VPN Remote Access To Your Office

The major USP of our small business customers is the capacity to access their workplace computers and network from home. Everybody loves working from home, as it saves them the commuting time and allows you to complete lot of your tasks from home. This can be achieved in either of the two ways: VPN (Virtual Private Network) and Terminal Services.

VPN lets you connect to your office network as though you were physically present in your office. However you need to configure your PC for the same. Start by enabling the incoming VPN connections on the remote computer (normally office computer). If you are using Windows XP Professional, right click on "My Network Places", then left click "Properties", select "Create New Connection", followed by "Setup Advanced Connection" and then "Accept Incoming Connections". Click “Next” twice and then choose "Allow Virtual Private Connections", followed by a user on that computer that becomes your login info. Ensure the user must have a password. Now click “Next” and ensure "TCP/IP" is highlighted. Then click “Next” and the job is finished. If the access to your remote computer is restricted by a router/firewall then you need to configure port forwarding to the remote computer. Port forwarding implies opening port 1723 to the remote computer.

Next you have to configure your home computer. Right click on "My Network Places" and then left click on "Properties". Choose "Create New Connection", followed by "Connect To The Network At My Workplace". Now choose "Virtual Private Network Connection" and type any name. Type the public IP address of your office for host name or IP. You can get the IP address by starting your web browser and visiting www.whatismyip.com from your office. Note down is number because you are going to type it in the hostname field. Click “Next” and “Finish”. Now you can login with the user name and password.

Yahoo music hits a new chord with online lyric library

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. is expanding its online music section to include the lyrics of 400,000 songs, hoping to strike a chord with Web surfers looking for a more reliable alternative to Internet sites that publish the words without the permission of the copyright owners.

The Sunnyvale-based company is touting the free service to be unveiled Tuesday as the Web’s largest legally licensed database of lyrics.

"It fills a huge, gaping hole out there," said Ian Rogers, general manager of Yahoo music.

Song lyrics have been available through scores of other Web sites for years, but most of those destinations are technically breaking the law by posting the words without the approval of the publishers and writers that own the rights.

What’s more, many of these unauthorized lyric sites rely on contributions from outsiders, a communal approach that increases the chances for inaccuracies.

Yahoo’s song lyrics, in contrast, are supposed to be the official versions. Under the licensing agreement, Yahoo will share with copyright holders the revenue from the ads that will be displayed alongside the lyrics.

The database and licensing deals were cobbled together over the past two years by Gracenote, a digital media management specialist. The Emeryville-based company, formerly known as CDDB, is best known for developing technology that automatically recognizes the tracks on compact discs - a feature that is included in Apple Inc.’s widely used iTunes software.

The 400,000 song lyrics included in Yahoo’s database span about 9,000 different artists, ranging from old standbys such as The Beatles and Bob Dylan to more recent stars like Radiohead and Beyonce.

Nearly 100 music publishers are contributing song lyrics, including industry heavyweights BMG Music Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group and Warner/Chappell Music.

Other lyrics sites boast that they have even more songs than Yahoo’s database.

But Yahoo believes its lyrics library is destined to become a hit because it won’t be bogged down with the pop-up ads and other intrusive "spyware" that clutters many of the sites that share lyrics without permission.

"Those sites generally aren’t healthy places for your computer to be," said music analyst Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media.

Leigh trumpeted Yahoo’s lyric database as a "long overdue" breakthrough that will boost the music industry by creating a new revenue stream for artists and song publishers by making it easier for people to identify a tune they might hear on the radio or on the Web.

"I also suspect this might cause the music industry to step up its efforts to take legal action against these unauthorized (lyric) sites with Yahoo cheering them on in the background," Leigh said.

The National Music Publishers Association, a trade group, didn’t respond to requests for an interview about Yahoo’s database.

Yahoo is hoping its database stimulates even more traffic on its music service, which is already the most popular on the Web. Yahoo music attracted 22 million U.S. visitors last month to rank it ahead of AOL music (17.5 million visitors) and MySpace music (14.8 million visitors), according to comScore Media Metrix.

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