Category Archives: world

Google gets Sparrow

Jul 20

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Sparrow, google, accusation

CEO of Sparrow Dom Leca is very excited about joining with Google.. are u?

If you have used it before you would know it’s a MAC email client, also works on iOS platform. Probably the only other app I would use after Outlook or MFE.

It could be good news for windows and android users which they would release eventually.

It is just that some applications are better being independent.

This is what Sparrow CEO had to say about this accusation

“We’re excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google!

We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience.

Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to all of our users who have supported us, advised us, given us priceless feedback and allowed us to build a better mail application. While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users.

We had an amazing ride and can’t thank you enough.

Full speed ahead! “

Tag: Sparrow, google, acquisition, android, windows, iOS, mac

Source: http://sprw.me/

Posted in Internet, news, world

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Kim Dotcom Sings, creating history!

Jul 20

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He is out and kicking and making some noise which sounds kinda cool, see it yourself.

War is not over yet, looks like he is ready for a fight too.


I was never a big fan of online file vaults/cyberlockers. I like torrent better, but then looks like very body else like to have a cloud vault and share it with friends. Services like dropbox are use full. However I surely would like to see him come out of these cheers to kim.com

My earlier blog on megaupload shutdown

Tag: Mr. President, kim doctom sings, medaupload, kim.com, technology, SOPA, PIPA

Posted in Internet, news, Technology, world

2 Comments

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5 fascinating cars of the future and the “Kid”

Jul 12

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Starting my life in late 70s I was grew up watching TV series like knight rider. The kid from Knight rider was “the car of the future” and I guess it will always be like that. The car that can talk! Can drive by its self, Jump (fly!!) and go through anything, almost indestructible. Yet none of the future car promises nothing like that :P …..The blog on ted 5 fascinating cars of the future reminds me how fantastic the future car from past used to be.

Knight Rited and the Kid, knight rider, kid

Knight rider http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083437/

The kid, knight rider, kid

Knight rider http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083437/

It’s 2012. we are yet to see our fair share of flying cars. Some promised car are on there way in!

Nissan’s PIVO 2 commuter car, PIVO 2

issan’s PIVO 2 commuter car

P1, the car that can’t spin out

P1, the car that can’t spin out
GM’s Electric Networked-Vehicle, electronic car, networked vehicle, networked car

GM’s Electric Networked-Vehicle

Google’s self-driving car, google, car, self driving

Google’s self-driving car

Shelley, the autonomous race car

Shelley, the autonomous race car

In a new TEDTalk, Chris Gerdes of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (awesomely abbreviated as CARS) explains that he and his team are busy at work developing the motor vehicles of the future. One of their starting points? Studying the brainwaves of the best motorists in the world — professional race car drivers. The idea is to combine computer technology with human intuition and skill behind the wheel.

In honor of Gerdes’ work, here is a look at five cars we may be seeing a lot more of in the future. Sure, they don’t fly. But, hey, many allow you to sit back and enjoy the ride without having to do a thing.

And to all Knight rider fans! the following Video will bring back some of your old memories!! The dreams of future perfect world!!

http://youtu.be/mfwQsp0xPDI

Posted in Technology, world

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Ouya! The next XBOX

Jul 11

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As I write this blog I see them in kickstarter, 29 days to go and already got over 500k USD over of their target. That is fast!

Build to have Android running on it makes the possibilities limitless. Games, apps, streaming or just watch tv… and open hack able platform shall probably give birth to some other GPL linux based platform for the end users. While projects like raspberry pi gives you a board for 25$, Ouya plans to give you a fully functional slick box to play with.

Specifications of Ouya

  • Tegra3 quad-core processor
  • 1GB RAM
  • 8GB of internal flash storage
  • HDMI connection to the TV, with support for up to 1080p HD
  • WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
  • Bluetooth LE 4.0
  • USB 2.0 (one)
  • Wireless controller with standard controls (two analog sticks, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad
  • Android 4.0

Ouya controller

This new console will be so open, that its backers are expecting and asking for it to be hacked.

“We decided, ‘let’s take this as far as it can go,” Uhrman said. “So if you want to go in and hack the box, go ahead and do it. We hope you do it.”

In a follow-up e-mail, she was more specific about just how far under the hood the Ouya crew would let a hacker go: “The circuit board will have well-documented test points. People can swap out chips, add, etc. We may even publish the hardware design if enough people are curious. Because Ouya will also have Bluetooth and a USB, hardware hobbyists can also make their own peripherals (someone already suggested pinball controls to us). Regarding the software, you’ll be able to root the device easily. It won’t void your warranty. Every unit has a debug console. We are even working on the idea of a “plant”—which will restore your profile after rooting your device (reverse your root). Because it’s built on Android, you’ll understand the source code well, too. (Obviously if a hacker roots the device, our integrated user experience and game store will no longer be available while the device is rooted — so there is, as always, a tradeoff between customizing your device and enjoying the benefits of standardization. We expect the true hackers to be an elite, but small proportion of the total number of people who buy the box. Most people will probably just use the standard setup.)”

I think this is as close as we go to open source hardware from a commercial hardware vendor. Opening up a new hardware platform in this way bring an enormous opportunity for open source software development in home multimedia platform. This could be the next big thing after IBM PC or android for home multimedia, gaming, automation and many more.

Tag: Ouya, ouya controller, open source software, open source hardware, open source, xbox

Reference:

http://kotaku.com/

http://www.kickstarter.com/

Posted in Open Source, Technology, world

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Open Source Hardware! Build your own design you can touch and interact

Jul 10

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Open source software was born when software started to become expensive. All you needed was hardware and a complier and a group of people who was willing to share their work for free to the world provided code stays free in its re-distribution. We have come a long way since that first day. Today we all are using open source in some way or others and some using it more than the others.

Interaction with logic using just software and a computer limits our ability to interact and automate within visible 3D graphic and sound. Occasionally the software can recognize your voice and respond.

The birth and mass production of 3D printers changes a lot. It gives us the ability to share and re-produce and build on Open Source Hardware.

This recent ted talk from Arduino shows how much progress we have made in hardware and design innovation using Open Source hardware. This makes me ask why, should Sony or apple lead all design innovation?  There is so much we would like to have but just have to wait for the big guys to think it is feasible and can bring billion dollars before they makes a move on it.

Chinese has shown you can just copy hardware and rule the world. We software users have been working so long for software integration and automation. Imagine how much we can accomplish with hardware and design innovation. The next great innovation could be a design innovation with Open Source Hardware.

I am interested in seeing what comes out of open source hardware like Robotics and Renewable energy projects

Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination

 

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

Source: bog.ted.com ted global 2012

Open-sourcing the blueprints of civilization: Marcin Jakubowski on TED.com

Posted in Integration, Open Source, Technology, Work, world

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Open Source Game Console Ouya: $99 freedom to gaming multimedia platform

Jul 4

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When I looked at this Ouya console, the start up reminded me of Openmoko the open source mobile phones or One Laptop Per Child programme, the freedom of open hardware and Open Platform. Android (Linux mobile os by Google) came in and gave all of us a taste of open source platform. It shows how investing on Open source for profit can make a difference. Both OLPC and Openmko is a mobile device as oppose to Ouya being something you need not to carry around but none of them fulfilled their promises.
open source gaming platform, Ouya, linux, future, multimedia, multimedia centreopen source gaming platform, Ouya, linux, future, multimedia, multimedia centre

I believe eventually product like Ouya (form factor is probably not an issue) will more heavily be used as a home entertainment device and free up the people who are stuck with XBOX, PS3 or give a choice to people who are using Linux media centers like XBMC and others.

Ouya could be a freedom from having to maintain your own platform, something more like for less geeky people :-) .  Any developer will be able to publish games, claims the listing, and all games will be free to play will bring a lot more to the board.

ouya2_gallery_post
The team behind the project also looks very interesting, which includes people like Jawbone Jambox and One Laptop Per Childdesigner Yves Behar, Ed Fries of Xbox fame, Amol Sarva of Peek, Peter Pham of Color, and counts Julie Uhrman of IGN as its founder and CEO.

Source:

theverge.com
gizmodo.com

Posted in Making things work, Open Source, world

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Blue Marble 2012 – Arctic View

Jun 19

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Via Flickr:
Source: www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/7394700302/in/photostream/

A very different view of the earth right above the Arctic, you can see Europe, Asia, Hint of Africa, even the place I come from. Taken by Suomi NPP captured on its entirety from an altitude of 512 miles (824 kilometers) over the North Pole
“Those pixels were captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS)on board the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite”- Gizmodo
Please follow www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin… the guidelines to re-use this image
tektab.com

Posted in Sky, world

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We decided on our emotions, do logic rules our emotion?

Jun 15

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I read this article on emotion and decision making and how they are related few days back and this got me thinking.

As the article goes

“A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a ground breaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.”
Emotion: Sorrow

It could be a good strategy to make something think with you in sync, make someone agree with you. Win your negotiation.

But then we would like to think that we are aware of our emotional state and can do the right thing for our self by deciding reasonably! But again we probably can never be happy unless we can help our emotional self-happy. I see it as a chicken and egg situation. At the end of the day isn’t it all about “whatever makes us happy”?

I always knew playing chess, how i fail to follow the math. There was always an emotional attachment. But maybe at one point one learns how to drive his emotion with logic and then decide. I would imagine our emotion is like a balance scale. Where we have logic and again some unknown factor? Emotion!.

Source:

http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/decisions-are-emotional-not-logical-the-neuroscience-behind-decision-making

tag: emotion, logic, negotiation, thinking, happy,

Posted in world

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How Safe is your password?

Jun 12

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Managing and securing password has been one of the biggest challenges. Password leaks news on such a short span of time on linkedin, eHarmony, last.fm makes me think that, these events are gradually getting more widespread.

According to Wikipedia: A password is a secret word or string of characters that is used for authentication, to prove identity or gain access to a resource (example: an access code is a type of password). The password should be kept secret from those not allowed access.

There are always two parties who maintain the password, the user and the service provider. User should remember the password and not share with anyone and the service provider should all everything possible to make sure it is not exposed to any third party.

What we are seeing these days that the service providers are failing to secure their password storage and hackers are being able to extract it.

What is a password hack?

When someone gains access to the password database by exploiting the system or the process, if not in plain text! they will try to crack it

When someone gets to know your password, you may be targets for your data, access. The motive can vary. Many times hackers just do it to show off their ability and insult the service providers, which of course get big news coverage. In these cases most of the time you have a little to worry about. On the other times they will do targeted hack, can stay unnoticed for long or never be discovered.

What can i do to feel a little more safe with my password?

Avoid using week password, try not to use same password for all your services or even by changing a character or two.

Try using OAuth instead of creating account with each provider when supported.

Avoid using services that do not support authentication over SSL

Ask your provider how they store your password and secure your data

And the last one, this one has a very little to do with the service provider; ensure you always use a secured terminal to login. Not compromised, and protected by antivirus etc etc.

secured-auth

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Posted in Internet, security, Technology, world

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Transit of Venus 2012

A transit of Venus across the Sun took place today 6/6/2012 when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against the solar disk. During a transit, Venus was seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun.  began at 22:09 UTC on 5 June 2012, and will finish at 04:49 UTC on 6 June.

The transit is similar to a solar eclipse by the Moon. While the diameter of Venus is more than 3 times that of the Moon, Venus appears smaller, and travels more slowly across the face of the Sun, because it is much farther away from Earth.

SDO’s Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit – 171 Angstrom
SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit - 171 Angstrom

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