The rumours of a smaller iPad was fueled by media reports from China, South Korea and Taiwan, saying that Apple ordered screens that are 7.86" in diagonal . This means about half the size of the current iPad!

What do you think of the idea of trading in your trusty iPad for a smaller version? Perosnally, I do not think I will go for a smaller model. Quite happy with my iPad 2.

via: IOL

image: Cultofmac

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It's only $35 and the size of credit card.

The Raspberry PI is a tiny, low-powered, and really cheap ARM-based Linux system that can connect to a TV or keyboard for word processing, gaming, and playing HD video. This bite sized computer is designed to peak childrens interest in programming. I can just imagine that many hobbyists and some of our own favourite geeks will have endless fun with this little ARM-based Linux computer.

Pre-orders have reached 350,000 units.

via: Slashgear

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We are quite excited. After a lot of blood and sweat (and some tears), we have launched our BETA site - visit xspgroup.net.

When deciding last year to start the new company, The xSP Group, there was a lot of discussion around the new brand, the look and the logo. This was actually quite a tall order.

Cyberdale was originally founded in 1991.
The name Cyberdale is based on a contrivation of the word cybernetics which relates to the science of computing technology, combined with the word dale which also means valley.The origin dates back to 1991 when the business was founded by Andre Jonker who then resided in an area called Olivedale.
The main business focus back then was centered around computer sales and related services. The addition of internet services in 1998, lead to more focus on the provision of technology services, until 2003 when the business adopted the name Extended Network Services, or XNS for short, as trading name for the provision of specialised network technology focused services. Before the "cloud" became the future of internet based services, XNS was replaced by xSP. SP being the abbreviation for Service Provider and the x retained from the XNS name.
The small x was chosen to indicate a wildcard or placeholder of sorts, where we'd like you to think Internet, Application, Security, Support, or well everything we do as your Service Provider.

The xSP Group will contain numerous brands i.e. Cyberdale xSP, Livesupport, Healthpack & Wazzup Internet (this is just to mention a few). We needed a logo which is simplistic and corporate. The logo should not be overbearing or overshadow the brands.

So what do you think of the logo?

The site is developed in HTML 5 & CSS3.

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The following is an example of why the web is [less secure]. The statement is not untrue, but the problem is that this way of thinking overshadows efforts to make secure protocols a priority.

Microsoft says: "Encryption must be optional to allow HTTP 2.0 to meet certain scenarios and regulations. HTTP 2.0 is a universal replacement for HTTP 1.X, and there are some instances in which imposing TLS is not required (or allowed). For example, a "random thought of the day" Web service has very little need for it, nor does a sensor spewing out a temperature reading every few seconds."

Read more here

via: CNET

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Trying to find a web-link dating back to 1995? Enter http://web.archive.org/.

The following is for Google to index. So the next time someone's looking for the "CGI Primer", here it is:

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A while ago about I blogged about my MTN woes. It looks like they will get their tit for tat.

MTN is facing a storm over claims that it helped the Iranian government to spy on local subscribers and assisted the regime in its brutal crackdown on protesters in 2009 and 2010.

Read the full article here

via: MyBroadBand

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Being in IT I know that just sometimes, we find ourselves slumping at our desks.

The reality is that slouching at a desk for long periods of time hurts the spine by squeezing it and putting pressure in places where it shouldn't be. Lack of movement and poor posture reduce 

circulation of blood to the spine.

This is why Philips created a new display that tracks user-attention and can make posture suggestions – or even turn off completely – if the user is slouching. It also offers break advice.

The ErgoSensor Monitor is a 24-inch 1920 x 1080 LCD with a 1,000:1 contrast ratio and integrated stereo speakers.

The ErgoSensor is also kinder to the environment, by realising you are no longer in front of your monitor, it will automatically switch off.Philips says that’s good for an 80-percent power saving.

via: Slashgear

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Twitter yesterday announced that they are filing suit against five twitter tool providers and spammers.

This morning, we filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers. With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.

This announcement did not mention any specific tools or providers.

Being a "victim" of Twitter spammers myself, I recently went on journey trying to find tools to quickly remove these unwanted spammers.
I have to admit, I have been using some of the tool providers, trying to get more followers. Even by setting your account with local or specific metric, you still get loads of unwanted followers.
Read this blog post here 

via: Twitter

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For all the female "geeks" and lady Star War fans out there.

These heels are hand-painted with scenes and characters from Star Wars.

So where can you find these? Head on over to Etsy, and for only $85 you can grab yourself a pair of super-nerdy custom made heels.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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The Definitive Choice for Software Application Development

Successful software development is characterized by the ability of the software to optimize user productivity; increase business efficiency; reduce overheads; facilitate seamless functioning of business processes; and achieve exemplary business results.

Our Custom Software Development Services include, but are not limited to:

• Web-Based Software Application and Product Development
• SaaS Solution
• Web Application Development
• Factory Management Systems
• Advanced Content Management Systems

Send a mail to info@cyberdalexsp.com to begin the discussion about your exciting new project.

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Interesting seeing the blog post (re-posted below) in my inbox this evening. 

This week suddenly there was interest in SSD drives from our customers. We have also been talking about changing over to SSD drives after having a bad harddrive year! I was also hoping to speed up my Macbook a bit.

We received pricing from local South African suppliers and was shocked! A 64GB SSD drive costs about $165 cost price before taxes.

I think it will still be quite a while in South Africa before the price gap between HDD's and SSD drives narrows.

Read the full article posted in the Spiceworks community here:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/209887-silent-buzz-the-state-of-solid-state-drives

This is the 41st article in the Spotlight on IT series. If you'd be interested in writing an article on the subject of backup, security, storage, virtualization, mobility or MSPs for the series PM Eric to get started.

Solid-state drives are creating a lot more buzz now with the slowdown in the manufacturing of traditional hard drives. There are plenty of things influencing storage decisions — space, speed, and cost among others — but the recent issues with HDD manufacturing left me wondering if this was in fact the right time to make the move to the SSD front.

My initial concern was the same as most SSD skeptics — little storage at an enormous cost. Then I came across a deal on a 90GB drive for around $80 after a mail-in rebate. I decided the price point was right to give it a try on my work laptop and see if the performance boost was worth the few extra dollars.

My work laptop, a Dell Latitude E5520, provided me with a 320GB drive out of the box, and though it took much thought and coercing, I eventually convinced myself I could make it on the lesser space and installed my new SSD.

Most of the apps I use are located on my server or a USB drive so dropping to a smaller drive really didn’t hurt that much. I used Ghost to move the contents of my drive to the SSD, plugged it in and was up and running in about 30 minutes. The performance was noticeable right from the start. It took less than 15 second to get to a working desktop, a much better mark than the 32 seconds from the Western Digital HDD I’d been using. In addition, I noticed a better performance in calling apps installed on the drive. Previously, my anti-virus management console took 15 seconds to get up and running, but on my new drive I’m down to less than 5 seconds.

Of course, there’s not a ton of long-term, real-world data on SSDs, but we’ve heard about the potential for performance degradation and drive failures resulting in total data loss. These are major concerns, but there are always concerns when dealing with unproven technology. As we all know too well, every part of a PC has the potential for problems. Nothing is foolproof. I don’t believe we will ever get to a point where data loss isn’t a concern, so a good backup plan is always key. This stresses the need to have good and current backups of all your data. This is why we back up all our units every day and on a weekly basis. It takes at the absolute most two hours to restore one of our systems — regardless of the type of storage inside.

Holding on to HDDs
I’m not ready to swap out every HDD in our company though. In my opinion, for now a mix of SSD and HDD is the way to go on systems. The cost for significant space makes it nearly impossible to purchase SSDs for systems that require a lot of storage. For example, our engineers require a minimum of 500GB on their machines and we RAID those to prevent data loss, so buying two drives that size for over 200 people just wouldn’t work right now.

Even if cost weren’t an issue, HDDs remain a perfectly viable option for many uses such as long-term storage, where SSD’s ability to call information quickly would mostly be wasted. We keep five prior years of data in storage for reference and accounting, and we’ve maybe had to access this information a total of three times in the last 15 years — the performance boost just isn’t needed there. A mixture is the way to go, using SSDs for things that need to be called quickly and HDDs for long-term storage.

A world without moving parts
I’ve been using this setup on my work computer for about three months now. Though I won’t be migrating the company as a whole to SSDs just yet, if the price of HDDs continues to climb I may consider it. I’ve used many different HDD types in our enterprise environment and have yet to find anything performance wise close to this. If the 500 GB drives we use in our production equipment continue to be unavailable or nearly identical in price to their SSD rivals, we may very well make the change over.

After all is said and done, the only downfall I’ve seen thus far is the price point for SSDs. If you know what you’re doing, making the switch is only limited by the hardware you use to ghost your image and, of course, your pocketbook. The advantage in speed and boot time is enough to make me loosen the purse strings a little and enjoy the true performance my units have to offer.

What are your thoughts on SSDs? As the price gap between HDDs and SSDs narrows, would you consider making the switch?

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Say goodbye to people on Twitter who does not want to be your friend

Your Twitter Karma

I tried Twitter Karma after reading a positive review on http://socialtimes.com/twitter-bulk-follow-unfollow-tools_b8651. My first impression was that this is a no frills app, and this sometimes proves to be very effective.

You first need to authorise the app, once done, you need to press the Whack button ... sounds cool - BUT it took ages to bring up any results.

The results displayed was accurate, and you could select multiple or all account - but the options after this is a bit odd and really did not make sense? Perhaps I am just daft, but after selecting people that I already follow the following options came up:
- Bulk Follow
- Bulk Block
and then there is a link to Where did Bulk Unfollow go?

--- On January 15, 2010, Twitter instructed us to remove the "bulk unfollow" capability of Tweeter Karma as it has been determined to violate their Automation Rules and Best Practices. We have done so in order to comply with their request. We apologize to you, our users, for having to make this change, but hope you will understand it is outside of our control. ---

This is a deal killer for me unfortunately :-/

Bulk unfollow

Seems like Twitter does not like bulk unfollow functionality, and Twitter claims that it is in violation of it's TOS.

Quick workaround - in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox extension store do a search for CHECK ALL :-)

 

Friend or Follow

Who unfollowed me on Twitter? Who's not following me back? Who am I not following back? Who are my friends? Find out!

This is a great looking web-app with accurate results. The only downside is that to get your hands on the good stuff, you need to pay $9.99/mo.

In South Africa this works out to over a R100/mo and it makes this tool a bit to expensive.

Untweeps

Unfollow Twitter users who don't tweet often enough

This tool offers to unfollow twitter users who have not posted any tweets recently.
Untweeps only permits you to unfollow people who have not tweeted in a specific time range, like in the last 30 days for instance,

Works effectively, but not yet what I am looking for... so the quest conitnues

ManageFiltter

And I think we finally have a winner! ManageFlitter allows you to view your lists in Follow Order, Followers, Following, Listed Tweets, Username and Last Tweet.

When hovering over a listed user, you will get a bio and some more info.

I had to use the Check All extension, but it worked quickly and efficiently - without costing me a cent.

ManageFlitter also automatically sends your public Google+ posts to Twitter, as long as you have the service connected to your Twitter account.

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Where we stay we do not have access to any Telkom infrastructure, and were forced to make use of 3G products. We happily paid the over inflated 3G prices, seeing that the quality of service was quite acceptable. Last year October however our connectivity took a serious dip. At present we have no connectivity. We are paying almost R900/mo for an uncapped service that cannot open email or even a local news site.

We at first thought it must be our equipmeTNnt. We were using a Planet 3G router for almost 1 year then, and thought it might be time to replace it. We then opted for a very expensive Mikrotik solution. Still no improvement. We then purchased a booster aerial. Still no luck. R5k poorer and still nothing!

Our service has now gone from bad to worse and is impacting on our work, and we are forced to work longer hours. When the problem started, we found that from 7PM every evening we have little to no connectivity. Today, if we are able to establish a connection, the speed is much worse than a 56k dial-up. Our voice quality has also dropped significantly, and most of our calls are being dropped. Last week I had to call a customer back 9 times on a 3 minute call.

Most of the time it is a battle getting through to competent technical support staff, when you call the mobile operators. We have spent countless hours on the phone with clueless technicians.

After lodging two complaints on http://www.hellopeter.com we finally got a response. This is the final result:

We have done drive tests in the area, and found that the signal levels are very low, especially on 3G. As per attached correspondence , it does not look like we can improve coverage in this area.

Complaint #1 : http://www.hellopeter.com/autopage/complaints-to-compliments/non-existant-tec...
Complaint #2 : http://www.hellopeter.com/autopage/complaints/service-degradation-734813

Our reality is that we rely on connectivity to earn a living, and without no connectivity, there is no income.

We are not being unreasonable here: We did not go out and buy all this stuff to use in some area where there wasn't any signal and now supposedly sit with buyers remorse. No, we were actually happy customers until the MTN tower broke in Paarl. We know this, because a consultant from a company called Bytes, was hired by MTN to investigate the issue, and he told us there is a problem. We also have the Google Latitude logs to prove it.

Just to make matters much much worse, my family suffered a terrible personal loss because of this. Last week (and now if this was America I would have sued) Thursday, we were forced to drive out to our office after hours, due to the lack of internet once-again. We went home just after 5PM to check on our pets. Left about 15mins later. We came back 3 hours later to a heart-breaking sight. Our boston terrier, Pogo was bitten by a snake, and by the time we found him it was too late. We rushed him to the vet, but he sadly passed away in my arms on our way to the vet. Struggling to get a call through with 3 phones, all on a bad MTN signal - imagine the words I have for these people.
If we had the same connectivity as we did last year October, then we would have stayed home - because it was only emails we needed to respond to. And even if our dog found a snake in the garden, we might have been in a position to save his life.

I am slowly getting fed up with the poor technology service in this country. Large profit hungry foreign corporations bleed us dry, while they do not accept the responsibility for providing the service - which only they are licensed for.
With the privilege comes a responsibility. I have now seen first hand what happens when these careless operators are allowed to run wild without consequence.

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Squidoo has become an excellent way for people to get their info out there to the public. Squidoo, basically, acts as a single web page dedicated to your topic. This includes text, pictures, video and most importantly, links. Squidoo links are also searched and indexed by search engines, in other words, squidoo offers do-follow links. Squidoo has become an effective way for many small and large businesses to get word of their product or service to an even larger audience.

Visit our latest lens HERE !

All of our SEO packages include Squidoo and Hub Pages creation. Want to find out more about our SEO services? Send an email to seo@cyberdalexsp.com for more info.

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Visit livesupport.cyberdalexsp.com

How does remote support work?

Our Remote Support system allows us to remote control, diagnose and resolve 99% of all faults without needing a site visit.

If you have a problem with your computer or your servers, we understand that you need it resolving quickly and efficiently. Gone are the days when an engineer needed to get in to his car and drive to your offices to the latest version of Microsoft Office or install a new printer.

Remotely, our experts can quickly connect to your PC, copy over the necessary files and carry out the work.

Although we love seeing you, we understand that it’s more important for us to fix your problems quickly and efficiently.

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http://blog.ineedhits.com/search-news/10-recent-google-algorithm-changes-you-...

Any time there is an update to Google’s search algorithm its big news. Our readers work themselves into a fluster speculating what aspects have changed and the impact it will have on their website’s ranking.

Brace yourself – Google is at it again. There have been some recent changes from Google, but the good news is that there is no need to guess this time, Google has (for once) released details of ten new algorithm changes it has made to how it shows and ranks search results.

In no particular order (and directly from Google), here they are:

1. Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
   What this means for webmasters: You will now be able to reach new markets that you couldn’t previously due to language boundaries.

 

2. Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
   What this means for webmasters: Ensure you have relevant and quality content on the right pages of your site and spend less time manipulating your header descriptions, and alt and meta tags.

 

3. Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
   What this means for webmasters: With this information laid out by Google, it is clear that site wide linking (in headers, footers and blog rolls) will not lead to any better ranking.

 

4. Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
   What this means for webmasters: Good news for Russian users, but pretty useless for the majority of searchers who use English.

 

5. Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
   What this means for webmasters: software applications must now include descriptive rich snippets in order to get a higher ranking.

 

6. Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
   What this means for webmasters: This tweak is aimed to improve image search function. But maybe Google is trying to decrease the link juice from sites like Flicker, Dailymotion etc.

 

7. Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
   What this means for webmasters: In order to rank well in the SERPs, you must be updating your content almost daily especially on blogs.

 

8. Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
   What this means for webmasters: Basically, this is good news for long-established brands. The official sites will get better rankings and the industry giants get a stronger hold on search results too!

 

9. Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
   What this means for webmasters: If your company’s news is in Google News then expect it to be given more prominence now during the time that the news is still relevant.

 

10. Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
    What this means for webmasters: Nothing specific, just that the user experience for non English speaking users will get better.

 

What’s significant from this news is that Google is now providing additional details on both large and small algorithm alterations. Do you think this is a sign of things to come? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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A simple banner for the Spotted Zebra Promotions team to re-direct users to the brand new SZP online catalogue.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Cyberdale xSP is a partner of Untangle Inc.

The Untangle Gateway, the world's first commercial-grade open source solution for blocking spam, spyware, viruses, adware and unwanted content on the network, provides a better alternative to costly, inflexible proprietary appliances.
Untangle's applications are currently being used in tens of thousands of businesses in a variety of industries, including financial services, real estate, education, bio-science, and professional services. Over 1 million computers arenow protected by an Untangle gateway.

Cyberdale xSP use and recommend this product to our clients as it provides a high end first level defense for your business network.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Own your network, or someone else will

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