They must start by sending SMS to 92567 with the word NUM. The SMS can be dispatched free of charge, Qtel said.
They must then click on the link that they receive and then just follow the instructions to download the application. The application is free of charge and supports all major handsets, including Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone and Android, although user experience is different for each handset.
“It is the only official application approved by Qtel and customers are advised to use it rather than any of the unofficial number change programmes,” the spokesperson said.
Customers must then choose “Change numbers” and RUN the application. All their numbers will be analysed. They can choose then to update all numbers or select the update for each contact specifically.
The spokesperson urged customers to download the application immediately to update their phone contact list as the number change took effect early this morning. Qtel said it had already dispatched thousands of text messages to customers, providing the link to the free renumbering application.

We haven’t received any news regarding Vodafone’s response on this. We’ll let you know if we come across anything from Vodafone. Subscribe to our feeds.

Intended for Mac users, the peripheral uses the same technology as the trackpad on the MacBook Pro (which, drawing from personal experience, is quite lovely) — that means all the gestures. Like the MacBook, the entire thing is a button, and clicks accordingly.

The wireless device connects to a Mac using Bluetooth, and is about twice the size of a laptop trackpad. It’s made in the same aluminum style as Apple’s latest keyboard, meaning there’s plenty of design continuity when they’re sitting side by side on your desk.

If you weren’t convinced by the Magic Mouse, this might do the trick. It’s available now for $69.

Cons: The ribbon is a stifling factor to user friendliness, intuitiveness and flexibility with respect to customization

Summary: Microsoft seems to have a very unique problem. Their greatest competitor are their own products. I started using MS products in the early 80s and kept faithfully upgrading all their software because every upgrade was really worth it. Then came the time when their products plateaued and upgrades were not worth their money anymore because for the average user upgrades became merely cosmetic. With office 2003 MS surely reached the plateau with their office suite and you can tell that they were really stuck because they were challenged by their own excellency. How could they make a product that is next to perfect even more perfect? Well, they couldn’t so they did something really stupid ? they invented the ribbon! Menu operated programs along with *fully* customizable toolbars can not get any better. When mouseing over menus, I find it much easier and quicker to read and comprehend the text in the menus than to look at, and figure out icons. It is like comparing a well organized and bulleted To-do list with a To-do list that someone has subjectively organized in groups but that are scribbled all over a notepad. Granted, the menus have icons too, but they are only there for aesthetic reasons whereas in the ribbon they are meant to be the main vehicle of communicating the underlying commands. My best solution at the moment is a combination of office 2003 and those programs of office 2007 that are without ribbon. My advice to Microsoft: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

Google’s Orkut social networking site has been beset with bugs lately, leading the company to apologize for spotty service.

Orkut is an online community intended to make participants’ social life more active and stimulating. The Orkut engineering team is working to address recent issues with the site, said Eduardo Thuler, Orkut product manager at Google, in a blog post on Friday. He cited issues related to the frequent updating of open source software as a factor.

“First, Orkut is based on open source software that is subject to frequent updates, which we then pull and merge into the Orkut code tree. A result is that this can sometimes makes bugs harder to discover and fix. We accidentally began overwriting user app preferences, which resulted in the activity updates not getting posted, but this has now been fixed,” Thuler said.

“The Orkut engineering team has been hard at work addressing some recent issues and we would like to provide a status update and apologize for the inconvenience our spotty service may have caused you,” he said.

Google also has had to deal with getting viewer and owner information via data pipelining, a process that broke. The company was working to fix this as of Friday, according to Thuler.

Assassin’s Creed II, a third-person adventure game by Ubisoft, is a fantastic gaming experience not just because it gives the player the feeling of being an assassin, but because it creates a beautiful, lush, deep world and then the unfettered freedom to play around in it. All games should be this fun to play, as brilliantly realized, and as immersive. Available now on the OnLive service, Assassin’s Creed II is dagger-sharp in just about every facet.

The plot of the Assassin’s Creed series may be a bit confusing to those new the series. According to the game’s lore, there has been a secret war going on for centuries between the Assassins and the Templars, with the Assassins seeking to protect Pieces of Eden while the Templars hope to use them to control people.

In the first Assassin’s Creed, you start off as Desmond Miles, a modern-day bartender, but then you play as his assassin ancestor, Altair, in 1165 AD. A pharmaceutical company run by the Templars has taken Desmond prisoner. In one of Templars’ labs, Desmond is strapped into a machine called an Animus, which allows him to relive the memories of his ancestors. The modern-day Templars apparently are looking into Altair’s life to get clues to the location of the pieces of Eden. The game had a great deal of promise, but was marred by repetitive missions and a disappointing amount of things to do.

Assassin’s Creed II changes all that. Desmond has been freed of his captivity and now aids other assassins in their search for pieces of Eden. This time, he relives the life of his ancestor Ezio Auditore da Firenze in 15th century Italy. The game primarily is from the point of view of Ezio, whose father and brothers were betrayed and killed by the Templars. Through several cities, Ezio tracks down the members of the conspiracy and gets that much closer to unraveling the mysteries of Eden.

The Italian part of the game opens with Ezio running around the city, getting in fights with rivals of the family, and chasing women (and later, being chased by their angry fathers). Few games take the time to properly pace the story and draw you in, but Assassin’s Creed II does. While the primarily story-arc is about a boy who becomes an assassin and avenges his family, the historical context is much more interesting. The Animus II’s database provides background on all of the characters or places you encounter, and virtually all are based on real people or locations. During the course of the story, Ezio will get aid from Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Caterina Sforza. Sure, History majors may laugh at the idea that a young Leonardo would fix assassin’s blades on the side, but such nods to a larger world surprisingly work in the game.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the variety of the missions. There are approximately 200 missions to complete in the game and about half of those are plot related. Side quests include assassinations, races, “beat-up” missions, and catching criminals. Even when you’re just assassinating people, there’s an open-ended element: do you sneak up onto the rooftops and jump down onto your target, or do you sneak in with the crowd and attack him that way? In between assassinations of the conspiracy members, you’ll have escort missions, platforming segments, rescue missions, and artifact collection objectives. Enzio’s uncle’s home in Monteriggioni serves as a base of operations and you can upgrade your cashflow (and the city) by buying famous works of art, investing in city renovation, or upgrading your weapons.

At the game’s best, you’re running around the city’s rooftops, easily hopping from perch to perch, and then leaping into a seamless battle or quick kill. The controls are on the whole well thought-out, and I especially appreciated the improvement of the combat system from the first game. While Ezio can take out a group of soldiers, the more the numbers (and the better their weapons), the less likely he is to survive. The AI is smart enough to block your attacks and strike when your back is turned, providing incentive to avoid the fight in the first place.

Still, there are some missteps. The previously discussed combat system works most of the time, but I had some responsiveness issues with the counter system and often found larger battles became predictably waiting games until my opponents let down their defenses. Similarly, the movement system is on the whole terrific and very intuitive save for those brief moments in your family’s crypt where you have to negotiate narrow caverns and encounter some camera issues.

My biggest complaint was in moving between the different cities. While there are some spots to fast travel between the cities, they are few and far between. I wanted to keep returning back to Monteriggioni to collect the money I was owed and upgrade the city, but traveling their often taken minutes and so I often didn’t bother.

The other major issues with the game have nothing to do with the Ubisoft product but instead with the service the game is available on the Mac. OnLive is a new service that allows Mac users to play high-end games on any Intel-based Mac-it’s brought a whole new feeling of excitement to the Mac and has the potential to do great things for the market. Once you get off the waitlist and download the simple client, it only takes seconds to unlock and start playing games.

The bad news for Mac users is that many of the console games, like Assassin’s Creed II, need a game controller to truly be played to their fullest. I tried playing Assassin’s Creed II with just a keyboard and mouse, and the result was such a disjointed mess that I finally broke down and borrowed a friend’s Xbox 360 controller. That’s the rub with OnLive: for the first time ever, Mac users can use Xbox 360 controllers with their games. But it’s pretty much a necessity to play with the controller (available for around $30 depending on the retailer). I consider that a small price to pay to play high-end games on my MacBook Pro, but I can understand some people being frustrated by the requirement.

The other problematic element of OnLive is its resolution limitations. Currently, OnLive runs at 1280-by-720 resolution; that means on an iMac or even an 17-inch MacBook Pro, the game looks grainy. OnLive has stated on its Website that, “Once higher sustainable bandwidths are widely available, OnLive will support higher resolution video, such as 1080p (1920×1080).” Let’s hope they make good on that promise because right now, Assassin’s Creed II’s visuals are not where they should be.

Still, OnLive blissfully sidesteps the entire DRM controversy that erupted over the Windows version of Assassin’s Creed II. When the game was released on the PC, Ubisoft’s initial DRM system was rightly criticized for being too restrictive. The initial retail version contained DRM that would erase your game if the Internet connection was severed for too long a time.

On my 2.8GHz Core i7 iMac and 2.66GHz MacBook Pro, OnLive’s service ran beautifully. I only was disconnected once after playing the game for hours, and I never encountered any frame rate issues.

Our Buying advice

While the screen resolution for Assassin’s Creed II isn’t what it should be, the game is on the whole every bit as immersive, rewarding, and free as the console version. Assassin’s Creed II is one of those rare sandbox games that actually has a sandbox that you want to explore and play in. When you’re not assassinating enemies (fun) or further revealing details on the complex conspiracy (also fun), just standing on one of the perches overlooking one of the breathtaking Italian cities is a truly unique and captivating moment in gameplay.

Nvidia on Monday introduced a graphics card priced at US$199 that will bring high-end gaming and Blu-ray 3D movie playback to desktops.

The GeForce GTX 460 is Nvidia’s most inexpensive desktop graphics card based on the company’s Fermi architecture, which provides better multimedia performance than its predecessors. The card includes 336 processing cores and 768MB of graphics memory.

It is also Nvidia’s cheapest graphics card to support DirectX 11, a set of tools to bring realistic images and sound when playing games or watching movies on Windows 7 PCs. The hardware will decode Blu-ray 3D movies for playback, provided PCs have the relevant drives.

The graphics card will have two outputs for displays. One graphics card will be able to play a movie across two monitors, said Justin Walker, product manager at Nvidia.

The card will also be able to harness the parallel-processing capabilities of graphics processors to improve gaming and application performance, Walker said. That is partly done by native hardware support for DirectX 11. Nvidia also offers CUDA, a set of programming tools to develop and manage parallel task execution.

Nvidia already offers three GeForce GTX graphics cards based on Fermi priced between $279 and $499. The fastest performer and most expensive card, the GTX 480, has also been called out for being excessively hot, though the company disagrees. Testers and PC makers have said that the excess heat generated by the GTX 480 leads to consumption of more power to cool a system.

Walker said that the GTX 460 does not generate much heat. The graphics card draws up to 150 watts of power, according to the company.

The card will likely compete on price with Advanced Micro Devices’ ATI Radeon HD 5830, which was priced under $250 on launch, but is now priced at $199 on retail sites like Newegg. The Radeon card, announced in February, is compatible with DirectX 11.

The GTX 460 768MB version will be available worldwide starting Monday. A variant of the card with 1GB of graphics memory will become available on Monday for $229.

It’s about time, too, for any mass-photo-uploader on Facebook knows just how long it can take to run though every uploaded shot to tag one’s friends in the picture.

Here’s what we mean. While Facebook does allow other users to tag themselves in a person’s shots, the procedure for doing so is still fully manual: You click on an area of the photograph you want to tag, select a name from your entire list of friends, save the tag, and repeat the process.

Or, at least, that was the old way to do it. Facebook’s new feature—which has yet to roll out to the site’s entire audience—is a built-in face recognition system for pictures uploaded to the site.

Facebook won’t automatically tag your friends for you per se. However, users included in the trial will find that the faces of people in their photos are automatically selected alongside a prompt that asks the user, quite simply, “Whose face is this?”

“With this new feature, tagging is faster since you don’t need to select a face. It’s already selected for you, just like those rectangles you see around your friends’ faces when you take a photo with a modern digital camera,” writes Sam Odio, Facebook’s product manager for Photos. “All that’s left for you to do is type a name and hit enter. Cool, huh?”

According to Odio, more than 100 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook each day. That’s quite a bit of tagging. Unfortunately, there’s been no indication by Facebook as to when the trial period might end for its new auto-discovery feature or, for that matter, when said technology could roll out to Facebook as a whole.

However, Odio says that this is just the first of many improvements for browsing, uploading, and tagging Facebook photos. Stay tuned… and tagged!

[source:PCMag]

A couple of years ago at Networkers, I heard about a proposal to grandfather people who had been long-time CCIEs, so that they didn’t have to take the recertification test any more. My first thought was that it would significantly weaken the program. How would you know whether someone was an active CCIE or grandfathered without taking time to gather the relevant information and spend the time to verify it? I felt so strongly about it that I spoke out against the idea.

Upon further thought, I have a suggestion to resolve the dilemma. When a high ranking military officer retires, he or she gets to retain the title, but with the addition of “Retired” (e.g. General Kilroy, Retired). Why not do the same thing for the CCIE program? It shows that the person can think, work hard, excel, and make a difference in their area of expertise. This is exactly what the military moniker conveys and I see no problem with doing the same for the CCIE program. Someday I’ll retire and wouldn’t mind a business card that says something like:

Terry Slattery, CCIE #1026/Inactive

How does this suggestion help the CCIE program? It would provide an official way for people who achieved the CCIE status to continue to get some benefit as well as let future employers know that the person has useful attributes and experience. It could broaden the program’s reach to people who have moved into the management world from the technical world. Imagine a Cisco account team finding that they are working with a CCIE/Inactive manager and being able to immediately get into a level of technical detail. The existing Cisco CCIE validation tool can tell whether someone is in active or inactive status, allowing employers to easily check someone’s status.

I’ve not considered how far back such a program should reach. Should all former CCIEs be allowed to use an “Inactive” designation (or whatever the designation would be)? Off hand, I can’t think of a reason to limit it and what measure one would use to set such limits. My intuition is that allowing all former CCIEs to use the “Inactive” designation would generate a lot of good will in the networking community.

What do you think?

-Terry

Now, it seems that the forward-thinking and receptive folks at Learning@Cisco have decided to launch a program that is very similar to what Terry described – CCIE Emeritus. I know CCIEs let their numbers expire in many cases when they have climbed the rungs of success to find themselves in management. The need for the cert is then an object of pride and accomplishment and less a necessity. Terry supported the idea of allowing long-time CCIEs to keep a title on their business cards and signatures that said, “Yes I was a CCIE for over ten years and I am proud of it!”

Read the announcement about CCIE Emeritus and get the details for membership in the program. Here’s an excerpt:

Who is Emeritus for?

Long term CCIE’s who have moved out of the “day to day” technical work but would like to stay involved in the program serving as ambassadors to current and future CCIE’s.

Applicants must have a current and active status as CCIE for at least 10 years and can’t be affiliated with a Channel or Cisco partner.

This deserves a round of applause for Leraning@Cisco, and I am a happy supporter of the effort. We need more role models and mentors in the CCIE ranks!

1) Apple TV, take two: Apple’s set-top box has never garnered much respect from reviewers, consumers, or even the company itself. Steve Jobs famously (or infamously) referred to the device as a “hobby” back in 2007 at the Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital conference. Living room entertainment has changed dramatically since then–video streaming, in particular, has gone mainstream with the burgeoning popularity of Netflix and other online movie sites–and rumor has it that Apple TV will soon undergo a similar transformation. Engadget recently reported that an upcoming Apple TV box will feature 1080p HD video, cloud storage (rather than the hard drive found in today’s model) for movies, TV shows, and music, and cost as little as $99. The device had better impress because competition in this space is intense. In addition to Internet-ready TVs and Blu-ray players, set-top boxes from Roku, and upcoming devices like the Boxee Box, the next Apple TV will have plenty of challengers. Oh, and a little company called Google hassomething in the works too.

2) iPod fall classic: It happens every September. Apple refreshes its iPod lineup at a music-oriented shindig in San Francisco. At last year’s event, Apple introduced the video camera-equipped iPod nano, and announced a few minor upgrades and price changes to the rest of the iPod family. While the era of the standalone digital music player (excluding the iPod touch) is drawing to a close, there’s still some life left in the genre. This year’s happening could bring a Web-based iTunes service borne from the Lala online music streaming service, which Apple bought in late 2009 and shuttered last month. Long-suffering Windows users, forced to use the bloated and slow iTunes desktop client, would certainly rejoice.

3) iPod touch meets iPhone 4: Or Apple might dote on the iPod touch and pretty much ignore the rest of the iPods. Since the multi-talented touch is really an iPhone without the phone (or camera), it’s likely the next-gen model will adopt the iPhone 4′s slimmer shell and some of its capabilities. How about an iPod touch with a front-facing camera for FaceTime video chat? Considering the touch’s popularity with kids, and the fact that it already has Wi-Fi (required by FaceTime), video chatting is a natural. As for the iPhone 4′s rear-facing camera, no, the touch won’t get it. Apple needs some product differentiation, after all.

4) MacBook upgrade: Too boring? Perhaps, but Macs still sell like hotcakes, even though Apple is obviously more focused on its mobile devices these days. The entry-level MacBook did get a minor upgrade recently, as did the pricier MacBook Pros. But what about the ultra-thin MacBook Air? Apple’s once-hip-but-now-forgotten laptop isripe for an upgrade, although some critics believe the Air’s time has passed.

5) iPad 2: OK, the iPad is still new by Apple standards, which is fond of annual (or even longer) upgrade cycles. Still, Apple’s tablet is crying out for a front-facing camera, particularly since the shiny new iPhone 4 has one. Tablets and video chat are made for each other, and the camera-less iPad is strangely ill-equipped in this area. Plus, competing tablets will almost certainly include a Webcam. It’s unlikely a new iPad will debut by the end of the year, however. January 2011 is a safe bet though.

The search giant announced in a blog post on June 25 that its encrypted search service moved fromhttps://google.com to https://encrypted.google.com.

The encrypted search, which gives a user the option to use SSL to prevent packet sniffing, was moved to accommodate “better serve our school partners and their users,” Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise says in the blog post.

Previously, school administrators — or anyone else, for that matter — who wanted to block encrypted searches at https://google.com would also block Google authenticated services such as Google Apps for Education.

Why would schools want to block encrypted searches? Using the service “creates an obscured channel between a user’s computer and Google,” which allows students to bypass a school’s content filter, Girouard said.

That makes it harder to block adult content, a policy of many schools.

Google’s change should make it easier for school IT staff to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires schools to implement measures to address minors accessing “inappropriate matter,” among other things.