Step 1: First of all, you need to launch an internet browser. Press “Windows + R” keys to open the “Run” prompt and type “iexplore” without quotes to open Internet Explorer. You can also type “firefox” to open Mozilla Firefox. On the address bar at the top, type http://192.168.1.1 and press “Enter” key.
This address belongs to your wireless modem or wireless router to which you are connected.
Step 2: A window asking for username and password will appear. In the username field, type “admin” without quotes and in the password field, either type “password” without quotes or leave the password field blank. Press “Enter” key to continue.
If password is correct, you will be redirected to the modem/router’s “Settings” page, otherwise, you will have to reset the modem/router. Check beneath the modem/router or check the manual for correct password.
To reset the modem/router, locate a small hole at the back of the modem/router and insert a pin to press the switch inside it. Keep the switch pressed for about 20-30 seconds after which the modem/router will restore the settings to “factory defaults” and reboot itself.
Repeat the step 2, in order to gain access to “Settings” page.
Step 3: On the modem/router’s “Settings” page, find “Wireless” option. Click the “Wireless” link to populate the wireless settings. Now, locate and click the “Security” or “Advanced Security” option.
On the security page, you will find “Network Authentication”. Different options available under Network Authentication menu are open, shared, WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK, etc. Select either WPA or WPA2, to find your computer’s WPA key and insert this key when asked for.
If in step 2, you had reset the modem/router, you will not find any WPA or WPA2 key, and you will have to manually assign one. Select any of the WPA-PSK or any other authentication and assign a key to it. A key can be 8-63 long. For minimal security, you can choose 8 characters key, like “iN\/5R92”. For maximum security, choose 63 characters key like, “sJ0esmoU2cBD\m+oMp$nrXj5XPVRTvVA5fpwGSGI\RVz4RdQ7V3y\l$P1NrT9Be”.
After you have assigned a key, save/apply the changes and reboot the modem/router.
Note:The procedure shown above is common to most of the modems/routers. If this doesn’t apply to you, check your modem/router’s manual to find the wireless security option
In an effort to bring the Internet to the masses in India and other developing countries, several academics and engineers have used their spare time to design a sub-$200 handheld Net appliance.
Called the Simputer, for SIMple ComPUTER, the device will enable India's illiterate population to surf the Web. According to the Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook 1999, some 48% of the Indian population can't read or write.
The device was designed by professors and students at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore, and engineers from Bangalore-based design company Encore Software. A prototype of the appliance will be available in August.
The Simputer is built around Intel's StrongARM CPU, with Linux as the operating system. It will have 16 MB of flash memory, a monochrome liquid crystal display (LCD) with a touch panel overlay for pen-based computing, and a local-language interface. The appliance will have Infrared Data Association and Universal Serial Bus interfaces, and will feature Internet access and mail software.
The designers expect the Simputer to be used not only as a personal Internet access device, but also by communities of users at kiosks. A smart-card interface to the device will enable the use of the device for applications such as micro-banking.
Taking Technology to Everyone
"We expect to change the model for the proliferation of information technology in India," says Professor Swami Manohar, professor in the computer science and automation department of the IISc. "The current PC-centric model is not sustainable because of the high cost of the PC, and also because we expect that most of the users will not be literate."
A subsequent version of the Simputer will also offer speech recognition for basic navigation through the software menus, says Manohar. The speech dictionary will be customizable to support different languages. A text-to-speech system will also be developed to take the technology to India's illiterate population. Later versions will also offer wireless technology.
The intellectual property for the device has been transferred free to a non-profit trust, called the Simputer Trust, and both the software and the hardware for the appliance have been offered as open source technology. In the open source model of development, users and developers, often unpaid, work together to update technology.
Manohar says that the trust decided to put the technology in Open Source to enable third party software developers and designers to add value to the platform.
The technology for the product will be licensed to manufacturers at a nominal fee of $1150, which is to be used to finance upgrades to the Simputer.
A number of large manufacturers have shown interest in licensing the technology, though the interest is currently confined to Indian companies, according to Vinay Deshpande, chairman of Encore and a member of the Simputer Trust.
Deshpande says that the designers have been able to achieve the sub-$200 price point since the electronic components used in the device are all off-the-shelf volume components, and the software is primarily open source software such as Linux.
The Simputer is a self-contained, open hardwarehandheld computer, designed for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate. Due to the low cost, it was also deemed appropriate to bring computing power to the developing countries.
Design
The device was designed by the Simputer Trust, a non-profit organization formed in November 1999 by seven Indian scientists and engineers led by Dr. Swami Manohar. The word "Simputer" is an acronym for "simple, inexpensive and multilingual people's computer", and is a trademark of the Simputer Trust. It includes text-to-speech software and runs the GNU/Linuxoperating system. Similar in appearance to the Palm Pilot class of handheld computers, the touch sensitive screen is operated on with a stylus; simple handwriting recognition software is provided by the program Tapatap.
License
The Simputer specifications are released under an open distribution license called the Simputer General Public License or the SGPL. Free software developers are being actively encouraged to port their applications to the Simputer.
Licensees
The Simputer Trust has licensed two manufacturers to create devices based on the Simputer specifications:
Encore Software (the original licensee which has also built the Mobilis for Corporate/Educational purposes and the SATHI for Defence purposes)
In the year 2004, Simputers were extensively used by the government of Karnataka to automate the process of land records procurement. Prior to this large scale deployment, Simputers were also used in an ambitious project in Chattisgarh for the purpose of e-education. In 2005 they were used in a variety of innovative and interesting applications, such as automobileengine diagnostics (Mahindra & Mahindra in Mumbai), tracking of iron-ore movement from mine pithead to shipping point (Dempo, Goa), Microcredit (Sanghamitra, Mysore), Electronic Money Transfer between UK and Ghana (XK8 Systems, UK), and others. In recent times, the Simputer has seen deployment by the police force to track traffic offenders and issue traffic tickets.
Multi-I/O connector (in Encore's Simputer) giving additional (slave) USB, and optional modem/VGA interfaces
Bundled Software
The Simputer uses the Linuxkernel (2.4.18 Kernel as of July 2005), and the Alchemy Window Manager (only the Amida Simputer). Software packages included provide:
In addition, both licensees developed custom vertical applications for microbanking, traffic police, medical applications, etc.
Alchemy user interface used by the Amida Simputer has been released under the GPL with the name "OpenAlchemy".
Commercial production
Pilot production of the Simputer started in September 2002. In 2004, the Amida Simputer became commercially available for Rs. 12450 and up. The prices for Amida Simputer vary depending on the screen type (monochrome or colour).
Success Inhibitors
By 2005, sales of Simputers failed to live up to the ambitious goal of selling 50,000 units: only 4000 Simputers were sold ([1]).
"Poor man's computer"
A reason often stated is that the poor have no need of computers before their basic needs (such as electricity) are met. However, the Simputer was never designed to be a "poor man's computer" (a position often used by the media)- it was a device designed to help bridge the digital divide. While most people tended to look at the cost of the Simputer as a factor, they ignored the fact that the "cost of ownership" for the end-user of the device in villages was not the cost of the device, but the cost of the Smart card used to store the user's data. The device itself should be considered shared infrastructure for the village.
Lack of support from Government and NGOs
Another reason may be that lack of purchasing by the Indian government and NGOs (as earlier committed) led to lack of adoption in the field.
License cost
The SGPL, the license under which simputer is marketed, asks for a license fee of 1 Million Indian Rupees (US$1=INR 39[as on 14th Feb. 2008, roughly $24,155]) to commercially exploit the Simputer design. This was perceived to be a high entry point for small scale organizations wishing to license the Simputer design
Comparison with PDAs
While the Simputer is not cheap when compared to PDAs available in the market at the time, this point is largely irrelevant, as it was not designed to be a PDA (which are used as PC companions) but as a standalone computer. The comparison with PDAs was a natural outcome because of the form-factor (and, to some degree, reports by the media).
Cost of laptops
The decrease of prices of laptop computers may have reduced the Simputer's price competitiveness.
Current status
Both licensees may seem to have stopped actively marketing their Simputer devices, though both are known to be developing newer devices based on Simputer technologies. While Encore has developed an XScale-based device for use by the Indian Military, PicoPeta has continued development of an as yet un-released device, and is actively encouraging Free software developers to port their applications to the Simputer platform, and to the Alchemy interface. PicoPeta was acquired by Geodesic Information Systems (a developer of communication and collaboration systems) in 2005.
The year 2038 problem (also known as Unix Millennium Bug, Y2K38 by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects all software and systems that store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 01 January 1970.[1]
The latest time that can be represented this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. Times beyond this moment will "wrap around" and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as a date in 1901 rather than 2038. This will likely cause problems for users of these systems due to erroneous calculations.
Further, while most programs will only be affected in or very close to 2038, programs that work with future dates will begin to run into problems much sooner. For example, a program that works with dates 20 years in the future will have to be fixed no later than in 2018.
Because most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this format, it is usually called Unix time, and so the year 2038 problem is often referred to as the Unix Millennium Bug. However, any other non-Unix operating systems and software that store and manipulate time this way will be just as vulnerable.
Early problems
In May 2006, reports surfaced of an early Y2038 problem in the AOLserver software. The software was designed with a kludge to handle a database request that should "never" time out: rather than specifically handle this special case, the initial design simply specified an arbitrary timeout date in the future. The default configuration for the server specified a timeout of one billion seconds. One billion seconds (approximately 32 years) after 21:27:28 on 12 May 2006 is beyond the 2038 cutoff date, so after this date, the timeout calculation overflowed and calculated a timeout date that was actually in the past, causing the software to crash. When the problem was discovered, server managers had to edit the configuration file and set the timeout to a lower value.[2][3]
Solutions
There is no easy fix for this problem for existing CPU/OS combinations, existing file systems, or existing binary data formats. Changing the definition of time_t data type to a 64-bit type would break binary compatibility for software, data storage, and generally anything dealing with the binary representation of time. Changing time_t to an unsigned 32-bit integer, effectively allowing timestamps to be accurate until the year 2106, would affect many programs that deal with time differences or dates before 1970, and thus also break binary compatibility in many cases.
Most operating systems for 64-bit architectures already use 64-bit integers in their time_t, and these operating systems are becoming more common, particularly in desktop and server environments. Using a (signed) 64-bit value introduces a new wraparound date in approximately 292 billion years, on Sunday, December 4, 292,277,026,596 AD. As of 2007, however, hundreds of millions of 32-bit systems are deployed, many in embedded systems, and it is far from certain if they will all be replaced by 2038. Also 32-bit applications running on a 64-bit system are likely to be affected by the issue.
Despite the modern 18-to-24-month generational update in computer systems technology, embedded computers may operate unchanged for the life of the system they control. The use of 32-bit time_t has also been encoded into some file formats, which means it can live on for a long time beyond the life of the machines the file format was initially designed for.
Alternative proposals have been made, some of which are in use, including storing either milliseconds or microseconds since an epoch (typically either 1 January 1970 or 1 January 2000) in a signed-64 bit integer, providing a minimum of 300,000 years range.[4][5] Other proposals for new time representations provide different precisions, ranges, and sizes (almost always wider than 32 bits), as well as solving other related problems, such as the handling of leap seconds.
In a nutshell, the year 2038 problem, as it is also known, is that most Unix-like operating systems represent time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. On 32-bit systems, that second count is a signed 32-bit integer. What that, in turn, means -- unfortunately for us all -- is that the latest time that can be represented is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038.
Macworld dominated the headlines last week, so it's likely many unsuspecting readers were in too comfortable a state of Mac nirvana to realize what was happening in the rest of the world. Snap out of it, people! Y2K38 is coming, and as of Saturday, the 30-year countdown has already begun!
Slashdot's bloggers can always be counted upon to be on top of potential crises in the geek world, and a good thing too, because there's been very little mention of the impending crisis elsewhere. But sure enough, alert Slashdot blogger kdawson sounded the alarms on Tuesday with a post calling attention to the Y2K38 phenomenon, and his was followed by no fewer than 530 comments.
In a nutshell, the year 2038 problem, as it is also known, is that most Unix-like operating systems represent time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970. On 32-bit systems, that second count is a signed 32-bit integer. What that, in turn, means -- unfortunately for us all -- is that the latest time that can be represented is 03:14:07 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) on Tuesday, January 19, 2038.
Oh, that we could see Wednesday, Jan. 20 that year! But alas, it may not be so. As with Y2K, times beyond the critical point will be represented internally as negative numbers, causing programs to believe the year is 1901. Doom will certainly follow -- or, at least, something might happen.
'Much Scarier'
"Most of the Y2K problems were just display errors, not bugs in the actual calculations going on under the scenes," wrote jandrese. "2038 is much scarier and is a lot more difficult to fix."
The best way to fix the problem is likely to switch to a 64-bit representation of time, but "thus far not too many people have made moves in that direction," jandrese added. "Switching to 64 bits is not as easy as it might sound, either, since lots of programs use timestamps and many of them make assumptions as to the size of their time fields."
Not everyone, however, is sure that the situation is quite that dire.
'A Non-Issue'
"The Y2K38 thing is really interesting, I think. I don't know how much of an impact it will have, but a lot of Unix code is built on those old timestamps," Slashdot founder Rob Malda told LinuxInsider. "I guess it's better we find out now than wait."
Even more so: "I think it's a non-issue in most cases," blogger Kevin Dean asserted. "*nix is built around free software, and the one variant that isn't, Unix 'proper,' is essentially irrelevant. The 32-bit addressing should also be addressed by the move now to 64-bit systems."
Some legacy applications might be "minimally affected by this," Dean told LinuxInsider, "but I think the fact that those people have uneditable, unsupported legacy applications that are critical to their operating is MUCH more of an issue than the date being off. This is nothing more than a low-severity bug and will be fixed without much effort."
Much Ado About Little
Indeed, one of the big lessons learned from the original Y2K was that "it was too much ado about too little," Slashdot blogger yagu told LinuxInsider. "We feared the worst and got the best, all things considered -- no major meltdowns, no critical systems failures, and civilization kept on marching.
"Even taking into consideration embedded systems, it just doesn't seem plausible we're up against any horrible scenario," yagu concluded. "There may be glitches here and there, and we will fix them as we discover them, but we're not up against anything frightening."
Perhaps the most profound comment on the topic, however, came from Slashdot blogger Malevolent Tester: "Is this going to affect the Duke Nukem Forever release?"
Sun Buys MySQL
Moving right along, the other biggest topic on the blogs recently appeared to be Sun's purchase of MySQL, announced formally in Jonathan Schwartz's blog on Wednesday. That was followed by more than 50 comments and then picked up for discussion on the Linux Today blog and All About Linux.
"If Sun's track record with OpenOffice is an indicator, MySQL under Sun is a good thing," yagu said. "Sun is one of a few large corporations that seem to 'get' Open Source more than the rest."
Companies will be more likely to try an Open Source database like MySQL when they know it has the backing of a major expert in the industry like Sun, yagu added.
A Question of Trust
An opposing view: "Sun has really been screwing around with open source for way too long to really figure how much to trust them still," wrote Barney on the Linux Today blog. "I'm still pissed they bought and killed off those cool box-appliance guys. Cobalt (NYSE: CBZ) IIRC. They'd be rocking the industry if they were allowed to continue as they were."
In the middle ground: "Sun could do right by them, or they could screw it up," Malda said. "They've always struggled with Open Source stuff, but if the right MySQL people stay in control it won't matter. No doubt the code will benefit from their involvement."
The acquisition of MySQL by Sun is a promising thing, Dean said. "I think Sun will continue to ensure that MySQL is freely available to the community and businesses that use it daily," he explained.
Schwartz has said that Sun's first goals are to tightly integrate and optimize MySQL with its own Solaris stack, Dean added. "While some people fear that Sun will ruin MySQL, I think people need to watch Sun a bit more closely - they're very clearly ramping up to make the SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) stack a LAMP killer in the data center, and because they have a clearly defined focus (unlike GNU/Linux's a-bit-of-everything approach), they may just do it."
Sun in the Cloud?
Speculating as to Sun's motivations, "you have to ask yourself the question, why?" Slashdot blogger gasmonso told LinuxInsider.
"While I'm not psychic, I have seen a lot of interest in cloud computing," he noted. "Maybe Sun envisions running their newly acquired database on a Sun cloud. This would allow them to compete with various other giants like IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Dell."
Of course, at this particular time of year, everything inevitably comes around to Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) again. "I know a few folks at MySQL, and good for them I guess," Malda concluded. "If I had their stock options I could buy me a MacBook Air."
