Now talk to friends on WhatsApp with new Voice Messages feature

Popular messaging app WhatsApp has introduced Voice Messages for users across platforms that will allow users to send recorded messages to their contacts. The introduction comes on the day the service crossed 300 million monthly active users.
A a company spokesperson told CNET ,“Today, we’re proud to announce that WhatsApp has surpassed 300 million monthly active users worldwide, a milestone on the road to WhatsApp becoming the communication network of the 21st century.”
As far as the new Voice Message service is concerned, WhatsApp’s team wrote on a blog post,
We are releasing Voice Messages on all of our platforms simultaneously. We worked very hard to make sure that iPhone and Android devices have perfectly working Voice Messages functionality, and we put extra effort into making sure that BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone users can enjoy the same rich and powerful Voice Messaging experience.
So how exactly does the service work? For Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 8 devices, users will now see a microphone icon next to the box where they type messages. Just press and hold the icon to record till the end of your message.
Once you release the icon, the voice message will automatically be sent to the recipient. To cancel a recording, just slide your hand across the microphone icon and it will be cancelled.

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Happy Friendship Day

Hii Friends
Happy Friendship Day

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Android smartphone Xperia Z Ultra launched by Sony India

 

Sony India on Tuesday launched its latest premium large-screen Android smartphone – Sony Xperia Z Ultra - in India, priced at Rs 46,990 and will hit the stores on August 2.
The online retailers are taking pre-orders for the device at Rs 44,990. Sony has partnered with Vodafone India to offer 8GB of free data download for a period of two months with this device.
Sony Xperia Z Ultra phablet has display resolution of 1920x1080p and 344ppi pixel density. Under the hood runs the quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, Qualcomm's latest and powerful processor, clocked at 2.2GHz, backed by 2GB RAM. This device has the same design language as Xperia Z smartphone and features on-screen keys as well as scratch-resistant and shatterproof glass.
Powered by a 3,050mAh battery, Xperia Z Ultra packs 16GB internal storage and supports microSD card expansion up to 64GB. Connectivity suite of Sony's latest gadget consists of 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and microUSB 2.0. On the back is an 8MP camera with LED flash, while a 2MP unit is placed in the front.
It is the biggest full HD phone in the world and is resistant to water as well as dust.
Sony India marketing head said the Xperia Z Ultra will come preinstalled in Sony TV and Sony Music apps, along with free Bigflix subscription for a month. The company also launched accessories like stereo Bluetooth headset and magnetic charging dock.
The smartphone is available in three colours – black, white and purple.

Specifications:

• 6.4-inch TFT Triluminos display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels and Shatter proof sheet on scratch-resistant glass
• Weight:  212 grams
• 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor
• 2GB RAM
• 8-megapixel rear camera with Exmor RS sensor
• 2-megapixel front facing camera
• 16GB internal storage expandable up to 64GB via microSD card

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Railway Minister launches SMS-based ticket booking system

Keeping in mind the high mobile phone penetration in India, the railways on Friday launched an SMS-based ticketing system aimed at improving customer convenience.

Launching the service, being run as a pilot project, Railway Minister Mallikarjun Kharge said it will also help the transporter deal with the touts who fleece the passengers.

"This service will be particularly useful for labourers and workers staying away from their homes and who have to book tickets to travel to their native place," said Kharge, adding: "While internet access in India is only about 10 per cent, more than 80 per cent people in the country use mobile phones."

Online booking of tickets is now around 45 percent of total reserved tickets and has eased the rush at booking counters, he said.

However, the real test of the service will be payment options available on the mobile phone as users will have to get an account opened through a bank or an agency approved by the Reserve Bank of India, said officials.

Railway Board Chairman Vinay Mittal said the service will be improved further with provision of more payment options, a user-friendly interface and value added services like alerts and updates.

He said payment through mobile phones was still evolving and banks are working on providing a safe, secured and quick payment mechanism.

As the payment options mature and users get accustomed to SMS based booking, it has the potential of overtaking bookings through internet as well as the booking counters, he said.

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How Email Works

In this diagram, the sender is a human being using their company account to send an email to someone at a different company.

Step A: Sender creates and sends an email

The originating sender creates an email in their Mail User Agent (MUA) and clicks 'Send'. The MUA is the application the originating sender uses to compose and read email, such as Eudora, Outlook, etc.

Step B: Sender's MDA/MTA routes the email

The sender's MUA transfers the email to a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA). Frequently, the sender's MTA also handles the responsibilities of an MDA. Several of the most common MTAs do this, including sendmail and qmail (which Kavi uses).
The MDA/MTA accepts the email, then routes it to local mailboxes or forwards it if it isn't locally addressed.
In our diagram, an MDA forwards the email to an MTA and it enters the first of a series of "network clouds," labeled as a "Company Network" cloud.

Step C: Network Cloud

An email can encounter a network cloud within a large company or ISP, or the largest network cloud in existence: the Internet. The network cloud may encompass a multitude of mail servers, DNS servers, routers, lions, tigers, bears (wolves!) and other devices and services too numerous to mention. These are prone to be slow when processing an unusually heavy load, temporarily unable to receive an email when taken down for maintenance, and sometimes may not have identified themselves properly to the Internet through the Domain Name System (DNS) so that other MTAs in the network cloud are unable to deliver mail as addressed. These devices may be protected by firewalls, spam filters and malware detection software that may bounce or even delete an email. When an email is deleted by this kind of software, it tends to fail silently, so the sender is given no information about where or when the delivery failure occurred.
Email service providers and other companies that process a large volume of email often have their own, private network clouds. These organizations commonly have multiple mail servers, and route all email through a central gateway server (i.e., mail hub) that redistributes mail to whichever MTA is available. Email on these secondary MTAs must usually wait for the primary MTA (i.e., the designated host for that domain) to become available, at which time the secondary mail server will transfer its messages to the primary MTA.

Step D: Email Queue

The email in the diagram is addressed to someone at another company, so it enters an email queue with other outgoing email messages. If there is a high volume of mail in the queue—either because there are many messages or the messages are unusually large, or both—the message will be delayed in the queue until the MTA processes the messages ahead of it.

Step E: MTA to MTA Transfer

When transferring an email, the sending MTA handles all aspects of mail delivery until the message has been either accepted or rejected by the receiving MTA.
As the email clears the queue, it enters the Internet network cloud, where it is routed along a host-to-host chain of servers. Each MTA in the Internet network cloud needs to "stop and ask directions" from the Domain Name System (DNS) in order to identify the next MTA in the delivery chain. The exact route depends partly on server availability and mostly on which MTA can be found to accept email for the domain specified in the address. Most email takes a path that is dependent on server availability, so a pair of messages originating from the same host and addressed to the same receiving host could take different paths. These days, it's mostly spammers that specify any part of the path, deliberately routing their message through a series of relay servers in an attempt to obscure the true origin of the message.
To find the recipient's IP address and mailbox, the MTA must drill down through the Domain Name System (DNS), which consists of a set of servers distributed across the Internet. Beginning with the root nameservers at the top-level domain (.tld), then domain nameservers that handle requests for domains within that .tld, and eventually to nameservers that know about the local domain.

DNS resolution and transfer process

• There are 13 root servers serving the top-level domains (e.g., .org, .com, .edu, .gov, .net, etc.). These root servers refer requests for a given domain to the root name servers that handle requests for that tld. In practice, this step is seldom necessary.
• The MTA can bypass this step because it has already knows which domain name servers handle requests for these .tlds. It asks the appropriate DNS server which Mail Exchange (MX) servers have knowledge of the subdomain or local host in the email address. The DNS server responds with an MX record: a prioritized list of MX servers for this domain.
  An MX server is really an MTA wearing a different hat, just like a person who holds two jobs with different job titles (or three, if the MTA also handles the responsibilities of an MDA). To the DNS server, the server that accepts messages is an MX server. When is transferring messages, it is called an MTA.
  
• The MTA contacts the MX servers on the MX record in order of priority until it finds the designated host for that address domain.
• The sending MTA asks if the host accepts messages for the recipient's username at that domain (i.e., username@domain.tld) and transfers the message.

Step F: Firewalls, Spam and Virus Filters

The transfer process described in the last step is somewhat simplified. An email may be transferred to more than one MTA within a network cloud and is likely to be passed to at least one firewall before it reaches it's destination.
An email encountering a firewall may be tested by spam and virus filters before it is allowed to pass inside the firewall. These filters test to see if the message qualifies as spam or malware. If the message contains malware, the file is usually quarantined and the sender is notified. If the message is identified as spam, it will probably be deleted without notifying the sender.
Spam is difficult to detect because it can assume so many different forms, so spam filters test on a broad set of criteria and tend to misclassify a significant number of messages as spam, particularly messages from mailing lists. When an email from a list or other automated source seems to have vanished somewhere in the network cloud, the culprit is usually a spam filter at the receiver's ISP or company. This explained in greater detail in Virus Scanning and Spam Blocking.

Delivery

In the diagram, the email makes it past the hazards of the spam trap...er...filter, and is accepted for delivery by the receiver's MTA. The MTA calls a local MDA to deliver the mail to the correct mailbox, where it will sit until it is retrieved by the recipient's MUA.

RFCs

Documents that define email standards are called "Request For Comments (RFCs)", and are available on the Internet through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) website. There are many RFCs and they form a somewhat complex, interlocking set of standards, but they are a font of information for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of email.

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How Internet Search Engine Works

SEARCH ENGINE OPERATION

There are three major functions for which the search engines are known for: index building and crawling, relevance calculation to provide results and result serving.

Crawling and indexing

The World Wide Web can be determined as a big city subway system with numerous stops. And, these stops are the unique documents ranging from html pages to jpg files to pdf files to mp4 files and others. The search engine’s basic requirement is the availability of the paths through which they can make interconnection between the various documents and these paths are the links.

The automated robots of the search engines better known as the Crawlers or Spiders make an access to the millions of the documents. Once, the search pages are found, the code from these are deciphered by the crawlers following which these codes get stored in the hard drives to be recalled when a search term is entered. Constructed data centers of the search engines are present all over the world, which makes the task of storing billions of pages.

Search engines work hard to provide the search results which are provided in a span of 1-2 secs which is possible because of the thousands of machines which process the large quantities of information.

Providing the results

Search engines are rightly designated as the answer machines. When an online search is made, then two important tasks are performed by these search engines, narrow the search results to show only those pages which are relevant for the search and rank the search results based on their popularity and the traffic.

Here comes the SEO which make the pages both relevant and important. In the initial days search results were only based on the simple word matching which was not very relevant, but nowadays these search engines are much advanced and have hundreds of factors to narrow the searches which make the results very relevant.

Important determination by the search engines

Basically, the important determination nowadays is basically based on the popularity. The more valuable the information contained in a document, the more popular it is. The search engines use metrics to determine popularity which show more satisfying results.

The search engines make use of the carefully crafted mathematical equations, algorithms, and other methods to sort out relevant pages from the billions of pages and rank them accordingly.

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Hacker VS Programmer

1. A hacker beats the system.
A programmer maintains the system.

2. A hacker is trying to get in.
A programmer is trying to stop things getting in.

3. A hacker does things because he believes in them.
A programmer does what he is supposed to.

4. A hacker changes the way things are.
A programmer tries to keep the status quo.

5. A hacker is agile.
A programmer is a small cog in a big slow machine.

6. A hacker has many points of attack.
A programmer has one job.

7. A hacker has to be fast.
A programmer doesn’t.

8. A hacker is self-reliant.
A programmer relies on others.

9. A hacker finds paths that don’t exist.
A programmer guards the old ones that already do.

10. A hacker is about being interesting.
A programmer is about being perfect.

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