Twitter needs a back up

Twitter went down last week, and the world got very quiet. People didn't know what do with themselves; they wanted to tweet the news that Twitter was down, but that was out of the question. Entire overheard conversations went unremarked upon, and mini-reviews of recent episodes of True Blood withered on the vine. I saw a funny Onion video that I was sure my followers would have appreciated and an outrageous Rush Limbaugh quote that demanded my impassioned response, but what could I do? Twitter was down for just a few hours—the service's first major outage during its new era of ubiquity—and it felt strange. It's not normal for an entire medium of communication to go offline; sure, sometimes Gmail is balky and your office phones won't respond, but for everyone else, e-mail and the phones and the Web still work. When Twitter goes down, it's down for everyone, everywhere.

Twitter is run by a single company in a single office building in San Francisco. When you send out a message, it flies about Twitter's servers and then alights in all your Twitter pals' cell phones and Tweetdecks. The system is fast and technologically simple, which helps explain its exponential growth.


But for Twitter, centralization is also a curse. In its early days, the site was known for its regular brokenness—its error-page logo, the "fail whale," became a cultural shorthand for suckiness. Twitter went down so often because the idea behind Twitter—sending out short status updates to the world—became too popular for one company to handle.


This isn't unusual with new technology. In its early days, the Web itself doubled in size every few months. But the Web didn't buckle from overuse. That's because it was distributed—the Web is just a protocol, a set of common rules that connect lots of different servers managed by lots of different companies around the world. Twitter's frequent failures thus raise a question: Shouldn't microblogging be distributed, too? How can a single company manage everyone's updates—shouldn't it be more like e-mail: managed by scores of different providers?




Dave Winer, the pioneering programmer and blogger who runs Scripting.com, has been arguing for months that Twitter is untenable in its current form. Winer likes Twitter—or, at least, he likes the idea of Twitter. Short status updates could well succeed e-mail as the dominant mode of wired communication. But having one company manage the entire enterprise is technically fragile, he argues. Twitter went down last week due to a distributed denial-of-service attack aimed at a single Twitter user—millions of zombie computers had been directed to cripple the user's social-networking pages (apparently as part of ongoing cyberwarfare between Russian and Georgian hackers). The rest of us were collateral damage—Twitter went down for you because of a beef between people on the other side of the world. Does this make sense? Winer doesn't think so. If Twitter worked more like e-mail or the Web—a system managed by different entities that were connected by common Web protocols—a hit like last week's wouldn't be crippling. A denial-of-service attack would have brought down some people's status updates, but Twitter would still work for most of the world.



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Restore files from a damaged hard drive with ZAR

Hard drive failures are always a nuisance — if not a disaster — especially when the backups have gone missing or were never made. Whether it’s your own oversight or that of a panicked user, at some point you’ll probably attempt to retrieve files from a damaged hard drive. In this IT Dojo video, I’ll show you how the Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR) tool can help you find and restore recoverable files from a failed hard drive.




During the video, I warn everyone about the potential dangers of using self-service data recovery tools and recommend that viewers contact a qualified data recovery company if the data is critical or the drive has physical damage. Despite my admonitions, I’ll no doubt receive a few complaints once this piece is published, and some will argue that tools like ZAR do more harm than good. But I’d like to move the discussion beyond an anecdotal debate and gather some real numbers–albeit through a nonrandom sample. Answer the following questions, and let us know if you’ve used a self-service hard drive recovery tool and if the experience was positive.

Scientists tune world's brightest X-ray beam

Hamburg: The most intense X-ray beam of its type in the world has been generated inside a 2,300 m circular tunnel under the German city of Hamburg, the Desy research institute said on Monday.


The machine, which cost 225 million euros ($297 million), was switched on in April, but unlike a light bulb it takes weeks to tune up.

The X-ray light came on Saturday. More months will now be spent adjusting measuring devices. Next year, scientists can begin actually using the machine to peer at atomic structures in proteins, cancer cells and the like.

Earlier this year, India signed an agreement to aid the project and gain special access to the machine, known as a synchrotron, which has been remodelled from an earlier particle accelerator at the site and is named Petra III.

In a previous life, the Petra ring was used to discover an atomic particle called the gluon.

The synchrotron keeps a beam of up to 10 billion positrons - the anti-particles to electrons - going round a circle permanently at almost the speed of light.

Desy, which is mainly funded by the German government, said the particles had been racing round the tracks for weeks, but have now been put on a zig-zag course so that they emit the light needed for experiments.

‘Mars mission’ crew is back!

Moscow, July 14: Six volunteers from Russia and Europe on Tuesday emerged from a capsule inside a Moscow research facility on where they had been locked away for the last three months to simulate a mission to Mars.


The six stepped out of the module smiling and in apparent good health after being cut off from the outside world for 105 days at the isolation facility at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP).

Dressed in blue overalls like real-life spacemen, the four Russians, Frenchman and German were handed bouquets of flowers and waved at well-wishers once outside the capsule.

The experiment “has been a success,” the Russian “commander” of the crew, Sergei Ryazansky, formally reported to his superiors from the Russian space agency Roskosmos.

The experiment has been aimed at exactly replicating the conditions of a manned mission to Mars.

It included a simulated landing on the Martian surface, communication delays of up to 20 minutes and unexpected emergency situations.

Scientists have been monitoring the psychological and physical effects of prolonged isolation on the participants and are hoping this will bring a better understanding of the problems of long-term space flight.



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Einstein robot makes facial expressions

Washington: Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have revealed that a hyper-realistic Einstein robot has learnt to smile and make facial expressions through a process of self-guided learning.

The researchers say that they took the aid of machine learning to "empower" their robot to learn to make realistic facial expressions.



"As far as we know, no other research group has used machine learning to teach a robot to make realistic facial expressions," said Tingfan Wu, the computer science Ph.D student from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering who presented this advance on June 6 at the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning.



The researchers have even uploaded a video showing the Einstein robot head performing asymmetric random facial movements as a part of the expression learning process on the website YouTube.



The faces of robots are increasingly realistic, and the number of artificial muscles that controls them is rising.



It was in light of this trend that the researchers from the Machine Perception Laboratory are studying the face and head of their robotic Einstein, hoping that their work may help them find ways to automate the process of teaching robots to make lifelike facial expressions.



According to them, the Einstein robot they worked on has about 30 facial muscles, each moved by a tiny servo motor connected to the muscle by a string.



The researchers point out that developmental psychologists speculate that infants learn to control their bodies through systematic exploratory movements, including babbling to learn to speak.



Initially, these movements appear to be executed in a random manner as infants learn to control their bodies and reach for objects.



"We applied this same idea to the problem of a robot learning to make realistic facial expressions," said Mr Javier Movellan, the senior author on the paper presented at ICDL 2009 and the director of UCSD's Machine Perception Laboratory, housed in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).



The research team may have achieved promising results, but they admit that some of the learned facial expressions are still awkward. One potential explanation is that their model may be too simple to describe the coupled interactions between facial muscles and skin.



To begin the learning process, the UC San Diego researchers directed the Einstein robot head to twist and turn its face in all directions, a process called "body babbling".



During that period, the robot could see itself on a mirror and analyse its own expression using facial expression detection software created at UC San Diego called Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT).



That provided the data necessary for machine learning algorithms to learn a mapping between facial expressions and the movements of the muscle motors.



After the robot had learnt the relationship between facial expressions and the muscle movements required to make them, the researchers made it learn to make facial expressions it had never encountered.



For example, the robot learned eyebrow narrowing, which requires the inner eyebrows to move together and the upper eyelids to close a bit to narrow the eye aperture.



"During the experiment, one of the servos burned out due to misconfiguration. We therefore ran the experiment without that servo. We discovered that the model learned to automatically compensate for the missing servo by activating a combination of nearby servos," the authors wrote in the paper presented at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning.



"Currently, we are working on a more accurate facial expression generation model as well as systematic way to explore the model space efficiently," said Wu.



Wu concedes that his team's "body babbling" approach may not be the most efficient way to explore the model of the face.



While the primary goal of this work was to solve the engineering problem of how to approximate the appearance of human facial muscle movements with motors, the researchers say this kind of work could also lead to insights into how humans learn and develop facial expressions

Google takes on Microsoft with Chrome operating system

Google is to launch a new operating system, in its most direct challenge yet to the dominance of Microsoft.

Google Chrome OS will be a development of its Chrome web browser. The search giant initially aims to install the new system on small, low-cost computers known as netbooks, which are currently outselling more powerful personal computers. Google said that it believed the software would eventually be used on PCs as well.
The move is likely to intensify the rivalry between Google and Microsoft, whose Windows operating system is used on the majority of the world’s personal computers. Operating systems help to run and control the basic functions of a computer.
Google said that the project was a natural extension of its Chrome browser and was necessary because older operating systems were designed at a time when the internet did not exist

Expert View

Today’s announcement will be of serious concern to Microsoft, whose Windows 7 is due out in October

Bill Thompson

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” said Sundar Pichai, a Google Vice President, and Linus Upson, engineering director, in a blog post. “We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you on to the web in a few seconds.”
The news spread quickly on the blogosphere, with many commentators applauding the move. The influential TechCrunch blog said it was a “genius play”, arguing that Microsoft’s XP software on netbooks was eight years old, making it a good target.
“Let’s be clear on what this really is,” MG Seigler, a TechCrunch writer, said. “This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft.”
Stephen Shankland, of the technology site CNET, said that Google’s move had widespread implications.
“One is that it shows just how serious Google is about making the web into a foundation, not just for static pages but for active applications, notably its own such as Google Docs and Gmail.
“It opens new competition with Microsoft and, potentially, a new reason for anti-trust regulators to pay close attention to Google’s moves."
Google said that the new software would be released later this year on an open source licence, meaning that computer developers and programmers across the world will have the chance to use, modify and improve it. Netbooks running the finished product will go on sale in the second half of next year.
The company claimed that Chrome OS would change the focus of operating systems from controlling desktop PCs to a system designed to run the internet as fast as possible.
“The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way and most of the user experience takes place on the web,” Mr Pinchai and Mr Upson said.
Google has a big task on its hands. Many companies and products have tried to take on Microsoft’s Windows and failed. Although rival systems such as Linux and Apple's OS X are widely acclaimed, some analysts estimate that Windows and other Microsoft products are used on more than 90 per cent of computers. Microsoft is to release an updated version of its own operating system, Windows 7, in October.
Google has repeatedly trampled on Microsoft’s territory recently. First, it launched Google Chrome, a web browser, in competition with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It has also recently released Android, an operating system for mobile phones, a direct challenger to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, which is used on the majority of smartphones.
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British scientists claim to create human sperm

LONDON – British scientists claimed Wednesday to have created human sperm from embryonic stem cells for the first time, an accomplishment they say may someday help infertile men father children.
The technique could in 10 years allow researchers to use the basic knowledge of how sperm develop to design treatments to enable infertile men the chance to have biological children, said lead researcher Karim Nayernia, of Newcastle University, whose team earlier produced baby mice from sperm derived in a similar way.
The research, published in the journal Stem Cells and Development, was conducted by scientists at Newcastle and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute.
Stem cells can become any cell in the body, and scientists have previously turned them into a variety of new entities, including cells from the brain, pancreas, heart and blood vessels.
Some experts challenged the research, saying they weren't convinced Nayernia and his colleagues had actually produced sperm cells. Several critics also said the sperm cells they created were clearly abnormal.
"I am unconvinced from the data presented in this paper that the cells produced by Professor Nayernia's group from embryonic stem cells can be accurately called 'spermatazoa," said Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield.
Pacey said in a statement that the sperm created by Nayernia did not have the specific shape, movement and function of real sperm.
Azim Surani, a professor of physiology and reproduction at the University of Cambridge said the sperm produced by the Newcastle team were "a long way from being authentic sperm cells."
Nayernia said the cells "showed all the characteristics of sperm," but his group's intention was simply to "open up new avenues of research" with their early findings, rather than using the sperm to fertilize eggs.
Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell expert at the National Institute of Medical Research said that despite the questions raised, Nayernia and colleagues may have made some progress in obtaining human sperm from embryonic cells.
Nayernia said creating embryos from lab-manufactured sperm is banned by British law.
He said they only plan to produce sperm to study the reasons behind infertility, and will not fertilize any eggs.
Some lawmakers said provisions should be made to allow sperm derived from stem cells to be tested as part of potential fertility treatments.

Source : YAHOO

Google Announces Search Engine Changes

Web giant Google has unveiled changes to its search engine to let users to "dig deeper" into results.

Google unveiled new search engine options at their Searchology event

The developments include automatic tables of information on a subject, arrange results by date and genre, and a GPS phone app for naming stars in the sky.
Google believes the changes will keep their search engine ahead of rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft's Live search.

Google's new search options

They currently have 63% of the US search market to Yahoo's 20%.
Vice President Marissa Mayer said search technology is "in its infancy" and Google engineers hope to identify the next big thing first.
Innovations unveiled include Google Squared, which does not return page results but arranges what appear to be facts from across the web.
For example, a search for breeds of dog could return a table of types, names and sizes.
Rich Snippets offers more detail in the preview text below web page links.
This is aimed at those searching for reviews, as it could offer average scores or price ranges for a restaurant.

Google's Sky Map phone app

The Search Options feature filters results depending on genre, allowing the search to be refined to forum discussions, reviews or videos, and also by date.
"As people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems," the company said in a blog post.
"To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment."
Another innovation announced at Google's Searchology event was the phone app Sky Map.
Designed for Android mobiles, it uses GPS technology to identify the stars of the solar system.

Can pressure waves speed up nuclear decay?

If cavitation can speed up the decay of nuclei in solution, we've yet to see good evidence for it

Is it possible to speed up radioactive decay by squeezing atoms?
In the last few months, Fabio Cardone at the Institute of Nanostructured Materials in Rome, Italy, and a few pals have posted on the arXiv a growing body of evidence that it does.

In March, Cardone and co reported an increase in neutron emissions when crushing marble and granite. Their conjecture is that the crushing causes the piezonuclear fission of iron atoms into two aluminium nuclei emitting two neutrons.
But our focus today is a paper published in February, in which the team reported that cavitation--the generation and collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid using pressure waves--causes the rate of decay of thorium-228 in solution to increase 1000 times.
I guess it's not entirely beyond belief that cavitation could have an effect on the nuclei of atoms in solution. Cavitation is known to generate huge pressures and temperatures. By some theories, the energy released in this process is close to that needed for fusion. But it's fair to say that the current consensus is that there is no good evidence that this line has been crossed in practice.

Nevertheless, Cardone's claims are interesting and his paper was published in Physics Letters A earlier this year.

Today, however, Stephan Pomp and pals from Uppsala University in Sweden, cast some doubt on the result and the methods used by the Cardone team in the Physics Letters A paper.

They point out that the Cardone claim is extraordinary given the body of evidence gathered over the past 100 years about nuclear decay. Such an extraordinary claim should be backed by extraordinary evidence.

"We find that such evidence is missing in this paper and it even seems that methodological mistakes have been made," they say.

Thorium decays be emitting alpha particles. Pomp and pals say Cardone and co placed their detector underneath the glass vessel containing the thorium solution. "We note that the range of the emitted a particles in glass is in the order of tens of micrometers and that it thus would be impossible for particles...to penetrate the vessel."

They suggest a number of tests that Cardone and co can do to strengthen their results, such as measuring the background counts when the vessel is empty or filled with pure water in which cavitation is taking place.

It'll be interesting to see the Cardone team's reply to these criticisms; perhaps they'll be able answer each point made by Pomp and pals.

In the meantime, the question still stands: can pressure waves accelerate nuclear decay? Not on the evidence presented by Cardone and co so far.

Ref:

arxiv.org/abs/0903.3104 : Piezonuclear Neutrons From Fracturing of Inert Solids

arxiv.org/abs/0710.5177: Speeding Up Thorium Decay

arxiv.org/abs/0907.0623: Comments on "Piezonuclear decay of thorium" by F. Cardone et. al.

MI6 boss in Facebook entry row

Personal details about the life of the next head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, have been removed from social networking site Facebook amid security concerns.

The Mail on Sunday said his wife had put details about their children and the location of their flat on the site.
The details were removed after the paper contacted the Foreign Office.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband denied claims security had been compromised, saying: "You know he wears a Speedo swimsuit. That's not a state secret."
Privacy protection
Sir John Sawers is currently the UK's ambassador to the United Nations and is due to take up his new post in November.
The Mail on Sunday said information published on Facebook included the couple's friendships with senior diplomats and actors, including Moir Leslie from BBC Radio 4's The Archers.
Lady Sawers revealed the location of the London flat used by the couple and the whereabouts of their three grown-up children and of Sir John's parents, the paper said.
She had not imposed privacy protection on her account, allowing any of Facebook's 200 million users in the open-access "London" network to see the entries, it added.
Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, chairman of the counter-terrorism sub-committee, expressed concerns about the possible security risk.
He told the BBC: "It raises all sorts of worrying issues about the... personal life, in particular the location of flats, transport details, movement details, of an individual who is our most senior counter-terrorism officer abroad.
"A great deal of taxpayers' money has been spent over the past several decades making sure he and his family are protected from security compromises. Well, it doesn't seem to be very relevant anymore, does it?"

He's a very able man, he's a very able appointment. It's pretty unfortunate that this has happened Sir John Major

He added: "It's distressing and worrying therefore that these sorts of details should be appearing in the public domain. I would have hoped these sort of mistakes would not have been made by people like that."
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Edward Davey said the disclosure had the potential to damage the security of Sir John's family.
"We would be negligent if there wasn't an internal inquiry into the security implications, not just in relation to MI6 but to Sir John and his family," he said.
"We need to be reassured that this has been considered properly and there is nothing we need to worry about as a result of this."
'Grow up'
But Foreign Secretary David Miliband told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme: "Are you leading the news with that? The fact that there's a picture that the head of the MI6 goes swimming - wow, that really is exciting.
"It is not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks, for goodness sake let's grow up.
"He is an outstanding professional who will do a really good job in an outstanding organisation."

Lady Sawers had no Facebook privacy protection, the Mail on Sunday says

Former Prime Minister Sir John Major said the issue had been "overblown".
He said: "I know John Sawers. He's a very able man, he's a very able appointment. It's pretty unfortunate that this has happened, I think that is true.
"But I think when you're faced with leaving Iraq possibly too early, huge problems in Afghanistan, the mess in Pakistan, the depth of the recession, I think this falls a long way below those."
Sir John Sawers is due to replace Sir John Scarlett as head of the overseas Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
He has been the UK's Permanent Representative to the UN since 2007.
Before that he was political director at the Foreign Office, an envoy in Baghdad and a foreign affairs adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
He was in that post from 1999 to 2001 and was involved in the Kosovo conflict and Northern Ireland peace process.
Elsewhere overseas he worked in the British embassy in Washington, as an ambassador in Cairo and to South Africa from 1988 and 1991 when apartheid was ending.

Downloading Data Directly Into Your Brain?

A shout-out to reader Raywalt de  Cuba for suggesting this idea.
What if it were possible to connect your brain to the Internet, either wirelessly or through a cable, download digital information at high speed, and then translate it automatically into a chemical form that could be stored by your brain cells as memory?

Downloading directly into your brain would have enormous advantages over our present method of receiving information by reading physical representations of symbols with our eyes, a meatware  interface developed by the Sumerians about 10,000 years ago. If you could pump data directly into your gray matter at, say, 50 mbps — the top speed offered by one major U.S. internet service provider — you’d be able to read a 500-page book in just under two-tenths of a second. (Top that, Evelyn Wood.)
That means you could burn through the entire 29 million-book collection of the Library of Congress in less than two months, provided that you didn’t need to take time off to sleep. (See my earlier blog on wakefulness-promoting drugs and technologies for advice on how to do that.) You’d be vastly more knowledgeable than the brainiest intellectuals on the planet today, or even A.J. Jacobs, that guy who read all 44 million words of the Encyclopedia Britannica  so he could write a book about it.

As usual, there are a few potential downsides. If we were able to download the entire contents of libraries into our brains, it would become increasingly difficult to find a book that everybody hasn’t already read for next month’s book club get together. We might find ourselves spending countless hours posting snarky reviews on Amazon.com.

Kindle and the Espresso Book Machine would go the way of the eight-track tape player. Authors would become increasingly overworked as they struggled to keep up with the demand for new works of literature.
And that’s assuming that our brains could handle so much reading. Nobody is really sure how much information the 100 billion neurons in the human brain can actually store, though one neuroscientist has speculated that its maximum capacity may be as high as 100 terabytes, or the equivalent of about 100 million books. And as Chris Chatham’s Developing Intelligence blog points out, the human brain processes information quite differently than a computer.
The brain is an analog device, transmitting information at irregular speeds. And unlike a computer, which retrieves information by polling its memory address, Chatham notes, the brain has content-addressable memory, which means that information can be retrieved by activating related concepts — for example, the word “fox” might trigger thoughts of other small furry mammals, fox-hunting horseback riders or desirable members of the opposite sex. Additionally, unlike a computer, the brain alters the information it stores as it forges new connections. This explains why I can re-read John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and be surprised to discover that the ending is different from what I seem to remember reading in high-school English class, because over time I had mixed it up with the movie version. Would our neural version of Google be able to process such a vast library of information efficiently? Or would it break down and become hopelessly paralyzed by data smog? Hard to say.

I’m not sure who first thought of the idea of downloading data directly into the human brain. In 1981, cyberpunk writer William Gibson published a short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” in which the lead character has the equivalent of a hard drive implanted in his head, so that he can store and transport sensitive data for corporate clients. Gibson’s story was the basis for a 1995 movie starring Keanu Reeves. The same actor subsequently appeared in another Gibson-influenced 1999 thriller, The Matrix, in which the network port on the back of his character’s head is used to pump him full of martial-arts expertise and other knowledge.

In the real world, back in 2000 Michael Saylor, founder of the business intelligence firm MicroStrategy, proposed  someday transmitting the latest information directly into subscribers’ brains. In a Washingtonian magazine story on Saylor, he elaborated on his notion:

Saylor wants to beam information directly into your mind, maybe through transmitters sunk into your skull or an implant behind your eye or a tiny speaker in your ear so he can reach you sleeping or eating or drinking or playing or flying or making love. The network he envisions would tell you about traffic jams or medicine you need to take or a stock you should sell or a book you'd like to read or whether your daughter broke her arm or a neighbor just drove through your basement.
"Our mantra is intelligent e-business, which means personalized, proactive Web, wireless, and voice intelligence, and so this idea that you shouldn't just use the Web site but rather the Web site should bark out to you," he says. "That was a totally new idea."
Translation: Your cell phone or transmitter would alert you with information it thinks you might need, sort of like an omniscient butler in your brain.
MicroStrategy would run this network and make billions in the process, which is Mike Saylor's job but not his goal. It's not why he was put on Earth. Saylor believes he was put here to change the world, to obliterate ignorance, to spread "intelligence everywhere."

More recently, a prominent British educator, Independent Schools Council chief Chris Parry, last year blithely predicted that within 30 years, students would be downloading lessons directly into their brains.  Earlier this year, an organization called the Innerspace Foundation offered a prize for the first device that bypasses the need for traditional learning of information.

So far, scientists seem to have had more success transmitting transmit information in the other direction, with brain machine interfaces that translate human brain-wave activity into digital form, so that people can operate machines with their thoughts.  But they’re also exploring ways to use the same interfaces to put information into the brain. Electronics giant Sony, for example, reportedly has patented a device for transmitting sensory data — ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds — into the brain by firing pulses of ultrasound. (One big advantage of this method would be that you wouldn’t have to have a surgical implant or a cable plugged into the back of your skull.)

So what do you think? Should we develop a way of pumping our brains full of information? Or should we resist the temptation to become know-it-alls? Express your opinion below.

Microsoft pulls 'puke ad' off YouTube

Microsoft has yanked a controversial ad for its Internet Explorer 8 browser - which features a woman vomiting several times - after an outcry among users.
» View Video

The ad, starring former Superman actor Dean Cain, depicts a woman spewing uncontrollably after apparently finding hardcore pornography on her husband's computer. The man then slips over on the mess before his wife continues to vomit on top of him.

Cain then steps into the foreground telling viewers that none of this would have happened if the man had used Internet Explorer 8, which includes a feature called "InPrivate Browsing" that lets users browse without leaving a trace.

Cain diagnoses the woman's problem as "Oh My God, I'm Gonna Puke" (O.M.G.I.G.P) syndrome.

The type of content on the computer is not detailed but, due to the nature of the woman's reaction, some have interpreted the ad as alluding to child pornography. Taken to the extreme, the ad could be seen by some as Microsoft offering tips on how to browse such material without getting caught by a spouse.

The ad, which only ran online and was described by one veteran technology commentator as the "worst tech commercial ever", was directed by comedian Bob Goldthwait, who starred in the Police Academy series of films.

Goldthwait made three other IE8 commercials for Microsoft, all featuring Cain as public service announcer, including "S.H.Y.N.E.S.S." (Sharing Heavily Yet Not Enough Sharing Still), "F.O.M.S" (Fear Of Missing Something) and "G.R.I.P.E.S" (Gripping Rage Internet Pathetically Extra Slow').

In an interview with the TechFlash website, Goldthwait said the series of ads were the first commercials he had ever directed.

"I think they were trying to do something that was a little less mainstream, and I think that's (what led to) my involvement," Goldthwait said.

In a statement, Microsoft said the OMGIGP ad was intended to be a "tongue-in-cheek" look at IE8's InPrivate Browsing feature using "irreverent humour".

"While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it," the company said.

Microsoft has removed the ad from its official YouTube channel, its own website and its ad agency's website, but it has already been re-published by other YouTube users.

Microsoft, after incurring significant damage to its brand from Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad campaign, has attempted to retaliate in recent months with edgy but bizarre commercials.

Last last year it launched a US$300 million ad campaign to spruce up Windows Vista's image, which featured comedian Jerry Seinfeld, actress Eva Longoria, singer Pharrell Williams and even the author Deepak Chopra.

Those ads received significant media coverage but they were heavily criticised for being too abstract and not funny enough.

Sony Celebrates an Unhappy Birthday: The Walkman is 30 Years Old

The Walkman is 30 years old today, but Sony (SNE) isn’t throwing the iconic gadget much of a birthday party. More of a somber memorial, really: There’s a special exhibit at Sony’s archive, but that’s about it.

Why so reserved? Maybe it’s because Sony is struggling through yet  another restructuring, so a big party would seem inappropriate. Maybe because Sony views the Walkman’s birthday like a lot of middle-aged people view their birthdays: Markers of bygone eras and missed opportunities.  Or else it’s just Apple’s (AAPL) fault. Associated Press:

The manufacturer, which also makes Vaio personal computers and Cyber-shot cameras, hasn’t had a decisive hit like the Walkman for years, and has taken a battering in the portable music player market to Apple Inc.’s iPod.
Sony has sold 385 million Walkman machines worldwide in 30 years as it evolved from playing cassettes to compact disks then minidisks — a smaller version of the CD — and finally digital files. Apple has sold more than 210 million iPod machines worldwide in eight years….
The archival exhibit shows other Sony products that have been discontinued or lost out to competition over the years — the Betamax video cassette recorder, the Trinitron TV, the Aibo dog-shaped robotic pet.

I do remember hearing some Sony folks mutter hopeful words about a new line of Walkmans that came preloaded with music from Sony artists like Beyonce, and were supposedly flying off the shelves at Wal-Mart (WMT). But that was a while ago, come to think of it, and I haven’t heard about it since.
In any case, just because Sony’s being bashful about the Walkman’s history doesn’t make it less interesting. You can learn more about it at Sony’s online archive, which is compelling despite the fact that it’s a stilted corporate hagiography.

They're Just Not That Into Us

They're Just Not That Into Us

Image (not a real alien) is licensed from istock.com

SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) research projects have scanned the sky for over 40 years looking for an intelligent signal. Could our level of intelligence be unique in the universe?

This is one of those thought provoking questions that I have real difficulty grappling with, because I know so little about the subject.

The same thing happens when I shop for my wife's birthday, so I've opted to apply the same marginally successful method of reaching a conclusion: make a list of everything relevant I can find, then take a shot in the dark as to which one of them is right.

Why is there no scientific evidence
of extraterrestrial intelligent life?

Possible answers:
	We are the only intelligent life forms.
	We are the first, or one of the first, intelligent life forms.
	More of the universe needs to be searched.
	We are not searching correctly.
	Intelligent life exists, but they choose not to be known to us.
	Governments are hiding the evidence.
	Evidence exists, but is not accepted by the public.
	Aliens use a different form of communication we cannot detect.

Unfortunately, I feel the most likely reason that we have not located an alien presence (or Eileen's presents), is that we simply have not looked long enough. I hope there is space at the mall. 

I would like to give a shout out to the people at The SETI Institute for having the foresight and diligence to be listening.

Will Facebook kill blogging?

Image via CrunchBase

Video didn't kill the radio star, iPods haven't murdered CDs and the "box" is definitely still alive and kicking despite years of hysteria about television having one foot in the grave.
When it comes to tech trends, we do like to predict which newcomer will kick its predecessors to the kerb.
Now with Nielsen Online declaring social networking to be one of 2009's fastest-growing categories exceeding email use for the first time ever it's the blog's turn to be scrutinised for signs of terminal illness.
Web monitors Hitwise say that in the year to April 2009, visits to social networking and forum sites increased by 16 per cent in Australia, with visits to blogs dropping by 27.5 per cent in the same period.
One of the leading blog providers, Blogger (now owned by Google), has suffered traffic decreases of 87.3 per cent year-on-year, at a time when Facebook visits have grown by 124 per cent.
Already, more than 5 million Australians are Facebook fanatics. For the 75 per cent who aren't, the online network is like a virtual pub, where you and your chosen "circle" can share photos of your weekend shenanigans, look up old classmates or simply waste time on trivia quizzes that prove your pop culture mettle.
Long-term blogger Shalini Akhil, a Melbourne novelist, admits her social media life has wooed her away from "obsessive" blogging. Two years ago, she was posting regular updates on two blogs but in 2007, she abandoned one of them and now prefers short status updates on Facebook.
"I must admit I am more active on Facebook and Twitter than I am with the blog," she says. "I only blog 'real' news now and use other social media a lot more for day-to-day stuff."
With celebrities like Oprah Winfrey flocking to join the bite-size blogging bandwagon of Twitter where you "tweet" what you're doing in less than 140 characters the concept of the micro-blog has exploded over the last year, with Twitter recording a staggering 2400 per cent growth.
Akhil says for her, it's the portability and spontaneity of Twitter that got her hooked.
"I send tweets from my phone when I'm out and about and I like the immediacy and brevity of it," she says. "It also feels a lot more intimate than blogging, for some reason."
Video game blogger Gabriel McGrath says he's still a committed blogger but he's using Twitter to lure readers to his blog, JustOneMoreGame, which covers retro, indie and coin-op games.
McGrath tweeted a meme called BackGames, asking people to describe a famous video game if the plot ran backwards the concept took off and sent him 21 times his usual week's traffic.
While McGrath uses Facebook to socialise and Twitter to unearth interesting blog articles, he thinks the blog itself can never be replaced for its depth.

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"Twitter is a bit like the trailer for a movie, the chat you have with a friend while you queue for popcorn," he says. "But blogs are still the film, the main feature."
But not everyone is happy with the impact of social networking and micro-blogging, as Sydney fashion journalist Patty Huntington discovered during her recent social media experiment. For her coverage of Rosemount Australian Fashion Week, she decided to dump lengthy blog reviews in favour of short grabs via Twitter.
"There was a huge amount of flack over my RAFW coverage, primarily because I failed to sit down and do those wordy blog posts that I've done for three years now," she says.
Huntington sent more than 30 tweets a day from the event, which tripled her blog traffic but left many readers feeling duped.
"People were expecting 2000-word posts but Twitter has just exploded and we've got the ability to email photos from a BlackBerry and live stream video I just wanted to do something more intimate."
While she enjoys the contrast of Twitter and its global exposure, she refuses to join Facebook and says her blog remains her "marquee" product.
"There's a heap of people on Facebook and Twitter who would never blog," she says. "They're kind of involved but they're just dabbling."
Blog search engine Technorati has tracked blogging trends across the world and says the activity has definitely reached mainstream status. In its 2008 State Of The Blogosphere report, it says 184 million people have started a blog.
Of the 1200 bloggers surveyed across 66 countries, most had been at it for an average of three years and collectively they were creating close to 1 million posts every day. Among them, 64 per cent were part of a social networking site and 41 per cent used Twitter.
Google Australia spokesperson Rob Shilkin says as one of the world's first free blogging services, Blogger is still going strong, with Nielsen NetRatings reporting slight year-to-year growth for both their unique users and time spent per month on Blogger.
Shilkin says the rise of Facebook and Twitter hasn't pushed blogs aside, simply expanded the spheres of communication.
"As internet speeds get faster, innovative new services (like Facebook and Twitter) become available and the internet becomes available on more devices the whole internet ecosystem grows, including people reading and writing more blogs," he says.
Jenny Sinclair, who was The Age's first blog columnist back in 2001, says we can credit the blog with enabling the success of new conversation tools.
"Blogs made Facebook possible," she says. "They gave us the feeling that the internet was something that ordinary people could do somewhere to set up your own opinions. And Facebook makes that even easier."
Now with more advanced web 2.0 tools to give people a voice and a presence, Sinclair says the blogging pack may be dividing between experimenters and stayers.
Career bloggers like gossip guru Perez Hilton have proven that if you're good enough you can use your musings as a launch pad.
McGrath says as a voracious follower of seven blogs, including Boing Boing, which has become its own brand, blogs are definitely becoming more professional.
"The writing, editing, using video and photos, many blogs have lifted their game in recent years and there's a bit more corporate involvement," he says. "My prediction is that more bloggers will get 'deals' and 'writing jobs' out of it."
Business analyst Karin Quadros hopes to one day sell her handmade creations from her craft blog Kayi Dreaming, which she started to explore her creative side. "I think blogging is a great way to promote yourself, especially if you're an independent designer," she says.
"I have seen close friends use their blog as a craft career kick-starter and I want to eventually do the same."
Of course, not everyone wants that kind of exposure. Sinclair says many of the world's most popular blogs remain anonymous kept separate from the prying eyes of people you know.
"As soon as your mum or your employer start reading your blog, I think you'd start to become more closed," she says. "When you think nobody is reading, it's more liberating. You can say exactly what you think."
And that means for the web's most mysterious commentators, Facebook and blogging don't mix.
Blog links
www.shaliniakhil.com
www.justonemoregame.wordpress.com
www.frockwriter.com
www.kayi-dreaming.blogspot.com
www.perezhilton.com
www.boingboing.net

Safeguard Your Orkut Profile

With the spread of social networking came a whole lot of security concerns, especially for those who're actively involved and have a good amount of their personal information stored online. Orkut, being a slightly older social network, has been known to have quite a bit of nefarious activity going on. If you wish to secure yourself and your online avatar on Orkut, here are a few tips to do so...

Secure your Password
The easiest way for someone to access all of your information is to gain your password. To ensure that this doesn't happen, never use Orkut or any other social networking software at a cybercafe you're not familiar with (or if possible, don't use it at ANY cybercafe). It's really easy to install malicious programs such as Key-Loggers that record your keystrokes and allow people to phish for your login details easily at such places. Needless to say, never enter your login details into a third party site and always look for the line https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?... in your URL while logging in.

Orkut's known for spam from autobots and random "fraandsheep" requests. Be vigilant and don't accept friend requests from every Tom, Dickwinder and Hari that sends one your way.

Set your Privacy Settings
In Orkut's Privacy settings (which comes under 'My Settings') the last box allows you to set privileges or rights for what kind of content of yours is accessible to fellow social networkers. If you wish your scrap book, videos, testimonials or photos to be private, set them to allow "only friends"  or "only friends of friends" to view them. This ensures that not every troll out there has access to your profile. If you wish to take it a step further, you can set it up so that that only friends of friends, or only people who know your email address can send you friend requests.

Accept Friend Requests Cautiously
Orkut's known for spam from autobots and random "fraandsheep" requests. Be vigilant and don't accept friend requests from every Tom, Dickwinder and Hari that sends one your way. In fact, its a good idea to check someone's profile before you accept their request, to ensure they're not the social degenerate or sexually frustrated low-life that would creep you out.

Beware of Unofficial Mail
Every now and then you'll come across some fishy looking email in your inbox, telling you that you need to 'reconfirm' your details (i.e. password) in order to continue using Orkut. Ignore any such mail and block those that send it. There are loads of people out there who come with with legit looking mailers and/or websites that ask you for your login details, please beware of them and trust only the main site with your account details.

Downloading Files for Orkut = Bad!
A lot of unofficial sites offer supposedly "powerful applications" that are nothing but stacks of Trojans and key-loggers. Don't download anything but official Orkut applications to ensure that you don't get screwed over.

Ensure your Password's not easy
Last but not the least, please ensure that your password is everything but easy to crack. Keeping it a variation of your name and/or your last name is downright retarded; please refrain from doing so. Using a mix of alphabetical and numeric characters is a great idea. Most of the time we get lazy and decide to keep it something that's easy to remember, which, in most cases, is easy to crack too. Keep a difficult password and remember it! If your memory sucks as much as mine does, write it down in a diary you own, or any other place that's only accessible to you.

That's about it for this list. If you think we've missed out on something, or wish to add a few tips of your own, please share them with all of us via a comment!

Source : Tech 2

Google Isn't Everything

An aeon ago, we all searched the Web with Yahoo, Excite, Altavista and others. The results, helpful at first, deteriorated over time. If a user searched for, say, “Viagra”, search engines decided that the best results were pages that contained the word “Viagra” as many times as possible. Naturally, spammers created pages stuffed with fake keywords to lure in the innocent. And results became increasingly crowded with unwanted stuff.
Along came Google with a revolutionary thought: Relevance, or links from other Web sites as an indicator of importance. So if the most number of pages on the Internet pointed to Pfizer’s (Viagra’s manufacturer) site, that was probably the most authoritative one. Google called its algorithm “PageRank”. Its results were so good that its market share grew exponentially year after year. Today, seven out of ten searches are via Google. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary list “googling” as a verb.

Competitors have ploughed many millions into dethroning the king. But Google owes much to a combination of bad competition, exploding Web content and the rise of online advertising. No new player is going to get that lucky.
But that’s not the end of it.

Image: bing.com

The new kid on the block

Google’s algorithm, while much more complex and powerful than the original PageRank, is starting to show its age. Spammers know they must game Google, and they do. The rise of social networks and the real-time Web offers users the ability to search conversations minutes, even seconds old, and Google is mostly at sea here.

New entrants have realised the futility of going head-to-head with Google, and are happy creating better niche products. Here are four promising new engines that complement, not replace, Google:

From the wonderful people who brought you Windows:
Bing
Snidely called “But It’s No Google”, Microsoft’s shiny new search engine comes closest to doing what Google does, sometimes better. Bing’s “decision engine” goes beyond basic search results in areas like travel, shopping or personal finance. This may put off people who prefer not to be “nudged” by their search engines, but most will like it. Bing has also innovated in the way results are presented: Hovering over a result will pull up a summary of the page or present related phrases.

Compute this:
Wolfram|Alpha
Unlike traditional search, which lists sites where answers may lie, Wolfram|Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine,” actually computes answers for you. It has been amassing expert knowledge: 10 trillion+ “pieces of data” linked through over 50,000+ algorithms and models. Searching for “Infosys Wipro employees” not only throws up the exact number of employees as reported most recently by both companies, but also draws a comparative graph covering the last few years.

I heard it on the grapevine:
Scoopler
Standard search algorithms, including Google’s, aren’t nimble enough to instantly index the “real-time Web” — instant messages, link- or photo-sharing, exchanges on social networks. Scoopler is a start-up that searches services like Twitter, Flickr and Digg for what users are talking about that very instant. A search for “iPhone” throws up a constantly-updating feed of conversational mentions. Most of the results are from Twitter, though, reflecting its domination of the real-time Web.

Flesh-powered:
Mahalo
Machines and algorithms are only as good as they are made to be. Mahalo goes to the source, with the human approach. The company encourages users to “claim” and then “curate” expert pages around topics. Mahalo hopes that having people organise and present the results will come across as warmer and more meaningful to searchers. If you’re interested in, say, “Sushi” or “Bob Dylan” and don’t want reams of useless search results, try Mahalo’s well-curated pages on both subjects, stocked with lots and lots of information.

Traveling the Web Together

Many online activities are deeply social: writing and reading blogs, visiting social-networking sites, sending instant messages and e-mails, and making Internet phone calls. However, actually browsing the Internet is usually still a solitary pursuit. Researchers from the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, VA, hope to change that with software called RCB (for real-time collaborative browsing) that makes it far simpler to connect with another person as he or she clicks around the Web.
There are already a few ways to navigate through Web pages collaboratively, but each has its limitations. Trailfire, for example, lets a user record her Web sessions but doesn't allow users to browse together at the same time. Another service, called Weblin, provides a way to annotate sites with animations and avatars, but it is only geared toward interacting on a single Web page. More powerful "screen sharing" lets users browse together as if sharing the same machine, but this normally involves connecting to an outside server.
What sets RCB apart, says Haining Wang, an assistant professor of computer science at William and Mary, is its simplicity. Only the person leading a session needs to have a browser extension installed--others can then participate with any standard Web browser. "This makes cobrowsing very simple and practical," Wang says. The researchers suggest that RCB could be particularly useful for businesses offering customer support, for distance-learning courses, or for friends who want to share links.
To use RCB, one person has to install a Firefox browser extension. This allows her to generate a session URL that can be sent to other participants. When a second user clicks on the URL, the host's RCB extension sends him to a Web page that then connects him to the first person's browser. Once connected, both users can interact with a Web page and follow links, with all actions funneled through the host's browser. The host also retains control over the session and can add or remove participants as needed. A host can connect to up to 10 participants without losing too much performance, but the researchers say that RCB is best suited for two people at a time.

"There is a real desire by users to share URLs with collaborators in real time," says Meredith Ringel Morris, a computer scientist in the adaptive systems and interaction group at Microsoft Research, who launched a collaborative search tool called SearchTogether last year. A survey conducted by Morris in 2006 found that 30 percent of participants said that they had tried to browse with others using instant messaging.
Morris says that the researchers' efforts to simplify cobrowsing through RCB "are a big step in the right direction." Users with limited technical skills could especially benefit from a cobrowsing tool, Morris says, since it allows a more experienced Internet user to walk them through unfamiliar tasks. Because this needs to be easy to do, she says, it's important that RCB uses a regular Web browser.
On the other hand, Morris worries that RCB places too much of a burden on the host of a cobrowsing session. As the system is currently implemented, a user can only set up a session if she knows her computer's host name or Internet protocol (IP) address, as well as the number of an unused transmission control protocol (TCP) port.
Vladimir Estivill-Castro, a professor at the School of Information and Communication Technology at Griffith University, in Australia, who has studied the usability of cobrowsing tools, says that the approach "seems rather convenient." But he thinks that more work needs to be done to improve the system so that many users can take actions on a single Web page.
RCB is not yet available to the public, but the researchers presented their work last week at the Usenix Technical Conference, in San Diego. Wang says that his group filed a provisional patent last September with the hope of getting the technology adopted by major browser vendors.

T-Mobile to launch successor to G1 with Google Android software

T-Mobile USA said today it’s preparing to launch a successor to the G1, the cell phone that uses Google’s Android software.
The T-Mobile myTouch 3G with Google is a big mouthful. But it’s certainly timely. It’s clear that T-Mobile needs to do release a new model in order to present some kind of counter to the launch of the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre.

Customers can start to pre-order the device — which comes in black, white, and merlot — beginning July 8, and it’s expected to be available later this summer. The phone has a 3.2-inch HVGA touch-screen display and virtual keyboard, which orients automatically from portrait to landscape mode in most applications. T-Mobile is focusing on the ability to customize menus, wallpapers, icons, and download thousands of Android Market apps as a reason to upgrade to the new phone. A version of the myTouch phone is going to debut on Vodaphone’s network in Europe.

The phone also has deep integration of Google services and the latest Android software. You can use Google Search via voice. You can view Google Maps with Street View (which shows you real 3-D pictures of streets), as well as use Gmail, YouTube and Picasa.

One of the new apps being touted is Geodelic’s Sherpa, which has an engine that customizes itself to the user’s preference. It learns your dislikes and likes when it comes to retailers, restaurants and attractions. It can then make recommendations based on what it knows about you.

In a statement, Andy Rubin, vice president of mobile platforms at Google and the visionary behind Android, said the new device will pave the way to attract more developers and lead to the creation of a new wave of “killer Android applications.”

The phone was designed by HTC. In addition to its touch screen and virtual keyboard it has a 3.2-megapixel camera, a music player with a preinstalled 4 gigabyte microSD memory card, and enhanced video capabilities to make it easy for users to record and share pictures and videos. You can share via multimedia messaging (MMS) or, with a single click, upload videos and pictures to YouTube and Picasa. The device can tap into Wi-Fi or T-Mobile’s 3G data newtork.

Source : VB

Wave: Google’s take on the future of communication

Finally unveiled after years of development under the codename “Walkabout,” Google Wave combines popular features from across the web — feeds, shared documents, photo galleries, etc. — to redefine online communication. At least that’s the goal. Its creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the braintrust behind Google Maps), even say they set out to break down traditional modes of communication — email and instant messaging — to find a system more in sync with how web users prefer to talk today. The result looks promising.
At a basic level, Wave is part chat room, part collaborative document. You and your friends belong to a page that any of you can add information to, and it will show up for everyone in real time. And this information comes in many different forms: images, videos, links, comments, event invitations, polls, blog entries, and the like. It’s an ongoing conversation — with rich content.

Here’s a quick wrap-up of the product’s features:
- You can add any number of users to a wave, just like inviting friends to your Gchat list.
- You can post richly-formatted text, photos, links and videos, just like on your Facebook feed.
- You can simply drag and drop files (photos, docs, etc.) to add them to your Wave
- You can stream in your feeds, including Twitter and FriendFeed (a company that’s probably not having the best day).
- You can reply to or comment on anything another member has posted to the Wave.
- You can type at the same time as anyone else on your Wave, and your messages will show up in real time almost character by character (though you can toggle it to show messages only after you press done, like an IM).
- You can rewind and play back your Wave conversation to see how it evolved at any point.
- Wave is open source, allowing third-party developers to play with and extend the product (something Google is encouraging before its public launch).
- You can export an edited wave as a new wave and start over if it gets too confusing.
- You can make some parts of a conversation viewable by a select group, or entirely private.
- You can embed your Waves in other places — your blog, your web site, etc.
- The open API allows developers to easily build new features into Wave — one example is Polly, a tool that lets you add polls to a wave. This also functions as an RSVP feature, negating the need for sites like eVite.
- Another extension, Bloggy, lets you start a Wave with a blog post, that readers can then respond to in a variety of ways.
- You can play interactive games in the sidebar of your Wave, like chess (an incarnation of Scrabble is sure to follow if it hasn’t already).
- Wave has workable versions for Android and the iPhone.
This list already seems impressive, but there’s a reason Google chose to unveil the product at its developer conference: There’s still a long way to go. Right now, Wave resembles a bunch of services that already exist on the web, from Twitter to FriendFeed to Facebook. Putting them all in one place is a breakthrough in itself, but for truly radical innovation, it’s a masterful idea to tap into third-party enthusiasm. It will be interesting to see how different the product looks by launch time.