… new cutting edge technology? or just another waste of time? Perhaps you might discover a life-changing potential so stay tuned.

A prototype e-mail system being tested at Stanford University later this year will radically change how users specify where their messages are supposed to be delivered. Called SEAmail, for “semantic e-mail addressing,” the system allows users to direct a message to people who fulfill certain criteria without necessarily knowing recipients’ e-mail addresses, or even their names.

In SEAmail, a user selects recipients for a message in much the way that he would set up a search query. The parameters can be as simple as a person’s name, or as complex as sets of logical requirements.

Yes, a user could also send a message to a group such as “say … all girls who graduated from Xyz School in 2000″ or I can see it working within companies i.e. “email all people working on SSAS.” SEAmail can handle that without requiring the user to spend time doing research or keeping an address book up to date.

But the system is limited by how much information it has about potential recipients. Within an organization, there’s usually a lot of available data. The technical challenge is setting up an integrated version of the data that SEAmail can access easily.

First thing that came to my mind about this technology is “spammer’s heaven” . You can target the exact group of people without even knowing their email IDs, bringing accuracy to junk. Is it ripe for misuse? Will there be more time spent patching than progressing? On first look, “Yes”.

Assuming that worries about spam could be properly resolved, still getting good data for SEAmail becomes a much harder problem on the broader Internet.

Also outdated information could degrade the quality of the system.

Still I think there is a lot of potential for internal use by large businesses, for which its benefits far outweigh the potential for abuse.

Even with issues, more of social than technological, SEAmail is ready to impact the way we mail and this may be something you’ll hear more about.

Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope Released. May 12th, 2008

Any Star Wars , Star Trek fan ( like me ) knows that space travel is not always easy, but Microsoft wants to make traveling the ‘final frontier’ as simple as turning on your computer.

Joining Google Sky and Stellarium is Microsoft’s entrant to the stars, Worldwide Telescope. I’ve been playing around with it for about an hour and it’s pretty cool. It effectively turns every computer that downloads it into a mini-planetarium capable of displaying high resolution images of millions of stars, planets and other celestial.

First of all I was happy to see that Microsoft has came out of “ ~ ta’s “ naming ( e.g. Vista, Lista, Volta … that “ta” was getting on my nerves ), “Worldwide Telescope” is a bit old skool name, inspired from you know what … I can live with this one.

OK, now Check it out if you’re an outer space dork — it includes a bunch of guided tours from astronomers. I liked the “many worlds” tour, which started with Mount St. Helen’s ranges and then flew off to the rest of the planets in our solar system for some hot world-on-world action. A tour called “Dust and Us” walks through the dark regions in galaxies where stars and planets form.

The software allows users to develop their own guided tours  of the universe to share with others or take part a guided tour  created by astronomy experts.

The WorldWide Telescope stitches together 12 terabytes –  the data of pictures from sources including the Hubble Space  Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center and the  Spitzer Space Telescope.

The experience is similar to playing a video game, allowing users to pan, zoom in and out of galaxies that are thousands of light years away. It allows seamless viewing of far, far away star systems and rarely-seen space dust in breathtaking clarity.

I can use WorldWide Telescope for 4 different “looks” – Panorama, Sky, Earth, or Planets. Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago.

Other data sets include the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey, also known as the Cosmic Genome Project, which aims to capture detailed optical images of more than a quarter of the night sky.
By default, WorldWide Telescope is configured to view the night sky as if you were standing at Microsoft Building 99 in Redmond. But you can change your Observing Location very easily via View options.

Experience WWT:

To use the new system, users need to download WorldWide Telescope from the web ( it’s free ). It only runs on Windows operating systems ( M$ strikes back ! … as usual )
The System Requirements does include 2GB of RAM , 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM, but i’m using it on my PC : Windows Vista, intel CTD 2.2 G Hz, 1 GB RAM, no graphics card, and it just works fine.

A test version is available for download at:  http://www.worldwidetelescope.org

P.S.  -  it’s interesting how the site is made using Adobe Flash and not Silverlight. … yehh !!

Other options :

Google Sky, an add-on to Google Earth has been there for some time, but I found WorldWide Telescope’s GUI, and overall experience better than Google sky.

Stellarium is a free open source tool that gives people a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to planets and moons. The project was launched in 2001 and is used in many planetariums.
Like WorldWide Telescope the software allows users to record and play their own tours of the Universe. Stellarium is really good, and Microsoft must continue taking WorldWide Telescope to next levels to stay ahead.

Stellarium is just wonderful. Best of all is that it is not quite the memory and system resource hog that Starry Night Basic and Pro is ( it is one more option ). In fact, I have found that the latest versions of Starry Night often will not run on computers that are a few years old. It gives good view of what the sky would look like from pretty much anywhere on Earth at any time over a wide range of dates. If you want to know what stars and constellations are which, if you are an amateur planning an observing session, or you have any other need for a basic planetarium software, then this seems good.

Future From My View:

-    WorldWide Telescope is not bad, but it’s not great either. It would be better as an online app where people can share access to their telescopes. People with better telescopes with the servo system and the drivers and the right CCD. They could sell time on their equipment via the Internet or at least share it with some new Microsoft or Google services.. A virtual space marketplace. I would pay for something like that and so would a lot of people.

-    I see social network interaction potential in developing our own guided tours and sharing them. We can have forums facility bundled where people interested in common space topics can interact and share information through custom tours and traditional chat.

-    This software will be like having an important educational mission.

-    Microsoft will never learn it…
Under download for Mac: ‘Minimum Windows XP SP2 , Vista recommended …with BootCamp”
Guys a Mac running Windows IS NOT A MAC, it’s like a beautiful woman wearing a sack and led boots….
Anyhow, they don’t seem to get it that clinging to their old lady OS doesn’t fly anymore.

-    In the hollywood hills we only use telescopes to see into our neighbors houses. let me know when someone comes out with that one. 

ranjit

Microsoft has lifted the lid on a new web service called Live Mesh, designed to connect a multiplicity of devices and applications online. The service is seen by many as a key plank in the company’s vision for the future of the web.
Live Mesh is designed to blur the lines between running software and storing data on a desktop and “in the cloud”.

Live Mesh pits Microsoft against companies like Amazon and Google which are already offering different varieties of “so-called” software-as-a-service systems.

Mesh will work on Windows and Mac; Microsoft looks like it is finally waking up to the fact that it cannot tie the web experience into the use of Windows. Microsoft is beginning to articulate the web as an operating system in its own right; an open platform of applications and services that sits about the traditional OS layer, be in Windows or OS X.
While initially offered for Windows XP and Vista users, Microsoft has said Live Mesh will also be rolled out to Apple Macs and other platforms.

Microsoft says Live Mesh can be used to create an online network of devices, from your PC to your mobile phone.

Files and folders, such as documents, music and photos, on those devices can be synchronised online and accessed via a web browser.

Live Mesh is also designed to facilitate the sharing of media online between different users.
Users will have 5GB of personal online storage and unlimited peer-to-peer data, for synchronising information between devices.

“Over the past 10 years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences.”      -  Ray Ozzie

sound like common sense – but it’s a huge statement for Microsoft to make.

Live Mesh, my verdict so far :

I just can’t believe that ” M$ ” will allow parallelism between the various versions of this service working on Mac, Linux and different Windows.

I’d love to be proved wrong but I am expecting to see this service spiced up with ‘extras’ that only work on the ‘latest version’ of Microsoft’s own OS (  . . . ok, i mean vista . . . M$’ another good old mean of persuading people to upgrade :) )

Given Microsoft’s very poor record with regard to security of data, it will be interesting to see how they propose to ensure confidentiality in a fully networked environment like this.

      

How fitting it is that the greatest wrestler of all time ends his career on The Grandest Stage of Them All. Silence engulfed the Citrus Bowl as more than 70,000 of screaming fans seemed amazed because they had just witnessed history – the end of a legendary career.

Flair knew he lost to not only a better competitor this night, but to a man he somewhat molded. In many ways, his career was ended by a near carbon copy of himself.

    Back in 1978, the original “Nature Boy,” Buddy Rogers, challenged Flair because he needed to know if his namesake was “for real.” Rogers passed the torch to Flair that night, and nearly 30 years later, the 16-time World Champion has passed it on to Michaels. The Showstopper beat “The Man” on the greatest stage in sports-entertainment. Still, Flair will always be The Man.

The legends like Naitch, HBK Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, The Rock, The Game these are my heros. They taught me to hang in there for that minute longer, will to survive, will to win, fight for that one more time and never give up. It was Flair who taught us, “To be the man, you’ve gotta beat the man”, something i’ll always live by.

     The career of “The Dirtiest Player in the Game”,“Rembrandt of the Squared Circle,” 35 years of entertainment ends here. But just look at the champions he has mentored and inspired – Triple H, Michaels, Batista and Randy Orton, Me to name a few. And DX, Evolution, the New World Order and any other wrestling supergroup that will form in the years to come owe gratitude to Flair’s Four Horsemen. The Nature Boy’s legacy lives on.

“Space Mountain may be the oldest ride in the park, but it has the longest line.”

“a kiss-stealing, wheeling, dealing, jet-flying, limousine-riding son-of-a-gun”

Woooooo!

That distinction belongs to the Pedion, an ill-fated notebook developed by Mitsubishi and Hewlett-Packard back in 1997.The Pedion measured 18.4 millimeters thick, which comes out to 0.7244 inch thick. Although the Air gets to 0.16 inch at the thinnest point, the Air is 0.76 inch thick at the beefiest portion, making it minutely thicker. Mitsubishi released the Pedion in early 1998.

The $6,000 notebook came with 64MB of memory and a 1GB hard drive. The notebook came with a magnesium case to make it sturdy. Even with that, though, consumers quickly reported mechanical and other problems. Mitsubishi subsequently withdrew the notebook from the market. (HP never came out with its version, I don’t think.)

Apple calls the Air the world’s thinnest notebook. How you interpret that (“on the market today” or “ever”) is up to you.

Others have come close, e.g. a special-edition Sony Vaio X505 sold back in 2004 comes close to the Air. The notebook, issued in limited numbers, measured 0.8 inch thick at the fattest point and 0.38 inch at the thinnest. (I never thought I’d be arguing notebook thinness…).

Although the Pedion died a quick, ugly death, some of the ideas behind it linger on, and one of those ideas is the thin notebook with a medium-size screen. Although notebook makers have for the past few years focused quite a bit of attention on notebooks with 15-inch and larger screens, the new battleground will be in the 11-inch and 13-inch screen arena, predicted “THE FORCE” .

In addition to the picture function the information- and entertainment system can also be equipped with an invisible audio function.

Technically everything can be used: TV, SAT, DVD, PC, etc

Under use of a special laser technology process, the glass enables to only show the information- and entertainment system when turned on. When turned off the screen surface will turn back into a homogeneous mirror surface, even when mirror and screen surface are not of identical size.

The vision is to equip each and every mirror located in an environment that requires communication and information with ad notam high-tech systems.

ad notam will be of use anywhere, glass & mirrors are an essential piece of design & working element & communication is taking place

“Called LiTraCon, the blocks are a combination of “optical fibers” and concrete, mixed so that the fibers create a fine glass aggregate within the concrete.”

This Light transmitting concrete is set to go on sale this year. The days of dull, grey concrete could be about to end.

A wall made of “LitraCon” has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of glass fibers can display a view of the outside world.

Thousands of optical glass fibers form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of every block. Shadows on the lighter side will appear with sharp outlines on the darker one. Even the colours remain the same. This special effect creates the general impression that the thickness and weight of a concrete wall will disappear.

The hope is that the new material will transform the interior appearance of concrete buildings by making them feel light and airy rather than dark and heavy.

Losonczi, a 27 year old architect from Csongrád recently came up with the idea while he was studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden. After demonstrating the material at design exhibitions all over Europe he has now formed a company to commercialize the concept.

His new company, also called LitraCon, is now optimizing its manufacturing methods and hopes to start selling prefabricated blocks of the material this year.

In theory, a wall structure built out of the light-transmitting concrete can be a couple of meters thick as the fibers work without any loss in light up to 20 m, Load-bearing structures can also be built from the blocks as glass fibers do not have a negative effect on the well-known high compressive strength of concrete. The blocks can be produced in various sizes with embedded heat isolation too.

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/

The world’s fastest commercial supercomputer has been launched by computer giant IBM.
Blue Gene/P is three times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM.
The latest number cruncher is capable of operating at so called “petaflop” speeds – the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Approximately 100,000 times more powerful than a PC, the first machine has been bought by the US government.
It will be installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois later this year.

Two further machines are planned for US laboratories and a fourth has been bought by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council for its Daresbury Laboratory Cheshire.
The ultra powerful machines will be used for complex simulations to study everything from particle physics to nanotechnology

TOP FIVE SUPERCOMPUTERS :

· Blue Gene/L, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California.
(280.6 teraflops; 131,072 processors)
· Jaguar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee
(101.7 teraflops; 11,706 processors)
· Red Storm, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
(101.4 teraflops; 26,544 processors)
· BGW Blue Gene, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York
(91.29 teraflops; 40,960 processors)
· New York Blue,  Stony Brook/BNL, New York Center for Computational Sciences,                                    New York
(82.161 teraflops; 36,864 processors)

( Source: Top 500 Supercomputers)

Currently the most powerful machine is Blue Gene/L, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.Used to ensure that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable, it has achieved 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second.
The machine packs 131,072 processors and is theoretically capable of reaching 367 teraflops.
By comparison the standard one petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912-processors connected by a high-speed, optical network.
However, it can be expanded to pack 884,736 processors, a configuration that would allow the machine to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per second (three petaflops).

Cell division :

The cell processor was originally designed for Sony’s PlayStation 3

The new Blue Gene computers form just a part of IBM’s supercomputing portfolio. The world’s biggest computer-services company has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

It is also currently building a bespoke supercomputer for the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. Codenamed Roadrunner, it will be able to crunch through 1.6 thousand trillion calculations per second.

The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 “cell” processors, designed for the PlayStation 3 (PS3).

Each cell chip consists of eight processors controlled by a master unit that can assign tasks to each member of the processing team. Each cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second.

The power of the cell chip means Roadrunner needs far fewer processors than its predecessors.

· Another contender for top supercomputer has been unveiled by Sun. Its Constellation machine will be able to run at a maximum speed of 1.7 petaflops.

· The first Constellation machine, called Ranger, is being put together for the University of Texas at Austin and will run at a modest 500 teraflops.

Elite genome: Genes in the chimp genome appear to have undergone more positive evolutionary changes than corresponding human genes.

With our big brains, capacity for speech, and upright stance, humans have long assumed that our species must have hit the genetic jackpot. But a controversial new study challenges the idea that we sprinted along on the evolutionary fast track while our chimp brethren were left swinging in the trees.

A comparison of thousands of human and chimpanzee genes suggests that chimps have actually evolved more since the two species parted from a common ancestor approximately five million years ago, according to Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the research.

Mutations happen spontaneously, and most are neutral or bad, says Zhang. But sometimes a beneficial mutation occurs in an individual and spreads throughout the population over time, a process known as positive selection: the genes carrying these good mutations confer evolutionary advantages that allow organisms to adapt and thrive. The changes thus become “fixed” in the genome.

Scientists generally believed that traits like higher cognitive skills were due to bursts of adaptive evolution, in which key genes accumulated beneficial mutations that contributed to the evolution of the human species.

To test that idea, Zhang and his colleagues analyzed sequences of approximately 14,000 genes from the chimp and human genomes. They compared rates of two types of mutations–those that alter the shape of the gene’s protein product and those that leave the structure of the protein unchanged. Genes that have been changed by positive selection have significantly more protein-altering mutations.

The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were surprising. Chimps had 233 positively selected genes while humans had just 154, implying that chimps have adapted more to their environment than humans have to theirs.

“It’s human egotism to put us on a pedestal,” says molecular anthropologist Morris Goodman of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. “I was attracted to the paper because it seemed to be chipping away at this desire to make us all that extra-special. At the molecular level, humans are not necessarily exceptional in terms of the adaptive changes.”

To Zhang’s surprise and disappointment, the positively selected genes were not related to brain or cognitive function but to more mundane cellular housekeeping duties. “One explanation might be that the number of genes responsible for evolution of the human brain may be very small,” Zhang speculates.

The Michigan team also discovered that a higher percentage of positively selected genes were associated with disease in humans than in chimps. According to the laws of population genetics, natural selection tends to be more efficient at spreading good genes and tossing bad ones in large populations than in smaller ones. Until recently, the chimpanzee population was much larger than the human population, which may have allowed natural selection to eliminate the deleterious chimp genes.

The other explanation, says Zhang, is that human genes that may have been advantageous in the past may now trigger disease because our environment and way of life have changed.

Not everyone is convinced that Zhang’s team has drawn the correct conclusion from the gene analysis. Humans and chimps are so similar that it is difficult to determine whether the genes are the product of positive selection, says Bruce Lahn, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago who studies the genetic basis of brain evolution.

“It is very rare that there will be enough changes in such a short lineage to tell us there is positive selection,” says Lahn. “I’m very surprised that they claim these are positively selected genes. I would guess if they tried to publish each of these genes as an example of positive selection, there wouldn’t be enough supporting data for the majority of them.”