Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Ek Tha Tiger-Iviewed...wallpapers & Review

Posted by Joy On 12:46 AM

Ek Tha Tiger (Hindiएक था टायगर) is an upcoming Hindi language romantic thriller. The film will be produced by Yash Raj Films and directed by Kabir Khan. This will be his third collaboration with the banner after Kabul Express (2006) and New York (2009). Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif were confirmed to play the lead roles at a press conference held on May 3, 2011 at Yashraj Studios.[1] It is scheduled to release on 1 June, 2012.

Cast

[edit]

Cast

[edit]Production

This will be Salman Khan 's first venture with Yashraj Films, whereas his father, Salim Khan, has written Trishul (1978), Kaala Patthar (1979) earlier for the banner.
Also, director Kabir Khan teams up with Katrina KaifPritam Chakraborty and Aseem Mishra again after the successful New York (2009 film).
"It is a very happy moment for me and YRF to have Salim's son Salman with us for the first time. Over the years, Salman has become a very matured and talented actor and both he and the beautiful Katrina have a tremendous connect with their audiences. Combined with Kabir's edgy directorial skills, we can all look forward to a thrilling film. I really loved the script which is based on a story written by Adi and I am sure that the whole team will do an excellent job on this project.".
—Yash Chopra on Salman Khan's entry into YRF.[2]
Usha Uthup too will be seen in the film, after her acting debut in 7 Khoon Maaf.

[edit]Filming

Filming began on August 10, 2011[3] and the film is set to release next year (mid 2012).[4] On 9 August 2011, Yashraj Films announced that they will be releasing the first look of the film in form of a digital poster, which was released on August 10, 2011. It is the first Bollywood film ever to do so.

File:Ekthatiger.jpg


Monday, August 29, 2011

IITian and Rickshaw-wala nice piece of conversation India changing

Posted by Unknown On 2:33 AM


ITian and Rickshaw-wala...nice piece of conversation  

             

   This one is delightfully interesting to read.

             

             There were two rickshaw-walas vying for our business, when we wanted to go to Sankat-Mochan temple in Benaras. I agreed to go with the one, who was about 20 years of age, seemed like a regular young rickshaw-wala, but I found something interesting about him. I was not proved wrong.



He wanted Rs 50, we said Rs 30. We settled for Rs 40.



Here are the highlights of the conversation that ensued, while we rode the rickshaw:



             "Aap kahan se aaye hain?"



"Delhi."



            "Bijness, ya kaam karte hain?"



"Naukri karte hain."



            "Kismein?"



"Internet mein."



            "Humara bhi kuch wahin kaam lagwa dijiye."



I just chuckled.



            "Main try kar raha hoon engineering padhne kee. Achchi naukri lag jaayegi tab."



"Achcha?" I asked a little interested.



"Haan, delhi mein Guru Gobind Singh Indraprashta University mein engineering ke liye apply kiya hai. Achchi hai woh university."



"Haan, achchi hai", I agreed.



            "Haan, kal hee maine JEE bhi diya."



"JEE matlab, IIT ka?"



            "Haan, Joint Entrance Examination" he pronounced it perfectly.Just to make it clear to me what JEE stood for. "Mushkil hota hai exam."



            "Haan, 2 saal toh log padhte hee hain uske liye, asaan nahin hai."



            "Delhi mein Akaash coaching institute hain na?"



"Haan, hai."



            "Aapne kya padhai kee?"



"Main engineer hoon, aur phir MBA bhi kiya."



            "Kahan se engineer?"



"IIT Delhi se."



            He swung back, surprised, a little delighted, and smiled. "Ok,

aapke liye Rs 30."



Swati and I laughed.



Swati asked "Padhai kab karte they IIT ke liye?"



            "Bas, rickshaw chalaane ke baad raat mein". Then he added

"Kismein engineering kee aapne?"



"Chemical."



            "Toh aapki Chemistry toh badi strong hogi."



"Nahin, aisa nahin hai."



            He continued "Yeh bataiye....jab Mendeleev ne Periodic Table

banaya tha tab kitne elements they usmein?"



Now it was my turn to get surprised. He was quizzing me. I said "Shayad 70-80."



            "No, 63" he said sharply. "Kaunse element kee electronegativity highest hai?"



Swati was laughing, and I didnt try too hard and said "Pata nahin."



"Flourine", he said confidently. Without a break he asked,"Kaunse element kee electron affinity highest hoti hai?"



Now I was laughing too and said "Nahin pata"



            "Chlorine. toh aapka kaunsa subject strong tha?" clearly having

proven that my chemistry wasn't a strong point.



"Physics", I said.



            "Achha, Newton's second law of motion kya hai?"



I thought I knew this one. "F=ma", I said.



            "Physics is not about formula, it is understanding concept!",  he reprimanded me in near perfect English. "Tell me in statement"



I was shocked. Swati continued to laugh.

I said "ok, Newtons second law, er....was...."



            " 'Was' nahin, 'is'!Second law abhi bhi hai!" he snapped at my

use of 'was'.



Surely, my physics wasn't impressing him either. "Yaad nahin, I said"



            "Force on an object is directly proportional to the mass of the

object and the acceleration of the object", he said it in near perfect

English. "Aapne M.Tech nahin kiya?"



"Nahin, MBA kiya"



            "MBA waale toh sirf paisa kamana chahte hain, kaam nahin karte."



"Nahin, aisa nahin hai, paisa kamaane ke liye kaam karna padta hai."  Didn't think too highly of me apparently anymore.



In a minute we reached our destination. We got off and I told

him that he must and should definitely study more, and that I thought he was sharp as hell. He took only Rs 30, smiled and began to leave. I got my camera out and said "Raju, ek photo leta hoon tumhari". He waved me off, dismissed the idea and rode off before I could say anything more....leaving me feeling high and dry like a spurned lover.

Damn, what a ride that was! India is changing, and changing fast.

           

             And so it goes !!!!!

Sunday, August 28, 2011

British and U.S. scientists have confirmed that an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) near London is the most accurate long-term t

Posted by Mainak On 2:13 AM

The NPL-CsF2 is a cesium fountain clock that's used as a standard for International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time.

The machine is apparently accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second. Not bad, I guess.

The NPL's Krzysztof Szymaniec joined scientists from Pennsylvania State University in evaluating the clock. The team published its results in the journal Metrologia.

The analysis concludes that the clock will lose only a billionth of a second every two months, and represents an unprecedented accuracy. Cesium clocks are usually expected to lose or gain a second over tens of millions of years.

"Together with other improvements of the cesium fountain, these models and numerical calculations have improved the accuracy of the U.K.'s cesium fountain clock, NPL-CsF2, by reducing the uncertainty to 2.3 × 10-16--the lowest value for any primary national standard so far," Szymaniec was quoted as saying by the NPL.

In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which as of summer 2010 had an uncertainty of 3 x 10-16, meaning it would take more than 100 million years to lose or gain a second.

That will be billions of years before the sun dies, taking the Earth with it, so I expect an update on this from a future blogger.



(Credit: National Physical Laboratory)

IBM goes for really, really, really big data

Posted by Mainak On 2:10 AM


According to an article in this week's MIT Technology Review, IBM researchers are working on a new 120 petabyte data repository made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around 1 trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

IBM Watson

The new system benefits from a file system known as General Parallel File System (GPFS) that was developed at IBM Almaden to enable supercomputers faster data access. It spreads individual files across multiple disks so that many parts of a file can be read or written at the same time.

GPFS leverages cluster architecture to provide quicker access to file data, which is automatically spread across multiple storage devices, providing optimal use of available storage to deliver high performance. It's also the storage engine for IBM's Watson, which could easily beat me at Jeopardy.

Here's the interesting part: 120 petabytes equals roughly 24 billion 5 megabyte MP3 files, which sounds like a lot. But contrast it against the enormous volume of data being amassed from sites such as Facebook that in 2009 were already storing 25 terabytes of logs a day and you see that only 4,915 days could be stored.

With the volume of data online and offline growing exponentially, I have a feeling that 120 petabytes won't sound so crazy in five years or less. It also goes to show that there's room for innovation around storage and file systems, despite the maturity of the market



iPad met its match in the TouchPad

Posted by Mainak On 2:09 AM

On Friday, August 19, Apple's iPad finally met its marketing match. That's when Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad went on sale for as little as $99 and triggered the kind of buying frenzy that had been reserved exclusively for products from Apple.

Over the last year and a half, no other tablet had been able to come as close as the TouchPad to eclipsing the fixation that consumers have had on the iPad.

Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies, believes the TouchPad's demise should give Apple pause. Especially if such a product were repeated by another major tablet vendor in the future. (Did I hear someone say Amazon?)

Kay explained. "If you were a big company like HP and you were doing a new category product launch, it would not be weird to have a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions," he said in a phone interview. "So, you could have used that money to subsidize the price of the TouchPad and you can flood the market with these devices that are worth way more than you have to pay for them. And get them in everybody's hands. Get everybody talking about it. That could have been the loss leader entry into the market," he said.

"So, it wasn't really a product failure, it was a pricing failure."

And the ingredients for making a good run at Apple were there. Platform: the TouchPad was a self-contained "vertical" platform, in which HP controlled both the hardware and software. (Like Apple.) Resources: HP's size and resources are enormous. (Like Apple.)

Of course, aggressive pricing would have had to continue along with significant design and software improvements. (Would more apps have followed? We'll never know.)

Though inventory sold out online and at stores in less than 12 hours, the TouchPad is still listed for $99.99 on HP's site. The product was a success, says analyst Roger Kay.

Though inventory sold out online and at stores in less than 12 hours, the TouchPad is still listed for $99.99 on HP's site. The product was a success, says analyst Roger Kay.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

It's hard to disagree with Kay's reasoning, because the consumer response bears this out. In addition to the lines that formed at Best Buy stores in the U.S. on Sunday (and remember this happened with only about 12 hours warning, not the months of hype that precedes an Apple product rollout), there was equally frenzied buying of the TouchPad online.

I found plenty of anecdotal evidence at stores. Best Buy was getting so many calls over the weekend that some stores had prerecorded messages about the TouchPad's availability. And in a visit to a suburban Los Angeles Best Buy this week, a sales associate told me he was still trying to get his hands on one. He was speaking simply as a consumer who wanted a TouchPad, not as a Best Buy sales associate.

And HP keeps the interest stoked via a Twitter feed dedicated to updating the TouchPad's availability.

Of course the argument can be made that this was simply a pricing issue--the same visceral response seen when hordes stampede to a half-off, all-you-can-eat day at Souplantation (hey, it's a California thing).

Maybe. But it also means tablets are too expensive. Motorola and Samsung are not going to generate big sales numbers in the U.S. with $499-and-up tablets. There are just too many more useful alternatives at $499 or even $429. They're called laptops.

(Apple gets a pass because it's Apple: probably the only consumer device company that can get millions of people--include me in that crowd--to pay $1,299 for a MacBook Air instead of $799 for an HP Pavilion or other Windows laptop equivalent.)

Which brings us to Amazon. Rumor has it that the Amazon tablet will be cheap and possibly subsidized. If true, that could spell success.

The moral of the story? The only way to combat the iPad--for the time being at least--is with cut-throat pricing. HP proved this, however accidentally.




Thursday, August 25, 2011

Bodyguard (2011 film)Reviews & wallpapers(HD)

Posted by Joy On 8:44 PM


Bodyguard (Hindi: बॉडीगार्ड) is an upcoming Hindi romantic action film directed by Siddique. The third remake of the director's own 2010 Malayalam film,Bodyguard, the film is being produced by Atul Agnihotri and features Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor in the lead roles. Bodyguard is scheduled for release on August 31, 2011.


Cast