Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
The King Of Pop!!!!
How can i not post about The King of Pop - Michael Jackson. Its been four days since the news of Michael Jackson's death broke out and i still am in a state of shock.
Some of my favourites are : Black or white, Thriller, Dangerous, Jam, They don't care about us, Smooth Criminal, Bad, Beat it, You are not alone, We are the world, Just cant stop loving you, Billie Jean....... the list goes on.....
We will miss you MJ.... May your soul Rest In Peace!!!
Google vs Microsoft
It’s easy to argue that the primary reason Microsoft has become the world’s largest software maker is that the company has repeatedly shown the ability to ship products. Even though the products may not be perfect and they may not meet the original ship date, Microsoft has proven that it almost always knows when the products are good enough to release to the market.
Google is emerging as one of Microsoft’s key competitors in the software business - perhaps even its biggest competitor within a few years - but Google has not mastered the “good enough” principle. Google software engineers have arguably created only two highly-profitable hit products: the ubiquitous Google.com search engine and the Web-based email client Gmail.
However, Google’s “continuous beta” approach that it used to build those two products will not satisfy the customers of two new market segments that Google wants to win: smartphone software and enterprise software ( Why ? ).
Google’s approach to innovation works well for building widgets and tools for the Internet and Google will continue its dominance in those areas.
However, if Google wants to succeed in smartphones and business applications then it’s going to have to create dedicated teams/departments within Google that are much more process-oriented and focused on product quality from end-to-end. The never-ending beta is not going to cut it in the smartphone world or the enterprise IT world.
Courtesy : TechRepublic
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Nature at its best....
Amazing striped icebergs
Icebergs in the Antarctic area sometimes have stripes, formed by layers of snow that react to different conditions.
Blue stripes are often created when a crevice in the ice sheet fills up with meltwater and freezes so quickly that no bubbles form.
When an iceberg falls into the sea, a layer of salty seawater can freeze to the underside. If this is rich in algae, it can form a green stripe.
Brown, black and yellow lines are caused by sediment, picked up when the ice sheet grinds downhill towards the sea.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Disappearing Gangotri Glacier!!!!
I was just randomly scanning through channels and happened to bump into "The Melting Point", a world environment day special on CNN IBN. I was in fact shocked after seeing the program.
The Melting Point throws light on how the glaciers around the world are affected by global warming citing the example of the Gangotri in the Himalayas.
For all you people sitting and thinking that we have not been hit by global warming this is a must watch video.
We as individuals should strive and work towards a eco-friendly life style else the day will not be far when the perils of global warming will knock your door.
GO GREEN!!!
Save Planet Earth!!!
The Melting Point throws light on how the glaciers around the world are affected by global warming citing the example of the Gangotri in the Himalayas.
For all you people sitting and thinking that we have not been hit by global warming this is a must watch video.
We as individuals should strive and work towards a eco-friendly life style else the day will not be far when the perils of global warming will knock your door.
GO GREEN!!!
Save Planet Earth!!!
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Batteries fuelled by air !!!!
Sounds like fiction huh?
The revolutionary STAIR (St Andrews Air) battery can recharge itself as it is being discharged. These batteries draw oxygen from the surrounding air onto an open mesh section of the battery. The oxygen reacts with a porous carbon component inside the battery which recharges this battery.
Unlike traditional batteries these batteries do not have any chemical constituent. It has only a porous carbon layer and makes use of atmospheric oxygen, so these cells are lighter. And since these cells are recharged as they are discharged they last longer and have greater storage.
These light and small sized batteries are expected to find their place in electric cars, laptops, mobile phones etc.
The revolutionary STAIR (St Andrews Air) battery can recharge itself as it is being discharged. These batteries draw oxygen from the surrounding air onto an open mesh section of the battery. The oxygen reacts with a porous carbon component inside the battery which recharges this battery.
Unlike traditional batteries these batteries do not have any chemical constituent. It has only a porous carbon layer and makes use of atmospheric oxygen, so these cells are lighter. And since these cells are recharged as they are discharged they last longer and have greater storage.
These light and small sized batteries are expected to find their place in electric cars, laptops, mobile phones etc.
Monday, May 18, 2009
History of Packet Switching
It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century.
And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate.
But the only reason that the net and the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called "packet switching".
The idea may sound mundane but, said John Pethica, chief science advisor at the NPL, the modern world would be a lot slower without it.
The internet, mobile phone networks and fixed line phones now all use the principles Davies and his team established to cram as much data as they can down the cables and wires making up the world's telecommunication networks.
Dr Pethica said the urge to find a better way to handle data emerged when computer networks were almost unheard of.
Donald Davies, NPL
At that time making a phone call involved creating a dedicated circuit between the handset of a caller and the person they wanted to chat to.
"A lot of people realised that point-to-point was going to be a big problem, even for telephones even before they thought about computers," said Dr Pethica. "The problem was how you turn it away from that."
The problem with human speech is that most of it is made up of silence - be that the pauses between words, time taken to breathe or gaps when one person waits for another to speak.
Using most of a telephone network to transmit silence is not a very efficient use of that resource. Far better would be to find a way to fill the blank spots with the moments from others calls when those folk were speaking.
Dr Pethica said many in the computer world in the late 60s were thinking about how to solve this problem.
"There were other ideas around, like Paul Baran at Rand, but they were nowhere near as useful as what Donald Davies did in terms of size of packets and nodes," said Dr Pethica.
"It was Donald who had the idea of making a set of nodes that you send packets of data to that find their own way through," said Dr Pethica.
The insight of Dr Davies and his team was to slice data, be that a chat on the phone, an e-mail or a picture, into separate pieces or packets. These are then put on the network and rely on the intelligence of nodes in the network to help them wend their way to their destination. Once there they are re-assembled into the right order.
Future proof
Dr Pethica said Davies' team worked out the mathematics that optimised such an approach - an idea that has proved its usefulness by still being in use today.
Computer research at NPL, NPL
Error correction schemes included in the technology helped it cope with the poor quality of phone lines in use in the late 1960s, said Dr Pethica. In more modern times those schemes help ensure data makes it across the busy lanes of the internet.
Davies and his colleagues went further than just establishing the concept for packet switching - they also build the first computer networks and proved their ideas could work.
"They had a whole series of early computers at NPL that they turned in to a local area network (Lan)," said Dr Pethica. He pointed out that the NPL scientists built such a network far in advance of the day when such things would become the common way to link up machines in an office.
"The important breakthrough that he and his team made was to build the Lan and make it work," he said.
Even before Dr Davies presented his work publicly, news of it had spread through the international computer science community.
As a result he was invited to talk about it to a team from the US Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa) working on the fledgling internet. The principles he established were rolled in to the technology to make that network function.
Dr Pethica said packet switching idea was developed with an eye on the future and how a computer network might grow. Forty years on the scalability in the Dr Davies insight is still proving its worth, he said.
Courtesy : BBC News
And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate.
But the only reason that the net and the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called "packet switching".
The idea may sound mundane but, said John Pethica, chief science advisor at the NPL, the modern world would be a lot slower without it.
The internet, mobile phone networks and fixed line phones now all use the principles Davies and his team established to cram as much data as they can down the cables and wires making up the world's telecommunication networks.
Dr Pethica said the urge to find a better way to handle data emerged when computer networks were almost unheard of.
Donald Davies, NPL
At that time making a phone call involved creating a dedicated circuit between the handset of a caller and the person they wanted to chat to.
"A lot of people realised that point-to-point was going to be a big problem, even for telephones even before they thought about computers," said Dr Pethica. "The problem was how you turn it away from that."
The problem with human speech is that most of it is made up of silence - be that the pauses between words, time taken to breathe or gaps when one person waits for another to speak.
Using most of a telephone network to transmit silence is not a very efficient use of that resource. Far better would be to find a way to fill the blank spots with the moments from others calls when those folk were speaking.
Dr Pethica said many in the computer world in the late 60s were thinking about how to solve this problem.
"There were other ideas around, like Paul Baran at Rand, but they were nowhere near as useful as what Donald Davies did in terms of size of packets and nodes," said Dr Pethica.
"It was Donald who had the idea of making a set of nodes that you send packets of data to that find their own way through," said Dr Pethica.
The insight of Dr Davies and his team was to slice data, be that a chat on the phone, an e-mail or a picture, into separate pieces or packets. These are then put on the network and rely on the intelligence of nodes in the network to help them wend their way to their destination. Once there they are re-assembled into the right order.
Future proof
Dr Pethica said Davies' team worked out the mathematics that optimised such an approach - an idea that has proved its usefulness by still being in use today.
Computer research at NPL, NPL
Error correction schemes included in the technology helped it cope with the poor quality of phone lines in use in the late 1960s, said Dr Pethica. In more modern times those schemes help ensure data makes it across the busy lanes of the internet.
Davies and his colleagues went further than just establishing the concept for packet switching - they also build the first computer networks and proved their ideas could work.
"They had a whole series of early computers at NPL that they turned in to a local area network (Lan)," said Dr Pethica. He pointed out that the NPL scientists built such a network far in advance of the day when such things would become the common way to link up machines in an office.
"The important breakthrough that he and his team made was to build the Lan and make it work," he said.
Even before Dr Davies presented his work publicly, news of it had spread through the international computer science community.
As a result he was invited to talk about it to a team from the US Advanced Research Project Agency (Arpa) working on the fledgling internet. The principles he established were rolled in to the technology to make that network function.
Dr Pethica said packet switching idea was developed with an eye on the future and how a computer network might grow. Forty years on the scalability in the Dr Davies insight is still proving its worth, he said.
Courtesy : BBC News
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