Gates vs Jobs: Whoz the hero?

Gates vs Jobs: The ubiquitous question in the tech world!

Without doubt both are genius, Without doubt both are living legends. But enter into tech world and you could find them to be star attractions of all conspiracy theories. Both seem to have an uncanny knack of attracting accusations. Read the article here which compares the two maven's.
My pick of the hero will be Steve Jobs, primarily because of his love for creativity and innovation. I was and I still am completely bowled by IPod's User Interface, only Apple could have come up with such a product!

Cheers!

Mozart's Birthday

Google Logo's always fascinate me primarily because they celebrate all events including events which one would really not remember though they are important. Thanks to google.com for spreading the word that today is Mozart's Birthday. Kudos to Google team for regularly coming up with such catchy and dynamic logos.

Cheers!

Web Design & Usability Guidelines

A web resource which will be cherished by Web Designers.

National Cancer Institute has build a site which is designed to provide over 50 of the top Web design and usability guidelines based on emerging research and supporting information in the field. Click here to explore the wealth of usability information.

Cheers!

Nokia Concept Lounge

Take few minutes out, sit back and explore this fantastic design idea from Nokia. Nokia Concept Lounge is a must checkout to understand how creativity can be unleashed in websites.

Cheers!

Bill Gates at a recent conference!

Photowhere

One problem with digital cameras is that they tend to name their pictures in a cryptic fashion (i.e. DSC0034.jpg).

To help users organize and retrieve digital photographs, a system has been developed, entitled PhotoWhere, which annotates digital photographs automatically with relevant keywords based on data from a GPS receiver and the World Wide Web.
Using a GPS receiver, the system tags each picture with the specific GPS coordinates where it was taken. The system then queries a geographical database that indexes web pages by GPS coordinates, which produces a set of web pages that are associated with these coordinates. Next, these web pages are analyzed using a combination of standard and unique information retrieval techniques in order to best determine what the web pages are about, or even better, what topics and keywords they have in common. From this information, an accurate annotation of about 5-10 relevant keywords is deduced. These keywords are presented to the user in real-time, right after s/he took the picture, thereby giving the user instantaneous information about the place where they are taking a picture. The keywords are also stored with the picture to facilitate keyword-based (and location-based) search and retrieval of pictures from a database.

Photowhere is Interactive Experience Group, MIT Media Labortary project. These people sure are helluva creative bunch!

Cheers!

New age concept of "Six Degrees of Separation"

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

Social networking sites like Orkut have been pitched as the internet version of the 'six degrees of separation' supposedly connecting most people, first proposed by psychologist Stanley Milgram and Ithiel de Sola Pool. Click here, to read this interesting article which relates the theory to these sites.

Cheers!

Water resistant PC from Intel @ Rs. 10K

[via Rediff]
Intel Corporation, in an attempt to bridge the digital divide in India, is planning to launch a personal computer priced below Rs 10,000 by this year-end. The global IT major is also on track with its earlier announced plans of investing over $1 billion in the country for its research and development (R&D) initiatives. It is also planning to look at newer locations for setting up centres, in addition to its Bangalore facility.

"We are working on the sub-Rs 10,000 PC and expect it to be commercially available by the end of this financial year. The PC will enable India to become one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world," Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice-president and general manager (sales and marketing group), told reporters on Tuesday.

Click here to read the entire article.

Cheers!

10 World Changing Web Moments

Webby Awards team has unveiled a list of 10 web moments that changed the web. It talks about the dotcom boom and bust, napster shutdown, 9/11 and much more.

Click here to go through the 10 World Changing Web Moments.

BTW, Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence in Web design, creativity, usability and functionality. They are calling in entries for 10th annual webby award, so if you think you have a creative and innovative website at your disposal, just enter your site to win Oscar of the Internet.

Cheers!

Executable Internet or XInternet

Read George F. Colony's article which claims, the web will fade and new paradigm of XInternet will come up and replace web in about 2-3 years!

Cheers!

Software Aging and Rejuvenation

Common saying goes that only humans age and get themselves rejuvinated. But apparantely Prof. Kishore Trivedi has brought this idea into software paradigm as well. According to him,

Software Aging is:

• Deterioration in the availability of OS resources, data corruption and numerical error accumulation.
• Potential fault conditions gradually accumulating over time leading to either performance degradation or transient failures or both.

Manifestation of aging is seen with performance degradation, crash/hang failure etc. Windows 95 is one such example.

Software Rejuvenation is:

• It is a proactive fault management technique aimed at cleaning up the system internal state to prevent the occurrence of more severe crash failures in the future. It involves occasionally terminating an application or a system, cleaning its internal state and restarting it.

Current methods of software rejuvenation include system restart, application restart (partial rejuventaion).


It seems to be a very interesting idea and is soon starting to become a hot research topic. For more info, click here.

Cheers!

New Year Greetings

Wishing one and all a very happy and colourful new year!

Moron is back after a long overdue vacation. New year resolution: Have a blast on everyday of the year!! Keep up with this space for technological odyssey 2006..

Cheers!