Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Ek Tha Tiger-Iviewed...wallpapers & Review
Monday, August 29, 2011
IITian and Rickshaw-wala nice piece of conversation India changing
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
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
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.
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
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.)
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)
Cast
- Salman Khan as Lovely Singh
- Kareena Kapoor as Divya
- Raj Babbar as Sartaj Rana
- Hazel Keech
- Mahesh Manjrekar
- Katrina Kaif (Special appearance in song Aaya Re Aaya Bodyguard)