Visit: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/wo/wo_040405web.asp

Google announces its foray into the beverage market with Google Gulp BETA.

An excerpt –
At Google our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to our users. But any piece of information’s usefulness derives, to a depressing degree, from the cognitive ability of the user who’s using it. That’s why we’re pleased to announce Google Gulp (BETA)with Auto-Drink(LIMITED RELEASE), a line of “smart drinks” designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty.

Think fruity. Think refreshing.
Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex. Plus, it’s low in carbs! And with flavors ranging from Beta Carroty to Glutamate Grape, you’ll never run out of ways to quench your thirst for knowledge.

For more info, click here
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Apple and PalmOne team up on the ultimate hybrid phone but skimp a bit on the form factor.

Labelled the iTreoPod, this most brilliant combination has set the world on its ear, and, unlike any other Apple announcement, news of its existence wasn’t leaked months before the actual arrival date.

The iTreoPod combines the best of the insanely popular Apple iPod with the raw genius of the much-lauded Treo 650. This device can make calls, shoot pictures, surf the Web, and play iTunes music. It also fits nicely in a trouser pocket if, say, you buy your pants at Big & Tall.

Click here for more information.

Gmail celebrates it’s first birthday.
So, what does it have for us on this day. Well, they announced plans to expand storage to 2GB, Wow! Also, Google will add a yet-to-be-determined amount of extra storage daily, with no plans to stop. At this moment, Gmail has 1158.250863 megabytes of storage for every user. The on keeps on increasing every second. No wonder everyone loves Google!

So, nothing for April Fool’s Day? Of course it has something lined up for us. The infinity+1 plan.

Click here to read an article by CNET on this.

UPDATE: storage has crossed 2GB!

The fastest supercomputer BLUE GENE/L has broken its own record and has clocked 138 Teraflops. Earlier Blue gene had 32 racks (1 rack has 1024 Processors), and they have added now 35 racks more.

One of the questions in most of the quizzes we find is on the Supercomputers
Here is a list I found in Chip Magazine, this is as of February 2004

1. BlueGene/ L DD2 Beta-system (IBM)- 70.7 TFLOPS
2. Columbia (NASA) – 51.9 TFLOPS
3. Earth Simulator (NEC, Japan) – 40 TFLOPS
4. MareNostrum(Barcelona Supercomputer Center) – approximately 40 TFLOPS too
5. Thunder(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) – 19.9 TFLOPS
6. ASCI Q (Los Alamos National Laboratory) – 13.9 TFLOPS
7. System X (Virginia Tech)- 12.25 TFLOPS
8. BlueGene/L DD1 Prototype (IBM) – 11.7 TFLOPS
9. eServer pSeries 655 cluster (Naval Oceanographic Office) – 10.3 TFLOPS
10. Tungsten (NCSA) – 9.8 TFLOPS

FLOPS- floating-point operations per second
For more information on these, Check out Chip Magazine Feb 2005, i know its a bit late

G

Ever wondered what keeps our e-mails as safe sealed envelopes rather than postcards that anybody can read ?(asssuming of course that TRANSLTR- the ultimate codebreaker from Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress doesn’t exist)

Here’s a little something about encryption and decryption algorithms…

The encryption of original data(plaintext) into its coded version(cipher text) through key based mechanism takes place using an algorithm and a key.

The algorithm is a set of rules that defines the encryption method from plaintext to ciphertext.A key is exactly what a key is – the specific combination of characters that helps to decrypt the message.There are mainly two types of algorithms:

• Symmetric – The same key is used for encryption as well as decryption.
• Asymmetric – A public key is used to encrypt the data and a private key is used to to decrypt it.This is the key used for encryption of our e-mails.

For example, if Mr. X wants to send a message to Mr.Y, then he simply looks at Mr.Y’s public key and uses it to code the message into plaintext and sends it to him.Mr.Y uses his private key to decrypt the message.Thias ensures that the message is not understood by a third party even if it is intercepted through some means.

The process also works the other way round.ie.Mr.Y can use his private key to encrypt a message and send it to Mr.X which he can be decoded using Mr.Y’s public key.Although this is less safe as compared to the earlier method it proves to Mr.X that Mr.Y is the real sender of the data.The most popular asymmetric algorithm used today is RSA(Rivest,Shamir and Adleman – its designers)

P.S Hope this gave all of you some food for thought…all these days I’ve been spellbound by Dan Brown’s genius once again having been busy reading Digital Fortress, which has left some questions unanswered…here’s one for all you ace programmers out there…Does a rotation cleartext algorithm really exist, and if it does how exactly does it work?

Nice Article though slightly ‘anti teachers’

http://youthcurry.blogspot.com/2005/02/last-obscene-day-of-school.html

Read!

Type “about:config” in your FireFox address bar.
The settings you’re looking for are:

1.) network.http.pipelining
2.) network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
3.) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
4.) network.http.proxy.pipelining
5.) nglayout.ititialpaint.delay

Set #1, #2, and #4 to “true”. Set #3 to a high number, like 32. Set #5 to 0.
(This works for broadband , i am not sure of dialups)

Doortouniverse

That is one of the most famousest of headlines going on about the recent announcement made by Mr. Gates concerning Internet Explorer 7, which is going to be released earlier than expected (this year) and not glued together with a copy of the next Windows. All these days Firefox had been tickling Microsoft’s belly, gaining a respectable (actually it’s more like “astonishing” if you consider the short time it took) five percent of the market. Opera of course had never been able to capture any market share mostly due to its not being free and partly due to its not being all that great in any case, and so for Opera nothing will change – its tiny number of faithful users will probably weather the IE7 flood. Anyway, for Firefox IE7 can be disastrous unless they come up with FF2 soon with something awesomely great, including even faster launch times, all security issues quenched, the updating mechanism bettered and support for things like ActiveX, which is… to be honest… asking a little too much of them, but this is what is required. Plus there are IE-specific sites, especially some banking sites, which simply deny entrance to Firefox. But in the end, Firefox can’t cater to those sites which have been designed so that they look good only in IE, by adjusting their code to match IE’s idiosyncrasies.

To compete, FireFox needs to continuously provide the competitive edge and fast. The sleeping giant has awakened. The hammer shall fall.

–Karan

PS: IE7 will be only for Windows XP SP2