Friday, July 6, 2012

For the first time on FOREX - 1:2000 leverage

Exness For the first time on FOREX - 1:2000 leverage

Dear Traders,
We are again reducing margin requirements, for the first time offering clients with Mini accounts the unique leverage of 1:2000. Such a massive alteration in deposit size provides traders with greater freedom when selecting their trading strategies, and also increases the accessibility of FOREX trading for all who want it.
From March 12, 2012 the company is setting up the following maximum leverage values on Mini accounts, depending on the volume of funds on the account:
Balance, USD Maximum leverage
0 – 999 1:2 000
1 000 – 4 999 1:1 000
5 000 — 9 999 1:600
10 000 — 29 999 1:400
30 000 — 149 999 1:200
From 150,000 and higher 1:100
You can learn more about the terms of our leverage provision at the «Leverage» section on our website.
In addition, we currently recommend that our clients update Terminal, since from June 1, 2012, support for client terminals with builds less than 416 will be terminated.


Open trading account  or www.exness.com

Mac vs. PC gap is the narrowest since '90s

(CNN) -- Aside from the iconic (and sadly discontinued) TV ads, the "I'm a Mac" vs. "I'm a PC" battle has never been a particularly close one, at least in terms of sheer numbers. To put it bluntly, Apple gets creamed.

But a leading tech analyst has put together a graphic showing that the ratio of Windows-based computers to Macs has tightened dramatically and is closer than it has been in a decade and a half.

Analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco has been following the Mac-PC war for years and recently crunched the numbers to show that, in 2011, Microsoft's PC desktops and laptops outsold Apple's Macs by a less-than 20-to-1 ratio.

Which, sure, is still lopsided. But it's the lowest margin since 1996 and is roughly the same as 1985, shortly after the Mac was first released. And it's significantly tighter than in 2004, the PC's high-water mark, when it was outselling Macs by a ratio approaching 60-to-1.

Factor in mobile gadgets like smartphones and tablets, where Apple has so far outshined Microsoft (though the Windows-makers hope to change that with the new Surface tablet) and you've got a playing field that, if not level, is certainly less tilted than it used to be.

The shift, Dediu wrote Wednesday, began in earnest in 2004.

"Although PC volumes continued to grow, they did so more slowly and the Mac grew faster," he said in a blog post. "What coincided with this was the emergence of portable computing. The MacBook became easily differentiable as a "better" laptop. It was not faster, did not have more storage or any key metrics being used to sell PCs. It was just better as an integrated product."

That's been the biggest shift since the mid-90s, Dediu writes, when the success of Windows '95 gave a similar boost to Microsoft. The PC advantage steadily climbed from 1995 to 2004, dipping only once in a 10-year span.

When iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices are factored in, Microsoft's advantage sits at about 2-to-1, Dediu said, and the two could break even within the next two years.

It's unclear how much he factored in Windows 8, Microsoft's new operating system that will run on both PCs and portable devices with the goal of marrying them together into a seamless computing experience. But Dediu says that Microsoft's evaporating lead could be bad news for the software company.

"The consequences are dire for Microsoft," he wrote. "The wiping out of any platform advantage around Windows will render it vulnerable to direct competition. This is not something it had to worry about before.

"Windows will have to compete not only for users, but for developer talent, investment by enterprises and the implicit goodwill it has had for more than a decade."

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Hotel replaces printed Bibles with Kindles

(CNN) -- Last year, Gideons International distributed more than 84 million printed copies of the Bible around the world to students, hospitals, members of the military and, of course, hotels, where they are a ubiquitous sight in bedside tables.

Starting this month, however, the InterContinental Hotels Group is modernizing that mission at one of its hotels, replacing the paper tomes with electronic versions of the Bible loaded on Kindle e-readers. Each of the 148 rooms at the chain's Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, England, will be outfitted with a Kindle Touch with Wi-Fi. Guests can use the e-ink devices to catch up on scripture, as well as purchase and read any other books available in the Amazon Kindle store.

The hotel was chosen for the pilot program because of its rich literary and publishing history: It's a few blocks from the Philosophical Society of Newcastle, one of the largest independent libraries in the UK. If it's a success, InterContinental could expand it to other locations, and other hotels might follow its lead.

The hotel's Bible-on-a-Kindle initiative has no connection to Gideons, a Tennessee-based Evangelical group and association of Christian professional men founded in 1899. However, the nonprofit group has no reservations about the hotel's program.

"Anything to put the Bible in people's hands is a good thing," Gideons spokesman Ken Stephens said. "It is a fascinating idea, and I'm sure somehow, some way, its time will come for us. But right now just the paper version is the best for what we do."

Stephens pointed out that paper books are more economical for large-scale distribution. Each Gideons Bible costs the organization about $5 to print and distribute. Although there are many free e-book versions of the Bible floating around online, a 6-inch Kindle Touch e-reader retails for $139.

Given the high price tag, Hotel Indigo is keeping close tabs on the devices. Just like with fluffy hotel robes, the full cost of any pilfered Kindle will be charged to a guest's credit card. For the first two weeks of the program, the hotel is allowing guests to download any other religious texts they like, up to $8 in value, for free.

If guests purchase other books to read, the cost will be charged directly to their rooms. However, they can't take the books with them, and the Kindles are wiped clean between visitors.

"As downloads will be synced to the hotel's account, guests will only be able to read the downloaded book during their stay," an InterContinental representative said.

Guests not keen on paying for an e-book they might have to abandon halfway through can choose from the 15,000 free titles in Amazon's free e-book collection.

The Gideons' hotel Bible project began in the U.S. in 1908 and has spread to 194 countries around the world. The group estimates it has distributed 1.7 billion Bibles in the project's 104-year history. While distributing pricey e-reading devices isn't much of a threat to Gideons, it's likely that the proliferation of e-reading features on all mobile devices could make a dent in demand.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Mobil Berbahan Bakar Air dari Purworejo

Guru dan siswa SMKN 1 Purworejo, Jawa Tengah, mengembangkan air sebagai pengganti bahan bakar minyak untuk menggerakkan kendaraan bermotor. Alat yang digunakan merupakan instrumen tambahan sistem pembentukan hidrogen. Ini dimaksudkan untuk meningkatkan kinerja mesin dan menekan polutan gas buang.

Sistem ini terdiri dari dua buah reaktor. Satu reaktor merupakan pembangkit uap air dan pengendali panas yang menghasilkan uap air panas pada konsentrasi rendah hingga kerapatan ikatan senyawa air merenggang.

Uap air panas itu kemudian dipertemukan dengan gas hidrokarbon hasil dari reaktor karburasi. Gas ini memiliki sifat indotermal yang bereaksi dengan uap air pada kondisi panas dan memiliki konsentrasi rendah hingga terjadi reaksi kesetimbangan.

Alat ini telah diuji coba di kendaraan jenis Toyota Landcruiser. Hasilnya menunjukkan mobil yang biasanya menghabiskan satu liter solar untuk menempuh jarak empat kilometer, setelah menggunakan alat tersebut dapat meningkat jarak tempuhnya menjadi delapan kilometer.

Diharapkan penemuan ini akan mengurangi polusi udara dan dikembangkan bukan hanya untuk mobil, namun juga kendaraan roda dua.(ADO)

Monday, July 2, 2012

Pemerintah Akan Hentikan Siaran TV Analog

Pemerintah akan menghentikan siaran televisi analog pada 2018 mendatang dan beralih ke televisi digital. Nantinya, semua TV analog membutuhkan perangkat tambahan berupa set top box agar dapat menerima siaran TV digital.

Menteri Komunikasi dan Informasi Tifatul Sembiring mengatakan, saat ini pihaknya masih menunggu Peraturan Menteri Kominfo keluar. Setelah Permen terbit, pemerintah segera mencari konsorsium yang dapat menyediakan pembangunan infrastruktur TV digital.

"Kominfo tidak akan menunda-nunda proses migrasi ini. Setelah Permen diterbitkan, pemerintah akan melakukan seleksi bagi beberapa perusahaan untuk menyediakan infrastruktur," kata Tifatul, usai membuka Broadcast and Multimedia Show (BMS) 2012 di Kartika Expo Center Jakarta, Senin (4/6).

Menurut Tifatul, saat ini proses migrasi dari TV analog ke TV digital telah dimulai sejak 2010. Diitargetkan pada 2018 mendatang migrasi ke TV digital telah rampung, dan siaran TV analog akan dihentikan. "Guna mencapai target migrasi TV digital, pemerintah akan melakukan kampanye agar masyarakat beralih ke TV digital," tegas Tifatul.

Sekadar informasi, untuk dapat menikmati siaran TV digital, masyarakat diberi tiga pilihan. Antara lain mengganti pesawat televisi dengan televisi digital, membeli perangkat set top box DVB-T yang harganya lebih murah daripada membeli televisi digital, atau membeli telepon seluler dilengkapi penerima TV digital DVB-T.(AIS)

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Dosen ITS Kembangkan Tenaga Listrik dari Sampah

Limbah sampah yang kerap dianggap sesuatu tak berguna kini menjadi barang berharga bagi Bambang Sudarmanta, dosen Fakultas Teknik di Institut Teknologi Sepuluh November (ITS) Surabaya, Jawa Timur. Di ruang kerjanya di laboratorium Teknik Pembakaran dan Bahan Bakar, Bambang merancang terobosan baru menjadikan sampah sumber tenaga listrik.

Awalnya, sampah ditaruh di belt converter atau alat pengubah untuk dipilah antara sampah organik dan nonorganik. Setelah terpisah, barulah sampah yang nonorganik dimasukkan ke dalam alat insinerator yang dibakar dengan suhu 600 derajat Celsius di atas bara api yang cukup panas.

Sampah nonorganik yang dibakar ini lalu diproses ke mesin katel uap. Setelah uap dihasilkan barulah diproses kembali ke dalam turbin uap dengan kecepatan minimal enam bar yang tersambung dengan generator hingga mampu menghasilkan tenaga listrik.

Menurut Bambang, dari empat meter kubik sampah kering bisa menghasilkan dua kilowatt tenaga listrik yang mampu bertahan empat hingga enam jam. Sayangnya, biaya produksi alat ini masih relatif mahal sebesar Rp 250 juta untuk satu alat insinerator lengkap.(ADI/ANS)

Google+ creator: Don't call it a social network

(CNN) -- Google+ has a problem.

It's not engagement or the lack of a clear way to monetize itself. It's not those sometimes-unwieldy friend-organizing circles, or even the perception that no one other than nerds uses the service.

The problem, its creators believe, is that many people keep comparing it to Facebook -- or, more broadly, social networks. While social interaction is a key part of Google+, the project is much more ambitious. Google+ is nothing short of a wholesale upgrade to all of Google's products and services, but with the identity of the user incorporated.

Mashable sat down with Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of social business, and Bradley Horowitz, Google+'s vice president of product, at the Google I/O developer conference. They were excited about the new Google+ features that were announced -- the Events feature and the new tablet app -- but they were also quick to downplay any comparisons to Facebook, or any suggestion that many people aren't interested in joining Google+.

"Google+ is just an upgrade to Google," says Gundotra. "People have a hard time understanding that. I think they like to compare us with other social competitors, and they see us through that lens instead of really seeing what's happening: Google is taking its amazing products, and by bringing them together, they just become more awesome."

Gundotra and others have said this before, and you get the sense that they really believe in their recipe for Kool-Aid. Google also released some new statistics to parry any stabs at accusing the network of not having a large and engaged audience -- 250 million total users, with 150 million of them visiting every month, and half of those people signing in every day (if you're doing the math, that's 75 million daily active Plussers).

Wading Into Google+'s Stream

But with the definition of Google+ so broad, what constitutes "active daily use" becomes a little hazy. If I'm signed into Google+ and simply do a Google search or upload a photo to Picasa, does that count? As Google defines the service, it would appear so.

However, a user performing such basic Google tasks may never visit the Stream, Google+'s main social feature. That brings the question: Just how engaged are Google's users with the Stream? This week at I/O, Gundotra revealed that "active" users of Google+ spend an average of 12 minutes in the stream, up from 9 minutes three months ago.

Still, that's not quite on par with Facebook, which sees its users spend a grand total of 10.5 billion total minutes spent on the network every day, according to its IPO filing. While that becomes about the same 12 minutes if you divide by Facebook's 900 million users, remember that we're talking about active users here, so Facebook's actual engagement is actually much higher.

So since this area is actually where the comparison to Facebook is valid, how can Google both increase the proportion of active users as well as boost engagement on the Stream?

"That's a fair question," says Gundotra. "I think there we boost engagement by giving people ways to connect things that they care about and are exciting â€" that nobody else has. Like Google hangouts. Like Events. Like beautiful photos."

Horowitz believes as more users "upgrade" to Google+ â€" which essentially just means letting Google know who you are â€" it'll become clear to them that Google's many services become much more useful. And at some point they'll find the Stream.

"When Google knows that I'm a man, and I live in this zip code, and I went to this school, and I have these interests, my entire experience gets better," he explains. "You will discover our engagement is massive, and guess what? Your friends, family and loved ones are already here. It's not as if we need to acquire users. We just need to bring them into the light."

Money Money Money

The way Horowitz and Gundotra describe it, upgrading to Google+ is almost a religious conversion: You weren't really living (i.e. using Google) until you make the transition. Still, Google is a business, and it doesn't undertake massive projects like Google+ without some kind of plan to monetize them.

So far, Google+ doesn't have anything like Twitter's trending topics (although it has a "What's Hot" stream that's a click or tap away for users) or Facebook's sponsored stories. When asked if we might someday see similar features introduced in Google+, Gundotra wouldn't say, but his change in manner betrays a disdain for how Google's competitors incorporate advertising.

"Our business model is very different," he says. Some of our competitors are like going to a baseball stadium. If you have 90,000 people there, you're going to put up ads everywhere, and that's basically the core business model. You're looking at a picture of your daughter, we're going to show you an ad.

"We have a very different philosophy. We think the right time to show and ad is when you are at the moment of commercial intent. When iIm doing a house remodel, and I'm looking for a microwave oven, then I see Bradley's +1 on a GE appliance, that means a lot more to me."

Gundotra repeated a statistic that Google has released before â€" that when brands use Google+'s social extensions in their ads, the click-through rate (CTR) jumps by 5-10%. While some have questioned that statistic, the fundamental idea of incorporating recommendations from friends into the ads they're seeing online makes a great deal of sense, and it's the business model of more than one company.

Still, Gundotra won't rule out the possibility of sponsored stories down the road.

"We don't serve ads [on Google+], but that doesn't mean we won't have sponsored stories," he says. "There may be more relevant forms of advertising that we do believe work."

The Business of Hangouts

There may be other sources of revenue for Google+, though. One of the much-touted advantages Google+ has over competitors (perceived or otherwise) is Hangouts â€" video chats you can have with multiple people, even through a mobile device and are absolutely free.

Hangouts have been a major differentiator for Google+ since the beginning, but until recently Google had positioned them as a casual, consumer-friendly feature, not a business tool (a new ad for Hangouts shows a work group having a meeting). Since their introduction, many businesses (including Mashable) have adopted Hangouts for collaboration, and it begs the question: why hasn't Google been more proactive about courting business users?

"We hear this so much," says Horowitz. "So many startups are running their business on Hangouts. Even big companies who would be embarrassed if I told you which ones. Their expansive camera units take longer to boot up than it takes to launch a hangout with commodity hardware and webcams in your laptop."

"There are lots of examples of great consumer tech coming into the enterprise," Gundotra adds, "because it's just so awesome. You could go back to 1991 with Windows. Enterprises really didn't want it, but it was just so great. If we can solve a problem for every human on earth, then businesses of course will use it."

So when will Google announce Hangouts for Business?

"We're very well aware of the opportunity in enterprise. We're not ignoring it. You should expect announcements from us in the future that add unique features that enterprises would need."

Google+'s Long Game

To some, Google+ made too many stumbles along the way to become a real Facebook competitor. As Gundotra and Horowitz see it, that's the wrong way of looking at it. Google+ is simply Google's way of taking its many disparate services â€" search, YouTube, Maps, etc. â€" and making them more relevant by incorporating the user's personal data. If some of those services then end up rubbing up against what Facebook offers, so be it.

In the bigger picture of platforms, though, the comparison is more than appropriate. Both Facebook and Google want you to spend your time on their site, not the other's. Facebook began with social interaction and spread to broader services such as messaging. Google's taking it the other way around â€" creating a suite of extremely popular products and then persuading users to get social with them.

Which approach is better? I don't think there's much question that Google's services improve greatly when you add in personal data, be it location, gender, interest or other factors. But the social component is incredibly powerful, and in that aspect Facebook is king (Facebook's engagement numbers are massive compared to Google+ â€" the stream, anyway). For the longest time, people have been trained to socialize there. It's difficult to imagine a world, even in the long term, where that activity shifts to Google.

But maybe it doesn't need to. Can Google+ still be considered a success even if the Stream never quite becomes as influential as Facebook's news feed? Google probably would like to think so, but it's clear that, for now at least, many perceive Google+ as a poor man's Facebook. And if perceptions are great enough, it has a way of become reality.

Yep, Google+ has a problem.