-Innovative Interesting Info-

China Overtakes Japan as World's Second-Largest Economy

2010-08-17T19:51:00.002+05:30

China overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy as the recovery in some of the major economies looks increasingly shaky.

Japan's gross domestic product grew just 0.4% in the second quarter,the Associated Pressreported. The figure suggests that China's economy, which is expected to grow by 10% this year versus Japan's rate of 2%-3%, will be larger at the end of 2010.

Japan's nominal GDP, not adjusted for price and seasonal variations, was $1.268 trillion in the second quarter, while China's was $1.335 trillion. Japan has held the position of world's second-largest economy since 1968, when it pulled ahead of West Germany.

Porsche Make World Record: Sale Most Expensive Car for $4 million.

2010-08-17T17:54:00.007+05:30

The ex-works, Gerhard Mitter/Lucien Bianchi Nurburgring 1000 kms-leading 1967 Porsche 910 Endurance Racing Works Coupe that sold for $797,000.

LOS ANGELES, CA. - Bonhams & Butterfields celebrated the thirteenth anniversary of its renowned motorcar auction at the sunny Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley with resounding success. Comprising a very diverse and newsworthy selection of 102 cars, 1 airplane and 1 boat – of which 77 sold (a 74% sell rate), the auction represented three major collections headlined by the Michael Amalfitano collection of competition cars, which blew through all pre-sale expectations and set the tone for a buoyant two-day sale.

The 1970 Porsche 917 Interserie Spyder goes from 0-60 mph in 2.3 seconds and a top speed of over 240mph. It has long been dubbed ‘The World’s Greatest Sports Car’ and had the price tag to match when it was sold for 3,965,000 (US dollars) in America at the weekend. “We are much honored to have been selected to offer these incredible motorcars at auction,” says Mark Osborne, head of Bonhams’ Motoring Department. “We are very pleased with the results and the satisfaction of having met or exceeded the expectations of our discerning and growing clientele.” The stunning vehicle was part of a sale of rare and exclusive cars which went under the hammer at ‘The Quail; a Motorsports Gathering’ in Monterey, California on Saturday. Other vehicles under the hammer include Bugatti Veyron with a top speed of 253 mph, which sold for over $1 million, a 1975 red Carrera RSA which fetched $330,000 and a 1967 factory racing Porsche Type 910 which sold for $720,000.

Bonhams’ annual sale at Quail Lodge – the longest running auction during the most famous collector car week in the world – has demonstrated yet again why the 217-year-old auction house is a leader in the international domain of automobiles and a cornerstone of the Monterey Peninsula Car Week.

British Schoolboy Become Millionaire at The Age of 16

2010-08-17T13:35:00.005+05:30

London:- School Going Entrepreneur in Britain has turned a millionaire at the age of just 16. Computer whiz Christian Owens Setup his 1st firm with his pocket money at 14 & another a year later. The Building of business he established only a year ago until it is worth £100million.Hard-working Christian Owens can afford to pause for at least a moment’s celebration after making his first £1million aged just 16.

The schoolboy entrepreneur used his pocket money to fund his first venture, website Mac Box Bundle at just 14 – which has taken £700,000 since its launch in 2008. He then launched advertising pay-per-click company ‘Branchr’ a year later and worked on the business after school and at weekends.Branchr was a smash hit with internet sites; made a staggering £500,000 in its first year. Christian, from Corby, Northampton shire, currently employs eight staff all adults around the UK and America as sales and technical assistants, and plans to open two Branchr offices in the next year.

Christian invests the majority of his earnings back into his two businesses.
He said: ‘I really wanted to create something groundbreaking and simple that would revolutionize the way advertising works. Mac Box Bundle was already becoming a success but I really wanted to push myself and do something different, so I came up with the idea of Branchr.

Christian, who has used a computer since the age of seven, began teaching himself basic web design aged ten when he was given his first Mac computer. Branchr works as a platform for website owners to sell advertising, and business owners to buy it. The company now sells more than 250million adverts to 11,000 websites every month and has acquired a second company, Atomplan, which provides business software. Mac Box Bundle sells a combination of popular Mac applications, worth up to $400 together for under just $100 a time – and donates 10 per cent of each bundle to charity.

Jenny Kim Milli Shoe Box Concept

2010-08-15T23:26:00.007+05:30

The name Milli is short for ‘millimeters,’ the unit that measures the size of bullets. It is also short for ‘millisecond,’ which is often the margin of victory in a foot race. The shoe is placed inside a bullet-shaped box, a symbol of power and speed.

This packaging concept Created By Jenny Kim , Milli Shoe Box.

Manmohan Singh clocks 2,273 days in office as PM of India

2010-08-15T22:50:00.007+05:30

NEW DELHI: Manmohan Singh has overtaken Atal Bihari Vajpayee to become the third longest serving Prime Minister of India — after Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi — clocking 2,273 days in office on Wednesday. Singh was probably most surprised when Sonia chose him to lead the government, as she stepped aside to take care of the party and politics. It started the reign of a strange twosome at the top, where the non-elected Singh handled the government while Sonia took care of the politics and party. With a fractious coalition including the Left parties who wanted to run the government by remote control, nobody expected much out of him or the UPA. But Singh turned out to be a man of strong ideas, and more importantly, determination. A spate of political commentaries of the time called him soft spoken and “not a politician” who could talk only in economic jargon.
Commentators were forced to revise their assessment after he showed remarkable pluck and forced the Congress to enter into a high-stakes confrontation over the nuclear deal. Singh goaded the Congress leadership to come along because he felt the nuclear deal was in “national interest”. In fact, returning from Washington in July 2005, after signing the nuclear deal with George Bush, Singh observed to some travelling journalists, “What the economic reforms did for the Indian economy, I think the nuclear deal will do for India’s energy and strategic future.” It was this belief that made him the bulldozer that pushed the extraordinarily difficult deal through, manouvering through political minefields everyday.

By May 2009, the world was in its worst ever economic crisis. Singh seemed to be the only person who knew what was going on in the hoary world of economics. The Indian economy was doing fine, had actually weathered the crisis with some deft handling by Singh. He was a safe pair of hands.

By 2009 too, the UPA government was going in for elections. Naturally, Singh had ceased to appear the reluctant leader he had seemed five years ago. He surprised many when he aggressively countered BJP’s campaign theme depicting him as a weak leader. BJP had sought to contrast Singh with L K Advani whom it painted as a “strong and decisive leader” to turn the Lok Sabha election into a presidential contest of sorts.

Singh has appeared wavering and not in control of things.

General Knowledge -- Q & A

2010-07-06T20:11:00.006+05:30

Q1. Differentiate between Internet and WWW with a brief explanation about

D history behind each one. Enhance your report with diagrams.

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The Internet is a global system of interconnected networks, a “network
of networks.” Through the joint use of two protocols, TCP
(Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol), any two
computers on any networks connected through the Internet can
communicate with each other and access data on each other’s storage
devices. The genesis of the idea for the Internet can be traced back
to 1959, when the Russians launched the Sputnik into orbit and the US
government decided it needs to build a dispersed communications
network that is not centrally controlled – to avoid the possibility of
the Russians taking out the entire American communications network
with one satellite-guided missile. The physical manifestation would
wait a decade – the kernel for today’s Internet was ARPANET, launched
in 1969.

The World Wide Web, or WWW for short, is the part of the Internet
accessible through HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol using a browser
such as Internet Explorer (Microsoft) or Netscape Navigator. The
father of the Web is considered to be Tim Berners Lee, a researcher
based at CERN in Switzerland, who invented HTTP in 1991. This is
therefore the date typically used as the “birthday” of the Web.

The Internet includes far more information than is accessible through
the Web – for example, email is accessible through applications using
SMTP; newsgroups are accessible through NNTP; and files are accessible
through FTP.

Great Internet architecture diagram –

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/internet-infrastructure1.gif

Also, great article on how the Internet “works” –

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm

A good Web diagram explaining how a browser and server interact is at

–
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/webserver-basic-sm.gif

A more complex diagram of Web architecture is at –

http://www.aspalliance.com/Yusuf/Article08/Architecture.gif

Q2. Identify the following terms that are associated with the internet & WWW technology:
a.) HTTP B.) FTP C.) URL D.) PROXY SERVER.
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a) HTTP – HyperText Transfer Protocol – A protocol is a standard set of rules, typically put together by an international standards organization. HTTP is the protocol that governs the rules for accessing and displaying files on the WWW – it also enables the concept of hypertext linking, which in turn allows us as users to “surf the Web”. If TCP/IP are considered to be infrastructure protocols, HTTP is an application-level protocol.
b) FTP – File Transfer Protocol – defines rules for the transfer of

files of any type between two computers interconnected through the Internet.

It is an application level protocol that runs on top of TCP/IP.

c) URL – Uniform Resource Locator – specifies the location of a file
on the Internet. It includes several components
– the protocol used

to access the file, e.g. http;

the domain for the server on which the

file is resident, e.g. www.yahoo.com; the directory location on that
server, e.g. “images/landscapes/” – and the name of the file e.g.
usmap.gif. The entire URL would then look as follows –

http://www.yahoo.com/images/landscapes/usmap.gif

d) Proxy Server – a proxy server is a server positioned as a
gatekeeper of sorts between the Internet and a private network such as

a company or school’s internal network. The proxy server translates
requests for files coming either from the Internet or from the
internal network – if the request is from the Internet, the proxy
server locates the file and returns it to the requesting client; if
the request is from the internal network the proxy server will check
if the file requested is already resident in its memory (cache) – if
it is, it will immediately return this file to the internal client
requesting it; if it is not, it will request the file from the
Internet and return it to the requesting client once the file is
returned.

Q3. What are cascading style sheets, how the concept can be used to produce more

manageable web pages?

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Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, provide Web page creators more control over the appearance of a Web page by creating a local standard that determines the precedence of various Web page style components when the page is displayed in a browser window. Such components include backgrounds, fonts, colors etc. While using individual HTML tags such as and allow acute control over specific pages, by using CSS and applying it to an entire site a consistency is achieved that lends the pages a more professional look. Further, making a change to the entire set only entails making a change to the CSS, and this in turn produces far more manageable Web pages and a far more efficient Web page maintenance process.

A “style” is simply a rule that instructs the browser how to display a specific HTML tag – every tag has several properties associated with it (e.g. has color, size, type), and the “style” can provide instructions for one or more of those tags. The “style sheet” is an html file that specifies such rules for a variety of HTML tags that are to be used in a set of Web pages.

Q4.) What are Image Maps? Differentiate between client side and server side image maps? Explain the effective use of clickable image maps on web page.?

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An image map is a graphic that has been organized in a way that allows
the user to click on various parts of it in order to initiate
different actions – most commonly, a link to another part of the page
or to another page altogether. Image maps can provide great
navigational aids – they are especially popular with geographic
applications, allowing users to focus in on a specific region by
clicking on smaller and smaller regions. They can also provide a more
intuitive view of the structure of a Web site, or of an organizational
hierarchy (imaging that each department on an organizational hierarchy
tree is clickable and leads to a diagram of that specific department’s
hierarchy, for example).

A client-side image map runs locally, on the user’s local machine, and
will therefore typically run quicker because the page will send fewer
queries to the server. They are also more versatile, allowing for
example the triggering and coordination of JavaScript events that can
further enhance the user’s experience.

Server-side image maps, however, are more popular, and are more widely
supported by browser applications. Server-side image maps depend on
the server to interpret the users actions on the image map – each such
action initiates a query that is returned to the server, which
interprets the action and send back the correct HTML file. Such image
maps are slower and less versatile in terms of the types of actions
that can be taken by users.

Google Server hardware

2010-07-06T20:07:00.002+05:30

Original hardware:-

The original hardware (circa 1998) that was used by Google when it was located at Stanford University included

§ Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256 MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.

§ 2 × 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers donated by Intel, they included 512 MB of RAM and 9 × 9 GB hard drives between the two. It was on these that the main search ran.

§ F50 IBM RS/6000 donated by IBM, included 4 processors, 512 MB of memory and 8 × 9 GB hard drives.

§ Two additional boxes included 3 × 9 GB hard drives and 6 x 4 GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.

§ IBM disk expansion box with another 8 × 9 GB hard drives donated by IBM.

§ Homemade disk box which contained 10 × 9 GB SCSI hard drives.

Current hardware:-

Servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of Linux. The goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per dollar, not absolute performance. Estimates of the power required for over 450,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which cost on the order of US$2 million per month in electricity charges. The combined processing power of these servers might reach from 20 to 100 petaflops.

Specifications:

§ Upwards of 15,000 servers^[2] ranging from 533 MHz Intel Celeron to dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III (as of 2003). A 2005 estimate by Paul Strassmann has 200,000 servers. while unspecified sources claimed this number to be upwards of 450,000 in 2006.

§ One or more 80 GB hard disks per server (2003)

§ 2–4 GB of memory per machine (2004)

The exact size and whereabouts of the data centers Google uses are unknown, and official figures remain intentionally vague. In a 2000 estimate, Google's server farm consisted of 6,000 processors, 12,000 common IDE disks (2 per machine, and one processor per machine), at four sites: two in Silicon Valley, California and one in Virginia. Each site had an OC-48 (2488 Mbit/s) internet connection and an OC-12 (622 Mbit/s) connection to other Google sites. The connections are eventually routed down to 4 × 1 Gbit/s lines connecting up to 64 racks, each rack holding 80 machines and two Ethernet switches. The servers run custom server software called Google Web Server.

Sony to introduce new PlayStation3 with bigger memory

2010-07-06T19:48:00.002+05:30

TOKYO: Electronics giant Sony said Tuesday it will introduce an upgraded PlayStation 3 videogame console in Japan at the end of July, with a bigger memory and a new white version on offer. The company will sell a 160-gigabyte model for 29,980 yen (341 dollars), the same price at which the Tokyo-based company had previously offered its 120-gigabyte console, it said in a statement.

It will also introduce a 320-gigabyte model for 34,980 yen. Both models will be available from July 29 in Japan. Sony did not indicate worldwide release plans in the statement. The move comes amid heightened competition between Sony and gaming rival Microsoft, with both giants looking to release motion-sensing controllers later this year in response to the runaway success of Nintendo's Wii.

PlayStation Move wands will hit the market in time for the year-end holiday shopping season in the United States. The devices let PS3 play be controlled with swings, jabs and other natural movements instead of toggle-and-button commands that have been trademarks of play on PS3 and rival Xbox 360 consoles by Microsoft.

Microsoft's Kinet technology will use a 3-D camera and gesture recognition software to let people play videogames using natural body movements instead of hand-held controllers.
Sony shares closed 1.33 percent higher at 2,361 yen in Tokyo Tuesday.

→ RNRL May Merge With Reliance Power

2010-07-03T20:16:00.006+05:30

MUMBAI: With Reliance Natural Resources Ltd losing much of the relevance it was originally created for -- sourcing and supply of fuels, its Board will tomorrow consider merging itself with sister concern Reliance Power. The Boards of both RNRL as well as Reliance Power will meet tomorrow to consider the merger, which would create a new entity with a combined market worth of Rs 50,000 crore.

The merger could possibly be through a share swap deal. Spokespersons of the group firms remained tightlipped about the rationale and modalities of merger, which would create an entity whose market cap would still be less than half of the initial market value of Reliance Power alone.

On the first day of its listing on February 11, 2008, R-Power had seen its market cap soaring to Rs 1,23,000 crore, albeit for a brief while, and later the stock had slipped way below the issue price of Rs 450 a share. As a damage minimisation, the promoters had issued bonus shares to salvage the share price, which is still less than half at nearly Rs 175 as of today.

On its first day on bourses, post the country's biggest ever IPO of Rs 11,500 crore that is still the only IPO that Anil Ambani's group came out with ever since he split from elder brother Mukesh in June 2005, R-Power figured among the top 10 valued firms, but currently ranks 30th. RNRL was born out of the demerger of Dhriubhai Ambani's Reliance empire five year ago. The purpose of creation of RNRL was for sourcing, supply and transporation of fuels, primarily natural gas. As per the demerger scheme, RNRL was to source natural gas from Reliance Industries and trade it to ADAG power plants including the proposed mega 7,800-MW Dadri unit near here being set up by R-Power. However, with the Supreme Court on May 7 upholding the government policy on pricing and utilisation of natural gas, RNRL almost had no role left in supply of gas to R-Power.

According to government's Gas Utilisation Policy, trading or profiteering from natural gas sales is not allowed -- no company can buy the fuel from a producer and sell it to an end consumer like a power firm for a margin. Suppliers like RIL can only enter into a Gas Sales and Purchase Agreement (GSPA) with an actual user of gas. Though it had signed a Gas Sales Master Agreement (GSMA) with RNRL expressing its intent to supply natural gas from eastern offshore KG-D6 fields, RIL can enter into a GSPA only with R-Power which is to implement the Dadri or other power plants of ADAG. The apex court had on May 7 rejected RNRL's plea for gas from RIL at rates arrived in a private family agreement, saying the government alone had the right to approve the price of fuel and fix its user.

Petabytes in use

2010-07-03T19:57:00.000+05:30

A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion (short scale)bytes, or 1000 terabytes. It is abbreviated PB. The prefix peta- (P) indicates a power of 1000:

1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1000⁵ B = 10¹⁵ B.

However, historically, the term petabyte may have been used confusingly to designate 1024⁵ bytes (which is actually a "pebibyte").

Multiples of bytes
SI decimal prefixes	IEC binary prefixes
Name (Symbol)	Standard SI	Binary usage	Ratio SI/Binary	Name (Symbol)	Value
kilobyte (kB)	10³	2¹⁰	0.9766	kibibyte (KiB)	2¹⁰
megabyte (MB)	10⁶	2²⁰	0.9537	mebibyte (MiB)	2²⁰
gigabyte (GB)	10⁹	2³⁰	0.9313	gibibyte (GiB)	2³⁰
terabyte (TB)	10¹²	2⁴⁰	0.9095	tebibyte (TiB)	2⁴⁰
petabyte (PB)	10¹⁵	2⁵⁰	0.8882	pebibyte (PiB)	2⁵⁰
exabyte (EB)	10¹⁸	2⁶⁰	0.8674	exbibyte (EiB)	2⁶⁰
zettabyte (ZB)	10²¹	2⁷⁰	0.8470	zebibyte (ZiB)	2⁷⁰
yottabyte (YB)	10²⁴	2⁸⁰	0.8272	yobibyte (YiB)	2⁸⁰

Multiples of bytes
SI decimal prefixes IEC binary prefixes
Name
(Symbol) Standard
SI Binary
usage Ratio
SI/Binary Name
(Symbol) Value
kilobyte (kB) 10³ 2¹⁰ 0.9766 kibibyte (KiB) 2¹⁰
megabyte (MB) 10⁶ 2²⁰ 0.9537 mebibyte (MiB) 2²⁰
gigabyte (GB) 10⁹ 2³⁰ 0.9313 gibibyte (GiB) 2³⁰
terabyte (TB) 10¹² 2⁴⁰ 0.9095 tebibyte (TiB) 2⁴⁰
petabyte (PB) 10¹⁵ 2⁵⁰ 0.8882 pebibyte (PiB) 2⁵⁰
exabyte (EB) 10¹⁸ 2⁶⁰ 0.8674 exbibyte (EiB) 2⁶⁰
zettabyte (ZB) 10²¹ 2⁷⁰ 0.8470 zebibyte (ZiB) 2⁷⁰
yottabyte (YB) 10²⁴ 2⁸⁰ 0.8272 yobibyte (YiB) 2⁸⁰

Examples of the use of "petabyte" to describe data sizes in different fields are:

Computer hardware: Teradata Database 12 has a capacity of 50 petabytes of compressed data.

Internet: Google processes about 24 petabytes of data per day.

Telecoms: AT&T has about 19 petabytes of data transferred through their networks each day.

Physics: The 4 experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid.

P2P networks: As of June 2010, Isohunt has about 10.8 petabytes of files contained in torrents indexed globally.

Archives: The Internet Archive contains about 3 petabytes of data, and is growing at the rate of about 100 terabytes per month as of March, 2009.

Games: World of Warcraft utilizes 1.3 petabytes of storage to maintain its game. Valve Steam delivers 20 petabytes of content monthly.

Film: The 2009 movie Avatar is reported to have taken over 1 petabyte of local storage at Weta Digital for the rendering of the 3D CGI effects.

Apple: iPhone 4 Reception Problem Is Explained by "Incorrect Signal Display"

2010-07-02T20:18:00.000+05:30

Apple claims that the iPhone 4 reception problem doesn't exist. They say that the "dramatic drop in [signal] bars" is explained by an erroneous signal display. However, they don't address the data and voice degradation caused by their antenna design. They promise their software update will fix the way the iPhone 4 displays signal bars. However, they don't claim the software patch would solve the signal attenuation problem caused by holding the iPhone 4 and touching the dead spot on its left bottom corner. The software patch will show the drop more accurately in the signal bar display.

IBM endorses Firefox as in-house Web browser

2010-07-02T20:12:00.000+05:30

SAN FRANCISCO: Technology giant IBM wants its workers around the world to use free, open-source Mozilla Firefox as their window into the Internet. "Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser," IBM executive Bob Sutor said yesterday in a blog post at his sutor.com website. "While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be."

Making Firefox the default browser means that workers' computers will automatically use that software to access the Internet unless commanded to do differently. All new computers for IBM employees will have Firefox installed and the global company "will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox," according to Sutor. New York State-based IBM, known by the nickname "Big Blue," has a corporate history dating back a century and now reportedly has nearly 400,000 workers.

"Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we're going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls," Sutor said.

Sutor is the vice president of open source and Linux at IBM, which launched an Open Source Initiative in 1998. Open-source software is essentially treated as public property, with improvements made by any shared with all. Firefox is the second most popular Web browser in an increasingly competitive market dominated by Internet Explorer software by Microsoft.

Google Chrome has been steadily gaining market share, last week replacing Apple Safari as the third most popular Web browser in the United States. "We'll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox," Sutor said.

"I think it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web. That is, Firefox forced competitors to respond."

Glodyne acquires US firm for $104 mn, to hire 2k People

2010-07-02T20:03:00.000+05:30

MUMBAI: Technology management services provider Glodyne Technoserve on Friday said it has completed the acquisition of the US-based technology company DecisionOne Corporation from its shareholders for $104 million.

DecisionOne is one of the largest, profitable pure-play Technology IMS companies in North America, with a revenue of $200 million and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin of 8.1 per cent in calendar year 2009, a press release here stated.

The US firm has extensive capabilities in providing infrastructure management services in the US and Canada. Its key clients include the marquee Fortune 500 clients, the release stated.

Glodyne Technoserve's Chairman and Managing Director, Annand Sarnaaik said the company expects great business synergies and operating leverage from this acquisition due to complements in the business portfolio and expansion of the business model.

"This is the beginning of an exciting journey for Glodyne in the North American market," he said, adding that business synergies of the acquisition would significantly enhance Glodyne's position in the $524 billion global technology IMS marketplace.

Glodyne aims to strengthen its position in the North American market with the addition of marquee clients and more than 2,000 highly-skilled professionals.