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Guys Guys Guys please dont install Google hacks as per with avgs latest update and pc tools says google hacks is a trojan so kindly use it online do not install google hacks at all

Popularity: 19% [?]

The editorial staffs of eWEEK and sister publications CIO Insight and Baseline put their heads together to name the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT.

To come up with this year’s list, we looked for people who not only had a tangible track record of IT success, but also have far-reaching influence, the ability to effect change and a deep level of engagement in developing emerging technologies.

The last criteria is especially important, as we wanted to highlight the people who are on the leading edge of technology development—those who are shaping not only the products we use and the model by which they are delivered, but also the way in which we work.

1. Larry Ellison

CEO, Oracle

Ellison’s plans to roll up the enterprise applications space show no signs of slowing. Oracle has leveraged its strength in the data center to cement its status as one of the world’s most important applications and middleware vendors. For more on Ellison’s influence, click here.

2. Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple
Apple’s influence is being increasingly felt in the enterprise.

3. Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft
Microsoft has certainly seen its challenges of late. But as Microsoft goes, so goes the industry still—with Ballmer at the helm.

4. Sam Palmisano
Chairman and CEO, IBM
Palmisano has positioned IBM to generate great returns in a mature market by expanding internationally and wherever he’s seen opportunity in the enterprise applications space.

5. Marissa Mayer
Vice president, search products and user experience, Google
Mayer oversees the way search is constructed and rendered usable by people all over the world.

6. Jean-Philippe Courtois
President, Microsoft International, Microsoft
Courtois leads global sales, marketing and services for Microsoft International in more than 240 countries outside the United States and Canada.

7. Joe Tucci
Chairman, president and CEO, EMC
Tucci is taking EMC on a trip beyond storage.

8. Mark Hurd
Chairman, president and CEO, Hewlett-Packard
Hurd has added to HP’s software division and its services portfolio.

9. John Chambers
Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems
IP is increasingly becoming the channel by which all communication travels, and Cisco is providing not only the plumbing but also the applications.

10. Larry Page & Sergey Brin
President of products and president of technology, respectively, Google
The founders of Google changed expectations for search engines, and now they’re doing the same with a growing suite of applications that have paved the way for a top-down model of technology implementation.

11. John Johnson
CIO, Intel
Johnson undertook one of the world’s largest mobile computing efforts: Some 85 percent of Intel employees are now free from their desktops, resulting in
double-digit productivity gains.

12. Kevin Turner
COO, Microsoft
The former Wal-Mart exec has succeeded as COO while other outsiders have floundered in the role.

13. Ray Ozzie
Chief software architect, Microsoft
Outside Microsoft, Ozzie is known as the person responsible for the company’s forward-thinking services strategy. Within some quarters of Microsoft, he is known for building out the services vision and platform, while letting other executives take credit.

14. Marc Benioff
CEO, Salesforce.com

Benioff was at the forefront of the SAAS revolution, and he continues to lead the charge.

15. Linus Torvalds
Developer, Linux Foundation
He developed Linux, arguably the first open-source app widely used in the enterprise, and his influence on the kernel continues to be felt on a day-to-day basis.

16. Jonathan Schwartz
President and CEO, Sun
Hitching his company’s horse to open source, Schwartz is making sure the Sun doesn’t set.

17. Jeff Bezos
Chairman and CEO, Amazon.com
Bezos is constantly evolving Amazon.com, from Web-based bookseller to uber-online retailer to cloud computing provider.

18. Michael Dell
CEO, Dell
Dell is back and ready to rumble in the enterprise space.

19. Barbara Desoer
CTO & COO, Bank of America
Banks, mortgages and acquisitions all come together in her tech operations during a difficult economic time.

20. Diane Greene
President and CEO, VMware
Greene believed in virtualization when no one else did. Now she has to defend VMware’s turf as virtualization becomes the common wisdom.

21. Nandan Nilekani
Co-chairman, Infosys Technologies
Nilekani has been instrumental in making India an IT force and is still coming on strong.

22. Mendel Rosenblum
Chief scientist, VMware
Rosenblum has enormous influence over the development of the hypervisor and is working on new areas for the company to explore.

23. Rob Carter
CIO, FedEx
Carter is widely considered the most innovative and effective CIO in the United States.

24. Peter Weill
Director, Center for Information Systems Research
As the director and senior research scientist at CISR, a research group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Weill conducts research on the role and value of IT in the enterprise.

25. Henning Kagermann
CEO, SAP
SAP software is used at all the big companies, and Kagermann would like it to run at small and midsize companies, too.

26. Bob Muglia
Senior vice president, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft
If Microsoft’s launches of the 2008 versions of SQL Server, Visual Studio and Windows Server go well, the future is Muglia’s.

27. Azim Premji
Chairman, Wipro Technologies
Premji has led Wipro, of Bangalore, India, since 1966, when it was a cooking fat company. Today, Wipro has $5 billion in revenue and provides IT services via a global delivery platform.

28. Scott Guthrie
Corporate vice president, .Net Developer Platform, Microsoft

Guthrie oversees several development teams responsible for delivering Visual Studio tools and .Net Framework technologies.

29. Eva Chen
CEO, Trend Micro
Under Chen’s leadership, Trend Micro continues to engineer security software that outperforms the competition’s.

30. Brendan Eich
CTO, Mozilla Corp.
Eich helps ensure that the browser is up to the task of acting as the operating system running an increasing number of mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud.

31. John Halamka
CIO, CareGroup Health System, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Clinical Research Institute
In addition to his CIO role, Dr. Halamka serves as an e-health adviser to both Microsoft and Google.

32. Paul Otellini
President and CEO, Intel
Otellini has helped get Intel back on track as the top producer of x86 processors for servers, desktops and laptops after struggling against Advanced Micro Devices for years.

33. Rollin Ford
CIO, Wal-Mart
The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, sets technology direction.

34. Steve Mills
Senior vice president and group executive, IBM
Mills oversees all of IBM’s software efforts.

35. Tim Berners-Lee
Director, World Wide Web Consortium
The inventor of the Web—and the man who’s envisioning its future with the Semantic Web.

36. Kevin Martin
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
Martin sets the telecommunications agenda, with his influence keenly felt lately around spectrum and net neutrality issues.

37. Michael Howard
Principal security program manager, Microsoft
Howard is co-author of Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle. His influence is so significant that companies outside of Microsoft are implementing their own versions of SDL.

38. Andrew McAfee
Associate professor, Harvard Business School
McAfee is a torchbearer for the emerging Enterprise 2.0 market.

39. Nicholas Negroponte
Founder, One Laptop Per Child
Negroponte, also founder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab, rocked the IT industry with the introduction of the XO—as much for the laptop’s technology innovations as for the project’s philanthropic spirit.

40. Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook
The 23-year-old Zuckerberg stole the social networking crown from MySpace and has built a thriving community of third-party developers.

41. Elizabeth Hight
Navy rear admiral, vice director, Defense Information Systems Agency
Nominated to take over DISA, Hight also is commander of the Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations—a big job any time, but really tough during wartime.

42. Jack Ma Yun
CEO, Alibaba
His Alibaba efforts—an English-language B2B site for international buyers looking to contact Chinese sellers and a Chinese language site focused on B2B trades inside China—lead China’s burgeoning e-commerce market.

43. Window Snyder
Chief security something or other, Mozilla
A former Microsoft security strategist, Snyder borrowed a page from Redmond’s playbook and introduced a comprehensive threat-modeling and penetration-testing routine to Mozilla.

44. Robert LeBlanc
General manager, IBM Global Consulting Services and SOA
LeBlanc is leading the all-important SOA charge at IBM.

45. Marc Andreessen
Entrepreneur
Co-author of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, chairman of Opsware and now co-founder of Ning, an up-and-coming social network platform. We’re starting to lose track of Andreessen’s many tech lives—and wide-ranging influence.

46. Tony Scott
CIO, Microsoft
Scott oversees Microsoft’s 4,000-person IT operation, whose practice of “eating its own dog food” makes Scott an early indicator of whether new products are ready for enterprise consumption.

47. Randall Stephenson
Chairman, AT&T
Back from being broken up, AT&T is now calling the shots for a mobile world.

48. Ralph Szygenda
CIO, General Motors

Still the general of CIOs, but his company is challenged.

49. Marc Tremblay
Sun fellow, senior vice president and chief architect of microelectronics, Sun Microsystems
Tremblay helped develop the UltraSPARC family of processors and now the “Rock,” a processor set for release in 2009 designed with parallel computing in mind.

50. Mark Lewis
President, Content Management and Archiving Division, EMC
Previously EMC CTO, Lewis leads the division that helps companies create value from all the data EMC technology stores.

51. Michal Zalewski
Information security engineer, Google
Before joining the search company, Zalewski launched an all-out assault on the security models of modern Web browsers, exposing critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox. His public disclosure of those flaws went a long way toward hardening the browsers.

52. David Barnes
CIO, United Parcel Service
Barnes is getting real efficient with the UPS fleet.

53. John Pescatore
Vice president and research fellow, Gartner
In many ways, Pescatore’s work determines enterprise spending at a very high level, influencing the delivery of Internet-facing products.

54. Robert Samson
Vice president, Worldwide Systems Sales, Systems and Technology Group, IBM
Samson is responsible for worldwide sales of IBM’s servers and storage products, as well as retail store solutions.

55. Faisal Hoque
Founder, Business Technology Management Institute
Hoque champions a form of management science called Business Technology Management, which aims to ensure that sustainable business value can be delivered through technology.

56. Bob Willett
CIO and CEO, Best Buy and Best Buy International
Willett is a forerunner of what we call “the hollowing of big IT”—where IT organizations of the future will be composed of managers and analysts with most specialty work outsourced.

57. Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikia
Co-founder of that fount of shared knowledge, Wikipedia, Wales is now looking to apply the wiki model to search with Wikia Search.

58. Bruce Schneier
CTO, BT Counterpane

Schneier is a leading cryptology expert and a voice for common sense in security policy.

59. Charles Phillips
President, Oracle
Larry Ellison makes the plans, and Phillips has to fuse his boss’ big thoughts with reality.

60. Stefan Esser
Security researcher
Esser’s “Month of PHP Bugs” project thoroughly exposed the insecure nature of the widely deployed PHP language and forced a rethink of security in the open-source world.

61. Martin Roesch
CTO, Sourcefire
The inventor of the open-source Snort, Roesch is a noted expert in the area of intrusion prevention technology.

62. Ann Livermore
Executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard
Livermore has tremendous influence over the types of products HP offers its enterprise customers, as well as the small and midsize companies HP has begun to pursue.

63. John Doerr
Venture capitalist, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
In tech, it’s all about making the right venture capital bets.

64. Angela Merkel
Chancellor, Germany

The first female chancellor of Germany, Merkel is a physicist by training and has the strongest understanding of technology of any world leader.

65. Ravi Marwaha
General manager, IBM Global Business Partners
The partner program Marwaha oversees actively networks with solution providers from different disciplines to develop innovative solutions that solve real-world customer problems.

66. John Glaser
CIO, Partners HealthCare
Leader in the strategic application of IT in the health care industry.

67. Bill Hilf
Director of platform strategy, Microsoft
Hilf is a key player in Microsoft’s evolving strategy to reach out to the open-source community.

68. Mark Shuttleworth
CEO, Canonical
The leader of the Ubuntu distribution is mainstreaming Linux on the desktop.

69. Randy Mott
CIO, Hewlett-Packard

Formerly CIO at Wal-Mart and Dell, Mott is responsible for HP’s IT strategy and assets.

70. Thomas Davenport
Author
“Competing on Analytics” is an important book at a time when business intelligence is in its ascendancy.

71. Gary Hamel
Author
His ideas in “The Future of Management” validate and expound new ways of working and using IT.

72. Simon Crosby
CTO, XenSource
Crosby is a leading proponent of open-source virtualization with the Xen hypervisor. (XenSource was acquired by Citrix in 2007.)

73. Edward Markey
U.S. Representative, D-Mass.
Markey serves as the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunication and the Internet, and is a major advocate for net neutrality.

74. Ross Mayfield
Co-founder, SocialText

As SocialText’s chairman and president, and former CEO, Mayfield is a thought leader in the burgeoning Web 2.0 collaboration software market.

75. Stan Shih
Chairman, Acer
Shih started Acer—which snapped up Gateway in 2007—and is still the company’s top tech visionary.

76. Desh Deshpande
Founder, Deshpande Center, MIT School of Engineering
From financial flop to billionaire to a new way of developing tech startups.

77. Edward Amoroso
CISO, AT&T
The chief information security officer at AT&T, Amoroso is a pioneer of security in the cloud.

78. Padmasree Warrior
CTO, Cisco
Formerly of Motorola, Warrior plays a key role in the development of Cisco technology.

79. Mark Olsen
Chairman, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
Olsen and the PCAOB are charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with setting the standards for and enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

80. Mary Lou Jepsen
Founder, Pixel Qi
As CTO of the OLPC, Jepsen introduced innovative display technologies. Now she’s applying that experience at her Pixel Qi startup, which will build components for low-cost information devices.

81. Joe Klein
Founder, Thefunded.com
Klein has built a huge following for his ratings of venture capitalists and his recounting of how they treat would-be entrepreneurs.

82. Bronwen Matthews
Security program manager, Microsoft
Matthews controls the budget for outside hacking teams hired to break Microsoft’s products.

83. Akash Saraf
CEO, Zenith InfoTech

Rather than setting up yet another boutique managed services offering, Saraf built a massive hosting infrastructure in India to deliver affordable managed services that resellers in the United States could brand as their own.

84. Chris Wysopal CTO, Veracode
Wysopal is a poster boy for hackers made good.

85. Lawrence Lessig
Founder, Center for Internet and Society
With his Change Congress Web site, Lessig’s goal is to reduce corruption and the influence of money in politics. Lessig is also an advocate for reduced legal restrictions on the radio spectrum and the creator of Creative Commons license.

86. Patricia Curley
CIO, The Kraft Group

Tasked with managing the technology that keeps the New England Patriots humming, Curley also oversees IT for the New England Revolution soccer team and Gillette Stadium.

87. Jim Collins
Author
“Good to Great” is the most popular and influential book among CIOs.

88. Edward Felten
Computer security and privacy and technology policy researcher, Princeton University

Felten is shining a spotlight on the intersection of public policy and privacy.

89. Evan Williams
Founder, Twitter
Williams asked the question, “What are you doing right now?” and changed the way we communicate in the process.

90. Matt Mullenweg
Co-founder, WordPress

The 24-year-old Mullenweg is a pioneer of the open-source blog.

91. Alan Kay
A computer science legend, Kay’s most recent work has been with the OLPC, whose XO laptop is based in part on his innovations.

92. Ivan Krstic
Former director of security, OLPC
Krstic, who left the OLPC in March, created the innovative Bitfrost security architecture for the XO. If Bitfrost proves itself on the XO, it will influence anti-malware security on mainstream operating systems.

93. Nicholas Carr
Author
Carr shook up the industry by saying that IT doesn’t matter. Agree or not, his ideas continue to shape the way that organizations look at the IT department.

94. Tavis Ormandy
Information security engineer, Google
Ormandy, one of the most visible hackers/researchers on the Google Security Team, faces the unenviable responsibility of making sure all of Google’s products pass the security smell test.

95. Mark Spencer
Chairman and CTO, Digium
Spencer founded Asterisk and the open-source telephony movement.

96. Dave Winer
Software developer and entrepreneur

Winer is the developer of RSS.

97. Thornton May
Florida Community College, IT Leadership Academy
May is a noted technology futurist.

98. William
Cheswick
Lead member of technical staff, AT&T Labs

Cheswick continues to innovate in the area of communications research.

99. Chris Anderson
Author
Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, proffered the notion of the niche in his book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.”

100. Ben Bernanke
Chairman, Federal Reserve Board
No one will have a bigger impact on the fate of the nation’s banks and financial services companies, interest rates, or access to credit.

Popularity: 66% [?]

 

With inflation in the country rising at 7% see the effects you can have

 

 

1.) Your monthly expenditure will go up on groceries will cost more and your usable income will buy less for the same money. Retailers will pass on the rise in wholesale prices to consumers.

 

2.Your home loan Rates may shoot up. The reserve bank will take steps

to tighten money supply. This will either stop interest rates from falling – or could even make them rise to curtail overall demand in economy .

 

3.Your Salary hikes may be curtailed. When inflation goes up the employer costs go up and to save money, the employer may reduce or hold back your increases

 

4. Growth may slow and so will job prospects, Industries put their foot on brakes or accelerators when interest rates go up. They hire fewer people or take their time to make up their minds on investment plans. This could Stagger job prospects

 

 5. Your Stocks and mutual fund values suffer. It is Simple when economic growth suffers corporate earnings take a knock and bulls and foreign investors stay away from the market

 

6. Exports may be hit. If inflation goes up the cost of manufacturing goods or producing services like software in the country goes up. The country’s competitiveness may suffer as a  result and export sector prospect in industry like textiles software and jewellery may be hurt.

 

7. Imports will become costlier if the rupee becomes weaker. That makes the government’s oil bill higher and could potentially lead to increase fuel prices be in diesel, cooking gas or kerosene

 

8. The foreign trips to India would be less as things would become expensive so the tourist industry will also be getting a big hit  

 

Popularity: 37% [?]

Net-enabled wireless devices cited as major source of increase

March 6, 2008 (Computerworld) The Internet grew by almost 33 million domain names last year, according to the fourth-quarter 2007 “Domain Name Industry” report released yesterday by VeriSign Inc., a digital infrastructure vendor that manages Internet domain names such as .com.

Total registrations worldwide topped 153 million across all of the top-level domain names, a 27% increase over the same quarter in 2006 and a 5% increase over the third quarter of 2007, according to VeriSign’s brief (download PDF).

By the end of 2007, there were more than 80.4 million .com and .net domain-name registrations, a 24% increase year over year and a 4% increase quarter over quarter, according to the report. That number took into consideration the domain names that were deleted by registrants in the five-day grace period before the end of the fourth quarter of 2007, according to the report. During the five-day grace period, registrants can delete a newly registered domain and get a full refund.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, new .com and .net domain name registrations were added at an average of 2.5 million per month, for a total of 7.5 million new registrations in the quarter. Registrations for country-code top-level domain names totaled more than 58 million, up 33% from 2006 and up 6% from the third quarter of 2007.

During the fourth quarter of 2007, VeriSign processed more than 33 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries per day, the company said.

The report also highlighted the importance of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the successor for IPv4, the current version of the Internet Protocol used today. According to VeriSign, IPv6 is a significant improvement because it provides for a huge increase in the number of addresses that can be made available for networked devices.

“The widespread adoption of Internet-enabled wireless devices and gaming consoles has created a growing demand for larger IP address space,” said Raynor Dahlquist, senior vice president of naming services at VeriSign, in a statement. “To stay ahead of this demand, VeriSign recently took steps to enable the A and J root servers for IPv6. This will help ensure that developing global infrastructures will have sufficient IP address space to innovate, to enhance the end-to-end connectivity for IPv6 networks, and to facilitate richer use of DNS.”

Popularity: 26% [?]

To get out of debt, you need to:
1. Assess Your Debt
2. Create a Budget
3. Cut Your Spending
4. Start Saving
5. Attack Your Debt

Jump start your debt reduction efforts by figuring out just how much debt you have to deal with, and how you’re going to deal with it. Here’s how:

* Smart Debt Reduction Moves for Beginners
* Calculate Your Debt Load

2. Create a Budget

A well thought out budget will help you to get out of debt and stay out of debt. Spend a couple hours going over your finances; then, create a budget that severs your reliance on credit cards. Cash-only is the goal from here on out.
3. Cut Your Spending

To free up money for debt repayment, you’ll need to cut your spending. Look for ways to lower your electric bill, phone bill, homeowner’s insurance, auto insurance and all of your other bills. Challenge yourself to eat out less, cut your grocery bill and to take up free or low-cost hobbies. Then, apply your savings directly to your debts, and enjoy the knowledge that you’re one step closer to a debt-free lifestyle.

a. Go Cash-Only

Credit cards make it easy to overspend, but you can’t use them if you don’t have them with you. Leave your credit cards at home, and stick to cash or debit for all of your purchases.

4. Start Saving

Getting out of debt is as much about paying off debt as it is about avoiding new debt. That’s why it’s important to prepare for the unexpected–car repairs, medical bills, time off from work–basically any expense that could cause you to pull out that credit card and start spending again. Estimate how much of a cushion you’ll need to shield yourself from surprise expenses; then, set that amount aside in an emergency fund. If you can’t afford to fully fund the account now, that’s okay; just set aside a small amount each month until you reach your savings goal.

5. Attack Your Debt

Once you’ve completed all of the previous steps, it’s time to start attacking your debt. Take the money that you’ve freed up with your new budget and spending cuts, and apply it to your debt. Then, keep at it, until all of your debt is paid in full. It may take a while; but if you stick to the plan, you’ll arrive at that finish line a stronger, happier–and most importantly–DEBT-FREE person!

Popularity: 25% [?]

I got an email from my Brother  about Shares  and I suppose the attachment that came together with it is a spreadsheet file. I was surprised that instead of the ordinary xls file that she normally sends I received instead an xlsx file. I tried to open it up with MS Excel 2003, but it throws an error.

I wonder what this XLSX could possibly mean. A quick search have it as a file type Microsoft Excel Open XML Document. This is the latest file format for MS Excel spreadsheet program for its MS Office 2007 Suite. Upon seeing open XML document, what came into my mind immediately is I could easily open the document using a browser or text editor. I was disappointed that I neither of the two is able to open the file. The file format XLSX could be broken down into 3 parts.

XLSX File Format content meaning from Microsoft Excel blog:

* XL - MS Excel file
* S - Spreadsheet
* X - macro free Xml

I was looking for a solution that would allow me to open the file without installing the MS Office 2007 suite. I wasn’t able to find like a FREE MS Excel 2007 file viewer. Instead I found a software that would allow recovery of data inside a damaged spreadsheet file. I am not actually recovering a damaged Excel file per se, but with this tool opening of the xlsx file is possible. Recovery Tool Box for MS Excel proved to be worth the download and installation. A small file of about 788Kb allowed me to open the XLSX spreadsheet file. After opening the files it prompts if a recovery is required or not. The purpose at hand that I have is only to view the data inside and no need to really do a recovery of the file. A button on the lower right Start Recovery with a check icon could just be easily used. In demonstration mode the saving of the recovered file could not be done without buying the license for using the software. Though not all the functionality of the spreadsheet file is there like the formating and some formulas, it is still very useful.

Popularity: 53% [?]

As it promised, Microsoft started sending Windows Vista users an update that identifies illegal copies of the OS installed with cracks that the company will disable when it distributes Service Pack 1 (SP1) in two weeks.

Last Thursday, Microsoft announced the update, which detects two common cracks used to activate pirated copies of Vista, and said it would hit Windows Update (WU) within a week. Users who have left Vista’s recommended WU settings alone will receive the update automatically. Others, said Microsoft, must enable Automatic Update within Vista or manually call up Windows Update from the Start menu.

A document posted to the company’s support site spelled out the details. Among other things, it promised that the 3MB update “does not affect the functionality of your operating system.” That jibes with what Alex Kochis, senior product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage program, said last week when he announced the update.

If the update finds one of the cracks — the first, dubbed “Grace Timer,” extends Vista’s activation grace period, while the other, “OEM BIOS,” mimics factory-floor activation — it pops up a notice alerting the user, but doesn’t disable either crack. Users whose PCs don’t have the cracks will not see the pop-up.

Once installed, the update cannot be removed, as it doesn’t appear in the “Uninstall or change a program” list in Vista’s Control Panel.

The update is one of the last steps Microsoft’s taking before it offers SP1 during the middle of next month. The service pack will kill the Grace Timer and OEM BIOS cracks, a move that in turn prompts the operating system to start showing messages informing users that they’re running a bogus copy and persistently nagging them to pony up for a legitimate version.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Is flying through outer space from the comfort of your living room enough to make you cry?

It is for former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble. A couple weeks back he said on his blog that a new Microsoft technology made him cry. He didn’t give many details, citing a confidentiality agreement, but he provided enough there for folks to connect the dots.

My new boss, Dan Farber, correctly predicted that it was an updated version of the WorldWide Telescope program, a fact later confirmed by TechCrunch.

Microsoft researcher Curtis Wong showed an early version of the telescope software at last year’s TechFest, Microsoft’s internal science fair. Sources tell me that Microsoft’s desktop software is far more immersive than what was shown at last year’s TechFest or than the sky feature in Google Earth. In particular, the software will let you get extremely close to celestial objects, enough so that the software might be useful not just to armchair astronauts, but also to serious researchers.

The technology features tens of millions of digital images from sources like the Hubble telescope as well as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project championed by missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray.

Attendees of the posh TED conference will get to see the new Microsoft software next week, while the company also plans to show it at TechFest, the internal science fair that takes place the following week.

I’ll be traveling to Redmond for the event, but I’m going to take a risk and leave my hankies at home.
Topics:
Microsoft, Online services

Popularity: 24% [?]

When the PlayStation3 was released in November 2006, Gaurav Khanna’s wife braved long queues so he could be one of the first people in the US to get his hands on the gaming console.

But the astrophysicist was not itching to burn some rubber in Gran Turismo or shoot hoops in NBA 07. Instead he wanted to build his own supercomputer.

Mr Khanna now owns 16 PS3s, which spend their days simulating the activities of very large black holes in the universe for the physics department at the University of Massachusetts.

Hooked together in a single cluster, the PS3 consoles provide his department with the same amount of computing power as a 400-node supercomputer.

“The challenge these days with supercomputing facilities is that there is a lot of demand for them. So even if I submitted a job that would be expected to take about an hour, it could actually take two days to get started because the queues are so long.

“The PS3 cluster is all mine and was very low cost to set up, which makes it really attractive,” he says.

What makes the gaming console vastly superior to high-end computers for complex research algorithms, Mr Khanna says, is the Cell chip built by IBM to facilitate high-end gaming functions on the latest generation of consoles.

In addition the PS3 was built with an open hardware architecture, which can run the Linux operating system.

Based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, Mr Khanna’s research on black holes is purely theoretical. In order to run his simulation data on the console he has to reprogram it so the algorithms will work on the new architecture.

“Linux can turn any system into a general purpose computer but for it to do work for me I have to run my own code on it for astrophysics applications. The hard part of the job was to make sure my own calculations could run fast on the platform, which meant I had to optimise the written code so it could utilise the new features of the system.

“I am not a Linux person - I am a Mac person - but I was able to follow instructions online,” he says.

His next challenge will be to turn his data into graphical simulations using the high end graphics engine included in the PS3.

“We haven’t done that yet but it would be very neat to actually see the simulation while it is going on,” he says.

Although Mr Khanna was one of the first scientists to optimise the PS3 for his own research work, Tod Martinez, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois has been tinkering with games consoles ever since his son’s original PlayStation malfunctioned.

He says that while researching whether or not to buy a new PS2 for his son he also began to explore the possibilities of using gaming consoles for scientific research.

“The two main things we do are rotations and translations of objects. We also need to get a lot of pixels onto the screen, which means we need big channels to move lots of data. It was pretty clear that modern games consoles mapped really well onto theoretical chemical calculations,” he says.

Once the PS2 was released he bought one unit for his son and a few units for himself and made some rudimentary attempts to program it. “But back then the architecture was proprietary and trying to convince the machine to run non-Sony programmed games was difficult.”

That situation improved rapidly when Sony released a DVD that would allow users to run Linux on the console. “Only 1000 DVDs were released but they really opened up the architecture considerably,” he says.

Since that time Mr Martinez has refined his computing resources considerably and he now runs a cluster of eight cut-down consoles from IBM based on the same Cell chip technology used in the PS3.

He has also expanded his use of gaming technology into graphics cards with the help of a new programming framework developed by graphics hardware specialist Nvidia.

Mr Martinez’s field of research is examining how molecules behave when you shine light on them - which has wide ramifications for the fields of agriculture, solar energy and the study of human vision.

“We have done tests of algorithms and Nvidia cards are four to five times faster than the Cell chip, which is 20 times faster than an ordinary high end computer,” he says.

Because both technologies can be classified as “stream processers” they are highly suited to moving massive volumes of data - unlike the general purpose processing for ordinary computing.

“Some people think it’s just about having a faster computer. They don’t realise how big a change it is to do computing at your desk after accessing a computer in a room somewhere where you have to wait around for results.

“Of course it does cost less, but what needs to be recognised is that it also changes the way people think about problems when they are given a hundred times more computer power.”

Using the example of a black box, Mr Martinez explains that instead of asking basic questions about how it works, you can just start tinkering around with it.

“So rather than taking the thing apart you just start moving all the knobs about to see what happens when you change something - just as you might in real life.”

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html

Popularity: 26% [?]

Maxthon2 - Right Click Link and Open In New Tab

I’ve been using both Maxthon and Firefox extensively for quite a while now. Maxthon on my office laptop and firefox at home. I have my fair share of complaints on both browsers. If left idle for hours, the mem usage and VM size kept going up, even if you have like only 5 opened tabs. I want to switch to either one for both my home and office PC but just too lazy to do it. Anyway, I can get up-to-date from both sides which is a good thing. For those who have never heard of Maxthon, here’s a quote taken from Maxthon’s official site.

Maxthon Internet Browser software is a powerful tabbed browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer browser engine (your most likely current web browser) which means that what works in the IE browser will work the same in Maxthon tabbed browser but with many additional efficient features like…

Then last week, out of the blue, the Maxthon on my office laptop stopped working. The network connection is ok, and IP is detected. But it just stopped functioning after a while. It just won’t do anything when you click on any link, open a new tab and go to any site, etc. I’ve to restart it each time it stopped working. KNS… :doh: It may be a bug but why it only happens after I’ve used it like a few months?

I went and downloaded the Maxthon setup file again, reinstalled, the problem didn’t go away. Got fed up.. downloaded Firefox instead. LOL! Then I noticed Maxthon has a new version, Maxthon2 which is currently in Beta RC4. I believe the final version will be released pretty soon. So, just to test things out, I downloaded and installed it.
The first impression was pretty impressive. Everything just felt snappier. The good thing is, Maxthon2 is installed in a different folder than Maxthon and it’s a totally different program altogether. It will import your settings from the old Maxthon, Firefox, etc. upon first launch. So, you can have both Maxthon and Maxthon2 running concurrently if you feel like it though I don’t see any sense in doing so. If you feel like trying it out, by all means do, you won’t regret it. You can download it from the site at Maxthon2 RC which has recorded some 99 millions+ downloads to date.

At this moment of writing, I have 15 opened tabs and I don’t feel the lag at all when I refresh any particular tab. With the current Maxthon version 1, when I have 15 opened tabs and I refresh any tab, the whole laptop just freeze for a couple of seconds. Pissed me off each time it does which is like most of the time. :wall:

It even has a Maxthon Setup Center which was formally known by Maxthon Options in Maxthon. But the Groups feature is nowhere to be seen. The last time I heard from the forum, it’s at the new sidebar because now they think that Favourites and Groups are totally different things but I beg to differ. Still no time to try it out though.

After I’ve customized everything. I found that when I right-click a link and choose Open In New Tab, once the tab is opened, it switched to the new tab automatically. It’s frustrating when I want to open a few links before I concentrate on those new tabs. Then I’ve to navigate back and forth until I get all the links opened. Stupid isn’t it? There’s not even an option for me to set in the Tabs section in the Maxthon Setup Center to solve this.

Unsatisfied, I went and searched for the solution in the Maxthon forum. It turns out that there’s a button available in front of my face all this time, at the Maxthon2 status bar, bottom right. 2 buttons actually; one for ‘Force Open Links in Background’ and one for ‘Force Open Links in New Tab’. After clicking on the first button, it works like a charm. All links will open in new tab and without focus. :thumb: Why didn’t they put this function in the Maxthon Setup Center yet is beyond me. Hopefully they will in the release version. But the buttons at status bar is a good touch no doubt. Unfortunately, many like me don’t even notice it which may mean something, right?

Maxthon2 Force Open Links in Background

I may change to Maxthon2 for my home PC when I get the Core 2 Duo system up and running as my primary system. Or maybe until the release version. Although Maxthon2 still has quite a few bugs to iron out, they are definitely on the right track.

Popularity: 100% [?]