Special Offer: Free IT Certification Study Guide Bundles and Practice Exams

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Practice Exams and study guides go hand in hand, and ExamForce produces some of the highest quality reference material available. ExamForce’s certified instructors craft these study guides so they follow each exam’s specific and recommended objection categories to ensure that you’ve got what you need come exam day.

Download: ExamForce IT Certification Study Guide Bundle

Microsoft

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  • 70-640 TS: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory, Configuration – 78 pages
  • 70-290 Managing and Maintaining a Server 2003 Environment – 45 pages

CompTIA

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Cisco

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  • CCNA 640-816 Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part II (ICND2) – 51 pages
  • CCNA 640-822 Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1 (ICND1) – 71 pages

Download: 1Z0-040 Oracle Database 10G New Features for Administrators Practice Exam

This practice exam provides sets a baseline of knowledge and helps test takers focus their study where they need it most.

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  • Automatic Management
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  • Automating Tasks with the Scheduler
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  • Flashback Any Error
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  • Maintain Software
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  • Miscellaneous New Features

Download: SY0-201 CompTIA Security+ Special Edition Practice Exam and Study Guide

CompTIA’s Security+ exam is a critical step for anyone interested in IT security. It’s a key component in the Department of Defense’s 8570.1 initiative that mandates federal IT workers and contractors gain security certifications to work with the federal government.

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What keeps a train on the tracks while it’s turning?

Most people think that trains stay on the tracks while it’s turning because of the flanges on its wheels. Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Think about this as well – while there’s an axle connecting each of its adjacent wheels, there’s no differential in the middle of it. How does it turn without derailing? In the following video, deceased American physicist Richard Feynman explains the science behind trains.


What does Apple’s Spotify approval mean for the app store?

Apple has given the thumbs up for the Spotify iPhone app. As well as being good news for music lovers, it may be a sign that Apple is feeling the heat over claims of anti-competitiveness in its approval policy.

For those who’ve not encountered it (the service isn’t scheduled to launch in the US until later this year), Spotify is a desktop based streaming music service with a few differences to its main rivals. Firstly, it has an extremely wide selection of music: certainly not everything, but a good chunk of both major titles and more obscure music (all of which is legally licensed). Secondly, the user has complete control over what songs they listen to and when. Thirdly, it’s free to use: there are radio-style commercials every 15 minutes or so, though a monthly subscription option removes these.

The iPhone app, which is free but only available to the monthly subscribers, goes one step further: as well as listening “live” through the phone’s internet connection, users can also put together a playlist for listening offline, with the relevant tracks downloaded to the phone. It’s worth noting the user doesn’t get the tracks permanently stored on the handset: from the description Spotify gives, the tracks can only be listened to once before they have to be downloaded again (or simply listened to while online). Here’s a short video presenting some of the features of the application:

When Spotify announced the app, the big question was how Apple would response. If you can listen to pretty much any song you like on your iPhone through Spotify whenever you choose to, legally and without extra cost, there’s much less incentive to use iTunes – and in turn, less need to buy songs from the iTunes store.

However, Apple has approved the app, though it’s not yet commented on its decision. The generous view is that it’s concluded that despite the potential loss to iTunes, simply having the app available makes the iPhone itself more attractive and may boost sales. (There’s no word yet of Apple cutting any financial deal with Spotify over the app.)

The less generous view is that Apple is starting to fear regulatory involvement over its approval process. It recently rejected Google Voice, an app which would have allowed users to make free phone calls within the US. As you’d imagine, that wouldn’t have gone down too well with AT&T which subsidizes the handset costs on the basis of getting future call revenues from iPhone users. However, the Federal Communications Commission – which has already talked of looking into the Apple/AT&T exclusive carrier deal – has begun an investigation into the Google Voice rejection.

And of course, there’s the extremely cynical view based on previous app decisions: the monkey which Apple employs to vet app submissions threw the banana representing Spotify on to the side of the cage marked ‘Yes’.

Wireless Electricity Demo

Eric Giler, CEO of MIT-inspired WiTricity, wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. In the following video, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT’s breakthrough version, WiTricity — a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker. With this promising new technology, you may soon never have to plug in ever again.

Suicidal planet defies the astronomy rulebook

Astronomers are hoping a recently discovered planet is on a rare suicidal orbit around its parent star. If it isn’t, the entire basis on which they make calculations about orbits may have to be rewritten.

WASP-18b is around 325 light years away from Earth: though that’s 1,885 trillion miles, it effectively makes it a close neighbor in the context of space as a whole. It takes its name from from the Wide Angle Search for Planets project which discovered it; the project’s cameras are pictured right.

The planet is only 1.9 million miles from its star, WASP-18, less than a twentieth of the distance between our Sun and its closest planet, Mercury. WASP-18b orbits in the equivalent of 22.5 hours (Earth time), quicker than the time it takes the planet to spin round. That means that by all astronomic logic, it should be moving closer and closer to its parent star.

However, given that WASP-18b being so close to the star means it must be around 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and taking into account that it is ten times the size of our solar system’s largest planet (Jupiter), its lifespan should only have been about a million years before being burned up. As WASP-18 is around a billion years old, and planets usually form around the same time as parent stars, something is amiss.

Douglas Hamilton, an astronomer who wrote a commentary on the report into the planet, told the LA Times that even the main possible explanations have flaws. It could be that WASP-18 has much less energy than assumed, causing less orbital drag; however, that would mean astronomers had overestimated the energy by a factor of a thousand, raising serious questions about standard assumptions.

It may also be that the planet has only recently been knocked into its current position, though in the big picture that would make it an amazing coincidence that astronomers spotted it before it met its doom.

According to Hamilton, that may leave one other explanation: “Perhaps we really are missing some key bit of physics.”

Easily Retrieve your License Keys With LicenseCrawler

LicenseCrawler is a free, portable tool to retrieve license keys and serial numbers from the depths of your hard drive. And while most of us keep our precious offline installation documentation in a “safe place,” so that we can “always find it,” having all these CD-keys available in a file is very convenient. Oh sure, you could crawl your registry manually to extract all the info yourself, but why bother when LicenseCrawler is there to do it for you?

Do you know of any other similar tools? Let’s hear about them in the comments!

[LicenseCrawler (Windows only)| Via MUO]

Google uses map app customers as traffic reporters

No longer is Google Maps merely a tool for your cellphone. Now your cellphone is a tool for Google Maps.

The firm says it now has enough users that it can give a good picture of traffic conditions by tracking the movements of their cellphones. If a large number of cellphones are in the same area and moving at a slow pace, that’s a pretty good indication there’s a traffic jam. (Similar technology is already used by some traffic data firms through devices fitted to cars.)

The system only tracks movements once a user specifically notes they are on a car journey, meaning it won’t get confused by people parked at home, or pedestrians who’ve gathered in a crowd for an event.

Because of the added data, Google is now expanding its live traffic maps from major highways to key arterial routes such as state highways and major inner-city roads.

Clearly there will be some privacy concerns, so Google has made it possible to opt out of the program (see http://google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81875 for details.) However, it’s at a price: those who don’t agree to their data being gathered won’t be able to use the My Location feature which is pretty much key to using the maps for driving. Where Google does gather data, it will permanently delete any record of user’s start and end locations once their journey is complete.

The mapping system is automatically turned on for users of the Palm Pre and the MyTouch 3G phones, while users of other phones can install it. However, the firm isn’t collecting data from people using the system on iPhones, likely thanks to restrictions on companies other than Apple collecting GPS data from the handsets.

Google notes in its blog that people stuck in traffic might not only want to warn friends of jams, but to “tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp.” It doesn’t say if there are any plans to share the traffic data with local authorities in such situations, though it would be a great PR move to do so.