GeT sOmThInG nIcE

2012-05-24T00:51:00.002+05:30

Steve Jobs’ Dream Apple iCar Revealed

Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, a revolutionary inventor and an ideal for most of the youth, was considering getting into car industry through his dream project “iCar”.

In a recent interview Mickey Drexler, an Apple board member and Steve Jobs close friend, revealed that Steve Jobs wanted to add automobile in the Apple huge product lineup. “Look at the car industry – it’s a tragedy in America,” says Drexler.

“They talk about expense, they talk about this – and then you say, well ‘who’s designing the cars?’ Steve’s dream, before he died, was to design an iCar,” he added. Rexler also said that if Jobs had designed the iCar, it would have surely dominated the industry just like his other creations which include the famous iPod, iPad and iPhone.

If rumors are to be believed then Apple has been working on developing an automobile for years now. One gets inclined to believe them when we notice that in 2007, Steve Jobs met with Volkswagen Group head Martin Winterkorn. The companies were reportedly planned to team up to work on a car aimed at the youth market. Volkswagen has since introduced a small car aimed at the younger crowd, which is not only budget-conscious but equally stylish, that may not have been developed with Apple but does feature an iPad-inspired dash-top tablet display.

Gurus believe that if Apple was to launch an iCar it would surely be futuristic and stuffed with features like “photocromic” exterior that allows the driver to change the colour of the car, a touch-screen display that would cover the entire dashboard or perhaps some sort of syncing system between the iPad, Macs and iCar which would allow user to track their car current location, information about the car mileage, average speed, car health, etc.

While it’s no iCar, Apple recently filed a patent on a new steering wheel-mounted Bluetooth-based remote controller for its devices that it hopes will reduce driver distraction. Which surely does increases our hope of seeing an iCar soon.

Aakash (tablet)

2012-01-17T16:14:00.001+05:30

UbiSlate 7+
UbiSlate 7+, the commercial version of Aakash
Developer	DataWind, IIT
Manufacturer	DataWind
Type	Tablet computer
Introductory price	2999
Operating system	Android 2.3
Power	3200 mAh li-po battery, 2-3 hr life
CPU	Cortex A8-700 MHz processor
Storage capacity	Flash memory Internal: 2 GB flash External: 2 to 32 GB microSD slot
Memory	256 MB RAM
Display	800 × 480 px 7 in (18 cm) diagonal
Sound	Built in microphone; stereo earphones; 3.5mm jack
Input	Multi-touch resistive touchscreen,headset controls
Camera	None
Connectivity	GPRS, Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)
Online services	Android Market
Dimensions	190.5 mm (7.50 in) H 118.5 mm (4.67 in) W 15.7 mm (0.62 in) D
Weight	350 g (12 oz)
Website	www.ubislate.com www.akashtablet.com

The Aakash is an Android tablet computer jointly developed by the London-based company DataWind with the Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan. It is manufactured by the India-based company Quad, at a new production centre in Hyderabad, with a trial run of 100,000 units.^[3] The tablet was officially launched as the Aakash in New Delhi on October 5, 2011. A substantially upgraded second-generation model called UbiSlate 7+ is projected for manufacture starting in early 2012.

The 7-inch touch screen tablet has an ARM 11 processor and 256 MB RAM running under the Android 2.2 operating system. It has two universal serial bus (USB) ports and delivers high definition (HD) quality video.For applications, the Aakash will have access to Getjar, an independent market, rather than the Android Market.

As a multi-media platform, the Aakash project was beset by delays and setbacks. The device was developed as part of the country's aim to link 25,000 colleges and 400 universities in an e-learning program. Originally projected as a "$35 laptop" the device will be sold to the Government of India at US$50and will be distributed at a government subsidized price of $35. A commercial version of Aakash is currently marketed as UbiSlate 7+ at a price of $60.

By January 3, 2012 1.4 million online orders for the Aakash had been received.

History

Aspiration to create a "Made in India" computer was first reflected in a prototype "Simputer" that went into production in a small way. Bangalore based CPSU, Bharat Electronics Ltd manufactured around 5,000 Simputers to Indian Customers during 2002-07. In 2011, Kapil Sibal announced an anticipated low-cost computing device to compete with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC), though intended for urban college students rather than the OLPC's rural, underprivileged students.

The device was projected to be designed by the students of Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan – at the time uncredentialed in research or product development. The announced computer had been purchased off the shelf. The project remained dormant for about a year.

A year later, the MHRD announced that the low cost computer would be launched in 6 weeks. Nine weeks later the MHRD showcased a tablet named "Aakash", not nearly what had been projected and at US$60 rather than the projected $35. "NDTV" reported that the new low cost tablet was not a patch that was shown as a prototype and was going to cost about twice as much.

While it was once projected as a laptop computer, the design has evolved into a tablet computer. At the inauguration of the national Mission on Education Programme organized by the Union HRD Ministry in 2009, joint secretary N. K. Sinha had said that the computing device is 10 inches (which is around 25.5 cm) long and 5 inches (12.5 cm) wide and priced at around $30.

India's Human Resource Development Minister, Kapil Sibal unveiled a prototype on 22 July 2010. The price of the device exhibited was projected at $35, eventually to drop to $20 and ultimately to $10. After the device was unveiled, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte offered full access to OLPC technology at no cost to the Indian team.

Doubts about the tablet were dismissed in a television program "Gadget Guru" aired on NDTV in August 2010,when it was shown to have 256 MBRAM and 2 GB of internal flash-memory storage and demonstrated running the Android operating system featuring video playback, internal Wi-Fi and cellular data via an external 3G modem.

Source: wikipedia

facebook

2011-12-14T18:44:00.003+05:30

Statistics

People on Facebook

More than 800 million active users
More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
Average user has 130 friends

Activity on Facebook

More than 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

Global Reach

More than 70 languages available on the site
More than 75% of users are outside of the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform

On average, people on Facebook install apps more than 20 million times every day
Every month, more than 500 million people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites
More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook

Mobile

More than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices
More than 475 mobile operators globally work to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Official Google Blog: We knew the web was big...

2011-12-12T16:24:00.000+05:30

Official Google Blog:: We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.

To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

As you can see, our distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question: your next Google search.

Thanks - GeT sOmThInG nIcE

2011-12-10T13:01:00.000+05:30

Thanks - GeT sOmThInG nIcE