Life in Technology

Microsoft Web Matrix

2011-03-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

History has been rewritten each time Microsoft does something on cloud. It was quite a revolution when people got Azure. It kept us thinking beyond the limits of scalability. Now the same had made its new face by creating the interaction point named WEB MATRIX. It was always my dream to join Microsoft with my revolutionary ideas. And had been thinking how to conceptualize my idea. The basic nonoccurence was due to the fact that I was not supported by my pocket to buy almost all the proprietary apps and was troubled with installation of apps using WPI (windows Platform Installer). Now things are different. The ideas with utter chance of probability is just within my reach. The new web matrix on launch with new WPI identifies basic dependencies as well for me. If a new version is released also I don't want to worry about.It take care of all those installation aspects. Its possible to try various platforms such as nuke, MVC , Azure...and many more. The fun fact is that it has its own versions of OSS (Open Source) apps. The entire app base is free online. The new WPI helps to get latest on to my VS2010 installed also. Now you may wonder the literal bombing is quite worth or just blah blah blah when you start playing with it.

To start with go to the link : http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

The basic idea behind this link is to let you see the interface cloud interface of the free face of Microsoft applications. This they have done using providing their latest softwares' cloud services with all dependency mapping intelligence. Microsoft T4 has much to play the thread pulling from behind which is much clear. Things are much clear and as a developer everybody Google with bing i know to find your doubts. Web Matrix also provide helpers instantly which helps us to quick learn the API's and SDK's much better way. Only what you have to do is to find and install a helper required. I had successful facebook and twitter apps on my desktop. If you are a beginner to programming tools are readily available to play with. If you are an intermediate in this world then you can define your own systems and see them live. If you are among those who define a path you walk then you can have your own way and make others walk it.

The apps can be from gallery,your own or from a base system. Joomla,drupal, dot Net Nuke..all in one place harmonically is not a word to depict the fact.If I just demonstrate a simple application it would be worth a while I know. But there are people who believe there is no learning without free lunch what to do. So will be helping all who is required if contacted at all possible times.

So kindly Keep updated and learn..(Here only that link is not mine, so with a satisfaction of delivering something that I wished for..).

Prism

2011-02-15T22:11:00.000-08:00

Prism was the code name for the guidance formally known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight. For brevity and conciseness, and due to customer demand, this guidance is now referred to simply as Prism.

Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy-to-maintain Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications and Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Windows Phone 7 applications. Using design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling, Prism helps you to design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but which can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. These types of applications are known as composite applications.

Find More: Getting Started with Prism 4.0 Tutorial

Enjoy learning!! Keep updated!!

Analysis of Techniques for Detection of Deep Web Search Interface

2010-12-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

The volume of information on the web is increasing day by day. The information in the web can be broadly categorized into two types i.e. surface web and deep web. The surface web pages can be easily indexed through conventional techniques but the deep web, whose size assumed to be thousand times larger than surface web, cannot be indexed through conventional search technique. The first stage of the extraction of the deep web information is the detection of deep web search interface. A search interface is generally consisting of html forms. The conventional techniques of searching the deep web information is done by filling the html forms on the search interface manually but recently the research is going on automatic accessing and understanding of html forms. Being the first stage of deep web extraction process, the detection of deep web search interface becomes one of the important module of deep web information retrieval. In this paper a technical analysis of some of the important deep web search interface detection techniques is done to find out their relative strengths and limitations with reference to current development in the field of deep web information retrieval technology.

Keywords : Deep web, hidden web, search interface detection, crawler, random forest.
1. IntroductionThe The whole process of extraction of information from deep web can be broadly categorized into four steps i.e. query interface analysis, values allotment, response analysis & navigation and relevance ranking. Query interface analysis is the first and most important step for deep web information retrieval. In query interface analysis, a request of fetching a web page from a web server is made by a crawler. After completion of the fetching process, an internal representation of the web page is produced after parsing and processing of html forms based on the developed model. Further the query interface analysis can be broken into the some modules that are detection of hidden web search interface, search form schema matching and domain ontology identification. In these module the detection of hidden web search interface is the first and foremost step towards deep web information retrieval. As expected, a human user can easily identify a deep web search interface but to understand a deep web search interface through a automatic technique without human intervention is a challenging task [1][2][3][4][5]. Figures 1 depict the different types of search interfaces.

Fig. 1 : Different types of search interface

Related Work
One of the prominent works for detection of deep web search interface is done by Leo Breiman (2001)[6] in form of random forest algorithm. A random forest algorithm detects the deep web search interface by using a model, based on decision trees classification. A random forest model can be defined as a collection of decision trees. A decision tree can be generated by bootstrapping processing of the training data. Various classification trees can be generated through random forest algorithm. To classify a new object from its input vector, the sample vector is passed to every tree defined in algorithm. A decision for classification is given by every tree. A decision about most voted classification is done by using all of the classification results of the individual trees. The advantages of random forest algorithm are that it exhibits a substantial performance improvement over single tree classifiers and injecting of the right kind of randomness makes accurate classifiers and regulators. The disadvantage of this algorithm is that it may select unimportant and noisy features in the training data, as a result a bad classification results because of its random selection feature.
One of the deep web crawler architecture is proposed by Sriram Raghavan and Hector Garcia-Molina (2001) [7]. In this paper, a task-specific, human-assisted approach is used for crawl the hidden web. There are two basic problems related to deep web search, firstly the volume of the hidden web is very large and secondly there is a need of such type of crawlers which can handle search interfaces efficiently, which are designed mainly for humans. In this paper a model of task specific human assisted web crawler is designed and relized in HiWE (hidden web exposure). The HiWE prototype built at Stanford which crawl the dynamic pages. HiWE is designed to automatically process, analyze, and submit forms, using an internal model of forms and form submissions. HiWE uses a layout-based information extraction (LITE) technique to process and extract useful information. The advantages of HiWE architecture is that its application/task specific approach allows the crawler to concentrate on relevant pages only and with the human assisted approach automatic form filling can be done. Limitations of this architecture are that it is not precise with response to partially filled forms and it is not able to identify and respond to simple dependency between form elements.
A technique for collecting hidden web pages for data extraction is proposed by Juliano Palmieri Lage et al. (2002) [8] . In this technique the authors have proposed the concept of web wrappers. A web wrapper is programs which extract the unstructured data from web pages. It takes a set of target pages from the web source as an input. These set of target pages are automatically generated by an approach called “Spiders”. Spiders automatically traverse the web for web pages. Hidden web agents assist the wrappers to deal with the data available on the hidden web. The advantage of this technique is that it can access a large number of web sites from diverse domains and limitation of this technique is that it can access only that web site that follow common navigation patterns. Further, modification can be done in this technique to cover navigation patterns based on these mechanisms.
A technique for automated discovery of search interface from a set of html forms is proposed by Jared Cope, Nick Craswell and David Hawking (2003) [9]. This paper defined a novel technique to automatically detect search interface from a group of html forms. A decision tree was developed with the C4.5 learning algorithm using automatically generated features from html markup that can give a classification accuracy of about 85% for general web interfaces. Advantage of this technique is that it can automatically discover the search interface. Limitation of this technique is that it is based on single tree classification method and number of feature generation is limited due to use of limited data set. As a future work, modification is suggested that a search engine can be develop using existing methods for other stages along with the proposed one with a technique to eliminate false positives.
A technique for understanding web query interfaces through best effort parsing with hidden syntax is proposed by Zhen Zhang et al. (2004)[10]. This paper addresses the problem of understanding web search interfaces by presenting a best-effort parsing framework. The paper presented a form extractor framework based on 2P grammar and the best effort parses in a language parsing framework. It identifies the search interface by continuously producing fresh instances by applying productions until attaining a fix-point, when no fresh instance can be produced. Best effort parser technique minimizes wrong interpretation as much as possible in a very fast manner. It also understands the interface to a large extent. Advantage of this technique is that it is a very simple and consistent technique with no priority among preferences and it can handle missing elements in form and limitation of this technique is that establishment of single global grammar that can be interacted to the machine globally is a critical issue.
A technique named as “siphoning hidden web data through key word based interface” for retrieval of information from hidden web databases through generation of a small set of representative keywords and build queries is proposed by Luciano Barbosa and Juliana Freire (2004) [11]. This technique is designed to enhance coverage of deep web. Advantage of this technique is that it is a simple and completely automated strategy that can be quite effective in practice, leading to very high coverage of deep web. Limitation of this technique is that it is not able to achieve the coverage for collection whose search interface fixes a number of results. Further the authors have advised that modification can be done in this algorithm to characterize search interfaces techniques in a better way so that different notions and levels of security can be achieved.
An improved version of random forest algorithm is proposed by Deng et al. (2008) [12]. In this improved technique a weighted feature selection algorithm is proposed to generate the decision trees. The advantage of this improved algorithm is that it minimizes the problem of classification of high dimension and sparse search interface using the ensemble of decision trees. Disadvantage of this improved algorithm is that it is highly sensitive towards the changes in training data set.
Further improvement in random forest algorithm is done by Yunming Ye et al. (2009) [13] by using feature weighting random forest algorithm for detection of hidden web search interface. This paper had presented a feature weighting selection process rather than random selection process. Advantage of this technique is that it makes a weighted feature selection process instead of random selection hence reduces the chances of noisy feature selection and limitation of this techniques is that features available only in the search forms were used. Future modification suggested in random forest algorithm to investigate more feature weighting methods for construction of random forests.
An algorithm named as “The naive bayesian web text classification algorithm” is proposed by Ping Bai and Junqing Li (2009) [14] for automatic and effective classification of web pages with reference to given model for machine learning. In the conventional techniques, category abstracts are produced using the inspection by domain experts either through semiautomatic method or artificial method. All the items are provided equal important according to conventional common bayesian classifier whereas according to improved naive bayesian web text classification algorithm, whole of the items in every title are provided higher importance to others. The strength of this technique is that text classification results are very accurate and further scope in this algorithm is suggested to make the classification process automatic in an efficient way.
An approach for automatic detection and unification of web search query interfaces using domain ontology is proposed by Anuradha and A.K.Sharma (2010) [15]. The technique proposed in this paper works by concentrating the crawler on the given topic considering the domain ontology. This technique results in the pages which contains the domain specific search form. The strengths of this technique are that results are produced from multiple sources, human effort is reduced and results are very accurate in less execution time. Limitation of this technique is that it is domain specific.

Summary of various techniques for detection of deep web search interface
By going through the literature survey of some deep web search interface detection techniques, it is concluded that each techniques for detection of deep web search interface have some relative strengths and limitations. A tabular summary is given below in table 1, which summarizes the techniques, strengths and limitations of some of important detection techniques for deep web search interface.

Table 1 : Summary of various techniques for detection of deep web search interface

Authors	Technique	Strengths	Limitations
Leo Breiman (2001)	Forest of regression trees as classifiers	A substantial improvement in performance over single tree classifiers.	May include un-important or noisy features.

Sri Ram Raghavan et al. (2001)	Hidden Web Exposer	An application specific approach to hidden web crawling	Imprecise in filling the forms.

Palmieri Lage et al. (2002)	Hidden Web Agents	Wide coverage of distinct domains.	Restricted to web sites that follow common navigation patterns.

Jared Cope et al. (2003)	Single tree classifiers	Automatically discovery of search interface, performed well when rules are generated on the same domain.	Long rules, large size of feature space in training samples, Over fitting, Classification precision is not very satisfying.

Zhen Zhang et al. (2004)	2P Grammar and Best effort Parser	Very simple and consistent, No priority among preferences, Handling of missing elements in form.	Critical to establish single global grammar that can be interacted to the machine globally.

Luciano Barbosa et al. (2004)	Automatic query generation based on small set of keywords.	A simple and completely automated strategy that can be quite effective in practice	A large domain of Keywords has to be generated.

Deng, X. B. et al. (2008)	weighted feature selection algorithm	Minimizes the problem of classification of high dimension and sparse search interface using the ensemble of decision trees	Highly sensitive towards the changes in training data set.

Ye, Li, Deng et al.(2009)	Feature weighted selection process	Minimizes the chances of selection of noisy features.	No use of contextual information associated with forms.

Ping Bai et al.(2009)	Naïve Bayesian Algorithm	Text classification results are very accurate.	Classification algorithm is not automatic.

Anuradha et al. (2010)	Based on domain ontology	Results are produced from multiple sources, reduces the human effort, less execution time, accuracy is high.	It is domain specific.

Conclusion
Deep web search interface are the entry point for the searching of the deep web information. A deep web crawler should understand and detect the deep web search interface efficiently to facilitate the further process of deep web information retrieval. An efficient detection of deep web search interface may results towards a significant retrieval of deep web information so the first and foremost step of deep web information retrieval is the efficient understanding and detection of deep web search interface. In this paper a technical analysis of some of the techniques for detection of deep web search interface is done and it is concluded that each of them have some relative strengths and limitations in detecting of deep web search interface. To explore the deep web information efficiently, an efficient technique for detection of deep web search interface should be designed which should have strengths simultaneously and particularly in terms of wide coverage of different domains, automatic procedure, resistant to noisy and unwanted features, ability to consider the features as per their importance, application specific approach as per requirement and user friendly approach. Finally the technique for detection of deep web search interface should be compatible with current web technology.

This is a paper published by :Dilip Kumar Sharma1, A. K. Sharma21GLA University, Mathura, UP, India. Email: todilipsharma@rediffmail.com
2YMCA University of Science and Technology, Faridabad, Haryana, India

I seem to be intrested in the topic specified by the author.Hope this become useful for any of the users of the blog.

References
Bergman, M.K. (2001). The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value. In The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 7, No. 1.
Peisu, X., Ke, T. and Qinzhen, H.(2008). A Framework of Deep Web Crawler. In Proceedings of the 27th Chinese Control Conference, Kunming,Yunnan, China.
Sharma, D. K., and Sharma, A.K. (2010). Deep Web Information Retrieval Process: A Technical Survey. In International Journal of Information Technology & Web Engineering, USA, Vol 5, No. 1.
Khare, R., An, Y., and Song, Y. (2010). Understanding Deep Web Search Interfaces: A Survey. In ACM SIGMOD Record, Volume 39 , Issue 1, PP: 33-40.
Sharma D. K., and Sharma A.K. (2009). Query Intensive Interface Information Extraction Protocol for Deep Web., In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Agent & Multi-Agent Systems, PP. 1-5 , IEEE Explorer.
Breiman, L. (2001). Random Forests. In Machine Learning, Vol. 45, No.1, PP: 5-32, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Raghavan, S. and Garcia-Molina, H. (2001). Crawling the Hidden Web. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Roma, Italy.
Lage, P. et al. (2002). Collecting Hidden Web Pages for Data Extraction. In Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Web information and data management , PP: 69-75.
Cope, J., Craswell, N., and Hawking, D. (2003). Automated Discovery of Search Interfaces on the web. In
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Australasian Database Conference (ADC2003), Adelaide, Australi,a.
Zhang, Z., He, B., and Chang, K. (2004). Understanding Web Query Interfaces: Best-Effort Parsing with Hidden Syntax. In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Management of Data ,PP: 107-118.
Barbosa, L., and Freirel, J.(2004). Siphoning Hidden-Web Data through Keyword-Based Interface., In Proceedings of SBBD.
Deng, X. B., Ye, Y. M., Li, H. B., & Huang, J. Z. (2008). An Improved Random Forest Approach For Detection Of Hidden Web Search Interfaces. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics, Kunming, China. IEEE.
Ye, Y., et al. (2009). Feature Weighting Random Forest for Detection of Hidden Web Search Interfaces. In Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing , Vol. 13, No. 4, PP: 387-404.
Bai, P., and Li, J.(2009). The Improved Naive Bayesian WEB Text Classification Algorithm, In International Symposium on Computer Network and Multimedia Technology, IEEE Explorer.
Anuradha, and Sharma, A.K. (2010). A Novel Approach For Automatic Detection and Unification of Web Search Query Interfaces Using Domain Ontology. In International Journal of Information Technology and Knowledge Management, July-December, Vol. 2, No. 2,PP: 196-199.
Dilip Kumar Sharma is B.Sc, B.E.(CSE), M.Tech.(IT), M.Tech. (CSE) and pursuing Ph.D in Computer Engineering. He is life member of CSI, IETE, ISTE,, ISCA, SSI and member of CSTA, USA. He has attended 21 short term courses/workshops/seminars organized by various esteemed originations. He has published 21 research papers in International Journals /Conferences of repute and participated in 18 International/National conferences. Presently he is working as Reader in Department of Computer Science, IET at GLA University, Mathura, U.P. since March 2003 and he is also CSI Student branch Coordinator. His research interests are deep web information retrieval, Digital Watermarking and Software Engineering. He has guided various projects and seminars undertaken by the students of undergraduate/postgraduate.
Prof. A. K. Sharma received his M.Tech. (CST) with Hons. from University of Roorkee (Presently I.I.T. Roorkee) and Ph.D (Fuzzy Expert Systems) from JMI, New Delhi and he obtained his second Ph.D. in Information Technology form IIITM, Gwalior in 2004. Presently he is working as Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Technology & Chairman, Dept of Computer Engineering at YMCA University of Science and Technology, Faridabad. His research interest includes Fuzzy Systems, OOPS, Knowledge Representation and Internet Technologies. He has guided 9 Ph.D thesis and 8 more are in progress with about 175 research publications in International and National journals and conferences. The author of 7 books, is actively engaged in research related to Fuzzy logic, Knowledge based systems, MANETS, Design of crawlers. Besides being member of many BOS and Academic councils, he has been Visiting Professor at JMI, IIIT&M, and I.I.T. Roorkee.

Nature Inspired Machine Intelligence

2010-12-29T21:32:00.000-08:00

Artificial Neural Networks
Evolutionary Algorithms
Swarm Intelligence
Harmony Search
Simulated Annealing
Membrane Computing
Artificial Immune System (AIS)
DNA Computation
Computing with Words
Artificial Life
Quantum Computation
Hybrid Approaches

If All the above features can be combined and made effective implementation on a real-time basis which should provide the right information at the right time can be said as NIMI (Nature Inspired Machine Intelligence). No matter who develops, any R&D division of a small company to Microsoft, Infosys, TCS, Wipro can emerge as a indisputable common brand in common mans day to day life. I say it because I believe technology has to be cheaper and should always reach common man as a help. What is the future of burning carbon and making a global footprint on Ozone layer? To avoid education and methodologies has to evolve from basic to basic+1 at least.

References[1] A. Abraham, “Neuro-Fuzzy Systems: State-of-the-Art Modeling Techniques”, in Jose Mira and Alberto Prieto, eds., Connectionist Models of Neurons, Learning Processes, and Artificial Intelligence, Springer Verlag Germany, 2001, pp. 269-276.
[2] W. Banzhaf, P. Nordin, E.R. Keller, and F.D. Francone, “Genetic Programming: An Introduction on The Automatic Evolution of Computer Programs and its Applications”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1998
[3] Kirkpatrick, S., C. D. Gelatt Jr., M. P. Vecchi, Optimization by Simulated Annealing, Science, 220, 4598, 671-680, 1983.
[4] G. Paun, Computing with membranes, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 61 (1), 108-143, 2000.
[5] Deutsch, D., Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle, and the Universal Quantum Computer”. Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. A400, 97–117, 1985.
[6] A. Abraham, Intelligent Systems: Architectures and Perspectives, Recent Advances in Intelligent Paradigms and Applications, Abraham A., Jain L. and Kacprzyk J. (Eds.), Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, Springer Verlag Germany, ISBN 3790815381, Chapter 1, pp. 1-35, 2002.
[7] Bishop C.M., Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1995.
[8] Fogel, D. B., Evolutionary Computation: Toward a New Philosophy of Machine Intelligence. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, Second edition, 1999.
[9] Kennedy J. and Eberhart R. Swarm intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2001.
[10] Passino, K.M., Biomimicry of Bacterial Foraging for Distributed Optimization and Control, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, pp. 52-67, June 2002.
[11] de Castro, L. N. and Timmis, J. I., Artificial Immune Systems: A New Computational Intelligence Approach, Springer-Verlag, London, 2002.
[12] Amos M., Theoretical and Experimental DNA Computation. Springer, ISBN: 3-540-65773-8, 2005.
[13] Zadeh L.A. and Kacprzyk J. (Eds.) Computing with Words in Information/Intelligent Systems: Foundations, Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, Springer Verlag, Germany, ISBN 379081217X, 1999.
[14] Reynolds R.G., Michalewicz, Z. Cavaretta M.J., Using Cultural Algorithms for Constraint Handling in GENOCOP. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Evolutionary Programming. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 289-305, 1995.
[15] C. Adami, Introduction to Artificial Life. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 1998.
[16] Z.W. Geem, J.H. Kim, and G.V. Loganathan, “A new heuristic optimization algorithm: harmony search”, Simulation 76 (2), 60–68, 2001.

Harmony Search Algorithm

2010-12-29T21:21:00.000-08:00

Harmony search (HS) is a music-inspired algorithm (Geem et al., 2001) and has been applied to various optimization problems including music composition, Sudoku puzzle, magic square, timetabling, tour planning, logistics, web page clustering, text summarization, Internet routing, visual tracking, robotics, energy system dispatch, power system design, cell phone networking, structural design, water network design, dam scheduling, flood model calibration, groundwater management, soil stability analysis, ecological conservation, vehicle routing, heat exchanger design, satellite heat pipe design, offshore structure mooring, RNA structure prediction, medical imaging, medical physics, etc (Geem, 2009; 2010a). Recently, HS was also applied to astronomical data analysis, which was published in Nature (Deeg et al., 2010).
Each musician in music performance plays a musical note at a time, and those musical notes together make a harmony. Likewise, each variable in optimization has a value at a time, and those values together make a solution vector. Just like the music group improves their harmonies practice by practice, the algorithm improves its solution vectors iteration by iteration.
The HS algorithm basically has three operations, such as memory consideration, pitch adjustment, and random selection. Using memory consideration operation, HS chooses a value from harmony memory (HM); using pitch adjustment operation, HS chooses a value which is slightly modified from HM; and using random selection operation, HS chooses a value randomly from entire value range. These basic operations constitute a novel stochastic derivative (Geem, 2008), instead of traditional calculus-based derivative, in order to search for the right direction to the optimal solution.
For more advanced issues in HS, researchers have researched exploratory power (Das et al., 2010), multi-modal solution space (Gao et al., 2009), multi-objective optimization (Geem, 2010b), distributed memory (Pan et al., 2010), hybridization (Fesanghary et al., 2008), and adaptive theory (Geem and Sim, 2010). In addition, HS has a unique derivative which considers the relationship among variables (Geem, 2011).

References
Das, S., Mukhopadhyay, A., Roy, A., Abraham, A., & Panigrahi, B. K. (2010) Exploratory Power of the Harmony Search Algorithm: Analysis and Improvements for Global Numerical Optimization. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSMCB.2010.2046035
Deeg, H. J., Moutou, C., & Erikson A. et al. A transiting giant planet with a temperature between 250 K and 430 K. Nature, 464, 384-387.
Fesanghary, M., Mahdavi, M., Minary-Jolandan, M., Alizadeh, Y. (2008). Hybridizing harmony search algorithm with sequential quadratic programming for engineering optimization problems. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 197(33-40), 3080-3091.
Gao, X. Z., Wang, X., & Ovaska S. J. (2009) Uni-modal and Multi-modal Optimization Using Modified Harmony Search Methods. International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, 5(10A), 2985-2996.
Geem, Z. W. (2008). Novel Derivative of Harmony Search Algorithm for Discrete Design Variables. Applied Mathematics and Computation, 199(1), 223-230.
Geem, Z. W. (2009). Music-Inspired Harmony Search Algorithms: Theory and Applications. Berlin: Springer.
Geem, Z. W. (2010a). Recent Advances in Harmony Search Algorithm. Berlin: Springer.
Geem, Z. W. (2010b). Multiobjective Optimization of Time-Cost Trade-Off Using Harmony Search. ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 136(6), 711-716.
Geem, Z. W. (2011). Stochastic Co-Derivative of Harmony Search Algorithm. International Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Optimisation, 2(1), 1-12.
Geem, Z. W., Kim, J. H., & Loganathan, G. V. (2001). A New Heuristic Optimization Algorithm: Harmony Search. Simulation, 76(2), 60-68.
Geem, Z.W., Sim, K.-B. (2010). Parameter-Setting-Free Harmony Search Algorithm. Applied Mathematics and Computation, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amc.2010.09.049
Pan, Q.-K., Suganthan, P.N., Liang, J. J., Tasgetiren, M.F. (2010). A local-best harmony search algorithm with dynamic subpopulations. Engineering Optimization, 42(2), 101 - 117.

Indian Copyright Act may be amended soon, DRM may become legally breakable

2010-07-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

A recent bill introduced by the Union Government seeks to amend the Copyright Act of 1957, attempting to bring Indian copyright laws at par with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)’s treaties, and give creative contributors to copyrighted material more rights. The Copyright Amendment Bill 2010, if ratified, will greatly affect the music, film, and photography industries of India.

Importantly, the amendment also proposes that private & personal copying will be treated as 'fair dealing'. This interestingly allows users to break DRM (digital rights management) on their legally purchased content, as long as they are not violating copyright terms. This will allow them to move and use the content on various devices. Amazingly, this provision will also allow developers to make and sell tools to break DRM protection.

These are the other major changes:

Independent authorship rights for lyricists, composers, and singers in films, which presently belong only to the producer and music company for the film.
Addressing concerns of music companies for not being able to derive royalties from “version recordings” of their original songs
Producer and principal director will be treated as joint first-owners of the copyright, which at present only belong to the producer
Change in the term of copyright for photographers from 60 years to “life plus 60 years”
Allow physically challenged persons to access the copyright material in specialized formats
Proposes to make the Copyright Act conform to WIPO’s Internet treaties of anti-circumvention, giving equal rights to both online and offline work.
Statutory/compulsory licensing for broadcasting companies to be allowed to access written, audio, and video works.

As expected, the changes proposed have been met by strong opposition and disgruntlement, mainly from music companies, who claim that the Indian film and music industry cannot be compared to any other in the world, and will have to have different laws. Even those who stand to gain by the new provisions are sceptical if the amendment will ever be passed, as many of the changes run counter to the manner in which the Indian industry has worked for many decades, and some changes, such as individual rights for lyricists and composers cannot be found elsewhere in the world.

The ‘fair dealing’ provision on personal copying of DRM-protected content in India, if ratified, will make a lot of Indians very happy, as well as make a lot of people across the world very envious of them. Here’s to the Copyright Amendment Bill 2010 getting passed!

Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4

2010-07-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has launched the full-release general availability versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, with a host of new features for developers. To fully-inaugurate their flaghsip developer products, Microsoft will be holding more than 150 developer events across the globe. Users will have access to many popular extensions for both Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, made by over 50 partners and available at the time of the release.

Visual Studio 2010 has the all new Visual Studio editor, which will use Windows Presentation Foundation, support ribbon interface, multiple monitors, Windows 7 multitouch, SharePoint functionality, Windows Azure tools, and IntelliTrace, a new product that will help eradicate nonreproducible bugs. It will also come bundled with Expression Studio, Business & Enterprise Servers, and Microsoft Office in the Ultimate and Premium SKUs

The .NET Framework will also feature built-in support for industry standards, for high-performance middle-tier applications (including parallel programming, workflow, and service-oriented applications), and ASP.NET Model-View-Controller, and will also feature Dynamic Language Runtime. Developers can also enjoy a side-by-side installation with .NET Framework 3.5, and get the advantage of a runtime that has been decreased in size by 80%, making it entirely faster.

Microsoft will also launch the Release to Web version of Silverlight 4 sometime today, which will include more than 60 customizable pre-written controls, extended out-of-browser capabilities, and enterprise application enhancements.

Visual Studio 2010 is available in 4 SKUs:
Ultimate with MSDN - $11,924 New or $3,841 Renewal
Premium with MSDN - $5,469 New or $2,299 Renewal
Professional with MSDN - $1,199 New or $799 Renewal
Professional with MSDN - $1,199 New or $799 Renewal
Here's what the products will offer:

VS 2010	Features	MSDN Premium Benefits	Additional Software
Ultimate	IntelliTrace Historical Debugging Comprehensive Testing Tools Test Case and Test Lab Management Advanced UML Architecture Tools Architectural Discovery Tools Unit Testing with Code Coverage and Test Prioritization Code Analysis, Metrics and Optimization Database Development and Testing Tools	250 hours Azure Usage TFS License (1 CAL) 4 Support Incidents	Windows OS & Servers XNA Game Studio Expression Studio Office SQL Server Business & Enterprise Servers
Premium	Advanced Application Development & Debugging Unit Testing with Code Coverage and Test Prioritization Code Analysis, Metrics & Optimization Database Development and Testing Tools Read Only Architectural Diagrams	100 hours Azure Usage TFS License (1 CAL) 4 Support Incidents	Windows OS & Servers XNA Game Studio Expression Studio Office SQL Server Business & Enterprise Servers
Professional	Application Development & Debugging Unit Testing	50 hours Azure Usage TFS License (1 CAL) 2 Support Incidents	Windows Client and Server OS SQL Server XNA Game Studio

The testing as well as promos were out,now it just the new full body embodiment!!

Scientists have created bacteria-based artificial life...Nearly???

2010-07-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

According to me, say nearly because they have created the 'software' part, which is no mean feat, considering it took nearly 15 years for them to do it. But is the hardware far behind?

Although we have evolved almost beyond recognition from our single-celled beginnings, the question of how life started has troubled scientists for a long time now. As typical scientific methodology prescribes, scientists are trying to find the answer to this big question by making efforts to generate life in the laboratory - life from lifeless chemicals. Genetic engineering is the manipulation of the genetic structure, DNA make-up, or genome of a living being, which is like the 'source-code' of the organism, present in every cell, determining everything about him/her/it. Although generating living cells from chemicals isn't possible as of now, we have been tinkering with the chemicals that make up the DNA to create artificial genomes.

Now, a scientific team - headed by Drs. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith and Clyde Hutchison of the J. Craig Venter Institute, USA - has created the first artificial bacterium by transplanting an artificially-created genome into a naturally occuring host cell. Or in a rough analogy, the operating system has been created, but is loaded in borrowed hardware. In 2008, the JCVI team synthesized a small bacterial genome; however they were unable to activate that genome in a cell at that time - the Beta version of the OS crashed. This time, however, the cell has 'booted up' and created over a billion copies of itself, which contained and displayed the characteristics of the synthetic DNA. This is the first cell controlled completely by a synthetic genome. The genome, known as Mycoplasma mycoides, is also a work of leviathanic proportions. It contains 1.08 million base pairs (like 1.08 million lines of code) and is the largest chemically defined structure ever synthesized in the laboratory. But to say at this point, that 'Artificial life has been created', would not be very accurate, as in this case, a synthetic genome was inserted into old microplasma cells, and that is not the same as 'creating life', for truly new life wouldn't require an existing living recipient cell.

Assembly of Mycoplasma mycoides (click to enlarge)

The new technique can allow us to create brand new genomes that do just what we demand of them. They could produce bio-fuels for us, gulp up the excess carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere or clear an oil-spill, like the one that has crippled the shores of Louisiana. But as Dr Helen Wallace from Genewatch UK - an organisation that monitors developments in genetic technologies - puts it, "If you release new organisms into the environment, you can do more harm than good. By releasing them into areas of pollution, [with the aim of cleaning it up], you could actually be releasing a new kind of pollution because we don't know how these organisms will behave in the environment."

Though we are now writing the software of life, we'd have to also look out for bugs and loopholes. If there's a crash, the damage might not be reversible through a Quick Format.

Quantum Communication goes super-secure

2010-07-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

Quantum particles, i.e. small sub-atomic particles like photons, are the carriers of information in Quantum Communication, where the 'quantum state' of the particle determines whether you are sending a 0 or a 1. While encrypting Quantum messages was already possible, researcher Robert Malaney, has further made Quantum Communication super-secure. The University of New South Wales' telecommunications researcher has developed a technique called 'unconditional location verification', where the location of the recipient of information is fixed. The protocol proposes to send an encrypted key to three wireless towers closest to the recipient, who is then required to decrypt and send back the information instantaneously. The location of the recipient is then determined using knowledge of transmission speeds, and further communication takes place only if the recipient is at the desired location. So, even if someone has mastered the decryption of all your classified information, he'd probably need to have the audacity of standing in your vicinity to do it.

The security that this technique provides would be desirable for organisations like banks, intelligence agencies, digital media distributors etc., who need point-to-point communication. This, for example, will ensure that the encryption technique of your bank transactions are further strengthened by cross checking your location of access, which in this case might be your home address, which is registered with the bank.

Windows 8 plans leaked, sound awesome; Windows Store to be Microsoft's App Store

2010-07-01T06:23:00.001-07:00

In the last few months, leaked pictures and documents become have become a daily affair for us.

However, this one made us sit straight and notice - leaked footprints for Windows 8. Seriously, we haven’t yet poured even half our love over the awesome Windows 7, before this thing hit us square this morning. Like all leaks, only time shall confirm the authenticity of these numerous leaked slides. But the detail and the obvious directions they point to, give them a lot of weight.

These slides, each labelled confidential, probably were used for some behind-the-doors presentation and contain tremendous detail and some very mouth-watering prospects. For the eager eyes, here lies the list and our views.

Kinect-style sensing: When Microsoft put so much effort behind the creation of the wonder that is Kinect (earlier known as ‘Project Natal’), we expected (and wished in our dreams!) that the technology would be ported to the Windows too. There is ‘no’ sign of motion gestures for operating Windows, or any mention of motion-based gaming, but the slides show the plans of motion-detection to put Windows to ‘sleep’ or ‘wake’ it up. Yes, as the slides above indicate, plans are that user’s entry or exit would be used to log-in or put the computer to sleep. This would also mark the introduction of sensor support, like proximity sensors, to Windows. Neat, but we want more of Kinect!

Quick on/off: Booting times are irritating, we know! They may soon, however, be a thing of the past as Microsoft plans to introduce a feature, dubbed as ‘Log off+Hibernate’, that would enable quick powering up from 0 watts consumption. This also is in line with the “Big stuff” that ‘ This is an absolute necessity, considering that Windows 8 is as much for handhelds (which needs always-on operating system) as it is for desktops. More on ‘Windows 8 and handhelds’, read on.

Windows Store: It’s a trend Apple started and now everyone wants to have an App store. But we suppose that Windows is a platform which needs this the most. Here’s our view: Rivals have always thrown dirt on Microsoft for the vulnerability and the security loopholes in its operating system. App store not only give Microsoft a huge source of revenue but also a point of centralised vigilance. As one of the slides suggests, developers would be able to upload the app to be available in only certain geographical areas, and also decide the type of devices it would be available for. The concept pictures show an all-encompassing vision, especially the 'developer's dashboard' above, which would be additional lure for them, if billions of users of Windows aren't. We just can’t seem to stress enough how much difference this would make. Instead of unreliable software from around the net, finally, we can have reliable, checked Apps. The largest of platforms might be the last to get its App store, but take our word, it would dwarf all others around.

Dell hid the fact that it deliberately shipped 11.8 million potentially faulty computers between 2003 and 2005

2010-07-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

Possibly the biggest news of the month, Dell has admitted to some very shady behaviour. A company not known for its squeaky clean record, Dell’s troubles this time around are centred on recently unsealed court papers, which contained a mighty revelation within them: Dell knowingly shipped 11.8 million Optiplex PCs that were potentially defective due to a faulty capacitor, between May 2003 and June 2005.

The capacitors, mostly manufactured by Nichicon, showed a 97% failure rate in a study conducted soon after the first problems started showing up. So what did Dell do? They didn’t recall the series, but instead, told their representatives to hide the problem, and then went on to continue shipping the PCs, and tell customers that the problem was caused by them overworking the system! A way to enjoy service fees? Possibly. More likely a way to get away from the bad publicity. However, the very same unsealed court papers also reveal that in 2005, Dell apparently paid out a $300 million fine to various companies, including Advanced Internet Technologies, who was the main plaintiff in the matter.

Technology: Microsoft Warns of Windows 7 Graphics Flaw

2010-05-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

A flaw with the graphics driver in Windows 7 could compromise the stability and security of PCs, Microsoft has warned.

The vulnerability lies in the Windows Canonical Display Driver (cdd.dll) for the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

"If exploited, it would likely cause the affected system to stop responding and restart," Jerry Bryant, group manager of response communications warns on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog. "Code execution, while possible in theory, would be very difficult due to memory randomisation, both in kernel memory and via Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR)."

Microsoft claims that the vulnerability only affects machines running the Aero graphics interface, and advises that customers "may choose to disable Windows Aero as a workaround to protect against potential threats" until the company releases a fix.

That said, Microsoft claims that the chances of the flaw being exploited in the wild are low, and have awarded the bug the lowest possible score on its Exploitability Index.

Further details of the flaw can be found in Microsoft's security advisory.

Web sites that can take a punch

2010-04-13T05:49:00.000-07:00

The recent, well-publicized cyberattack on Google was just the latest skirmish in a long war. And like most long wars, this one features an arms race, as hackers seek out new security holes, and web site administrators try to close them.

Systems for detecting attacks against networked computers are commercially available, and academic and industrial researchers are constantly improving them. But when a web site is under attack, its only viable defense may be to take its servers offline, which, in the short term, can cost it money in lost revenue and productivity and, in the long term, could hurt its credibility. Indeed, knocking a site offline may be an attackers’ sole intention.

MIT researchers have developed a system to keep web servers — or, for that matter, any Internet-connected computers — running even when they’re under attack. The work was funded largely by the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and in a pair of tests whose thoroughness is unusual in academia, DARPA hired a group of computer security professionals outside MIT to try to bring down a test network protected by the new system. In both tests, says Martin Rinard, the professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the research, the system exceeded all the performance criteria that DARPA set for it.

The MIT system was developed by a host of researchers, including not only Rinard but Jeff Perkins, a research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Postdoctoral Fellow Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos and Professor Michael Ernst, who has since moved to the University of Washington. During normal operation, it monitors the programs running on an Internet-connected computer to determine their normal range of behavior, and during an attack, it simply refuses to let them wander outside that range.

To take a simple example, suppose that a program running on a web server routinely stores data in one of two memory locations — call them A and B. During an attack, malicious code tries to trick the program into storing data at location C instead. The MIT system won’t let it: instead, it sends the data to either location A or location B.

Of course, the data may not be of a type that belongs at either of those locations. And the system will modify behaviors that could be even more disruptive than data storage. But in sites with large banks of servers, the MIT system gets several chances to find the best response to an attack. If storing at location A causes one server in the bank to crash, the MIT system will tell the other servers to store it at location B, instead.

“The idea is that you’ve got hundreds of machines out there,” Rinard says. “We’re saying, ‘Okay, fine, you can take out six or 10 of my 200 machines.’” But, he adds, “by observing what happens with the executions of those six or 10 machines, we’ll be able to deploy patches out to protect the rest of the machines.” The entire process of recognizing an attack, testing a number of countermeasures and deploying the most effective ones can take a matter of seconds.
Baptism by fire

In the first of DARPA’s two field tests, engineers at a computer security firm — the so-called red team — were given the code for the MIT defense system. (In the real world, a company that marketed such a system would make every effort to keep its code secret, but Rinard says that it’s standard practice in the security field to consider the worst-case scenario.) The red team had several months in which to devise attacks against a hypothetical network protected by the system. During the test itself, no malicious code was allowed to execute on the protected computers, and in 70 percent of cases, the MIT system kept the applications running on those computers from going down. DARPA also set performance goals for the system, such as the amount of extra processing power it required, and the extent to which it altered the applications’ normal operation. In all cases, the system was well within DARPA’s prescribed limits.

The first red-team exercise considered cases in which hackers tried to infect computers with malicious code, and the MIT researchers presented the results of the test at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Operating Systems Principles last fall. A second red-team exercise, testing an updated version of the defense system that the MIT researchers developed together with defense contractor BAE Systems, concluded at the end of January. That test evaluated the system’s ability to handle a different kind of attack, which seeks to circumvent security checks that web applications typically perform to ensure that users have permission to access protected information. Although the researchers are still sorting through the data from that test, Sidiroglou-Douskos says that the system’s success rate in keeping applications up and running rose from 70 percent to 90 percent.

Angelos Keromytis, an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, who works on related techniques for combating cyberattacks, says that the MIT approach is “very original,” but cautions that Web developers may be reluctant to adopt it anytime soon. “They’re wary of a system that changes another system automatically,” Keromytis says. “When they manually make changes to their systems, they break them, so they think that automatically doing it is going to be worse.” Keromytis points out, however, that while DARPA has run a number of red-team exercises evaluating new technologies in a range of areas, “This is probably one of the most successful exercises that I have seen.” The mere fact that DARPA was willing to spend so much money testing the system, Keromytis says, indicates that “they think it’s close enough to a rough prototype that works, which is more than one can say for most academic research.”

iPad Arrives This Saturday

2010-04-05T04:52:00.001-07:00

CUPERTINO, California—March 29, 2010—Apple’s magical new iPad will be available in all 221 US Apple® retail stores and most Best Buy stores this Saturday, April 3, beginning at 9 a.m. Starting at just $499, iPad lets users browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and delivers up to 10 hours of battery life.*

“iPad connects users with their apps and content in a far more intimate and fun way than ever before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We can’t wait for users to get their hands and fingers on it this weekend.”

Apple retail stores will offer a free Personal Setup service to every customer who buys an iPad at the store, helping them customize their new iPad by setting up their email, loading their favorite apps from the App Store, and more. Also beginning Saturday morning, all US Apple retail stores will host special iPad workshops to help customers learn more about this magical new product.

Pricing & Availability
iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, and $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores, most Best Buy stores, select Apple Authorized Resellers and campus bookstores. The iBooks app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3.

*Battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors. Actual results vary.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Yes, You Can Build a Web Company in India. Here’s How.

2010-03-27T21:47:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley and India have a cozy relationship, but a big question has resulted in friction, failed companies and millions in losses: When will the Internet catch on in India in a big way?

A few companies have done well and a few more are coming up, slowly but surely. But there are hardly any true breakout hits.

RedBus is pretty close. It’s essentially an Expedia for bus tickets in India. It sells about 3,500 bus seats per day, is the fourth most-trafficked Web site in India and has at least tripled its revenues year-over-year. The company sells seats for roughly half the bus operators in India, and that’s saying something: This is an insanely fragmented market that had next to zero centralization just a few years ago. All of this has been built in three years on about $1 million in venture funding. (The company raised another $1.3 million in 2008, but it’s still in the bank. Investors include Helion, Inventus andSeedfund.)

I can vouch for the company being cheap. Having spent my morning in the plush eight-acre Infosys headquarters, the offices of RedBus were a marked contrast. They are split among two buildings located in one of those very chaotic Indian neighborhoods where vendors are shouting, cows are wandering and smell of open sewers is not too far off. It feels far from the sanitized, steel-and-glass rows of multinationals.

None of this is intended as an insult– co-founder and CEO Phanindra Sama is proud of his cheapness. (Sama is pictured above, sorry it’s so blurry. My camera was having issues.) We met in a no-frills, un-airconditioned conference room. He didn’t turn on the air conditioning for famed Silicon Valley Indian entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi, when he visited last month either—and Rekhi is an investor in RedBus.

Despite the sweat trickling down my forehead, arms, legs and back throughout the interview, I didn’t want to leave. What Sama and his two founders have pulled off in a short period of time with little funding in India is impressive.

Background for Americans: There are two kinds of buses in India—those that make stops and have ticket-takers on board and that go to one destination only and sell pre-paid tickets only. There are some 3,000 operators of the latter category and, before RedBus, there was no way to contact them directly. To get a bus ticket, you went to an agent. That agent only had inventory from a few bus lines. To book the ticket, he or she would call one person who was in charge of booking every seat on that particular route. There was a long wait time, and frequently the routes the agents knew about were sold out – meaning you had to change your travel plans, or find another agent who had different sources. Meanwhile there was no standardization on pricing and commissions. The agent simply wrote the cost on a piece of paper and if you wanted to ride, you paid it.

Now, RedBus has a central database that gets seats from half of India’s bus operators. It has done so well that it powers the bus ticket applications for most of India’s more general travel sites like MakeMyTrip.com. It also sells an OpenTable-like software-as-a-service product to help bus companies manage their own inventory and better integrate their inventory with RedBus. In terms of seats, it sells less than 1% of the 750,000 rides taken daily, but with several channels and few other easy options, there’s a ton of room to grow a big company.

Sama didn’t set out to build a company. I know that’s a cliché with startups these days, but it’s a rarity in Bangalore where the glamor of being a Web entrepreneur runs high and plenty of TechCrunch-reading kids save up money, quit for a year, try to start a company, and go back to a multinational if it doesn’t hit quickly. When RedBus’s mentor first suggested the company raise $1 million, Sama gasped. He hadn’t even thought in those amounts. His only immediate thought was: “If I had $1 million, I’d put it in the bank and make interest.”

That mentor was Sanjay Anandaram formerly of Neta, Wipro and other ventures known between the Silicon Valley and Indian entrepreneur communities. Sama met Anandaram throughTIE’s JumpStartUp program. Despite the reach, influence and press of TIE—the uber-Indian networking organization started in the Valley— Sama is the first entrepreneur I’ve met in India who gives it this much credit for his company’s survival.

Specifically, he cites Anandaram’s advice. When RedBus was trying to sell software to the bus lines, it was Anandaram who said: Don’t keep trying to sell the same thing, ask what they need and build that. The bus lines needed to sell seats. So RedBus built a site, and bought the inventory itself from the bus lines to list on the site. Once it proved it could move seats, the operators were happy to pay the company a percentage of seats sold.

Once the company could prove results, it was Anandaram who warned them to undersell expectations: Tell an operator you can sell one seat for them a month, even if you think you can sell fifty. If you sell two, you’ll be a hero, not a disappointment. RedBus has carried that over to fundraising, admittedly forgoing higher valuations because it didn’t want to oversell and under-deliver.

That’s harder than it sounds for an entrepreneur, who is usually the single most bullish person on his company. And it is absolutely shocking in India’s startup culture. I had a blog network tell me on my last morning in India – with a straight face – that it would be doing double the revenues of Gawker in a few years. I like to give entrepreneurs the benefit of the doubt, but I also know the media business. Forgive the generalization, but Indians just love to over-sell. It’s deep in their trader heritage. “You have to sacrifice your ego,” Sama says.

But, especially for a startup in India, the most important piece of advice Sama and his co-founders got from Anandaram might have been this: You are not an Internet company.Because the Internet isn’t more widespread in India, there has to be a core mindset that the Net is an important channel, but just a channel. Just under 50% of RedBus’s business comes from the Net, much of the rest is via mobile phones.

And the company invested early in two expensive ways of skirting that Web limitation. The first was building its own network of bike couriers to deliver tickets and take payments, ala the hugely successful Chinese online travel company, CTrip. The second was investing in seven different call centers throughout India, not one central call center. Says Sama, if you don’t localize a call center to local slang, languages, and customs the customer service won’t work.

Seriously? An Indian in Bangalore arguing a centralized, remote call center can’t give good customer service? That has about as much globalization-irony as China’s BYD refusing to outsource any of its manufacturing.

For Anandaram’s part he noted the founders’ willingness to listen and learn from someone who’d been there. He says the biggest mistakes he sees Indian startups making are not seeking advice, being too obsessed with retaining control and not valuing sales, marketing and partnerships.

The RedBus story squares with something I’ve been noticing more in my travels to emerging markets—frequently when entrepreneurs complain about a lack of angel investing or venture capital, what they are really lacking isn’t just the money, it’s the mentorship. This came up inmy recent conversation with Pierre Omidyar, whose philanthropic effort, the Omidyar Network, seeks to fund both non-profit and for profit entrepreneurs specifically those in the poorest areas of the world. Omidyar Networks has money it can gives these entrepreneurs, thanks to eBay and the dot com boom—lots of money. But what the organization is increasingly finding so lacking is that horrible buzz word “human capital.”

In Omidyar’s own experience, eBay never touched the $3 million it raised from Benchmark in 1996. But the mentorship he got was well worth giving up 25% of the company. “That’s what is so hard to find around the world,” Omidyar says. “We’re increasingly looking at whether $500,000 worth of human capital could help more than $500,000.”

I know that the idea the VCs bring more than money is ridiculed by most entrepreneurs today, but those are usually entrepreneurs operating in a scene that has had an explosion of startups—both failed and successful ones—in the last fifteen years. Even the shiest, most awkward or most unconnected entrepreneurs in the Valley can find a mentor with little effort. Sometimes we take for granted that that’s not the case in much of the rest of the world.

Lucky for RedBus’s founders, they were an exception.

18 DAYS: THE MAHBHARATA RETOLD (CONCEPT NOTES by GRANT MORRISON)

2010-03-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

This new version of the Mahbharata is set in fantastic, mythic time, at the end of the Dwapara Yuga (Copper Age) and the beginning of the fallen, corrupt Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron.

Although historically, the epic is generally thought to refer to events occurring as recently as 9 BC and as long ago as 15 BC (depending on which account you favour), I’d like to place the action much further back into a more fantastical Indian past so that we can take full advantage of the possibilities for action and spectacle on a scale rarely scene. This is like a psychedelic The Lord of the Rings with Star Wars technology.

BHARAT

In this cosmic, symbolic version of events, Bharat is the primordial landmass – the single continent, also known as Pangaea, said to exist before continental drift created the shapes we’re now familiar with. As we’ll learn here, it wasn’t continental drift that split mighty Pangaea but the descendants of King Bharata.

Bharat is home to the mighty kingdoms of the Kauravas, who come to represent the world of blind, ignorant matter, and the Pandavas, who stand in for the world of spirit and understanding and personify the clash between the impulse to participate in the restless material sphere and the impulse to transcend it.

On the ninth day of the 18 Days War, the geology of Bharat is split apart by the ferocity of the conflict, the Flood occurs, and the dreaded Iron Age we currently live in begins.

This is not a strictly accurate historical portrayal of events but a poetic, fantastic interpretation of the original text.

Some of these descriptions are so convincingly reminiscent of the precise effects of tactical atomic weapons and laser beams it seems a shame not to take them at face value and imagine a culture with access to its own versions of such weaponry.

Watch the Teaser Here: http://www.18-days.com/teaser.html

Kerberos: Highly Secure,Single Sign-on Authentication in Mac OS X

2010-03-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

A strong, secure network authentication protocol is crucial to all modern computing infrastructures. Whether you are sending login information over the Internet, a corporate intranet, or wireless LAN, opportunities for malicious users to gain access to protected data must be carefully considered. To address this risk, Mac OS X implements Kerberos, an open-source, single sign-on authentication protocol developed and maintained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

This article discusses Kerberos in Mac OS X and how the protocol is used for secure Single Sign On authentication. The importance of this secure, standards-based methodology will be discussed from both a system administrator and developer perspective.

What Is Kerberos?

Picture walking into the local county fair, and you are given two choices. You can either use your credit card at the entry of every ride or you can use it once at a booth, which grants you a ticket that you can use for the remainder of the day. It's a pretty simple choice if you're concerned about the security of your credit card information and want to have a hassle-free day at the park.

This is exactly what Kerberos accomplishes in its implementation of Single Sign On in network environments. At the beginning of the workday, a user enters his/her password into the system once; this action decrypts a ticket from a server running as a Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC). The ticket holds a set of encrypted keys, which are used throughout the day to authenticate user access without exchanging sensitive password information. It expires after a given amount of time (typically one day), so even if a would-be intruder sniffs it out and decrypts the information, the user-access information remains safe in the long term.

Brief History of Kerberos

Researchers at MIT took early notice of the problems inherent in sending sensitive data across computer networks. The basic tenet is the assumption that all data transmitted across a network—whether behind a firewall, on an intranet, or across the Internet—should be secured through a third-party authentication process and strong cryptography. After working through internal versions at MIT, the first public version of Kerberos (version 4) was released to the public in 1987.

A robust development cycle has continued since then, working under the version 5 specification since 1993. The latest Kerberos is version 5, release 1.5 (in Mac OS X, it's often referred to as Kerberos 5.5).

How Kerberos Works

Here's a brief description of how Kerberos works.

Kerberos uses three major components to implement secure authentication:

Kerberos KDC: Kerberos is integrated into Open Directory in Mac OS X, thus the Open Directory Master runs the KDC for Kerberos. Active Directory can also be used as a KDC for Mac OS X clients.
Kerberized Service: A Kerberized service is an application that can use Kerberos to grant access to users (e.g., Apple Mail, SSH).
Kerberos Client: A Kerberos client is the user who is requesting access to a Kerberized service.

Whereas the KDC holds everything together, Kerberos' purpose is to authenticate client-service access, so the client and service are referred to as Kerberos principals and the KDC is referred to as the third party.

Each principal has a unique encryption key known only to the principal and the KDC. The KDC also has its own unique encryption key. The basic concept relies on the KDC to issue session keys inside Ticket Granting Tickets (TGTs) to clients and services, authenticating services without transmitting passwords or allowing each principal access to any private key other than its own. Instead, the KDC issues a TGT, which holds client information and the session key that expires after a period of time (typically 10 hours).

Understanding the session key is critical to understanding how Kerberos works. The process is roughly equivalent to passing an encrypted password over the network (which is what Kerberos avoids), with the critical advantage of an expiration time. In other words, if someone does sniff out and decrypt the information in a TGT, the breach will be limited to the current session.

From a network security standpoint, the advantages of this strategy are similar to users changing their passwords every 10 hours (the default session time), which every system administrator knows is an unrealistic expectation.

Kerberos in Mac OS X

Kerberos is Apple's choice for a system-wide Single Sign On technology, and Mac OS X continues to enable applications for Kerberos. It was first introduced in Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar. In its first Mac OS X release, enabling Kerberos required a manual configuration process. Since the release of Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, Kerberos authentication has been integrated into Open Directory, which makes the setup process much easier. Setting up an Open Directory master will automatically enable that server as a Kerberos KDC.

You can check to see if Kerberos is running by connecting to the Open Directory master with Server Admin and selecting Open Directory from the Services list.

In Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, WebDav and VPN access became Kerberized, which means they each can use Kerberos for single sign-on authentication. Kerberized utilities in Mac OS X now include Safari, SSH, SMB, Mail, Telnet, VPN client, and the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) client. Mac OS X also includes Kerberos.app, which is a GUI-based Kerberos ticket-granting application designed specifically for Mac. You can find Kerberos.app in /System/Library/CoreServices/. Kerberos.app is a system utility that can be used to explicitly request and retrieve a ticket from a Kerberos KDC if a user's Mac OS X login isn't set to do this automatically with Open Directory. Kerberos.app is typically used by administrators; general purpose use of Kerberos is transparent to the user. To add support for additional applications, such as Eudora and Fetch, users can download Mac OS X Kerberos Extras from the MIT project page.

Kerberos for Mac OS X System Administrators

A system administrator who is new to Kerberos might wonder what problem Kerberos really solves. Many system administrators and developers are comfortable implementing secure applications with standard passwords, SSL, and certificates. The key unique features of Kerberos are Single Sign On and third-party authentication, each of which adds significantly to both security and an efficient user-level login process.

Single Sign On contributes to a secure network environment by giving users a single username and password with a standardized security profile across all Kerberized applications. Remembering this password and changing it according to your organizations security guidelines is simplified because it is done in just one place.

The third-party authentication system in Kerberos is a significant advantage over many other security protocols because passwords not only don't cross the network in clear text—Kerberos keeps passwords off the network altogether.

A downside of third-party authentication is the reliance on the KDC to be up and running for users to get access to services. In enterprise and mission-critical environments, it's important for system administrators to create at least one fail-over KDC. In Mac OS X, this can be implemented with an Open Directory Replica that runs alongside an Open Directory Master. This fail-over KDC can be configured in Server Admin.

Kerberos for Mac OS X Developers

Kerberos is compelling from a developer standpoint, as it allows applications to authenticate users with a standards-based, open-source process that's deployed across a variety of operating systems. Most versions of UNIX, Linux and Windows have built-in Kerberized features. Kerberos is a wise choice for authentication in general, but applications designed for multiplatform use are especially well suited to be Kerberized.

The Kerberos Framework in Mac OS X includes:

Kerberos v5

This is the latest version of Kerberos, version 5, release 1.5 (in Mac OS X, it's often referred to as Kerberos 5.5).
Generic Security Service Application Program Interface (GSS-API)

The definition of GSS-API (which is used in the Mac OS X implementation of Kerberos) is basically equivalent to Kerberos v5, but is used to denote the application interface for developers. *
Login Library

This part of the API gives developers the tools to automate login for Kerberized applications (i.e., SSO)
Kerberos v4

Some older Kerberized applications still use the Kerberos v4 spec, so it's important that this is included in any Kerberos framework.
KClient

KClient provides an application programming interface (API) for Kerberos v4 services.

* Some implementations, such as the Windows implementation of Kerberos, use proprietary forks of the API with different names. The Windows variant is called Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI). It has proprietary elements but is generally considered similar enough to create comparable ports and interoperability between the two platforms.

Mac developers who stick to the Kerberos v5/GSS-API can be confident they won't have to significantly rewrite code as they move applications across platforms and upgrade to new versions. The GSS-API is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard that can be used for a wide variety of security purposes but is most often found in Kerberos-related codes. GSS-API assumes a client-server architecture and standardizes the authentication process between two systems. The idea is to allow developers to work with a single API, regardless of which security system is implemented. This allows varied security systems to build in interoperability with Kerberos by using the API; for instance, packages such as OpenLDAP, SSH, and CVS all have been Kerberized by utilizing GSS-API calls in their code.

The development community is highly active, both on the open-source side and in the development of proprietary solutions associated with Kerberos. Developers of applications that operate in network environments can and should take advantage of the open platform Kerberos is based on. Both the user base and the application developers benefit from Kerberized applications. Users get Single Sign On and the confidence of secure authentication. Developers get to leverage a proven infrastructure for secure authentication without having to reinvent the wheel, while retaining the flexibility of developing custom codes by working directly with the open-source API.

Continued Improvements

As the MIT Kerberos Development Team continues to work closely with Apple, each version of Mac OS X adds new features and security based on Kerberos. In Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, Kerberos for Macintosh 5.5 added an Apple-designed Kerberos authentication dialog and a new version of the Kerberos application (Kerberos.app) that includes a graphical realms editor and is Cocoa based.

Nintendo 3DS: The Details

2010-03-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Nintendo Japan has announced that they will present the newest portable console, theNintendo 3DS, in June. The new handheld will offer 3D viewing without glasses. Here's all the information we have gathered so far:

• With the announcement slated for E3 in June, Nintendo's shooting a bit early in their Japanese press release by saying it will go on sale sometime between April 2010 - March 2011.

• You won't need to wear 3D glasses to enjoy the 3D effects. This may work like Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda, the Nintendo DSi game that uses the frontal camera to track the viewer eyes. By tracking the user's eyes—a trick first shown by Johnny Chung Lee's Wii hack—the machine can alter the perspective in the game to make it look as if the player is looking into a 3D virtual space.

• It's unclear if this would be the only 3D element in the console.

• Backwards compatibility will be incorporated for DS and DSi games support.

• It may have an accelerometer for tilt-controls with motion-led gaming, just like the iPhone/iPod Touch.

• The screen might be higher-res than anything we've seen from Nintendo before, maybe reaching 720p—and measuring around the same size as the DS.

• It'll have two screens just like previous portables, but they'll be used in conjunction as one giant screen, according to RPAD.tv, who convinced developers to talk to them at GDC.

• A Tegra chip could be powering it.

• Nintendo might put a 3G sim in, for over-the-air downloads.

• Those over-the-air downloads might include ebooks, something already seen on the DSi XL.

UPDATE

• It'll include two cameras (one backwards-facing, one forward-facing), just like the DSi—for DSi backwards compatibility support.

• The Japanese publication Asahi is claiming it'll use one of Sharp's parallax barrier LCDs.

• 3D control sticks may help with gaming, the 3DS itself could vibrate like an old Rumble Pak.

India's Got Some Outsourcing Competition

2010-03-17T04:08:00.001-07:00

In the world of outsourcing, it's not same-old, same-old any longer.

Dramatic cost savings are dwindling and companies are seeing improved labor quality in emerging nations, two forces that seemed to drive a shift in outsourcing delivery preferences in 2009, according to the latest report by global management consulting company A T Kearney.

The firm's Global Services Location Index (GSLI) recently ranked the top 50 outsourcing destinations worldwide. Although India is still number one, other countries are gaining ground, and some perennial favorites are losing appeal.

The GSLI report found that companies are re-assessing their outsourcing choices, evaluating them based on political and security risks, labor arbitrage and skills requirements. In addition, businesses are looking to spread out outsourcing locations to protect global delivery, and are increasingly interested in nearshore and sameshore options. Some Latin American and Caribbean countries are profiting from the growing nearshoring trend and are thereby strengthening their positions as attractive alternatives to India.

Chile placed highest among countries from the region, ranking eighth on the strength of its political stability and favorable business environment. Clearly, the recent earthquake in that country will affect Chile's near-term ability to do business. Other popular choices include Mexico (ranked 11th) and Brazil (12th).

The report also indicated some US cities—such as San Antonio (14th)—were profiting from onshoring. Skilled local workers and lower wages (compared with other US cities), combined with the falling dollar and government pressure to create domestic jobs have resulted in the city's growing popularity as an IT services provider.

Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary fell in popularity because of increased costs and wage inflation.

Capitalizing on their loss were Romania (which moved from 39th to 19th), Russia (37th to 33rd) and Ukraine (47th to 42nd). According to the report, the residents' strong educational background and the countries' engineering base along with high language competence and geographical proximity make those countries attractive nearshore options for Western European clients.

An Open Letter to Steve Jobs Concerning the HTC Lawsuits.

2010-03-06T02:32:00.001-08:00

Enforcing patents is wrong. You’ve famously taken and built on ideas from your competitors, as have I, as we should, as great artists do. Why is what HTC has done worse? Whether an idea was patented doesn’t change the morality of copying it, it only changes the ability to sue.

But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?

And the iPhone needs competition to stay awesome. HTC won’t hurt your sales much, anyway — you know the iPhone’s success is because of the art in each of its million details, not because of a handful of tech patents. Who will want a pale imitation when they could have the original?

I always thought of you as a guy who’d say, “Well, copy me if you can, because you’re copying what I did years ago, and what I’m working on now is EVEN cooler!” I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to leapfrog me: they’ll always be playing catch-up.

If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it's going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft. Enforcing patents isn't a good long-term play: it's the beginning of the end of the creative Apple we both love.

What's the WURFL?

2010-03-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

WURFL = Wireless Universal Resource File

The WURFL is an "ambitious" configuration file that contains info about all known Wireless devices on earth. Of course, new devices are created and released at all times. While this configuration file is bound to be out of date one day after each update, chances are that the WURFL lists all of the WAP devices you can purchase in the nearest shops.

If you have browsed this site this far, you are probably looking for answers to the following questions:

Why do WAP developers need a resource file like the WURFL?
Why isn't someone providing WURFL like functionality for money?
How do I use the WURFL?
Which features of which phone are listed in the WURFL?
Who endorses and supports the WURFL?
...and probably more.

If you read on, you will find answers.

WAP and the Need for Resource Files
The WAP standard was a great idea. All the major players in the mobile telephony industry got together in 98 and created a consortium (WAP Forum, now OMA) to establish a worldwide standard called WAP, Wireless Application Protocol.

While the protocol is supported by all device manufacturers and network operators, in practice phone and browser manufacturer have been eager to differentiate while abiding by the letter of the specs.

The consequence of this is a plethora of devices which makes it real hard for developers to build WAP and Wireless services which work acceptably well for the owners of those devices.

The message from the WAP Forum is to wait for implementations to converge and deliver developers from the problem.
Thank you, honey...but we can't wait. As developers, we need solutions, we need them quick, we need them good and, sometimes, we need them cheap too!

What developers need are means to:

programmatically abstract away devices differences
avoid that we need to modify applications whenever a new device ships
avoid that we need to track new devices that ship (particularly those in uninteresting markets)

the WURFL is the starting point to fix all of that. You can think of the WURFL as a global database of all devices and their capabilities.
Of course, the wurfl is not all that there is to it. What you also need is a way to efficiently read the info from the database and use it in your applications to dynamically customize your apps for families of devices.
For this reason, this project is on the lookout for programmers who can provide new smart utilities that exploit the WURFL and for porting existing utilities to different platforms.

Pivot????

2010-02-24T04:29:00.000-08:00

To learn more about Pivot and our vision for this project, check out this video, share it, embed it, and blog/tweet/post your thoughts about it.

Why We Think This Is Exciting

When we use the Web today we treat the most fundamental scenarios as separate activities. Search takes us from many things to one, browsing moves us from one thing to another, and recommendations expose affinities that enable us to explore related topics. Can we do better by combining these scenarios into a more unified experience?

Pivot focuses on this intersection, enabling us to learn key lessons while attempting to broadly apply this philosophy to the Web. We hope that Pivot will inspire and fuel transformative experiences across the Web.

At the heart of Pivot are "Collections." They combine large groups of similar items on the Internet, so we can begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way. By visualizing hidden patterns, Pivot enables users to discover new insights while interacting with thousands of things at once.

Intelligent RAM

2009-12-28T01:46:00.002-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Given the growing processor-memory performance gap and the awkwardness of high capacity DRAM chips, we believe that it is time to consider unifying logic and DRAM. We call such a chip an "IRAM", standing for Intelligent RAM, since most of transistors on this merged chip will be devoted to memory. The reason to put the processor in DRAM rather than increasing the on-processor SRAM is that DRAM is in practice approximately 20 times denser than SRAM. (The ratio is much larger than the transistor ratio because DRAMs use 3D structures to shrink cell size). Thus, IRAM enables a much larger amount of on-chip memory than is possible in a conventional architecutre.

Although others have examined this issue in the past, IRAM is attractive today for several reasons. First, the gap between the performance of processors and DRAMs has been widening at 50% per year for 10 years, so that despite heroic efforts by architects, compiler writers, and applications developers, many more applications are limited by memory speed today than in the past. Second, since the actual processor occupies only about onethird of the die ,the upcoming gigabit DRAM has enough capacity that whole programs and data sets can fit on a single chip. In the past, so little memory could fit onchip with the CPU that IRAMs were mainly considered as building blocks for multiprocessors. Third, DRAM dies have grown about 50% each generation; DRAMs are being made with more metal layers to accelerate the longer lines of these larger chips. Also, the high speed interface of synchronous DRAM will require fast transistors on the DRAM chip. These two DRAM trends should make logic on DRAM closer to the speed of logic on logic fabs than in the past.

POTENTIAL ADVANTAGES OF IRAM
1) Higher Bandwidth. A DRAM naturally has extraordinary internal bandwidth, essentially fetching the square root of its capacity each DRAM clock cycle; an on-chip processor can tap that bandwidth.The potential bandwidth of the gigabit DRAM is even greater than indicated by its logical organization. Since it is important to keep the storage cell small, the normal solution is to limit the length of the bit lines, typically with 256 to 512 bits per sense amp. This quadruples the number of sense amplifiers. To save die area, each block has a small number of I/O lines, which reduces the internal bandwidth by a factor of about 5 to 10 but still meets the external demand. One IRAM goal is to capture a larger fraction of the potential on-chip bandwidth.
2) Lower Latency. To reduce latency, the wire length should be kept as short as possible. This suggests the fewer bits per block the better. In addition, the DRAM cells furthest away from the processor will be slower than the closest ones. Rather than restricting the access timing to accommodate the worst case, the processor could be designed to be aware when it is accessing "slow" or "fast" memory. Some additional reduction in latency can be obtained simply by not multiplexing the address as there is no reason to do so on an IRAM. Also, being on the same chip with the DRAM, the processor avoids driving the offchip wires, potentially turning around the data bus, and accessing an external memory controller. In summary, the access latency of an IRAM processor does not need to be limited by the same constraints as a standard DRAM part. Much lower latency may be obtained by intelligent floor planning, utilizing faster circuit topologies, and redesigning the address/data bussing schemes. The potential memory latency for random addresses of less than 30 ns is possible for a latency-oriented DRAM design on the same chip as the processor; this is as fast as second level caches. Recall that the memory latency on the AlphaServer 8400 is 253 ns.
These first two points suggest IRAM offers performance opportunities for two types of applications:
1. Applications with predictable memory accesses, such as matrix manipulations, may take advantage of the potential 50X to 100X increase in IRAM bandwidth; and
2. Applications with unpredictable memory accesses and very large memory "footprints", such as data bases, may take advantage of the potential 5X to 10X decrease in IRAM latency.
3) Energy Efficiency. Integrating a microprocessor and DRAM memory on the same die offers the potential for improving energy consumption of the memory system. DRAM is much denser than SRAM, which is traditionally used for on-chip memory. Therefore, an IRAM will have many fewer external memory accesses, which consume a great deal of energy to drive high-capacitance off-chip buses. Even on-chip accesses will be more energy efficient, since DRAM consumes less energy than SRAM. Finally, an IRAM has the potential for higher performance than a conventional approach. Since higher performance for some fixed energy consumption can be translated into equal performance at a lower amount of energy, the performance advantages of IRAM can be translated into lower energy consumption
4) Memory Size and Width. Another advantage of IRAM over conventional designs is the ability to adjust both the size and width of the on-chip DRAM. Rather than being limited by powers of 2 in length or width, as is conventional DRAM, IRAM designers can specify exactly the number of words and their width. This flexibility can improve the cost of IRAM solutions versus memories made from conventional DRAMs.
5) Board Space. Finally, IRAM may be attractive in applications where board area is precious --such as cellular phones or portable computers--since it integrates several chips into one.

CAPTCHA

2009-12-28T01:46:00.000-08:00

INTRODUCTION

A captcha is a program that can generate and grade tests that: (A) most humans can pass, but (B) current computer programs can't pass. Such a program can be used to differentiate humans from computers and has many applications for practical security, including (but not limited to):

--- Online Polls.
In November 1999, slashdot.com released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science (a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots by using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own voting program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots". MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll requires that only humans can vote.
---Free Email Services.
Several companies (Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) offer free email services, most of which suffer from a specifc type of attack: "bots" that sign up for thousands of email accounts every minute. This situation can be improved by requiring users to prove they are human before they can get a free email account. Yahoo!, for instance, uses a captcha of our design to prevent bots from registering for accounts. Their captcha asks users to read a distorted word such as the one shown below (current computer programs are not as good as humans at reading distorted text).

---Search Engine Bots.
Some web sites don't want to be indexed by search engines. There is an html tag to prevent search engine bots from reading web pages, but the tag doesn't guarantee that bots won't read the pages; it only serves to say "no bots, please". Search engine bots, since they usually belong to large companies, respect web pages that don't want to allow them in. However, in order to truly guarantee that bots won't enter a web site, captchas are needed.
---Worms and Spam.
captchas also offer a plausible solution against email worms and spam: only accept an email if you know there is a human behind the other computer. A few companies, such as www.spamarrest.com are already marketing this idea.
---Preventing Dictionary Attacks.
Pinkas and Sander have suggested using captchas to prevent dictionary attacks in password systems. The idea is simple: prevent a computer from being able to iterate through the entire space of passwords by requiring a human to type the passwords. The goals of this paper are to lay a solid theoretical foundation for captchas, to introduce the concept to the cryptography community, and to present several novel constructions.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart." The P for Public means that the code and the data used by a CAPTCHA should be publicly available. This is not an open source requirement, but a security guarantee: it should be difficult for someone to write a computer program that can pass the tests generated by a CAPTCHA even if they know exactly how the CAPTCHA works (the only hidden information is a small amount of randomness utilized to generate the tests). The T for "Turing Test to Tell" is because CAPTCHAs are like Turing Tests . In the original Turing Test, a human judge was allowed to ask a series of questions to two players, one of which was a computer and the other a human. Both players pretended to be the human, and the judge had to distinguish between them. CAPTCHAs are similar to the Turing Test in that they distinguish humans from computers, but they differ in that the judge is now a computer. A CAPTCHA is an Automated Turing Test. We deliberately avoid using the term Reverse Turing Test (or even worse, RTT) because it can be misleading Reverse Turing Test has been used to refer to a form of the Turing Test in which both players pretend to be a computer

Diamond chip

2009-12-28T01:43:00.002-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Electronics without silicon is unbelievable, but it will come true with the evolution of Diamond or Carbon chip. Now a day we are using silicon for the manufacturing of Electronic Chip's. It has many disadvantages when it is used in power electronic applications, such as bulk in size, slow operating speed etc. Carbon, Silicon and Germanium are belonging to the same group in the periodic table. They have four valance electrons in their outer shell. Pure Silicon and Germanium are semiconductors in normal temperature. So in the earlier days they are used widely for the manufacturing of electronic components. But later it is found that Germanium has many disadvantages compared to silicon, such as large reverse current, less stability towards temperature etc so in the industry focused in developing electronic components using silicon wafers

Now research people found that Carbon is more advantages than Silicon. By using carbon as the manufacturing material, we can achieve smaller, faster and stronger chips. They are succeeded in making smaller prototypes of Carbon chip. They invented a major component using carbon that is "CARBON NANOTUBE", which is widely used in most modern microprocessors and it will be a major component in the Diamond chip

WHAT IS IT?
In single definition, Diamond Chip or carbon Chip is an electronic chip manufactured on a Diamond structural Carbon wafer. OR it can be also defined as the electronic component manufactured using carbon as the wafer. The major component using carbon is (cnt) Carbon Nanotube. Carbon Nanotube is a nano dimensional made by using carbon. It has many unique properties.

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?
Pure Diamond structural carbon is non-conducting in nature. In order to make it conducting we have to perform doping process. We are using Boron as the p-type doping Agent and the Nitrogen as the n-type doping agent. The doping process is similar to that in the case of Silicon chip manufacturing. But this process will take more time compared with that of silicon because it is very difficult to diffuse through strongly bonded diamond structure. CNT (Carbon Nanotube) is already a semi conductor.

ADVANTAGES OF DIAMOND CHIP

1 SMALLER COMPONENTS ARE POSSIBLE
As the size of the carbon atom is small compared with that of silicon atom, it is possible to etch very smaller lines through diamond structural carbon. We can realize a transistor whose size is one in hundredth of silicon transistor.
2 IT WORKS AT HIGHER TEMPERATURE
Diamond is very strongly bonded material. It can withstand higher temperatures compared with that of silicon. At very high temperature, crystal structure of the silicon will collapse. But diamond chip can function well in these elevated temperatures. Diamond is very good conductor of heat. So if there is any heat dissipation inside the chip, heat will very quickly transferred to the heat sink or other cooling mechanics.
3 FASTER THAN SILICON CHIP
Carbon chip works faster than silicon chip. Mobility of the electrons inside the doped diamond structural carbon is higher than that of in he silicon structure. As the size of the silicon is higher than that of carbon, the chance of collision of electrons with larger silicon atoms increases. But the carbon atom size is small, so the chance of collision decreases. So the mobility of the charge carriers is higher in doped diamond structural carbon compared with that of silicon.
4 LARGER POWER HANDLING CAPACITY
For power electronics application silicon is used, but it has many disadvantages such as bulk in size, slow operating speed, less efficiency, lower band gap etc at very high voltages silicon structure will collapse. Diamond has a strongly bonded crystal structure. So carbon chip can work under high power environment. It is assumed that a carbon transistor will deliver one watt of power at rate of 100 GHZ. Now days in all power electronic circuits, we are using certain circuits like relays, or MOSFET inter connection circuits (inverter circuits) for the purpose of interconnecting a low power control circuit with a high power circuit .If we are using carbon chip this inter phase is not needed. We can connect high power circuit direct to the diamond chip

Cooperative Linux

2009-12-28T01:43:00.000-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Cooperative Linux utilizes the rather underused concept of a Cooperative Virtual Machine (CVM), in contrast to traditional VMs that are unprivileged and being under the complete control of the host machine. The term Cooperative is used to describe two entities working in parallel, e.g. coroutines [2]. In that sense the most plain description of Cooperative Linux is turning two operating system kernels into two big coroutines. In that mode, each kernel has its own complete CPU context and address space, and each kernel decides when to give control back to its partner.

However, only one of the two kernels has control on the physical hardware, where the other is provided only with virtual hardware abstraction. From this point on in the paper I'll refer to these two kernels as the host operating system, and the guest Linux VM respectively. The host can be every OS kernel that exports basic primitives that provide the Cooperative Linux portable driver to run in CPL0 mode (ring 0) and allocate memory. The special CPL0 approach in Cooperative Linux makes it significantly different than traditional virtualization solutions such as VMware, plex86, Virtual PC, and other methods such as Xen. All of these approaches work by running the guest OS in a less privileged mode than of the host kernel. This approach allowed for the extensive simplification of Cooperative Linux's design and its short earlybeta development cycle which lasted only one month, starting from scratch by modifying the vanilla Linux 2.4.23-pre9 release until reaching to the point where KDE could run.

The only downsides to the CPL0 approach is stability and security. If it's unstable, it has the potential to crash the system. However, measures can be taken, such as cleanly shutting it down on the first internal Oops or panic. Another disadvantage is security. Acquiring root user access on a Cooperative Linux machine can potentially lead to root on the host machine if the attacker loads specially crafted kernel module or uses some very elaborated exploit in case which the Cooperative Linux kernel was compiled without module support.

One Most of the changes in the Cooperative Linux patch are on the i386 tree-the only supported architecture for Cooperative at the time of this writing. The other changes are mostly additions of virtual drivers: cobd (block device), conet (network), and cocon (console). Most of the changes in the i386 tree involve the initialization and setup code. It is a goal of the Cooperative Linux kernel design to remain as close as possible to the standalone i386 kernel, so all changes are localized and minimized as much as possible.

2. USES
Cooperative Linux in its current early state can already provide some of the uses that User Mode Linux[1] provides, such as virtual hosting, kernel development environment, research, and testing of new distributions or buggy software. It also enabled new uses:
Relatively effortless migration path from Windows.
In the process of switching to another OS, there is the choice between installing another computer, dualbooting, or using a virtualization software. The first option costs money, the second is tiresome in terms of operation, but the third can be the most quick and easy method-especially if it's free. This is where Cooperative Linux comes in. It is already used in workplaces to convert Windows users to Linux.
Adding Windows machines to Linux clusters.
The Cooperative Linux patch is minimal and can be easily combined with others such as the MOSIX or Open-MOSIX patches that add clustering capabilities to the kernel. This work in progress allows to addWindows machines to super-computer clusters, where one illustration could tell about a secretary workstation computer that runs Cooperative Linux as a screen saver-when the secretary goes home at the end of the day and leaves the computer unattended, the office's cluster gets more CPU cycles for free.
Running an otherwise-dual-booted Linux system from the other OS.
The Windows port of Cooperative Linux allows it to mount real disk partitions as block devices. Numerous people are using this in order to access, rescue, or just run their Linux system from their ext3 or reiserfs file systems.
Using Linux as a Windows firewall on the same machine.
As a likely competitor to other out-of-the-box Windows firewalls, iptables along with a stripped-down Cooperative Linux system can potentially serve as a network firewall.

Computer Intelligence Applications

2009-12-28T01:41:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

The word 'robot' evokes many different thoughts and images, perhaps conflicting ones. Some may think of a metal humanoid, others of an industrial arm, and yet more may think, unfortunately, of a lost job. In the field of medical robotics, the word robot is just as fuzzily defined, with many different applications. These range from simplistic laboratory robots, to highly complex surgical robots that can either aid a human surgeon or execute operations by themselves.

The idea of robotics in surgery got its start in the military. The idea was to develop technology where a surgeon could perform an operation from a remote location on an injured soldier in the battlefield. This concept has evolved into robotics to enhance surgical performance. In this instance, a robotic arm called Endowrist performs the procedure with the surgeon guiding the robotic arm from a location in or adjacent to the operating room. The surgeon sits at a station peering at a monitor that shows a magnified view of the surgical field. A computer mimics and enhances his hand movements. The computer in this instance makes the movements more precise by dampening even a tiny tremor in the surgeon's hands, which might increase the difficulty in performing procedures under high power microscopic magnification. Examples of such procedures now being performed that were extremely difficult if not impossible before this technology are fallopian tube repair in women, microsurgery on the fetus, and minimally invasive coronary bypass surgery. The Zeus robot made by Computer Motion and a similar device, the Endowrist made by Intuitive Surgical are now in clinical trials for the above-mentioned procedures. Even with the robot to enhance the surgeon's ability, a great deal of practice is required to master the technique.
The reasons behind the interest in the adoption of medical robots are multitudinous. There is a great analogy to be found with the automation involved in the manufacturing industry. That is not to say that the issues of medical robotics are the same, but that the advantages to be gained are similar. Robots provide industry with something that is, to them, more valuable than even the most dedicated and hard-working employee - namely speed, accuracy, repeatability, reliability, and cost-efficiency. A robotic aid, for example, one that holds a viewing instrument for a surgeon, will not become fatigued, for however long it is used. It will position the instrument accurately with no tremor, and it will be able to perform just as well on the 100th occasion as it did on the first. The use of robotics and computers in minimally invasive spine surgery has resulted in more accurate surgical procedures, shortened operative time and fewer complications. It is expected that Computer Enhanced Image Guidance Systems will improve the precision of these procedures as a result of real time 3-D imaging at the time of the surgery. Diagnostic studies will be digitally transmitted to the operating room and projected to monitors to further aid the surgeon in performing the correct procedure with minimal trauma to the patient

SURGICAL NAVIGATION SYSTEM

A surgical navigation system has been built that is currently used regularly for neurosurgical cases such as tumor resection at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The system consists of a portable cart containing a Sun UltraSPARC workstation and the hardware to drive the laser scanner and Flashpoint tracking system (Image Guided Technologies, Boulder, CO). On top of the cart is mounted an articulated extendible arm to which a bar is attached to house the laser scanner and Flashpoint cameras. The three linear Flashpoint cameras are inside the bar. The laser is attached to one end of the bar, and a video camera to the other. The joint between the arm and scanning bar has three degrees-of-freedom to allow easy placement of the bar in desired configurations

Semantic Web

2009-12-28T01:40:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

In the beginning, there was no Web. The Web began as a concept of Tim Berners- Lee, who worked for CERN, the European organization for physics research. CERN's technical staff urgently needed to share documents located on their many computers. Berners-Lee had previously built several systems to do that, and with this background he conceived the World Wide Web.

The design had a relatively simple technical basis, which helped the technology take hold and gain critical mass. Berners-Lee wanted anyone to be able to put information on a computer and make that information accessible to anyone else, anywhere. He hoped that eventually, machines would also be able to use information on the Web. Ultimately, he thought, this would allow powerful and effective human-computer- human collaboration.

What is the Semantic Web?
The word semantic implies meaning. For the Semantic Web, semantic indicates that the meaning of data on the Web can be discovered not just by people, but also by computers. The phrase the Semantic Web stands for a vision in which computers software's as well as people can find, read, understand, and use data over the World Wide Web to accomplish useful goals for users.

Of course, we already use software to accomplish things on the Web, but the distinction lies in the words we use. People surf the Web, buy things on web sites, work their way through search pages, read the labels on hyperlinks, and decide which links to follow. It would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if a person could launch a process that would then proceed on its own, perhaps checking with the person from time to time as the work progressed. The business of the Semantic Web is to bring such capabilities into widespread use

2. MAJOR VISIONS OF SEMANTIC WEB
" Indexing and retrieving information
" Meta data
" Annotation
" The Web as a large, interoperable database
" Machine retrieval of data
" Web-based services
" Discovery of services
" Intelligent software agents

THE SEMANTIC WEB FOUNDATION
The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed.
The World Wide Web has certain design features that make it different from earlier hyperlink experiments. These features will play an important role in the design of the Semantic Web. The Web is not the whole Internet, and it would be possible to develop many capabilities of the Semantic Web using other means besides the World Wide Web. But because the Web is so widespread, and because it's basic operations are relatively simple, most of the technologies being contemplated for the Semantic Web are based on the current Web, sometimes with extensions.
The Web is designed around resources, standardized addressing of those resources (Uniform Resource Locators and Uniform Resource Indicators), and a small, widely understood set of commands. It is also designed to operate over very large and complex networks in a decentralized way. Let us look at each of these design features.

Self Defending Networks

2009-12-28T01:39:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

As the nature of threats to organizations continues to evolve, so must the defense posture of the organizations. In the past, threats from both internal and external sources were relatively slow-moving and easy to defend against. In today's environment, where Internet worms spread across the world in a matter of minutes, security systems - and the network itself - must react instantaneously.

The foundation for a self-defending network is integrated security - security that is native to all aspects of an organization. Every device in the network - from desktops through the LAN and across the WAN - plays a part in securing the networked environment through a globally distributed defense. Such systems help to ensure the privacy of information transmitted and to protect against internal and external threats, while providing corporate administrators with control over access to corporate resources. SDN shows that the approach to security has evolved from a point product approach to this integrated security approach

These self-defending networks will identify threats, react appropriately to the severity level, isolate infected servers and desktops, and reconfigure the network resources in response to an attack. The vision of the Self-Defending Network brings together Secure Connectivity, Threat Defense and Trust and Identity Management System with the capability of infection containment and rouge device isolation in a single solution.

SELF DEFENDING NETWORKS
To defend their networks, IT professionals need to be aware of the new nature of security threats, which includes the following:
Shift from internal to external attacks Before 1999, when key applications ran on minicomputers and mainframes, threats typically were perpetrated by internal users with privileges. Between 1999 and 2002, reports of external events rose 250 percent, according to CERT.
Shorter windows to react. When attacks homed in on individual computers or networks, companies had more time to understand the threat. Now that viruses can propagate worldwide in 10 minutes, that "luxury" is largely gone. Antivirus solutions are still essential but are not enough: by the time the signature has been identified, it is too late. With self-propagation, companies need network technology that can autonomously take action against threats.
More difficult threat detection. Attackers are getting smarter. They used to attack the network, and now they attack the application or embed the attack in the data itself, which makes detection more difficult.An attack at the network layer, for example, can be detected by looking at the header information. But an attack embedded in a text file or attachment can only be detected by looking at the actual payload of the packet--something a typical firewall doesn't do.The burden of threat detection is shifting from the firewall to the access control server and intrusion detection system.Rather than single-point solutions, companies need holistic solutions.
A lowered bar for hackers. Finally, a proliferation of easy-to-use hackers' tools and scripts has made hacking available to the less technically-literate. The advent of 'point-and-click' hacking means the attacker doesn't have to know what's going on under the hood in order to do damage.
These trends in security are what have lead to the advent of SDNs or Self Defending Networks as the latest verson in security control.

Rover Technology

2009-12-28T01:38:00.003-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Rover Technology adds a user's location to other dimensions of system awareness, such as time, user preferences, and client device capabilities. The software architecture of Rover systems is designed to scale to large user populations.
Consider a group touring the museums in Washington, D.C. The group arrives at a registration point, where each person receives a handheld device with audio, video, and wireless communication capabilities. an off-the-shelf PDA available in the market today. A wireless-based system tracks the location of these devices and presents relevant information about displayed objects as the user moves through the museum. Users can query their devices for maps and optimal routes to objects of interest. They can also use the devices to reserve and purchase tickets to museum events later in the day. The group leader can send messages to coordinate group activities.

The part of this system that automatically tailors information and services to a mobile user's location is the basis for location-aware computing. This computing paradigm augments the more traditional dimensions of system awareness, such as time-, user-, and device-awareness. All the technology components to realize location-aware computing are available in the marketplace today. What has hindered the widespread deployment of location-based systems is the lack of an integration architecture that scales with user populations.

ROVER ARCHITECTURE
Rover technology tracks the location of system users and dynamically configures application-level information to different link-layer technologies and client-device capabilities. A Rover system represents a single domain of administrative control, managed and moderated by a Rover controller. Figure 1_ shows a large application domain partitioned into multiple administrative domains, each with its own Rover system - much like the Internet's Domain Name System" 2

End users interact with the system through Rover client devices- typically wireless handheld units with varying capabilities for processing, memory and storage, graphics and display, and network interfaces. Rover maintains a profile for each device, identifying its capabilities and configuring content accordingly. Rover also maintains end-user profiles, defining specific user interests and serving content tailored to them.
A wireless access infrastructure provides connectivity to the Rover clients. In the current implementation, we have defined a technique to determine location based on certain properties of the wireless access infrastructure. Although Rover can leverage such properties of specific air interfaces,1 its location management technique is not tied to a particular wireless technology. Moreover, different wireless interfaces can coexist in a single Rover system or in different domains of a multi-Rover system. Software radio technology3 offers a way to integrate the different interfaces into a single device. This would allow the device to easily roam between various Rover systems, each with different wireless access technologies.
A server system implements and manages Rover's end-user services. The server system consists of five components:
The Rover controller is the system's "brain." It manages the different services that Rover clients request, scheduling and filtering the content according to the current location and the user and device profiles.
The location server is a dedicated unit that manages the client device location services within the Rover system. Alternatively, applications can use an externally available location service, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS).
The streaming-media unit manages audio and video content streamed to clients. Many of today's off-the-shelf streaming-media units can be integrated with the Rover system.

Bit Torrent

2009-12-28T01:38:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker bandwidth. The key philosophy of BitTorrent is that users should upload (transmit outbound) at the same time they are downloading (receiving inbound.) In this manner, network bandwidth is utilized as efficiently as possible. BitTorrent is designed to work better as the number of people interested in a certain file increases, in contrast to other file transfer protocols.

One analogy to describe this process might be to visualize a group of people sitting at a table. Each person at the table can both talk and listen to any other person at the table. These people are each trying to get a complete copy of a book. Person A announces that he has pages 1-10, 23, 42-50, and 75. Persons C, D, and E are each missing some of those pages that A has, and so they coordinate such that A gives them each copies of the pages he has that they are missing. Person B then announces that she has pages 11-22, 31-37, and 63-70. Persons A, D, and E tell B they would like some of her pages, so she gives them copies of the pages that she has.
The process continues around the table until everyone has announced what they have. The people at the table coordinate to swap parts of this book until everyone has everything. There is also another person at the table, who we will call 'S'. This person has a complete copy of the book, and so does not need anything sent to him. He responds with pages that no one else in the group has. At first, when everyone has just arrived, they all must talk to him to get their first set of pages. However, the people are smart enough to not all get the same pages from him. After a short while, they all have most of the book amongst themselves, even if no one person has the whole thing. In this manner, this one person can share a book that he has with many other people, without having to give a full copy to everyone that is interested. He can instead give out different parts to different people, and they will be able to share it amongst themselves. This person who we have referred to as 'S' is called a seed in the terminology of BitTorrent.
WHAT BITTORRENT DOES?
When a file is made available using HTTP, all upload cost is placed on the hosting machine. With BitTorrent, when multiple people are downloading the same file at the same time, they upload pieces of the file to each other. This redistributes the cost of upload to downloaders, (where it is often not even metered), thus making hosting a file with a potentially unlimited number of downloaders affordable. Researchers have attempted to find practical techniques to do this before. It has not been previously deployed on a large scale because the logistical and robustness problems are quite difficult. Simply figuring out which peers have what parts of the file and where they should be sent is difficult to do without incurring a huge overhead. In addition, real deployments experience very high churn rates. Peers rarely connect for more than a few hours, and frequently for only a few minutes. Finally, there is a general problem of fairness. The total download rate across all downloaders must, of mathematical necessity, be equal to the total upload rate. The strategy for allocating upload that seems most likely to make peers happy with their download rates is to make each peer's download rate be proportional to their upload rate. In practice it's very difficult to keep peer download rates from sometimes dropping to zero by chance, much less make upload and download rates be correlated.
BitTorrent Interface
BitTorrent's interface is almost the simplest possible. Users launch it by clicking on a hyperlink to the file they wish to download, and are given a standard "Save As" dialog, followed by a download progress dialog that is mostly notable for having an upload rate in addition to a download rate. This extreme ease of use has contributed greatly to BitTorrent's adoption, and may even be more important than, although it certainly complements, the performance and cost redistribution features

Compositional Adaptation

2009-12-28T01:37:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Interest in adaptive computing systems has increased dramatically in the past few years, and a variety of techniques now allow software to adapt dynamically to its environment. Two revolutions in the computing field are driving this development. First is the emergence of ubiquitous computing, which focuses on dissolving traditional boundaries for how, when, and where humans and computers interact. For example, mobile computing devices must adapt to variable conditions on wireless networks and conserve limited battery life. Second is the growing demand for autonomic computing, which focuses on developing systems that can manage and protect themselves with only high-level human guidance. This capability is especially important to systems such as financial networks and power grids that must survive hardware component failures and security attacks.

There are two general approaches to implementing Software adaptation. Parameter adaptation modifies program variables that determine behavior. The Internet's Transmission Control Protocol is an often-cited example: TCP adjusts its behavior by changing values that control window management and retransmissions in response to apparent network congestion. But parameter adaptation has an inherent weakness. It does not allow new algorithms and components to be added to an application after the original design and construction. It can tune parameters or direct an application to use a different existing strategy, but it cannot adopt new strategies. By contrast, compositional adaptation exchanges algorithmic or structural system components with others that improve a program's fit to its current environment. With compositional adaptation, an application can adopt new algorithms for addressing concerns that were unforeseen during development. This flexibility supports more than simple tuning of program variables or strategy selection. It enables dynamic recomposition of the software during execution-for example, to switch program components in and out of a memory-limited device or to add new behavior to deployed systems.

What is compositional adaptation?
Compositional adaptation enables software to modify its structure and behavior dynamically in response to changes in its execution environment. The complexity comes from three dimensions. First, there are more users. Now everyone, not just trained professionals, uses software. Second, there are more systems and more interactions among them. Third, there are more resources and goals.

Compositional adaptation exchanges algorithmic or structural system components with others that improve a program are fit to its current environment. It enables dynamic recomposition of the software during execution, which means it provides switching of program components in and out of a memory-limited device or to add new behavior to deployed systems.

We can classify opportunities for adaptivity into three categories:
Application-level adaptivity: A variety of mathematical models may be available to describe the science of a given problem. Some of these models may be more accurate than others but they may also have higher computational and storage requirements. A simulation code may find it advantageous to switch adaptively between such models to trade off accuracy for computational time and resources. For example, consider a chemically-reacting-flow simulation of an internal-combustion engine. Chemical reaction between the fuel and air occurs in both the intake stroke and the power stroke, but the rate of reaction during the intake stroke is so slow that the simulation can ignore the reaction during this stroke, modeling it only in the power stroke. This reduces computational requirements without affecting the accuracy of results.

Algorithm-level adaptivity: There may be many algorithms for implementing a desired functionality, and it may be advantageous to switch between algorithms to adapt to resource availability or to properties of the desired output. For example, an out-of-core sorting algorithm may use a divide-and-conquer style algorithm like merge-sort when the array size is large, and switch to an iterative, in-place sorting algorithm like insertion-sort once the size of the sub-array to be sorted becomes small enough to fit into cache. The divide-and-conquer algorithm performs better on a memory hierarchy but once the sub-array is small enough, the simple iterative algorithm is more efficient because it has lower recursive overhead.

System-level adaptivity: Fault-tolerant computers adapt to hardware failure to ensure system survival. Portable devices can change quality of service (QoS) to adapt to available resources; for example, an Internet device can display color and images when a high bandwidth connection is available, but switch to black-and-white and suppress images when bandwidth is insufficient.

Halo

2009-12-28T01:36:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the slow growth of infrastructure for transacting multimedia messages (those integrating voice, text, sound, images, and video) have stimulated an intense race to deploy non-traditional infrastructure to serve businesses and consumers at affordable prices. The game is new and the playing field is more level than ever before. Opportunities exist for entrepreneurs to challenge the market dominance enjoyed for years by incumbents. New types of service providers will emerge.

An electronic "information fabric" of a quilted character-including space, atmospheric, and terrestrial data communications layers-will emerge that promises to someday link every digital information device on the planet. Packet-switched data networks will meld with connection-oriented telephony networks. Communications infrastructures will be shared more efficiently among users to offer dramatic reductions in cost and large increases of effective data rates. An era of inexpensive bandwidth has begun which will transform the nature of commerce.

The convergence of innovative technologies and manufacturing capabilities affecting aviation, millimeter wave wireless, and multi-media communications industries enables Angel Technologies Corporation and its partners to pursue new wireless broadband communications services. The HALO™ Network will offer ubiquitous access to any subscriber within a "super metropolitan area" from an aircraft operating at high altitude. The aircraft will serve as the hub of the HALO™ Network serving tens to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Each subscriber will be able to communicate at multi-megabit per second data rates through a simple-to-install subscriber unit. The HALO™ Network will be steadily evolved at a pace with the emergence of data communications technology world-wide. The HALO™ Network will be a universal wireless communications network solution. It will be deployed globally on a city-by-city basis.

Wireless Broadband Communications Market
There are various facts that show the strong interest in wireless communications in the United States:
" 50 million subscribers to wireless telephone service
" 28 million dollars annual revenue for wireless services
" 38,000 cell sites with 37 billion dollars cumulative capital investment
" 40% annual growth in customers
" 25 million personal computers sold each year
" 50 million PC users with Internet access
"The demand for Internet services is exploding and this creates a strong demand for broadband, high data rate service. It is expected that there will soon be a worldwide demand for Internet service in the hundreds of millions". (Lou Gerstner, IBM, April 1997) The growth in use of the World Wide Web and electronic commerce will stimulate demand for broadband services.

Broadband Wireless Metropolitan Area NetworkAn airplane specially designed for high altitude flight with a payload capacity of approximately one ton is being developed for commercial wireless services. It will circle at high altitudes for extended periods of time and it will serve as a stable platform from which broadband communications services will be offered. The High Altitude Long Operation (HALO™) Aircraft will maintain station at an altitude of 52 to 60 thousand feet by flying in a circle with a diameter of about 5 to 8 nautical miles. Three successive shifts on station of 8 hours each can provide continuous coverage of an area for 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Such a system can provide broadband multimedia communications to the general public.

Real Time Application Interface

2009-12-28T01:34:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

A real time system can be defined as a "system capable of guaranteeing timing requirements of the processes under its control".
The RTAI plug-in should help Linux to fulfill some real time constraints (few milliseconds deadline, no event loss). It is based on a RTHAL: Real Time Hardware Abstraction Layer. This concept is also known in Windows NT.
The HAL exports some Linux data & functions close related to HW. RTAI modifies them to get control over the HW platform. That allows RTAI real time tasks to run concurrently with Linux processes. The HAL defines a clear I/F between RTAI & Linux.
1.1 OS requirements summary
Generally speaking, we would like Software components to rely on a platform offering both real time support and "standard" general purpose API.
The Platform needs a real-time executive (small footprint, deadline fulfillment, ... ) and a comprehensive OS for Applications ( NT, UNIX, Linux, ... ).
The market place already offers products for:
" NT OS: real time extensions like Radisys' Intime or VenturCom's RTX
" UNIX : micro kernel based technologies natively supporting real time and rich UNIX like API's.

The Linux OS exports the same application service level but suffers from a lack of real time support. Fortunately some options are foreseen:
" Native real time support in Linux : does not seem the Main stream of Linux.
" Linux Modifications for real time constraints (KURT): no outstanding background.
" Linux and real time sharing resources ( L4Linux) : experimental project.
" Linux as a task of a real time executive: RTLinux, RTAI, eCos, Nucleus, ...
"Linux as a task of a real time executive" is maturing today. RTLinux is a better known solution. RTAI , now requires a closer look and justifies this presentation.
1.2 A little bit of ... Linux kernel core
Linux, like other OS, offers to the Applications at least the following services:
" HW management layer dealing with event polling or Processor/peripheral Interrupts
" Scheduler classes dealing with process activation, priorities, time slice, soft real-time
" Communications means among Applications (at least FIFO).
" Hardware Interrupts are served by handlers. On Intel machine the handler addresses are store in the Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT)...but it is still possible to pool interrupt peripherals.
The Linux current releases offer some soft-real time capabilities, but neither guaranties hard deadline nor prevents event loss.
1.3 A little bit of ... RTAI
RTAI is such a small proprietary (see note 1) executive, still under development at DIAMP (Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale del Politecnico di Milano) by Paolo Mantegazza's team . It offers some services related to:
" HW management layer dealing with peripherals
" Scheduler classes dealing with tasks, priorities, hard real-time
" Communications means among tasks & processes (at least FIFO).
RTAI real time entities are simple mono-thread tasks whereas Linux applications are full features (mono or multi threads) processes. RTAI is basically an Interrupt dispatcher. The Intel processor interrupts (0..31) are still managed by Linux. RTAI mainly traps the peripherals ISA IT's and if necessary re-routes them to Linux (e.g.: disk IT). It is also able to manage other kind of ITs.
It supports, like Linux, both SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) and UP (Uni-Processor) Architecture. From a real time point of view, it is quite similar to RTLinux.

Whereas RTLinux is an intrusive modification of the kernel, RTAI uses the concept of HAL to get information from Linux and to trap some fundamental functions.
This HAL provides few dependencies to Linux Kernel. This leads to:
" Simple adaptation in Linux Kernel
" Easy RTAI port from version to version of Linux
" Easier use of other Oses instead of RTAI

Rain Technology

2009-12-28T01:33:00.001-08:00

NTRODUCTION

Rainfinity's technology originated in a research project at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The name of the original research project was RAIN, which stands for Reliable Array of Independent Nodes. The goal of the RAIN project was to identify key software building blocks for creating reliable distributed applications using off-the-shelf hardware. The focus of the research was on high-performance, fault-tolerant and portable clustering technology for space-borne computing. Two important assumptions were made, and these two assumptions reflect the differentiations between RAIN and a number of existing solutions both in the industry and in academia:

1. The most general share-nothing model is assumed. There is no shared storage accessible from all computing nodes. The only way for the computing nodes to share state is to communicate via a network. This differentiates RAIN technology from existing back-end server clustering solutions such as SUNcluster, HP MC Serviceguard or Microsoft Cluster Server.
2. The distributed application is not an isolated system. The distributed protocols interact closely with existing networking protocols so that a RAIN cluster is able to interact with the environment. Specifically, technological modules were created to handle high-volume network-based transactions. This differentiates it from traditional distributed computing projects such as Beowulf.
In short, the RAIN project intended to marry distributed computing with networking protocols. It became obvious that RAIN technology was well-suited for Internet applications. During the RAIN project, key components were built to fulfill this vision. A patent was filed and granted for the RAIN technology. Rainfinity was spun off from Caltech in 1998, and the company has exclusive intellectual property rights to the RAIN technology. After the formation of the company, the RAIN technology has been further augmented, and additional patents have been filed.
The guiding concepts that shaped the architecture are as follows:
1. Network Applications

The architecture goals for clustering data network applications are different from clustering data storage applications. Similar goals apply in the telecom environment that provides the Internet backbone infrastructure, due to the nature of applications and services being clustered.
2. Shared-Nothing
The shared-storage cluster is the most widely used for database and application servers that store persistent data on disks. This type of cluster typically focuses on the availability of the database or application service, rather than performance. Recovery from failover is generally slow, because restoring application access to disk-based data takes minutes or longer, not seconds. Telecom servers deployed at the edge of the network are often diskless, keeping data in memory for performance reasons, and tolerate low failover time. Therefore, a new type of share-nothing cluster with rapid failure detection and recovery is required. The only way for the shared-nothing cluster to share is to communicate via the network.
3. Scalability
While the high-availability cluster focuses on recovery from unplanned and planned downtimes, this new type of cluster must also be able to maximize I/O performance by load balancing across multiple computing nodes. Linear scalability with network throughput is important. In order to maximize the total throughput, load load-balancing decisions must be made dynamically by measuring the current capacity of each computing node in real-time. Static hashing does not guarantee
an even distribution of traffic.
4. Peer-to-Peer
A dispatcher-based, master-slave cluster architecture suffers from scalability by introducing a potential bottleneck. A peer-to-peer cluster architecture is more suitable for latency-sensitive data network applications processing shortlived sessions. A hybrid architecture should be considered to offset the need for more control over resource management. For example, a cluster can assign multiple authoritative computing nodes that process traffic in the round-robin order for each network interface that is clustered to reduce the overhead of traffic forwarding

Biological Computing

2009-12-28T01:32:00.001-08:00

INTRODUCTION

Biological computers have emerged as an interdisciplinary field that draws together molecular biology, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. The highly predictable hybridization chemistry of DNA, the ability to completely control the length and content of oligonucleotides, and the wealth of enzymes available for modification of the DNA, make the use of nucleic acids an attractive candidate for all of these nanoscale applications

A 'DNA computer' has been used for the first time to find the only correct answer from over a million possible solutions to a computational problem. Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California in the US and colleagues used different strands of DNA to represent the 20 variables in their problem, which could be the most complex task ever solved without a conventional computer. The researchers believe that the complexity of the structure of biological molecules could allow DNA computers to outperform their electronic counterparts in future.
Scientists have previously used DNA computers to crack computational problems with up to nine variables, which involves selecting the correct answer from 512 possible solutions. But now Adleman's team has shown that a similar technique can solve a problem with 20 variables, which has 220 - or 1 048 576 - possible solutions.
Adleman and colleagues chose an 'exponential time' problem, in which each extra variable doubles the amount of computation needed. This is known as an NP-complete problem, and is notoriously difficult to solve for a large number of variables. Other NP-complete problems include the 'travelling salesman' problem - in which a salesman has to find the shortest route between a number of cities - and the calculation of interactions between many atoms or molecules.
Adleman and co-workers expressed their problem as a string of 24 'clauses', each of which specified a certain combination of 'true' and 'false' for three of the 20 variables. The team then assigned two short strands of specially encoded DNA to all 20 variables, representing 'true' and 'false' for each one.
In the experiment, each of the 24 clauses is represented by a gel-filled glass cell. The strands of DNA corresponding to the variables - and their 'true' or 'false' state - in each clause were then placed in the cells.
Each of the possible 1,048,576 solutions were then represented by much longer strands of specially encoded DNA, which Adleman's team added to the first cell. If a long strand had a 'subsequence' that complemented all three short strands, it bound to them. But otherwise it passed through the cell.
To move on to the second clause of the formula, a fresh set of long strands was sent into the second cell, which trapped any long strand with a 'subsequence' complementary to all three of its short strands. This process was repeated until a complete set of long strands had been added to all 24 cells, corresponding to the 24 clauses. The long strands captured in the cells were collected at the end of the experiment, and these represented the solution to the problem.
THE WORLD'S SMALLEST COMPUTER
The world's smallest computer (around a trillion can fit in a drop of water) might one day go on record again as the tiniest medical kit. Made entirely of biological molecules, this computer was successfully programmed to identify - in a test tube - changes in the balance of molecules in the body that indicate the presence of certain cancers, to diagnose the type of cancer, and to react by producing a drug molecule to fight the cancer cells.

DOCTOR IN A CELL
In previous biological computers produced input, output and "software" are all composed of DNA, the material of genes, while DNA-manipulating enzymes are used as "hardware." The newest version's input apparatus is designed to assess concentrations of specific RNA molecules, which may be overproduced or under produced, depending on the type of cancer. Using pre-programmed medical knowledge, the computer then makes its diagnosis based on the detected RNA levels. In response to a cancer diagnosis, the output unit of the computer can initiate the controlled release of a single-stranded DNA molecule that is known to interfere with the cancer cell's activities, causing it to self-destruct.

3D Searching

2009-12-28T01:31:00.000-08:00

Definition

From computer-aided design (CAD) drawings of complex engineering parts to digital representations of proteins and complex molecules, an increasing amount of 3D information is making its way onto the Web and into corporate databases.

Because of this, users need ways to store, index, and search this information. Typical Web-searching approaches, such as Google's, can't do this. Even for 2D images, they generally search only the textual parts of a file, noted Greg Notess, editor of the online Search Engine Showdown newsletter.

However, researchers at universities such as Purdue and Princeton have begun developing search engines that can mine catalogs of 3D objects, such as airplane parts, by looking for physical, not textual, attributes. Users formulate a query by using a drawing application to sketch what they are looking for or by selecting a similar object from a catalog of images. The search engine then finds the items they want. The company must make it again, wasting valuable time and money

3D SEARCHING

Advances in computing power combined with interactive modeling software, which lets users create images as queries for searches, have made 3Dsearch technology possible.Methodology used involves the following steps
" Query formulation
" Search process
" Search result

QUERY FORMULATION
True 3D search systems offer two principal ways to formulate a query: Users can select objects from a catalog of images based on product groupings, such as gears or sofas; or they can utilize a drawing program to create a picture of the object they are looking for. or example, Princeton's 3D search engine uses an application to let users draw a 2D or 3D representation of the object they want to find.

The above picture shows the query interface of a 3D search system.

SEARCH PROCESS
The 3D-search system uses algorithms to convert the selected or drawn image-based query into a mathematical model that describes the features of the object being sought. This converts drawings and objects into a form that computers can work with. The search system then compares the mathematical description of the drawn or selected object to those of 3D objects stored in a database, looking for similarities in the described features.
The key to the way computer programs look for 3D objects is the voxel (volume pixel). A voxel is a set of graphical data-such as position, color, and density-that defines the smallest cubeshaped building block of a 3D image. Computers can display 3D images only in two dimensions. To do this, 3D rendering software takes an object and slices it into 2D cross sections. The cross sections consist of pixels (picture elements), which are single points in a 2D image. To render the 3D image on a 2D screen, the computer determines how to display the 2D cross sections stacked on top of each other, using the applicable interpixel and interslice distances to position them properly. The computer interpolates data to fill in interslice gaps and create a solid image.

Fuel Cell

2009-12-28T01:03:00.000-08:00

A fuel cell is a device that uses hydrogen (or hydrogen-rich fuel) and oxygen to create electricity by an electrochemical process. If pure hydrogen is used as a fuel, fuel cells emit only heat and water as a by-product. Several fuel cell types are under development, and they have a variety of potential applications. Fuel cells are being developed to power passenger vehicles, commercial buildings, homes, and even small devices such as laptop computers.
What Is A Fuel Cell?
In principle, a fuel cell operates like a battery. Unlike a battery, a fuel cell does not run down or require recharging. It will produce energy in the form of electricity and heat as long as fuel is supplied.
A fuel cell consists of two electrodes sandwiched around an electrolyte. Oxygen passes over one electrode and hydrogen over the other, generating electricity, water and heat.
Hydrogen fuel is fed into the "anode" of the fuel cell. Oxygen (or air) enters the fuel cell through the cathode. Encouraged by a catalyst, the hydrogen atom splits into a proton and an electron, which take different paths to the cathode. The proton passes through the electrolyte. The electrons create a separate current that can be utilized before they return to the cathode, to be reunited with the hydrogen and oxygen in a molecule of water.

Formula One Car!!!

2009-12-28T01:01:00.001-08:00

Car racing is one of the most technologically advanced sports in the world today. Race Cars are the most sophisticated vehicles that we see in common use. It features exotic, high-speed, open-wheel cars racing all around the world. The racing teams have to create cars that are flexible enough to run under all conditions. This level of diversity makes a season of F1 car racing incredibly exciting. The teams have to completely revise the aerodynamic package, the suspension settings, and lots of other parameters on their cars for each race, and the drivers have to be extremely agile to handle all of the different conditions they face. Their carbon fiber bodies, incredible engines, advanced aerodynamics and intelligent electronics make each car a high-speed research lab. A F1 Car runs at speeds up to 240 mph, the driver experiences G-forces and copes with incoming data so quickly that it makes Car driving one of the most demanding professions in the sporting world. F1 car is an amazing machine that pushes the physical limitations of automotive engineering. On the track, the driver shows off his professional skills by directing around an oval track at speeds

Formula One Grand Prix racing is a glamorous sport where a fraction of a second can mean the difference between bursting open the bubbly and struggling to get sponsors for the next season's competition. To gain those extra milliseconds, all the top racing teams have turned to increasingly sophisticated network technology.

Much more money is spent in F1 these days. This results highest tech cars. The teams are huge and they often fabricate their entire racers. F1's audience has grown tremendously throughout the rest of the world. .

In an average street car equipped with air bags and seatbelts, occupants are protected during 35-mph crashes into a concrete barrier. But at 180 mph, both the car and the driver have more than 25 times more energy. All of this energy has to be absorbed in order to bring the car to a stop. This is an incredible challenge, but the cars usually handle it surprisingly well

F1 Car driving is a demanding sport that requires precision, incredibly fast reflexes and endurance from the driver. A driver's heart rate typically averages 160 beats per minute throughout the entire race. During a 5-G turn, a driver's arm -- which normally weighs perhaps 20 pounds -- weighs the equivalent of 100 pounds. One thing that the G forces require is constant training in the weight room. Drivers work especially on muscles in the neck, shoulders, arms and torso so that they have the strength to work against the Gs. Drivers also work a great deal on stamina, because they have to be able to perform throughout a three-hour race without rest. One thing that is known about F1 Car drivers is that they have extremely quick reflexes and reaction times compared to the norm. They also have extremely good levels of concentration and long attention spans. Training, both on and off the track, can further develop these skills.

Cryptography

2009-12-05T20:18:00.000-08:00

The earliest forms of secret writing required little more than local pen and paper analogs, as most people could not read. More literacy, or literate opponents, required actual cryptography. The main classical cipher types are transposition ciphers, which rearrange the order of letters in a message (e.g., 'hello world' becomes 'ehlol owrdl' in a trivially simple rearrangement scheme), and substitution ciphers, which systematically replace letters or groups of letters with other letters or groups of letters (e.g., 'fly at once' becomes 'gmz bu podf' by replacing each letter with the one following it in the Latin alphabet). Simple versions of either offered little confidentiality from enterprising opponents, and still don't. An early substitution cipher was the Caesar cipher, in which each letter in the plaintext was replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions further down the alphabet. It was named after Julius Caesar who is reported to have used it, with a shift of 3, to communicate with his generals during his military campaigns, just like EXCESS-3 code in boolean algebra. There is record of several early Hebrew ciphers as well.

The Ancient Greek scytale (rhymes with Italy), probably much like this modern reconstruction, may have been one of the earliest devices used to implement a cipher.

The earliest known use of cryptography is some carved ciphertext on stone in Egypt (ca 1900 BCE), but this may have been done for the amusement of literate observers. The next oldest is bakery recipes from Mesopotamia.

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) Alpha 1 Releasing On Dec 10

2009-12-05T20:13:00.001-08:00

The next version of Ubuntu will be out sometime in April next year. But for those of you who can't wait any more, the Alpha version is all set for release on 10 December 2009. You can download the software and help the Ubuntu team remove the glitches and improve the latest version. If you are planning to help with the testing, start syncing your Lucid images today. To sync your images, you can use the rsync URLS at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com, according to Ubuntugeek.com.

Different PDC (Professional Developers Conference)

2009-12-02T02:00:00.000-08:00

It ended up being a somewhat different PDC (Professional Developers Conference) than we had anticipated, and even, to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles last week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.

We'll start our conference wrap-up with a look at the flashpoints (remind me to call Score Productions for a jingle to go with that) we talked about at the beginning of the week, and we'll follow up with the topic that crept in under the radar when we weren't expecting.

Making up for UAC, or, Making Windows 7 Seem Less Like Vista

This was absolutely the theme of "Day 0," which featured the day-long workshops. At this point, Windows engineers have absolutely no problem with the notion of disowning Vista, disavowing it, even though it was technically a stairstep toward making Windows 7 possible. But it is now perfectly permissible to acknowledge the performance hardships Vista faced and let go of the past in order to move forward.

Mark Russinovich leads the way in this department, and the fact that he's appreciated leads others to follow suit. During his annual talk on "Kernel Improvements" -- which he expanded this year to a two-parter -- Russinovich spoke about the way that the timing of Windows' response to user interactions was adjusted to give the user more reassurance that something was happening, rather than the sinking suspicion that nothing was happening.

In an explanation of a user telemetry service he helped get off the ground called "PerfTrack," he told attendees, "We went through and found roughly 300 places in the system where you interact with something, and there's a beginning and then an end where you go, 'Okay, that's done,' and optimized the performance of those user-visible interactions. We instrumented those begin-and-ends with data points, which collects timing information and sends that up to a Web service ... and for each one of these interactions, we define what's considered 'great' performance, what's considered 'OK' performance, and what's considered Vista -- I mean, uh, 'bad,'" he explained, with a little grin afterward that appeared borrowed from Jay Leno. "And then if we end up in that 'OK' or 'bad,' what we do is, selectively turn on more instrumentation using ETW [Event Tracing for Windows] -- instrumentation of file accesses, registry activity, context switches, page faults -- and then we collect that information from a sampling of customer machines that are showing that kind of behavior.

"We feed that back to the product teams, they go analyze those and figure out, 'Why is their component sluggish in those scenarios?' and optimize that."

One of the results he demonstrated, shown here in this pair of charts, shows the number of user-reported instances of Start menu lag time leaning more toward the quick side than the slow side of the chart, between two builds of the Windows 7 beta.

The fact that performance matters was one of the key themes of PDC 2009, and attendees greeted that message with enthusiasm -- or, maybe more accurately, with appreciation that the company had finally received the message. But there are still lessons to be learned here that can be applied to other product areas, if anybody out there is listening.

Why Windows Azure?

The major theme of Day 1 was the ability to scale services up -- scaling local services up to the data center, and data center services up (or down, depending on your application) to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) cloud provider, Windows Azure.

Last year at this time, Microsoft went to bat with essentially nothing -- no real definition of an Azure application, no clear understanding of who the customers will be, and absolutely no clue as to the business model. But now we know that services will be rendered on a utility basis like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) EC2, and we have a much clearer concept of the customer groups Azure will address. One is the small business that has never before considered data center applications ; another is the class of customer that needs to plan for exceptional capacity traffic during unusual situations, but can't afford to maintain that high capacity 24/7; and the third is the big customer building a new class of application that has never before been considered on any platform.

Channeling customers to Microsoft's cloud will be "Dallas," its code name for large-capacity data bank services typically open for mining by the general public, which should eventually be given a typically Microsoft-sounding name; and AppFabric, the company's new mix-and-match component applications system built on the IIS 7 platform. But in neither of these cases is Microsoft particularly inventing the wheel, and as I heard from a plurality of attendees this week, Microsoft's entering another crowded field of contenders (including SalesForce.com and IBM) where competition has already been saturated. Success in this venture is by no means assured.

What Will Office Web Apps Do?

Less than we once thought, apparently. The extent to which you can view "rich content" created with real Office applications, in Office Web Apps, apparently remains strong. But since O Web will be free to everyone (for sensible reasons), the ability to create the same depth of rich content online will be artificially limited.

Since many businesses utilize Excel as a type of database, or as a window into their databases elsewhere, this means the utility of that product online will be most restricted. Word may suffer the least, however, as the need to compose respectable looking correspondence from anywhere one happens to be is a pressing need that Word Web App can easily fulfill.

Making the Case for Office 2010

We expected Microsoft Office to be the star of Wednesday's keynote, with demos of new functionality that, if it wasn't major, would at least have been advertised as fresh and new. It was not to be. Although we did have an opportunity to speak with an Office product manager, the message Microsoft was sending this year was very different.

In the past, folks used to ask why a consumer applications suite was being prominently featured at a conference geared towards developers. The answer from Microsoft typically was, because Office is a platform, and developers build to platforms. The message Microsoft sent this year was that Office was not a platform. And that's a problem, because if that's true, there's no conference for Office. The excuse for the lack of Windows Mobile news was that it was a topic for MIX, the conference for Web developers set for next spring in Las Vegas.

So does Office wait for TechEd? All of a sudden, this major profit center seems homeless.

There was a little buzz devoted to something called the "Outlook Social Connector" plug-in, a new tool for integrating individuals' social media contacts within Office's communications app. Deals with social network hosts such as LinkedIn were announced. In one respect, that does address consumer concerns; in another, it's a little ironic. Here we have a situation where people take the time to broadcast their identities over multiple social services on purposes as a way to spread out ... only to discover the need for a kind of "identity vacuum" to pull them back in again to one cohesive chord.

What we did see from the Office 2010 public beta (released Monday, then released Tuesday, then "launched" Wednesday) let us know that if Microsoft truly is listening to its customers and acting on their telemetry, then the word they're saying most often must be, "Whoa!"

During the Technical Preview phase, Microsoft unveiled its BackStage concept -- a way of organizing all the preparatory content of an application, such as print preview and preferences, in a more dimly-lit, cooler arrangement, making you almost want to whisper when you talk about it. The screenshot above shows BackStage in the Excel 2010 Technical Preview.

This is the same BackStage in Excel 2010 Beta 1. It's more conservative in several obvious regards, including the staging. But notice also something very important: The "Office button," which premiered in Office 2007 and which flattened down to become an icon menu tab in the Tech Preview, has now returned to being the File menu. If customers have been asking, "Where's File/Save?" then you have to wonder when they started asking, and how long they've been at it.

The new flavor of Visual Studio is already the old flavor. When you're dealing with a development platform unto itself, the beta version is often -- unofficially but certainly -- the working edition for many developers, and VS 2010 is already on Beta 2 now. More than one session presenter this week asked for shows of hands as to how many folks were already using Beta 2 as their development platform -- and in each case, a majority of everyone's hands were raised.

Will virtualization envelop Windows? Hell if I know. One of the hottest topics of prior conferences was something of a dud this year, and that's not good for a company that is actually behind in its ability to virtualize 64-bit platforms on 32-bit systems -- a feature Sun's VirtualBox and VMware (NYSE: VMW) already provide. But once the problem of absence of live migration in Hyper-V was kicked, virtualization took something of a breather this year, though it wasn't off the radar altogether.

The Push Toward Online Identity

Indeed, this ended up being the wildcard topic of the show. The principal security and architectural problem faced not only by developers but administrators as well, is enabling a secure single sign-on platform for local and remote applications. With multiple vendors supporting even more authentication protocols than there are vendors -- or so it appears -- this goal would seem impossible to achieve.

Microsoft is working to address this in its upcoming Windows Identity Foundation library, which will require the push of Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 -- a way to get AD out there to servers that aren't Windows. But just getting all hosted apps vendors on-board with AD is a colossal task, made more difficult by a "competitive" spirit among application and security vendors that works against the very spirit of communication and federation they need to accomplish the goal of common identity. We will be talking more about this in the coming days, because we learned a lot about this from PDC.

Now, there's something I'm missing. Yes, Scott Guthrie, I know I missed you in my list of headliners ... and I'm sorry, it was inadvertent, and I apologize. Though I do know Brian Goldfarb gave you heck about it. But there's something else, let's see, I'm trying to recall .. help me out, Brian ...

Oh, thank you, Scott, much obliged. Silverlight 4. This one should have been on our radar for certain. Silverlight stole the show on Wednesday, and was much of the talk among developers on Thursday. The new version will provide 1080p video, which everyone wanted. And it will provide authenticated access to system services outside the sandbox, which everyone wants.

If Office Web Apps were to run on Silverlight 4, you would get access to the right-click context menu -- a critical feature of regular Office 2007 and Office 2010 that's difficult to make up for with the ribbon alone. S4's access to system devices will make it feasible for developers to craft iTunes-like smartphone applications for devices that are tethered to PCs ... and maybe even devices running on smartphones themselves, and not just Windows Phones.

Which reminds me, there was that one Guthrie demo Wednesday that bit the bottom of the bit bucket, with that cool-looking phone. Did anyone ever make that work ... Brian Goldfarb to the rescue once again. Yes, it is indeed possible to perform adaptive streaming of movies to the iPhone using Silverlight. We talked at length with Goldfarb, and here's a preview of coming attractions:

"We've worked with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) to create a server-side-based solution with IIS Media Services, and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.'"

It was certainly more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary tone at this year's PDC, but attendees seemed comfortable with that this time around. Here was one strange phenomenon we've never noticed before: Attendance increased with later days. Wednesday attendance was noticeably higher for sessions and the keynote than for the previous day, and that was despite news of the big laptop giveaway being kept under lock and key. And Thursday -- which has often been a day for "leftovers" -- ended up being packed as well, including with attendees who brought those shiny new Acer multitouch laptops with them.

Now there's something that hasn't been touched on: Acer. Think about that for a moment. This is the same company that publicly dissed Vista in 2006 for being a non-event for consumers, practically leading the wave for the complaints that were to follow. And here it is lending its name to an event that not only promotes Windows 7, but prototypes its proper use (from Microsoft's perspective) in all computing. Microsoft let Acer show everyone else how quick bootup and clean performance are supposed to be done.

That's the biggest indicator of Lessons Learned we saw all week.

Hacking - The Art of Exploitation Ebook

2009-12-02T01:47:00.000-08:00

This text introduces the spirit and theory of hacking as well as the science behind it all; it also provides some core techniques and tricks of hacking so you can think like a hacker, write your own hacks or thwart potential system attacks.

This book explains the details of various hacking techniques, many of which get very technical. While the fundamental programming concepts that these hacking techniques build from are introduced in the book, general programming knowledge will certainly aid the reader in understanding these concepts. The code examples in this book were done on an x86-based computer running Linux. Having a similarly set-up computer to follow along is encouraged; this will let you see the results for yourself and allow you to experiment and try new things. This is what hacking is all about.

Hacking is the art of creating problem solving, whether used to find an unconventional solution to a difficult problem or to exploit holes in sloppy programming. Many people call themselves hackers, but few have the strong technical foundation that a hacker needs to be successful. Hacking - The Art of Exploitation explains things that every real hacker should know.

Windows 7 a playground for Hackers??

2009-12-02T01:44:00.000-08:00

Most parents concerned about their children's online activity are worried about the people they might meet in chat rooms and the threat of cyber-bullying.

Hackers, starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, glamorised the underground computer activities of a group of geeks

Few would consider that little Johnny could be a hacker in the pay of serious criminals. But, say experts, that is quite possible given the range of sophisticated tools now available free over the internet.

"There aren't rooms full of hackers in Siberia," says Paul Vlissidis, technical director of IT consultancy NCC Group. "Organised criminals are making use of the talent that is out there."

A typical hacker tends to be male, in his teens or twenties, well-educated and well-off. "It's a playground," says Vlissidis. "A lot of them do it for technical curiosity and the thrill of it."

While these characters run the risk of falling in with wholly unpleasant people, Vlissidis says they have little to fear from the police.

"Low-level hacking is probably going to stay under the radar of most law enforcement agencies. Those hackers are pretty much immune to being caught."

The Metropolitan Police cannot confirm or deny this potential scourge – bedroom-based hackers from the home counties.

It says only: "It is not possible to quantify how many hackers are operating nationally due to a lack of reporting by victims and the current lack of a national system for collating fraud reporting."

Manchester-based NCC Group has a division dedicated to testing the security of companies' and public organisations' systems, networks and websites.

Vlissidis admits it is in his interest to scare people, but says solemnly: "The reason we want people to be scared is that we are scared. We need to become a lot more paranoid than we are now."

This becomes patently clear when his "ethical hacker" colleague, David Wood, cheerfully starts reading my emails, friend updates and even bank details back to me, having hacked my Google Mail (Gmail), Facebook and PayPal accounts over a wireless internet connection.

The demonstration is disturbing in its simplicity. First off, Wood hacks my Facebook and Gmail with an attack that goes by the wonderful name of "cookie stealing".

Both sites require users to log in over a secure connection. But the web browser then stores a code, known as a session cookie, which keeps the user logged in.

As users move between pages on the site via an insecure connection, Wood can listen out for my session cookie over the wireless network, using an open source hacking tool called ferret.

Once he "hears" the value, another tool called hamster provides a link for him to login to the site as me. All he needs to do is click the link and he's in.

The PayPal hack is harder, but not significantly so. It plays on the fact that people often connect to networks with little or no idea of who is providing that network.

Anyone with malicious intent can set up a network so that it misdirects users' requests to visit certain sites. For example, NCC has set up this wireless network so that it directs me to the PayPal login page but via an insecure connection, rather than the site's secure login page.

Blissfully unaware, I log in via this insecure connection and Wood can repeat the previous hack to reach a site with direct access to my bank account.

The NCC guys do not, however, eschew wireless networks entirely. Instead they use virtual private networks (VPNs), when on a public network, which can protect you from such attacks. One of the most popular VPNs is GoToMyPC, which costs £12 a month.

Other attacks exploit the forgotten password feature, which is often the weakest link on a site as it tends to use information that is publicly available.

But even before a hacker needs to resort to such time-consuming methods as discovering my mother's maiden name, often he (it is usually a he) will be able to guess it.

Vlissidis recommends using pass phrases, such as "a_rolling_stone" rather than the more predictable "password".

He recommends having at least 10 passwords categorised from high to low security. Some he will write down physically on a piece of paper kept far away from his computer when they are new, but otherwise he remembers them all.

The "remember me" function is not an option, he says firmly. If selected, all my passwords will be stored in the internet browser. These can then be easily accessed if I make the mistake of visiting a malicious website.

All this seems desperately inconvenient, which is, of course, the heart of the problem.

We have sacrificed security for convenience, all too often at a great cost to ourselves. It is NCC's intention to scare us silly, so we do not need to bear that cost.

TOP TIPS

Always use a "virtual private network" when connected to an untrusted network

Disable wireless networks when not in use

Select manual connection to home Wi-Fi networks, do not set it to automatically connect

Ensure the firewall is enabled on all your network adaptors

Always ensure anti-virus software is installed and fully updated

Do not keep shared folders on your laptop

Cheese to W32.Induc....

2009-12-02T01:38:00.000-08:00

W32/Induc is a virus that adds its malicious code in to the Delphi library files thus adding itself to the compilation process. Any file compiled with the infected Delphi compiler will also be infected.

Many customers feel they have got a false since the file they compile on their own is now detected . The reason being a virus, which was compiled with the binary itself. Also this threat has been going on for almost an year unnoticed so the customers will submit the files which are not changed from over an year and are homegrown or on CD or from reliable source thinking it is a false positive.

Characteristics -

The risk assessment of this threat has been updated to Low-Profiled due to media attention at:

The virus copies the malicious code in to SysConst.pas file which is present in the \Lib.
It renames the existing SysConst.dcu to SysConst.bak.
A new SysConst.dcu file is created by compiling the malicious SysConst.pas.
The original SysConst.pas file is then deleted.

The above said infection happens in the Delphi versions 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0

Symptoms -

Presence of the file SysConst.bak in \Lib folder.

Any file compiled in the infected Delphi compiler will also carry the viral code in it. The viral code will look like the one below.

This virus does not have a malicious payload.

Method of Infection -

W32/Induc spreads by inserting the malicious code in to the files compiled using the infected library of the Delphi.

Manual Removal:

Run a full system scan to detect and quarantine the W32/Induc infected files.
Delete the SysConst.dcu file from the \Lib where the Delphi compiler is installed.
Rename the SysConst.bak file present in the \Lib to Sysconst.dcu

Removal -

All Users:
Use current engine and DAT files for detection. Replace files not cleaned with backup copies.

Additional Windows ME/XP removal considerations

How to upload lage files?

2009-12-02T01:36:00.000-08:00

Answer is now www.cutesentit.com...
Lets see how it works

Send Files with CuteSendIt - How It Works

Live.SysInternals

2009-12-02T01:34:00.000-08:00

I guarantee the internal file association is now all alone left with the user to have a better understanding!!
It help me a lot to stargaze the whole internal arena and tools help me to get in..
Those who doesn't under stand these words better check Operating System fundamentals and go check
www.live.sysinternals.com
All the best!!
Contact if confused on : libinpkurian@gmail.com

Kill IE6 Campaign??????

2009-12-02T01:28:00.000-08:00

What it Says??

Discover the mission
The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out. This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about making sure that we encourage people to move to modern browsers such as IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users. Clients pressure designers to ’force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. While Microsoft is encouraging companies and developers to move on from IE6, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on.
Read the article
In our article, ‘Calling time on IE6’, we ask designers and developers if it’s finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it. Major names in the web industry debate our mission, talking about the pros and cons behind dumping IE6. How feasible is it to shun the browser entirely? What can you do to minimise the impact IE6 has on you and your clients (and increasingly tight budgets)? And what can and should Microsoft do to help us all move the web and web standards on? Find out by reading the article, or just ‘skip to the end’ by looking to the right and getting involved.

Hole in Microsoft wireless keyboard found!!

2009-12-02T01:26:00.000-08:00

Researchers from Remote-Exploit.org, the home of the BackTrack pen-testing Linux distribution, have recently released an open source wireless keyboard sniffer Keykeriki, capable of sniffing and decoding keystrokes of Microsoft 27Mhz based keyboards through on-the-fly deciphering of XOR based encryption.

Their wartyping — decoding signals from wireless keyboards — proof of concept is based on a research paper published by the group one and a half years ago:

“Now 1.5 years after releasing our whitepaper “27Mhz Wireless Keyboard Analysis Report” about wireless keyboard insecurities, we are proud to present the universal wireless keyboard sniffer: Keykeriki. This opensource hardware and software project enables every person to verify the security level of their own keyboard transmissions, and/or demonstrate the sniffing attacks (for educational purpose only). The hardware itself is designed to be small and versatile, it can be extended to currently undetected/unknown keyboard traffic, and/or hardware extensions, for example, a repeating module or amplifier.”

According to their slides, it took them approximately 20 to 50 keystrokes in order to successfully recover the encryption key, which shouldn’t come as a surprise taking into consideration the use of XOR encryption.

Moreover, the researchers aren’t aware of any patching possibility to the affected 27Mhz keyboards, and point out that while Logitech’s “Secure Connect” solution is in fact adding an additional layer of encryption, they intend to include decryption capability in future releases of Keykeriki, next to inspection of 2.4Ghz wireless devicesand keystroke injection on the affected keyboards.

Time to get yourself a wired keyboard? Not necessarily, since additional research also proves that wired keyboards are also susceptible to sniffing attacks. The potential security implications and potential for abuse, are pretty evident. However, it’s worth pointing out that with or without Keykeriki, economies of scale centered mass keylogging and session hijacking for fraudulent purposes, would continue happening through the usual channels - botnets and crimeware.

Twitter used to control botnet!!

2009-12-02T01:24:00.000-08:00

Twitter might be revolutionizing social communication, but it’s also providing a handy way for hackers and virus makers to issue commands once their creations are out in the wild.Symantec has determined that a trojan horse called “Downloader.Sninfs” was using the @upd4te Twitter account to send obfuscated commands to infected machines. Twitter has since disabled the account in question.

While it’s hardly the only site that malware makers could use, the social messaging service’s massive growth make it a logical place from which to widely distribute obfuscated information. Such use raises the possibility that Twitter could be applied for a number of similar, far less insidious purposes, however, such as by intelligence services as a supplement or replacement to number stations.

What's new with Gmail on iPhone and Android

2009-11-30T00:37:00.000-08:00

Back in April, we released a new version of Gmail for mobile, re-designed to be faster, more usable, and offer basic offline support on iPhone and Android devices. The improvements we made to its underlying architecture have made it possible for us to rapidly release new features and further improve performance since then.

Over the last six months, we've added a lot: mute, label management, keyboard shortcuts, smart links, an outbox, and the ability to move messages (label and archive in one step). Some new features, like swipe-to-archive and auto-expanding compose boxes, take advantage of these mobile phones' unique properties. We also made address auto-complete faster, enhanced refresh capabilities, and sped up loading so Gmail for mobile starts in under three seconds on newer smartphones.

We'll continue to add more functionality —and there's no need to download or update anything as long as you have iPhone/iPod touch OS 2.2.1 or above or are using an Android-powered device. Just go to gmail.com from your mobile browser as you do on your PC. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

Gmail account security tips

2009-11-30T00:36:00.000-08:00

As part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we recently posted about how to pick a smart password. Having a strong password goes a long way in helping to protect your data, but there are a number of additional steps you can take to help you keep your Gmail account secure:

1. Remember to sign out. Especially when using a public computer, be careful to sign out of your Google account when you're finished. Just click the "Sign out" link at the top right corner of your inbox. If you're using a public or shared computer and want to be extra thorough, you can also clear the browser's cache, cookies and history. Then, completely close the browser. On your personal computer, you can also lock your computer with a password-protected screensaver if you need to step away momentarily. Learn the best ways to lock your screen in Windows or in Mac OS X. Forgot to sign out? Open up a new Gmail session on another computer and use Gmail's remote sign out feature to close any sessions that might still be open elsewhere.

2. Be careful about sending certain sensitive information via email. Once you send an email, you're no longer in control of the information it contains. The recipients, if they so choose, could forward the email or post its contents in a public place. Even if you know and trust the people you're emailing, that information may become exposed if their accounts become compromised or they get a virus on their machines. As a rule of thumb, should you need to provide a credit card number or financial account number to respond to a message, provide it over the phone or in person — not over email. And never share your password with anyone. Google does not email you to ask you for your password, your social security number, or other personal information — so don't send it!

3. Enable "Always use HTTPS." Any time you visit a webpage, your computer needs to send and receive information across the Internet. HTTPS is used to encrypt data as it is transmitted between computers on the Internet, so look for the "https" in the URL bar of your browser to indicate that the connection between your computer and Gmail's servers is encrypted. We use HTTPS on the Gmail login page, and you can choose to protect your entire Gmail session with HTTPS as well. HTTPS can make your mail slower, so we let you make the choice for yourself. Open Settings and choose "Always use HTTPS" on the General tab if you want to turn it on.

4. Be wary of unexpected attachments.To help protect you from viruses and malware, Gmail automatically scans every attachment when it's delivered to you, and again each time you open a message. Attachments you send are also scanned. That said, no system is foolproof, so if you happen to get an email from a friend with an attachment you didn't expect, don't be afraid to ask the sender what it is before you decide whether to open it.

5. Make sure your account recovery information is up-to-date. Your account recovery information helps you regain access to your account if you ever forget your password, or if someone gains access to your account without your permission. We currently offer several paths to account recovery. Every Gmail user must select a security question and answer — be sure to choose a combination that is easy for you to remember, but hard for others to guess or come across by investigating. Don't choose a question like "What is my favorite color?" as others may easily guess the answer. We also encourage you to provide a secondary email address and/or a mobile phone number, so we can send you a link to reset your password if you lose access to your account.

You can find additional security tips for Gmail in our Help Center. Learn more about protecting your computer, website, and personal information by checking out our security series on the Google blog or visiting http://www.staysafeonline.org.

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE)

2009-11-13T22:53:00.001-08:00

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device. These scripts have access to many of the APIs available to full-fledged Android applications, but with a greatly simplified interface that makes it easy to:

Handle intents
Start activities
Make phone calls
Send text messages
Scan bar codes
Poll location and sensor data
Use text-to-speech
And more

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, and shell are currently supported, and we're planning to add more.
ASE is designed for developers and is alpha quality software. Please report bugs and feature requests on the issues list. You can download the current APK by scanning or clicking the following barcode:

Things to Know About Google's Go Programming Language

2009-11-13T22:45:00.000-08:00

Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10. The ambitious technology's pedigree features programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to create Unix. Created as a systems programming language to help speed up development of systems inside Google, Go is now viewed as a general-purpose language for Web development, mobile development, addressing parallelism and a lot more.Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10.
The ambitious technology comes with a pedigree featuring programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to create Unix. Created as a systems programming language to help speed up development of systems inside Google, Go is now viewed as a general-purpose language for Web development, mobile development, addressing parallelism and a lot more.
Ironically, Google launched Go just a week before Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, which typically dominates the software development landscape while it is running. This time there might be a little Go buzz at the event.
Go is an experimental language that is still in the process of being tweaked and maturing, but it holds huge potential. The Google Go team blogged about Go, saying, "Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C."
Moreover, having released Go as an open-source effort, Google is opening up the ongoing development of the language to the community at large. Will it be the next big thing? Could it supplant Java? Rob Pike, one of the three founders of the Go project, spoke with eWEEK about the overall effort. Here are 12 things to know about Go.

1. Where did the idea for Go come from?

Pike, Thompson and Robert Griesemer of Java HotSpot virtual machine and V8 JavaScript engine fame, decided to make a go of developing a new language out of frustration with the pace of building software. Said Pike:

"In Google we have very large software systems and we spent so long literally waiting for compilations, even though we have distributed compilation and parallelism in all of these tools to help, it can take a very long time to build a program. Even incremental builds can be slow. And we looked at this and realized many of the reasons for that are just fundamental in working in languages like C and C++, and we needed a different approach. We also decided the tools that everybody used were also slow. So we wanted to start from scratch to write the kind of programs we need to write here at Google in a way that the tools could be really efficient and the build cycles could be very short."

2. Go is a multipurpose language

Pike said Go is appropriate for a broad spectrum of uses, including Web programming, mobile programming and systems programming. "We based it on our ideas of what we think systems programming should be like," he said.
Then a Google engineer told the team he wanted to do a port to ARM processors for the Go language because he wanted to do some work in robotics. With the ARM support, "We can now run Go code in Android phones, which is a pretty exciting possibility," Pike said. "Of course, ARMs also run inside a lot of the other phones out there, so maybe it's a mobile language."
He added, "I think people, once they absorb it a little bit more, will see the advantage of having a modern language in some ways that actually runs really fast. And it's an interesting candidate to think of as an alternative for JavaScript in the browser.
"Although getting Go supported inside browsers is going to be a seriously challenging undertaking ... but it is an interesting thing to think about because it has a lot of the advantages of JavaScript as a lightweight, fun language to play with. But it's enormously more efficient. So some of the big, heavy, client-oriented applications out there like Google Wave would be much zippier if they were written in Go, but of course they can't be written in Go because it doesn't run in a browser yet. But I'd like to see some stuff in that direction, too, although how that's going to happen I don't know."

Appro to Show Off AMD, Intel and Nvidia Systems at SC09

2009-11-13T22:13:00.000-08:00

At the Supercomputing show, Appro will unveil a host of new HP solutions that will be powered by CPUs from Intel and AMD, and Nvidia's Tesla GPUs based on its upcoming architecture code-named Fermi. Appro executives say using GPUs for more general-purpose computing jobs will be a focus of the show. Appro also will show off a future system running on upcoming AMD Opteron chips.

GPU computing and energy efficiency will be key to a host of new and enhanced high-performance computing offerings at the Supercomputing show starting Nov. 14.
And according to John Lee, vice president of advanced technology solutions for Appro, his company won't be the only one at the show in Portland, Ore., talking about the increasing role of graphic processing units in mainstream computing.
"GPUs, from our perspective, are really making a third processor a real valuable option for HPC," Lee said in an interview, referring to CPUs from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices and GPUs from Nvidia. "Last year, everyone was talking about [Intel's] 'Nehalem' [architecture]. This year [the focus will be on] the new 'Fermi.'"
Nvidia has been a key driver in pushing GPUs into general-purpose computing environments, particularly for parallel computing workloads. Now the GPU maker is readying Fermi, its much-anticipated next-generation CUDA architecture.

Avid Liquid

2009-11-13T22:02:00.000-08:00

Avid Liquid’s powerful SD and HD video editor offers integrated DVD authoring; surround sound audio processing and 1000s of powerful real-time effects. Liquid’s integrated toolset provides all of the tools needed to create the highest quality productions and finish to tape, DVD or web streams.

Editing, effects, authoring, and more –

Avid Liquid’s powerful video editor integrates DVD authoring, surround sound audio processing and powerful visual effects.

Complete HDV Workflow -

Liquid features frame-accurate editing of HDV content. Liquid's real-time effects engine provides multiple streams of HDV, video monitoring with Liquid Pro and a smooth workflow for finishing in SD or back to HDV tape.

Format flexibility -

Liquid supports Avid Open Timeline. Liquid lets videographers edit DV, MPEG I-frame, MPEG IBP, uncompressed, Windows Media, DIVX and MPEG-4 in SD as well as HDV.

Smooth DVD Production -

Edit, create titles and effects and then dive into a DVD authoring toolset that lets users define the interactivity, create menus, add a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix and then burn a finished DVD.

Google Wave

2009-11-13T21:53:00.000-08:00

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation
and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Green IT

2009-11-05T04:50:00.000-08:00

Changing the way you do things to have less of a negative impact on the environment. Whether you are new to this idea or a dedicated tree-hugger, finding ways to go green in business can save you money, improve your image, potentially attract more clients and, of course, help save the environment.
ME

Euphoric Quotes

2009-11-05T04:47:00.000-08:00

In the euphoria after the Cold War, there was a misplaced notion that the UN could solve every problem anywhere.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Individuals approaching death often experience encounters with their dead relatives, who seem to welcome them to the next world. These deathbed visions are authentic and convincing; they are often followed by a state of euphoria and seem to ease the transition.
Stanislav Grof

That Beatle euphoria has always been there, and it's hard to be in a room with a Beatle and try to be totally natural. You never shake that off.
Alan Parsons

There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.
Nigella Lawson

There is no planning. On the night it is really great, it's euphoria and if it is not so great there is always tomorrow night. That was his attitude.
Ed McMahon

Nothing but life

2008-08-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

it turned black nd blue here.came across heart breaking crash managed to recover.Its now a change for entire views and prespectives.But I luv my college and class.Rajagiri College of Social Sciences.Kalamassery!