (okay, that’s an awful pun). I had looked at lighttpd in the past but no Windows binaries were available. However, there is one maintained here (v1.4.11). (Here’s a new link, the website was changed) Installation was fast and simple, although it would have been nice to pick the install directory. However, I didn’t have to compile it, so I won’t complain too much. It worked right away, and the sample page was up and running.
Next, I installed the latest version of php (5.1.6). That wasn’t too difficult. I followed the manual installation instructions and had a working php installation. I didn’t need to make any changes to php.ini. Well, actually, I didn’t think I needed to make changes.
The next hurdle was to get php and lighttpd working together. There’s a page here that has instructions for integrating them. FastCGI allegedly doesn’t work with Windows and lighttpd so I am using it in cgi mode for now. It requires activating mod_cgi and adding the proper cgi.assign in lighttpd.conf. There is also a small change required in php.ini. I needed to add the line cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1. To test it, I made a test.php file with three lines:
At first, browsing to my test page returned a blank page. Well, that’s pretty much useless. After reloading the page and restarting the server multiple times, I looked at the source of the blank page. Since I saw the raw php code, I realized (surprise) that my configuration was incorrect. In my quick scan of the default php.ini file, I left the short_open_tag variable Off. I changed that to On and then it worked.
The third part of my installation was a database. I was using MySQL, so I decided to stick with that. I got the newest version (5.0.24a) and started the installation. This one didn’t go quite so smoothly. The last part of the installation involves running the Server Instance Config Wizard. I went through the detailed configuration and for some reason, it didn’t apply the security settings at the end. If I went back and forward again, it got stuck on the Create Service step. I saw that the service was already there but not configured correctly. Eventually, I figured out that I should delete the service and enable the TCP access in the Config Wizard. Then it was successful.
Now, I wanted to transfer some of the old web pages to the new server. For some of them, I used mod_alias because they were just static files and they could stay in the old location. I also wanted to transfer Drupal and that wouldn’t work the same way. My first step was to back up the Drupal database. That was easy enough using phpMyAdmin on the old setup. Then I had a thought which maybe wasn’t so bright at the time. I decided to install phpMyAdmin (2.8.2.4) for the new web server. It wasn’t that difficult, I guess, but I did find out that I missed a step earlier. For some reason, it wasn’t connecting to the database and complaining that php_gd2.dll wasn’t loaded, even though it was activated in php.ini. I wasn’t sure why until I ran php -v from the command line. I saw errors that started with “PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘./php_mysql.dll’” It turns out that I neglected to the change the extensions directory in php.ini. The default of ./ just wasn’t working since they were actually in c:/php/ext. That fix was easy enough. With phpMyAdmin working properly, I imported the Drupal database and then copied the htdocs/drupal directory to the new location.
Drupal was working! Well, not quite yet. The front page worked, but every link I clicked on gave me a 404 error. I did a search on the Drupal website for 404 and found the solution quickly. I found this comment about the rewrite rules for lighttpd. Adding the suggested lines to lighttpd.conf and enabling mod_rewrite solved the problem. I believe it has to do with the clean url option in Drupal. Now, all the pages appear correctly but files that I uploaded previously are not available. I haven’t found a solution for that yet but I haven’t looked enough yet. The solution could be here, though. Or maybe not. I don’t have that many files, so I might just upload them again. And I might as well upgrade to 4.7.3 first.
It was time to try a different web server, one that was a little less weighty (okay, that’s an awful pun). I had looked at lighttpd in the past but no Windows binaries were available. However, there is one maintained here (v1.4.11). (Here’s a new link, the website was changed) Installation was fast and simple, although it would have been nice to pick the install directory. However, I didn’t have to compile it, so I won’t complain too much. It worked right away, and the sample page was up and running.
Next, I installed the latest version of php (5.1.6). That wasn’t too difficult. I followed the manual installation instructions and had a working php installation. I didn’t need to make any changes to php.ini. Well, actually, I didn’t think I needed to make changes.
The next hurdle was to get php and lighttpd working together. There’s a page here that has instructions for integrating them. FastCGI allegedly doesn’t work with Windows and lighttpd so I am using it in cgi mode for now. It requires activating mod_cgi and adding the proper cgi.assign in lighttpd.conf. There is also a small change required in php.ini. I needed to add the line cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1. To test it, I made a test.php file with three lines:
At first, browsing to my test page returned a blank page. Well, that’s pretty much useless. After reloading the page and restarting the server multiple times, I looked at the source of the blank page. Since I saw the raw php code, I realized (surprise) that my configuration was incorrect. In my quick scan of the default php.ini file, I left the short_open_tag variable Off. I changed that to On and then it worked.
The third part of my installation was a database. I was using MySQL, so I decided to stick with that. I got the newest version (5.0.24a) and started the installation. This one didn’t go quite so smoothly. The last part of the installation involves running the Server Instance Config Wizard. I went through the detailed configuration and for some reason, it didn’t apply the security settings at the end. If I went back and forward again, it got stuck on the Create Service step. I saw that the service was already there but not configured correctly. Eventually, I figured out that I should delete the service and enable the TCP access in the Config Wizard. Then it was successful.
Now, I wanted to transfer some of the old web pages to the new server. For some of them, I used mod_alias because they were just static files and they could stay in the old location. I also wanted to transfer Drupal and that wouldn’t work the same way. My first step was to back up the Drupal database. That was easy enough using phpMyAdmin on the old setup. Then I had a thought which maybe wasn’t so bright at the time. I decided to install phpMyAdmin (2.8.2.4) for the new web server. It wasn’t that difficult, I guess, but I did find out that I missed a step earlier. For some reason, it wasn’t connecting to the database and complaining that php_gd2.dll wasn’t loaded, even though it was activated in php.ini. I wasn’t sure why until I ran php -v from the command line. I saw errors that started with “PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘./php_mysql.dll’” It turns out that I neglected to the change the extensions directory in php.ini. The default of ./ just wasn’t working since they were actually in c:/php/ext. That fix was easy enough. With phpMyAdmin working properly, I imported the Drupal database and then copied the htdocs/drupal directory to the new location.
Drupal was working! Well, not quite yet. The front page worked, but every link I clicked on gave me a 404 error. I did a search on the Drupal website for 404 and found the solution quickly. I found this comment about the rewrite rules for lighttpd. Adding the suggested lines to lighttpd.conf and enabling mod_rewrite solved the problem. I believe it has to do with the clean url option in Drupal. Now, all the pages appear correctly but files that I uploaded previously are not available. I haven’t found a solution for that yet but I haven’t looked enough yet. The solution could be here, though. Or maybe not. I don’t have that many files, so I might just upload them again. And I might as well upgrade to 4.7.3 first.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
A letter to Rahul Gandhi (RAUL VINCI) by an IITan
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YOURS SINCERELY
NITIN GUPTA ( RIVALDO)
B. Tech, IIT Bombay
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