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In just 43 days, the newest Zynga game has managed to hit a milestone no other game has hit before. CityVille now has over 100 million active users, according to AppData.

The game launched on December 2, 2010 and grew faster than any game in history. In just 22 days, CityVille passed FarmVille, another Zynga game, to become the most popular game. At that time, we said the number of users would dip a little at some point because all games aren’t played by everyone who tries them out, but right now CityVille is still growing.

Zynga’s other titles are not nearly as successful as CityVille. Farmville currently has 57.1 million users, Texas HoldEm Poker has 36.3 million users, FrontierVille has 28.3 million users, and Mafia Wars has 18.8 million. Zynga reaches more than half of all Facebook users: it has 286.7 million users, which is significantly ahead of number two and number three: CrowdStar with 47.5 million users and Electronic Arts with 38.7 million users.

Like all of Zynga’s games, CityVille is free, but users can spend real money on virtual goods to enhance their experience of playing the game. Zynga makes a killing in revenue every year from the sale of virtual goods. Three months ago, the company was valued at $5.51 billion, which is more than Electronic Arts.


It’s a common observation that laptops with the passage of time get slower and users end up buying a new one after getting frustrated. Check out our how-to guide to speed up your aging laptop without buying a new one.

Re-Install Operating System

The first thing you must do is to re-install OS on your system. In addition to this, remove all unused programs, files or any other thing which unnecessarily resides on your hard drive.

Upgrade Your RAM

After you’re done with cleaning up and stuff, upgrading system RAM is the next step. 4GB ram is enough for a regular PC user. 
 

Upgrade Your Hard Drive To A Solid State Drive

Most laptops come up with slow hard drives, running at 5400RPM because of overheating and power issues. These HDDs are cheaper but slow down systems considerably when starting, running application programs, games and browsing the internet.
In contrary to this, Solid State Drives or SSDs are much cooler and faster then conventional hard drives and are easier to upgrade as well. The only drawback of SSDs is its price.
Use a USB adapter if your laptop has only one spot for hard drive. You can copy data from your existing hard drive to the new one using tool called CloneZilla. Make sure that your SSD runs to its fullest capacity.
SSD will surely put a new life into your laptop and you may be able to get a few more years out of it. 
 

Lets me know in comments if you know any other way to speed up slow-aged laptops.


This post describes how to connect GPRS from mobile phones via bluetooth in Ubuntu. This procedure is explained for Aircel connection. However, the changes that need to be done for Airtel users are mentioned at the end. Similar procedure works for other network service providers as well.

ubuntu

1. First you need to pair your bluetooth enabled mobile with Ubuntu. You can do that by clicking on the bluetooth icon on the top right of the screen. Or you can find it in System->Preferences. 

2. Then, Open a terminal and type: 

$ sdptool search DUN

You should get this
Code:
Searching for DUN on 00:13:FD:CC:F6:5C ...
Service Name: Dial-Up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10005
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 2
Language Base Attr List:
  code_ISO639: 0x454e
  encoding:    0x6a
  base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
    Version: 0x0100

3. Note your phones mac address and channel number which is in red.
In my case phone's mac address is 00:13:FD:CC:F6:5C and channel number is 2

4. Next type this command:
 $ sudo gedit  etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

And add the following

Code:
rfcomm0 {
        bind yes;
        device 00:13:FD:CC:F6:5C;
        channel 2;
        comment "Nokia 3230 via Bluetooth";
}

Enter your phones's mac address and channel number
save and exit.

5. now test the connection by following commands

Code:
$ sudo rfcomm release 0
$ sudo rfcomm connect 0
After a delay you will get the following

Code:
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to 00:13:FD:CC:F6:5C on channel 2
Press CTRL-C for hangup
Now you have data connection to your phone!.
Press ctrl+C to break connection.

6. Now we have to setup ppp. In my case service provider is Aircel, Type in

Code:
$ sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers/aircel
And enter the following

Code:
# Aircel PPP initialisation/termination script
noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/aircel-connect"
disconnect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/aircel-disconnect"
silent
debug
/dev/rfcomm0
115200
defaultroute
usepeerdns
Save and exit

7. Now type in

Code:
$ sudo gedit /etc/chatscripts/aircel-connect
Enter the following

Code:
# Aircel PPP CONNECT script
TIMEOUT         5
ECHO            ON
ABORT           '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT           '\nERROR\r'
ABORT           '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT           '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT           '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
''              \rAT
TIMEOUT         12

OK              ATE1
OK              'AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","aircelgprs"'
OK              ATD*99***1#
Note- In place of aircelgprs you have to put in your APN.
Now save and exit.

8. Now type in

Code:
$ sudo gedit /etc/chatscripts/aircel-disconnect
And enter the following

Code:
# Aircel PPP DISCONNECT script
ABORT        "BUSY"        
ABORT        "ERROR"        
ABORT        "NO DIALTONE"    
SAY        "\nSending break to the modem\n"    
""        "\K"        
""        "\K"        
""        "\K"        
""        "+++ATH"    
""        "+++ATH"    
""        "+++ATH"    
SAY        "\nPDP context detached\n"
Save and exit.

Now we are ready to connect to internet! for first time

9. Open terminal and type in

Code:
$ sudo rfcomm connect 0
Don't close this terminal and open another terminal

Code:
$ sudo pon aircel
Congratulation now your phone must be connected to internet verify it by GPRS icon in your phone.
Now bring up firefox and hit any site.

10. To disconnect from internet type this in same terminal as where you typed pon aircel

Code:
$ sudo poff aircel

For Airtel users, just replace the word 'aircel' to 'airtel' everywhere in this post. And enter suitable APN in the PPP connect script mentioned above. For Airtel it would be AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com","",0,0. Or simply, airtelgprs.com for Nokia users.

Please comment if you have problems.


China first attacked and hacked Google. Then Google banned its services. China banned Facebook for a while. Followed by Twitter. Then the whistle-blower site Wikileaks. And many more popular websites. Reasons may be particular. But website and people who use them are sufferers. Latest entry to the list is Skype.

According to The People’s Daily, a newspaper run by Chinese Communist party, all Internet Phone Services except the two local ones, China Telecom and China Unicom, were illegal. This means that services like Skype, China’s UUCall etc. will be getting an axe soon. Chinese government have already banned websites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube all over the country.



The ministry also set up a hotline to collect reports and distributing PSA circulars.

“Currently, our ministry is working with relevant departments to focus on the crackdown on illegal VoIP & we are now appealing to the public for clues for illegal VoIP cases,” it said in a circular.

Although, Wang Yuquan(a chief consultant at Frost and Sullivan in Beijing) said that the notice is just a warning to companies like Skype not to grow too big or to challenge the state-owned telecom service providers.

“If the ministry hadn’t made this announcement, I think Skype would have offered its services in a very large scale. Now, with the announcement, it can’t,” he said told AP.

There are over 450 million internet users in China, therefore, this would be very difficult to enforce, since users can simply download Skype or any other application from websites outside China.

There is no shutting-down action from the Chinese Ministry of IT so far, Skype is still available for use in China for the time being. Users in China currently can access Skype via TOM Online, the majority JV partner. TOM Online offers local versions of Skype for Windows, MAC as well as mobile platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Facebook has released user’s activity stats for the year 2010. According to the statistics, over 2.7 million pics were uploaded, 1 million links shard & 7.6million pages liked every 20 minutes in the year 2010.



Amazingly, Lady Gaga was the most-liked celebrity with 24.7 million likes, Eminem was 2nd with 23.7 million and Barack Obama was 3rd with 17.2 million likes.

The stats also depicts Facebook user’s love lives. Over 43,869,800 people changed their relationship status to single during 2010 while 3,025,791 changed it to “it’s complicated”, 28,460,516 changed their status to in a relationship, 5,974,574 to engaged and 36,774,801 to married.

Here are a few stats of Facebook User’s Activity from a randomly chosen 20 minutes:
Shared links: 1,000,000
Tagged photos: 1,323,000
Event invites sent out: 1,484,000
Wall posts: 1,587,000
Status updates: 1,851,000
Friend requests accepted: 1,972,000
Photos uploaded: 2,716,000
Comments: 10,208,000
Messages: 4,632,000
Likes: 7,657,000

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