Nano-Scale Memory Fits A Terabit On A Square Inch

"San Jose Business Journal talks about Nanochip, a company that's developing molecular-scale memory: "Nanochip has developed prototype arrays of atomic-force probes, tiny instruments used to read and write information at the molecular level. These arrays can record up to one trillion bits of data -- known as a terabit -- in a single square inch. That's the storage density that magnetic hard disk drive makers hope to achieve by 2010. It's roughly equivalent to putting the contents of 25 DVDs on a chip the size of a postage stamp." The story also mentions Millipede project from IBM, where scientists are trying to build nano-scale memory that relies on micromechanical components."

(via Slashdot)

Firefox 1.0.1

Firefox 1.0.1 is out with some security fixes. Internationalized domain names like www.bär.de or www.bücher.de – the German words for “bear” and “books” – will work, but are instantly rewritten to “Punycode”. This means www.bär.de turns to “http://www.xn--br-via.de/” in the browser address bar. The reason behind this apparently is to prevent phishing attacks, which could fool users by leading them to URLs which look like “paypal.com” but actually contain a cyrillic “a.” (Google, by the way, does understand special characters in domains, which you can see by entering “site:www.bär.de”.)

(via Blogoscoped)

Please don't do it! [The Google Login]

Well Google is said to introduce some "premium" links in the search results, and to access a "premium" link one hs to provide a user-name and passoword.

"Google is likely to require its users to begin providing personal information to use some of its products and services, said CEO Eric Schmidt.

Requiring people to provide their identity and a password to gain service access is common at many Web sites, but would be new for Google. Having more personal information would enable Google to offer more useful improvements, Schmidt said."

Liked the idea?? I don't .

(via addict3d)

HP's CEO walks away ...!

Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, is leaving the troubled computer maker after being forced out by the company's board.

On a conference call with reporters, executives said Fiorina was not terminated for cause and that she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman said she'll get a payout of approximately $21 million.

more ... at CNN

Want a PhD in Game Dev???

University of Southern California, introduced a chair for the study of interactive entertainment. The chair is endowed by EA, the game dev giant.

Bing Gordon, Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Electronic Arts (Research), was named the first holder of the Electronic Arts endowed faculty chair at the USC School of Cinema-Television, according to a statement from the company, the biggest video game publisher.

"A leader in the game industry for more than 20 years, Bing once again is making history as the inaugural holder of the first-ever endowed chair at a university for the study of electronic gaming and interactive entertainment," USC Dean Elizabeth Daley said in the statement.

more.. at CNN

(via Slashdot)

Einstein

This time, its a parrot!

It can be bore, it can produce the sound of more than 10 animals, it considers itself a super-star, and a lot more. Its cool!

BTW Its streaming media, so better try with a good connection.

(courtesy Asim Ajmal)

hummm, some more maps around

Well this is another map availble on the web, and seems even better than Google's version. Isn't it?
And though, they might haven't got as much bandwidth as Google enjoys.

(Thanks Ali)

How Google Maps works?

Joel Webber analyzed the DHTML behind the new Google Maps. It's nice to see a clean XHTML + CSS approach with absolute positioning and "console game" style, tile-based scrolling. Instead of using XMLHttp requests like in Google Suggest, there's a hidden Iframe which fires the parent's "load" function.

(via Blogoscoped)

Google Maps

MAPS.GOOGLE.COM

Yet another Google thing! and as always Its Cool!

Currently its only for Americas, lets wait when it will include our cities ...

Pupna Fetch Engine

"This one goes to the Humor Department: Pupna is a new search engine puppy that retrieves exactly what you are searching for... and nothing else."

(via Blogoscoped)

OrganicHTML

"I'm not exactly sure how the Flash-based OrganicHTML works, but it grows a flower based on any URL you provide it."

Hummmmmm, its seems cool!

(via Blogoscoped)

About.com up for sale

Primedia, the publishing company owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has put the Web site About.com on the block, and five companies plan to bid on it, according to executives close to the auction.

Final bids are due today, and the asking price is $350 million to $500 million, they said.

The bidders that plan to submit final offers Tuesday are Google, Yahoo, The New York Times Company, the AOL unit of Time Warner and Ask Jeeves, the executives said. The auction process has been under way for at least a month and is being managed by Goldman Sachs, the executives said.

(via CNET)

Microsoft: Longhorn beta will arrive by June

The company has said publicly that Beta 1 of Longhorn would arrive by the end of 2005, though internally, the company has been aiming for a release by midyear. The final version of Longhorn is slated for the second half of next year.

Beta 1 will be the first look at Longhorn in its current form. Microsoft released a developer preview version of Windows at the Professional Developers Conference in the fall of 2003 and updated that early code last spring.

more... ar CNET

What is a "Bug"?

An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. Examples: “There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards.” “The system crashed because of a hardware bug.” “Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs” (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems).

read more bug history, how the word evolved to be used in CompLang.

0wn any domain, no defense exists

"Shmoocon ended today. And just to prove The Shmoo Group wasn't sitting idle for the entire time while planning the con - A new exploit was demo'd by EricJ that left all jaws our on the floor. Want to own ANY domain? Want a trusted SSL cert for it? Check it out here. We 0wnz0rd PayPal, but left the rest for you. We have no idea how to fix this and neither do the browser developers. Official advisory here. Phishing attacks of doom coming soon."

(via BoingBoing)

Cell phone's for you...it's the judge

According to several British papers, 44-year-old Aftab Ahmed was handed a groundbreaking sentence from the Ipswich Crown Court. But it's not the sentence itself that's been making headlines. It's the way the sentence was delivered: over Ahmed's mobile phone.

more ... at CNET

How to Take Over a Train Station?

"Everyone knows that home wireless networks are insecure, but who would expect a major transportation hub to be vulnerable to the same problems? Well, waiting for my friend's train at South Station in Boston, MA, I happened to notice that it was possible to take control of the entire station's wireless network, including its home page and authorization method (free wireless, anyone?)--and those of thirty other businesses throughout Massachusetts, thanks to a few coding errors on the part of the wireless company with which South Station contracted."

(via Slashdot)

Gizoogle

Gizoogle is a "Gangsta" search engine, not unlike Google but using street slang... take a look at the results for your own name.

You can go to Translation Page by following Translizzle Some Text at Gizoogle Home page.

(via Blogoscoped)

Microsoft Roadshow - Part I

This Wednesday, I happened to attend the Microsoft Roadshow in Lahore. Event was good, well organized and had a lot of MS touch :)

First session was about the buzz-word: Security. I played TicTacToe with my peer throughout the session, a lot of the security being discussed was a network-admin sort of thing.

Second session: Yup! Impressive. SQL Server 2005 Rocks!

They have got a lot of things added. Yukon, codename for SQL Server 2005, supports User Defined Types. Develop a class of your own in .NET say with the name "Employee", deploy it as User Defined Type, and Boom! You can add a column of type "Employee" to your SQL Server Table. Cool! Isn't it?

Thought sometime, that if you could have some instrumentation added to your Stored Procedures (SP onwards), the life would have been somewhat easier. But writing to local file system from within a SP, ahem ahem ... ! Well now you can! You can develop your SPs in
any of the .NET languages, publish it as SP, and again BOOM!, you have got your assembly listed in SQL Server 2005, under the node, "Stored Procedures", you can call it from any other pure SQL SP. And yes you can publish your SQL SPs as Web Service! No DB connection needed, just add a web-reference to your project and Enjoy!

The next big thing in Yukon is support for XML Documents. You can now define a column, in a table, of type XML, and that column will be able to accommodate a complete XML Doc. You can event insert XML through T-SQL inline, like: INSERT INTO Table1 VALUES('some-valid-xml'). You can even provide a schema while defining the column, so that each time somebody inserts XML into the column, SQL Server would be able to validate it against the schema. Appreciated!

You can query the XML Doc stored in SQL Server, with XPath/XQuery, so that you can get to some individual attribute.

Yes! You are right. The Performance???? Is still a question.

Yahoo Testing YQ "Search By Example" Tool

"Yahoo is launching a new tool that lets you submit all or part of a web page that you're viewing as a search query, rather than the traditional method of typing words into a search box. The tool, called Y!Q, analyzes the content you've submitted and extracts the most relevant terms from the page, and presents results accordingly."

"Today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Offers New Contextual Search Tool, describes this cool new utility, available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers."

(via SEW)

Interns are precious!

"By the way, it's because of this phenomenon—the fact that many of the great people are never on the job market—that we are so aggressive about hiring summer interns. This may be the last time these kids ever show up on the open market. In fact we hunt down the smart CS students and individually beg them to apply for an internship with us, because if you wait around to see who sends you a resume, you're already missing out."

"Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%."

Joel on hiring stuff.

Sun: Patent use OK beyond Solaris project

Sun Microsystems has begun fending off concerns that there are severe limits on how programmers may use 1,600 patents it's unfettering in conjunction with its open-source Solaris plan.

The company said last week that it would permit open-source programmers to use the patents when working on the OpenSolaris project. What several influential observers found unclear is whether programmers in other areas--most notably in Solaris competitor Linux--would have to fear legal action from Sun.

The server and software company clarified its position somewhat on Monday. "Clearly we have no intention of suing open-source developers," said Tom Goguen, head of Solaris marketing. However, he added, "We haven't put together a fancy pledge on our Web site" to that effect.

more ...

(via CNET)

U.S. Army Guide to Code Breaking

"From the introduction of this document, the U.S. Army's field manual guide to Cryptanalysis: 'This manual presents the basic principles and techniques of cryptanalysts and their relation to cryptography. Cryptanalytics is the art and science of solving unknown codes and ciphers.'"

I have read this document quite a little , but I assume it would be an interesting read. I'll continue with it, when time permits.

(via Slashdot)

Google Eyes Domain Registration Market

"Google is now an ICANN-approved domain name registrar, an intriguing move that could be tied to its blog hosting service, Blogger. Yahoo recently dropped its domain prices to $4.98, as hosting companies use domains as a cheap way to lure customers. Registrar status could allow Google to compete aggressively on price. Bloggers seem to resist paying for hosting, so cheap domains might help Google's plans for world domination."

(via Slashdot)

MSN Search Switches Engines

Two years after saying it would create its own search engine from scratch, MSN Search has officially released its new technology on its main sites around the world. Today's SearchDay article, MSN Search Officially Switches To Its Own Technology, looks at what's new since the beta came out last year and what may come.

(via SEW)

Google's Top Brass Talk "Search"

Google's VP of Engineering Adam Bosworth, spoke to The Gillmor Gang (you can listen online) about future search engine architecture, personalization, and RSS. Findory's Greg Linden responds to some of Bosworth's comments with his take on the value of personalization.

(via SEW)