Cloud Computing - A trap

Richard Stallman on cloud computing: "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign."

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the Internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained prominence in recent years. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".

The growing number of people storing information on Internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies.

Dell recently even made attempts to trademark the term "cloud computing".Fortunately its application was refused.There has be a rise of concern that involvement in cloud computing could bring in privacy and ownership issues.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," Stallman said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

Previous article: Google's third founder

Google's Third founder

Just as Google is celebrating its 10th anniversary, a man claiming to be the "third" founder of Google has come out to stake his claim to history."Google was designed by Larry, Sergey, and me in February 1997,"Hubert Chang claims in this online video.Chang has emerged from obscurity this week with the audacious claim that he helped launch the search giant in 1997 along with acknowledged co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

In the video, Chang said he met Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani in the summer of 1996 while studying for a Ph.D. at New York University. Motwani, later introduced him to Brin and Page, who were students at Stanford.Chang claims he helped Brin and Page come up with the PageRank algorithm that became the basis for Google's search engine. He also said they all agreed on the kind of corporate culture the company should have.

Google's response to Chang's claims is "Though many people were involved with Google in its early days, it has been well documented over the past decade that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in September 1998."Google's sparse corporate history makes no mention of Chang.

Motwani, in an e-mail, dismissed Chang's claims. He recalls email correspondence with Chang but refutes any existence of a third founder.He mentions by the time the basic idea of PageRank was in place and there was a clear intent of building a company around it he never met with Hubert Chang.

Chang claimed he did not stay to help found Google because he had a made a commitment to his father to finish getting his Ph.D. He also said his e-mail correspondence from 1997 was not saved because he exceeded the NYU e-mail quota for messages at the time.

He closes the video by noting after ten years he's telling his story. "I feel quite confident about the good side of humanity. If you could, please forward this video to your friends. Thank you."

Squabbles over who originated a specific technology or concept are nothing new in Silicon Valley. The latest high profile case involves competing claims by Harvard classmates that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of social networking giant Facebook, wasn't the only founder. But this kind of claim so late is quite skeptical.

Previous Article : Spielberg - Reliance deal

Spielberg Signs Movie Deal with Reliance

Over the last few years, the Hindi film industry has seen the emergence of a lot of big corporate players the biggest being the Anil Ambani owned Reliance Big Entertainment. The company, which has already made its presence felt across areas such as film production, distribution, exhibition, home video, DTH and music, has now bagged one of the most lucrative deals in the history of Indian cinema.

Reliance Big Entertainment has inked a 1.5 billion $ deal with Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG to set up a new age DreamWorks studio. The studio, to be based in Los Angeles, will produce 6 films per year for the next 6 years and the rights for all these films across platforms such as theatres, DTH, television, DVD's will remain with Reliance.The deal allows Spielberg to end a contentious three-year relationship with Viacom's (VIA) Paramount studio, which in late 2005 acquired the DreamWorks live-action studio for $1.2 billion.




A deal between Reliance and Dreamworks would help realize the global ambitions of the group's chairman, Anil Ambani, one of the world's richest men. The conglomerate has interests in everything from power generation to financial services. It is currently in negotiations to buy MTN Group, South Africa's largest mobile phone network operator.

Previous article:Phone number 6666666

Phone number 6666666 sold for $2.75 mn

The sale of world's most expensive mobile phone number has earned a Qatar telecom company a place in the new edition of Guinness Book of World Records.

The phone number 6666666 of Qtel, which was sold for $2.75 million (Qatar Riyal 10 million) to an anonymous buyer in an auction at a charity event last year, will appear in the 2009 edition of the book, it was announced.

The previous record price for a phone number was made in China where the number 8888-8888 sold for $480,000, (Qatar Riyal 1.75 million).

Although the auction took place over a year ago, the record will appear in the 2009 edition of the Guinness World Records book, to be published worldwide next week, reported Qatar daily The Peninsula.

Previous article:Google-HTC phone

Google - HTC phone

Google is expected to unveil its first mobile phone next week, sparking a fierce battle with Apple's hugely successful iPhone ahead of the Christmas shopping season.

The handset, known as the Dream, will be made by Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, and available exclusively on the T-Mobile network in the UK.

It is expected to be available in stores as early as November. It is thought the device will be launched at a special press conference in New York next Tuesday.

The handset will run Google's new mobile phone operating system, Android. It is thought the phone will have a slide-out Qwerty keyboard as well as a built-in GPS (global-positioning system), and will be capable of running Google's range of web applications such as its email service Gmail, productivity suite Google Docs and mapping service Google Maps. It is also likely to feature Google's new web browser, Chrome.

Google, which already dominates the online advertising and search industries, is looking for ways to replicate its success on mobile devices. By putting its own web browser at the heart of the Android operating system, it has the potential to deliver its content and applications to a ready-made target audience.

"We want to create a whole new mobile experience for users who want the same applications on the phone as they use on the internet," said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, on the day the Android project was announced.

Courtesy:Telegraph

Previous article:Bendable news-paper

Bendable e-Newspaper reader

At some point in immediate all classical newspapers will go extinct , either because electronic media's dominance and prevalence one or due to the depleting newsprint resources . And it seems that the Plastic Logic company is quite ready for that moment, since it has just unveiled its Electronic-Reading Device.

Plastic Logic’s black-and-white bendable plastic substrate e-newspaper is about to be launched. Larger than the Kindle and eReader, it has a full 8.5 x 11-inch display and works by gesturing. The device can be continuously updated wirelessly and can both store and display hundreds of books, documents, and newspaper pages. It is compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files as well as PDFs. Available during the first half of 2009, the price and name should be announced at the next CES.

The device, which is unnamed, uses the same technology as the Sony eReader and Amazon.com’s Kindle, a highly legible black-and-white display developed by the E Ink Corporation. While both of those devices are intended primarily as book readers, Plastic Logic’s device has a screen more than twice as large. The size of a piece of copier paper, it can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents.

Richard Archuleta, the chief executive of Plastic Logic, said the display was big enough to provide a newspaper-like layout. “Even though we have positioned this for business documents, newspapers is what everyone asks for,” Mr. Archuleta said.

The black and white, E-Ink device features a wireless link to download content, room enough to store "hundreds of pages of newspapers, books, and documents". Better yet, the device is said to use "flexible, lightweight plastic" rather than glass resulting in a reader about one-third the thickness of the Kindle at about the same weight.

For a complete walk through of the prototype device, check out this video

Previous article: Xeon 7400 Processor

Intel's Xeon 7400 Processor

The latest news on Intel unveiled the fact that the company plans to release its six-core ‘Dunnington’ processor at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas, next week.It is aimed at blade/server market.

The new Dunnington will need an external memory controller, the same as Intel's current line of processors, yet the company is confident that the large cache size the CPU features will help it get over any memory limitation. The giant chip manufacturer will release its first models of the next-generation Nehalem processors in the fourth quarter, which will feature an integrated memory controller supposed to solve memory bottlenecks.

Intel chose to build quad-core chips by taking two dual-core chips and putting them into a special package. This approach was scorned by the chip design purists, but it allowed Intel to get quad-core chips out quickly while AMD struggled for a year with the technical challenges of building Barcelona, a quad-core chip with all the cores on one die.


The Xeon 7400, as well as other upcoming Intel chips, will feature all cores on a single piece of silicon. The current family of processors feature multiple cores shaped into one package. This differs from AMD's approach, which has monolithic processors, yet Intel got to the market faster this way. Although there are voices that shout against Intel's technology, there are few users that really care how the CPU is made as long as it works just fine.



The Dunnington chip is designed for the blade/server market, and this explains why Intel would have it released at VMWare’s VMWorld conference. As the virtualization of operating systems catches more and more ground these days, with one OS running inside another OS, the new processor will most likely attract many of the system administrators attending the show.

Dunnington will arrive just before the Nehalem generation of chips, which will be quite a mishmash of designs. Intel will have a wide variety of Nehalem chips, including ones with two, four, and eight cores, chips with up to 16 threads, and some with integrated graphics.


Previous article: "Big Bang" experiment

Big Bang "experiment"

Physicists around the world last night celebrated the first tests of the Large Hadron Collider which they hope will unlock the secrets of the universe and its origins.


The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Why LHC?

The LHC was built to help scientists to answer key unresolved questions in particle physics. The unprecedented energy it achieves may even reveal some unexpected results that no one has ever thought of!

How LHC works?

Inside the accelerator, two beams of particles travel at close to the speed of light with very high energies before colliding with one another. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field, achieved using superconducting electromagnets. These are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to about ‑271°C – a temperature colder than outer space! For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.

All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From here, the beams inside the LHC will be made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of the particle detectors.

First Beam



An international collaboration of scientists today sent the first beam of protons zooming at nearly the speed of light around the 17-mile-long underground circular path of the LHC.Celebrations across the United States and around the world marked the first circulating beams, an occasion more than 15 years in the making.

Staff in the control room on the border of Switzerland and France clapped as two beams of particles were sent silently first one way and then the other around the LHC's 27km underground chamber.

It will be weeks or months before two particles ever crash together in the giant tube, and even longer before scientists can interpret results, said Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

With a statement like "recreate the big bang", it's hard not to think of this as the end of the world--the last big bang was pretty darn big, we've been told. However, the scientists are quick to point out that this is a controlled environment, and we aren't likely to see a new universe create itself.

And if they're wrong, what can you do?

More to read at NGC and to see at Big Picture

Previous Article: Gates' words

A look back at Gates' pearls of wisdom

• "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." (On software piracy in China, July 1998)

• "Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that." (At the Computer History Museum, Oct. 2004)

• "At Microsoft, there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top--I'm afraid that's not quite right, but fortunately, there are plenty that are coming." (BBC, Dec. 2001)

• "The best way to prepare (to be a programmer) is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system." (Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers, 1986)

• "Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick." (The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2003)

• "We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast....It will be some finite number of years, and I don't know the number--before our doom comes." (Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, Daniel Gross, 1997)

• "It really is a failure of capitalism. You know capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of diseases of the world at large, it's really let us down." (Interview with Bill Moyers, May 9, 2003)

• "I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user." (In a speech at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Feb. 24, 2004)

• "Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other." (Business @ the Speed of Thought)

• "I wish I wasn't (the world's richest man)... There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it." (Speaking at online advertising conference in Redmond, Wash., May 5, 2006)

• "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." (The Road Ahead)

• "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." (Focus Magazine, Oct. 23, 1995)

Previous post : Facebook hits 100 million users

Facebook catching up on MySpace

Facebook has hit 100 million active users.Last month 25th,fast growing social network Facebook has hit the 100 million users mark, according to a statement by Dave Morin, the company's Senior Platform Manager.Facebook's main competitor, MySpace, passed the 100 million mark over two years ago.

While Facebook got its start at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004, most of this recent growth is coming from outside the US. MySpace took 3 years after launch to hit that magic number; for Facebook it took 4 years and 6 months.

MySpace' s "100 million users" announcement was met with lot of criticism.It was pointed out that many of those user accounts were, and active users are what really counts.

Facebook, on the other hand, has always claimed they only count active accounts. If that remains the case,then the unofficial announcement - taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook status update - that Facebook has 100 million users is perhaps even more significant than MySpace’s two year old milestone.

For more read, Facebook reaches 100 million


Previous Article: Chrome Features

Chrome Features

Now that Google Chrome is out and happening , here is a look at some features unique to it.




Task Manager for websites

Shift + Escape inside Chrome, opens up a ‘task manager’ with a list of all websites currently open inside Chrome.

Browser history : In Visual Mode

Borrowed from Google Desktop , Ctrl + H gives you "visual" browser history.

You can search it taking advantage of the small thumbnail image of the web pages alongside.

Simple Contextual Menus

Uncluttered menus with three-four options appear when you click on a hyperlink.Simple and sweet.

Intelligent Start Page

Although not a completely original idea, Chrome’s start page is a pleasant surprise. Besides the ubiquitous search bar, it gives you a list of most commonly visited Web pages to fire up quickly.

Omnibox - Chrome's awesome bar

Google’s version of awesome bar includes Web search, Web history, Address bar and Suggestions all in one unified box that will serve all your browsing needs.

Incognito Mode

Google Chrome also features a privacy mode called Incognito which is similar to InPrivate in IE8. Pages you view in that window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. You can also access this quickly with a shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + N.

Drag and drop tabs

You can drag a tab out of Chrome into a separate window, and you can drag a separate window back into tab bar, where it’ll be happily received by Chrome.

Download bar

Chrome does not have any download manager windows, but just a simple, clean download bar at the bottom that will show your current running downloads.

Undo closed tabs

Firefox 3 has this "Undo Closed Tab" option in the menu while you can open closed tabs in Opera via the Ctrl+Z shortcut.

To re-open a closed tab in Google Chrome, just hit Ctrl+T and you’ll see an option that says "Recently closed tabs" - click the one you closed by accident.

Quick Launch websites

Desktop shortcuts for web pages are possible with other browsers as well but Google Chrome make the whole flow very easy. Open any site and choose "Create application shortcut" from the File menu.

There’s still a lot to Google Chrome, and I’m sure it is going to be the hot topic of discussion in the e-world.

Google Chrome is available in about 100 languages and currently supports only Windows XP and Vista. According to Google, the Mac and Linux versions are in development and will be released soon in the further updates.

For now, just give it a try!

Download Google Chrome

Previous Article:Chrome Screenshots

Chrome Screenshots

The service’s logo.

Screenshots of Google Chrome from the service’s frontpage.

The auto-completion of the so-called “omnibox” address bar.

The homepage showing 9 thumbnailed pages to access, along with more pointers in the side-bar, to appear “[e]very time you open a new tab”, as Google says.

This screenshot shows Google Calendar and a dialog reading “Create shortcuts in the following locations”, listing Desktop, Start Menu and Quick Launch Bar.

Zooming in on the browser tabs.

The Google Chrome task manager, e.g. to monitor if certain sites cause memory problems.

A screen showing the “Google incognito” mode for allegedly more private browsing.

Another auto-completion example.

A star near the address input bar lets you bookmark a page, apparently.

A look into the settings menu.

Google in their tour says with Chrome “you see your download’s status at the bottom of your current window.”

Google's Chrome

Google Chrome is set to be the third contender in a new round of "browser wars", competing with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and its rival Mozilla Firefox.

Chrome is touted to be faster, more stable and more secure than the alternatives and was designed specially for next-generation web content – such as video, web-based games, chat and internet banking.

Vice president of product management Sundar Pichai and engineering director Linus Upson said the company's developers had set out to "completely rethink" the concept of a web browser.

"On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple... Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better," they said in a post on Google's official blog.

The announcement comes one day after Google sent a press release about Chrome to journalists in Europe in the form of a comic book, which quickly spread online.

The 38-page comic book attempted to explain the technical concepts behind the web browser in layman terms.

"As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," Mr Pichai and Mr Upson said.

"As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available.
"We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries."

Like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome will be open source – meaning that other developers can contribute to the project or use it as a template for their own work.

Firefox is one of the most well-known examples of the open source code ideology, a principle of software development that states that the technology behind a product be made freely available and that encourages community development.

Read more at Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser
View comic at Google's Chrome

Previous Article:Semantic Web: An Introduction