Here we’re at the dusk of 2010…..

Here I’m with my new blog, after a really long time. The anticipation of coming up of Year 2011 was eating me for almost a week now. So here I’m at the doorstep of the New year, I have got mixed emotions. On one side I’m really excited as i’ll be commencing my college life, and even sad as i’ll have to say a goodbye to my school friends and my family

Year 2010, for me was full of ups and downs. there were many happening things like, I became the ‘SCHOOL CAPTAIN’ of my school, represented my school at the regional level science exhibition. The bad moments are the one’s i did experience at the dusk of august of 2010, i got to realize my false friends and true enemies. Leaving the crap moments of the last year behind, I have stepped in the new year with newaspirations, expectations and dreams.

I was really fortunate to be in Nagpur on the new year’s eve. With my whole family together after a period of 4 years , it felt really great to celebrate the welcome of the new year.Grooved to the music till the hands of the clock met each other. It was a total fun here at Nagpur.

Wishing you all a very prosperous and happy new year 2011, special mentions to those who are going to commence their college life this year, may all of you get a good college, true friends, and Please never forget the old one’s (especially me). Loads of Wishes to you and your family….

2011
01/01
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The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Now Belongs to China

Unveiled on 28th at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing (HPC China 2010) in Beijing, Tianhe-1A is the world’s fastest supercomputer with a performance record of 2.507 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark.

Tianhe-1A was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China, and it is already fully operational. To achieve the new performance record, Tianhe-1A uses 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. It cost $88 million; its 103 cabinets weigh 155 tons, and the entire system consumes4.04 megawatts of electricity.

Tianhe-1A ousted the previous record holder, Cray XT5 Jaguar, which is used by the U.S. National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. It is powered by 224,162 Opteron CPUs and achieves a performance record of 1.75 petaflops.

According to Nvidia, Tianhe-1A will be operated as an open access system to use for large scale scientific computations.

 

2010
10/29
CATEGORY
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Sony Retires the Cassette Walkman After 30 Years……BYE BYE!!

After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player.

The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. Once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer.

The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman over the product line’s 30-year career.

Somewhat ironically, the announcement was delivered just one day ahead of the iPod’s ninth anniversary on October 23, although the decline of the cassette Walkman is attributed primarily to the explosive popularity of CD players in the ’90s, not the iPod.

 

2010
10/24
CATEGORY
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Biggest Military Leak in History: WikiLeaks Releases 390,000 Iraq War Documents

WikiLeaks has once again captured international headlines with the release of 391,832 secret Iraq War documents that reveal new information about detainee treatment, civilian deaths, and the involvement of Iran in backing Iraqi militias.

The Iraq War Logs, provided to at least a dozen media organizations including The Guardian, The New York Times, Del Spiegel, Al Jazeera, CNN and the BBC, offer an on-the-ground perspective into six years of the Iraq conflict. Some of the documents posted by Wikileaks, The NYT and others provide unprecedented detail into how the war conducted.

Here’s a summary of the conclusions many media organizations have made about the documents:

  • The number of Iraqi civilians deaths is greater than the numbers publicly reported by the United States. Most of those deaths came at the hands of other Iraqis.
  • Iran was involved in the training, supplying and support of Iraqi Shiite militias. They may have even engaged with U.S. troops directly.
  • Detainees were treating with shocking amounts of violence. The abuse was so feared that U.S. troops sometimes threatened prisoners with a transfer to Iraqi police units, where they would have most certainly been treated worse.

While several media organizations have had time to analyze the documents, there’s definitely a lot more to be learned from today’s leak. The Iraq War Logs leak is the largest leak of military secrets in history, supplanting the record WikiLeaksWikileaks set with the Afghan War Diary leak.

The Pentagon, which has been preparing for document’s release, responded to the Iraq War Logs release earlier .

“We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the world, including our enemies,” Department of Defense Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said in the Pentagon’s response. “We know terrorist organizations have been mining the leaked Afghan documents for information to use against us, and this Iraq leak is more than four times as large. By disclosing such sensitive information, WikiLeaks continues to put at risk the lives of our troops, their coalition partners and those Iraqis and Afghans working with us. The only responsible course of action for WikiLeaks at this point is to return the stolen material and expunge it from their Web sites as soon as possible.”

WikiLeaks is looking to get back to what it does best: leaking secret documents. Since the Afghan War Reports, WikiLeaks has seen its website go down and its funding blocked. Recent actions by founder Julian Assange, who has been embroiled in scandal, have led to internal strife at the organization.

 

2010
10/23
CATEGORY
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Google Is Testing Cars That Drive Themselves

Google announced today that it has developed cars that drive themselves automatically in traffic, and that it has been testing them on the streets of California for months. It might seem like an unusual project for Google, but it could actually have big benefits.

We’re not just talking about cars running Google Android. This is the stuff of science fiction. The only accident that has occurred so far: One of the cars was rear-ended by a driver at a stop light. Human error!

The vehicles have been tested on 140,000 miles of California road, from Silicon Valley to Santa Monica. Each car is manned during the tests. One person sits in the driver’s seat, ready to take control of the vehicle instantly by grabbing the wheel or touch the brake should something go wrong with the system. The person in the passenger’s seat is an engineer who monitors the software operations on a computer.

GoogleGoogle hired engineers who previously participated in competitions and races involving automated cars — important turning points in the development of the technology, which has been coming into its own since around 2005 according to The New York Times.

If your first concern is one of safety, Google would argue that you’re going about it all wrong. Safety is one of the the project’s purposes. Google believes that the technology could nearly half the number of automobile-related deaths because computers are supposedly better at driving than humans in the right circumstances.

There are other hypothetical pluses, too. The vehicles’ instant reaction time and 360-degree awareness would allow them to drive closer together on the highway than humans can, reducing traffic congestion. They could be more careful when operating the gas, reducing fuel consumption.

But the biggest benefit for Google would be the hour or so of daily commute time the car owner would save. Instead of driving, he or she could either be productive or entertained in the vehicle, doing work on a wirelessInternetInternet connection or watching television. Google doesn’t say it explicitly, but TechCrunch was quick to note that this time could be spent using Google products and absorbing Google-run advertising.

The most optimistic projections put this technology at least eight years away from market, though. Legal hassles are among the myriad problems; all of the current traffic laws assume that a human driver is present in the vehicle.

 

2010
10/11
CATEGORY
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Modu will unveil the first modular smartphone – the T-Phone – on 10.10.10

Modu is gathering the press on the magic 10 October to show the world their next modular phone. It’s called the T-Phone and runs on Android OS. Its core will pack touchscreen, 3G, Wi-Fi, 2GB internal storage and microSD card slot. As usual the rest of the features will depend on the jackets that’s on top.

The first modular phone by Modu had little market success. Only a month after its market launch in July 2009, Modu announced their plans for a smarter successor. It seems the time has come to show the world what the engineers have come up with this time.

The T-Phone is expected to be the lightest touch-based phone in the world. There is no more info on the specs, besides it will run the Android OS.

The interchangeable jackets that will complement the new Modu T-Phone should offer full hardware QWERTY keyboard, stereo speakers, gamepad-like controller, etc.

Let’s hope the T-Phone will do better than its predecessor. You can also check the official teaser website.

 

2010
10/07
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Smart Phones
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Verizon and Motorola Announce Droid Pro and Citrus

Verizon and Motorola have jointly announced two new smartphones — the business-oriented Droid Pro, and the entry-level Citrus.

The Droid Pro somewhat unexpectedly delves into BlackBerryBlackBerry Rocks!territory: it’s a candy bar phone with a 3.1-inch touch screen and a full qwerty keyboard. It also sports a 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash and auto-focus, a 1GHz processor, 512MB of memory and 2GB of on-board storage (which can be further expanded via SD memory cards). As far as communication goes, it supports Wi-Fi, BluetoothBluetooth 2.1 and tri-band UMTS.

All of this makes the Droid Pro a businessman’s phone and a competitor to BlackBerry, which shows that Motorola plans to cover all bases with its Droid line of smartphones. It might be a good strategy: after all, how many keyboardless, touch-screen Androids do we really need?

The Citrus, on the other hand, is a small touch-screen phone, sporting Android 2.1 (unfortunately, it seems that entry-level phones don’t get to have the latest version of AndroidAndroid.) The technical details are scarce, but the folks from Engadget found out the device will have a 524MHz MSM7525 processor and a 3-inch screen. It should hit the market before the end of 2010, while the Droid Pro should be available from Verizon in the first week of November.

2010
10/07
CATEGORY
Smart Phones
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Olympus and DoCoMo Demo Augmented Reality Eyeglasses

There are some pretty cool demos going on this week at the CEATEC show in Japan. We earlier reported on these bendable OLED screens, and also about Samsung’s WiMax 2 demo network that is wirelessly streaming full-HD 3D video at the show. This latest announcement though, blows both of those out of the water for coolness.

Olympus and NTT DoCoMo (Japan’s largest carrier) have are demoing a prototype of a pair of augmented reality eyeglasses with a head-mounted display that weigh as much as a normal pair of eyeglasses.

The head-mounted display, called “AR Walker”, which is equipped with sensors (including an accelerometer and compass), displays the augmented reality view of what the wearer is looking at in the lower half of the right eye’s lens. When connected to a phone (we’re not sure if it is through Bluetooth or not) basically wherever the wearer looks, the heads up display will give info (assuming of course there is any info to give).

Now for the really cool parts.

According to Tech-On, not only will the display show you overlays, but you can use the system for navigation – but instead of a run-of-the-mill moving arrow on a map, a cartoon character (called “DoCoMo Dake”) will pop up and guide you to your destination. No only that, it will introduce stores (and we’re assuming points of interest) as you walk on journey.

Blown away yet? Well, here’s the real kicker: when you look up at the sky while wearing these glasses, the display shows you the weather. Really. (and there is no reason to believe that it wouldn’t be able to show you a star map at night either, though that wasn’t in the report).

Olympus originally demoed a similar concept in 2008, but the glasses were much heavier and of course, augmented reality has made pretty big strides in two years. Also, this is certainly not the only attempt at cracking this gadget space, but this certainly sounds like a pretty advanced attempt. Though DoCoMo hasn’t announced a release date, Tech-On says that the date is in discussions, so this could be somewhat close to reality. Make that augmented reality.

We only have one question – do they come in horn-rims?

2010
10/06
CATEGORY
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Leaving WordPress.com? Your Traffic and SEO will Follow with Offsite Redirect.

There comes a time in every young blog’s life…well ok, so not every blog. But there comes a time in many blogs lives where they grow up and it’s time to move on from being hosted on WordPress.com for one reason or another. Previously, you could take your content with you but traffic to your domain would just hit your old site unless you did some voodoo and tattooed the WordPress logo to your forehead.

According to a new blog post over at WordPress.com, there is a whole new service for those who have decided to migrate over to a self-hosted blog:

Purchasing the Offsite Redirect upgrade will take the traffic coming to your old wordpress.com blog and forward it to your new domain so that links to your old content won’t break and you won’t take an SEO hit as a result of your move. Oh, and unlike the old domain mapping/DNS workaround, the signup process is easy as pie.

So there  you have it, folks. Not really a lot else to say, other than it’s a welcome addition to those who will be trying to avoid issues as they migrate away from the service. Kudos to you, WordPress.com. This is a class move.

2010
10/06
CATEGORY
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With Less than 50% Market Share, IE Is Now Losing the Browser Wars

According to data from StatCounter, Internet Explorer has dipped
below the 50%-mark in its global share of the Internet browser market.

StatCounter shows IE at 51.34% of the market in August 2010; by the end of September, IE was holding on to just 49.87% of the browser market. The browser also shows a drop of nearly 10% year over year.

This is the first time IE has fallen below the halfway point in market share, and from where we sit, the glass is looking half empty.

These losses come in the face of steady growth from Firefox over the past several years and speedy gains by Chrome in recent months.

During the same month that IE sank to its all-time low, Firefox grew by about half a percent to 31.5%, while Chrome added almost a full percentage point to its share of the market.

Microsoft’s latest version of the browser, Internet Explorer 9, handily addresses common issues with the IE experience, including speed and compliance with web standards — issues that caused the browser to lose users in the first place. But although IE9’s advances may not be “too little,” they’re definitely “too late” to the browser war that’s been waging around the globe for years.

Internet Explorer has been on the decline at least since Firefox’s launch in 2004; the browser’s first real answer to its smaller, more agile (as companies) competitors didn’t come until six years later. The speed and standards compliance should have come a long time ago, when consumers first began to realize that Firefox could outperform IE on every front. We’re duly impressed with IE9’s improvements, but they may constitute a Hail Mary hurled out at the end of a losing game.

What do you think: Can Microsoft turn this boat around and bring its browser into a state of recovery and recuperation? Or is Internet Explorer in all its versions, good, bad and ugly, down for the count?

2010
10/06
CATEGORY
Tech NEWS
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