Google building Pacific fibre cable
Company in talks to build its own infrastructure

Google is reportedly in negotiations to build a fibre optic cable across the Pacific to link its US operations with Asia.

Australian magazine Communications Day claimed that the search giant is in talks with Asian and Australian companies over the ‘Unity’ project to lay a Google-owned line from the west coast of the US to the Asian subcontinent.

The move would provide Google with substantial future cost savings, since it would give an ‘at cost’ link to the fastest growing internet population on the planet and reduce the company’s dependence on third parties.

“Additional infrastructure for the internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We are not commenting on any of these plans,” said a Google spokesman.

The proposed line could be in service by the end of 2009.

Up to 80 per cent of the world’s communications are carried by undersea cables, the most advanced of which can transfer seven terabytes of data every second. There are five trans-pacific cables in operation and another one already planned.

Microsoft buying FaceBook

Microsoft is poised to buy a five per cent stake in social networking site Facebook, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The report said that the software giant will pay between $300m and $500m for the stake.

If the figures are accurate it would value Facebook at up to $10bn and make its founder Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

“It would probably be pretty good for Microsoft since it has not had the best success in creating really hip, young-people-grabbing stuff on the web,” Kim Caughey, a senior analyst at Fox Pitt Capital, told The Guardian.

The figure is a step up from analyst predictions last month that Facebook was worth around $6bn. The company had a turnover of $150m last year, with profits of $30m.

However, Facebook has several hurdles to overcome, not least the decision of a court as to who actually owns it.

A legal battle is currently underway between Zuckerberg and former college friends about who had the original idea for the site.

The company is also being investigated by the New York Attorney General over allegations that it does not protect its users against sexual predators.

Toshiba announces gigashot A and K series camcorders
By Amy-Mae Elliott Pocket-lint - Tuesday, September 25 03:34 pm

Toshiba has announced the forthcoming launch of the new gigashot A and K series of camcorders in Japan.

The gigashot k series offers 720p video with an 80GB hard disk drive, but the gigashot A series is range to look to.

The A100F model offers a shock-mounted, 1.8-inch 100GB disk with CMOS sensor that provides for 2-megapixel stills or 1920×1080 video at 60fps with Dolby digital stereo audio.

That hard disk drive capacity will mean that you could record in SD for up to 23 hours, or 12 hours in the highest quality.

An SDHC card slot allows for expansion while other specs to note are a 3-inch LCD, 10x optical zoom, plus HDMI and USB connectivty.

Toshiba claims that the 78.1 x 135.4 x 79mm dimensions have made it the world’s smallest “Full HD” camcorder with built-in hard disk drive, although Sanyo might have something to say about that as they currently claim the same for their Xacti HD1000.

The A100F will be available in Japan in November for the equivalent of about £815. No word on pricing or availability for other territories.

Google Phone ‘confirmed’
By Stuff.tv Stuff - Thursday, September 20 01:00 pm

This is a conceptual Google Phone image, which means Google Phone (GPhone) may look like this.

Yet more reports are coming from Asia of a Google phone in the works. Taiwanese component manufacturers have apparently told plugged-in tech rag DigiTimes that they are working with Google - but that much about the handset is yet to be finalised.

Stew all the rumours around in a big pot for a few hours and the picture that emerges is that the phone will be designed by HTC who makes the Touch (pictured) and run Google’s own Linux based OS to rival Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Apple’s iPhone OS X.

And it seems Google’s been learning from the mistakes of Apple. It had originally planned an EDGE device but given the reception to the iPhone’s pants data speeds from us HSDPA spoiled Europeans, it ’s now looking at bumping the spec to 3G.

That looks set to delay the rumoured ‘end of 2007′ launch but we could still expect to see a gPhone arriving by the first half of next year - right about when we’re expecting the 3G iPhone. Roll on next year.

Intel shows concept iPhone running on Moorestown platform
By Amy-Mae Elliott Pocket-lint - Thursday, September 20 05:45 pm 

Intel shows concept iPhone running on Moorestown platform

At the ongoing Intel Developer Forum the chip-giant has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been talking up some future technology.

The “Moorestown” processor was revealed, not realistically about to hit the market until 2009 or 2010, Intel described this as the chip the iPhone would have wanted.

With 45nm processor and integrating a memory controller, video encode/decode engine and graphics all on a single chip it will allow concept products like the device shown, to become a reality.

A super-slim UMPC with phone capablities, this touchscreen device, apparently a deliberate homage to Apple, could run for 24 hours between charges.

“Halo 3″ launched on XBox 360
By Franklin Paul and Nicole Maestri Reuters - Tuesday, September 25 06:08 am

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft began its midnight sales of “Halo 3″, the acclaimed alien shooter game that it hopes will widen its lead over Sony in the battle for industry dominance.

While some aficionados lined up before dawn at a Best Buy store on New York’s Fifth Avenue to grab a good seat for the launch extravaganza, others took advantage of the retailer’s offer to let them pay for a copy of the game and pick it up at midnight or the next day.

Alex Escobar was the first one at the store’s checkout counter, turning in a receipt to pick up his advance order.

“It is worth it. It is time to finish this fight,” Escobar said, echoing the tagline for a game featuring a futuristic soldier battling to save humanity from an alien onslaught.

What had been a only a modest gathering earlier in the day had swelled to a crowd of about 500 people that cheered as buyers entered the store, resembling other big consumer debuts this year, such as the last “Harry Potter” book and Apple’s iPhone.

“Halo 3″ is seen as the $30 billion (15 billion pound) video game industry’s equivalent of a new Potter book and Microsoft is counting on the game to finally push its money-losing entertainment unit into profitability.

“This is a critical holiday in terms of winning the next-generation console fight versus our competition and nobody has anything to go up and match ‘Halo,’” Shane Kim, vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, told Reuters Television.

Microsoft is backing the game with a marketing blitz that includes celebrity-studded midnight sales events at some 10,000 retailers across the United States.

In New York, someone dressed as the game’s armour-clad hero worked the crowd as music blared, lights flashed and event promoters handed out free goodies such as “Halo” t-shirts.

Gaming retail chain GameStop said the title set a record for advance orders, while Microsoft expects initial demand to surpass that for 2004’s “Halo 2″, which racked up $125 million in its first 24 hours.

SYSTEM SELLER

The first two “Halo” games have sold a combined 15 million copies and cemented Microsoft as a serious player in a video game industry that was dominated by Sony’s PlayStation 2.

“Halo 3″ is targeted firmly at the core Xbox audience of young males, for whom realistic combat games are a staple. It does little to widen the machine’s appeal to a more casual audience that is being courted with tremendous success by Nintendo’s Wii console.

“It’s not necessarily going to move a lot of new systems like the first ‘Halo’ did,” said Dan Hsu, editor-in-chief of EGM, a gaming magazine.

“At the same time, with all the marketing blitz and hype, consumers will be out there,” Hsu said, “and if they are thinking video games, they are thinking one of two things: ‘Halo’ or the Wii.”

Microsoft is certainly betting that the last chapter of the Halo trilogy will give a further boost to its latest console. The Xbox 360, launched in late 2005, has already enjoyed stronger sales than the pricier PlayStation 3, which critics say so far lacks any “system-seller” games.

“I was caught between buying the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but there are certain games like ‘Madden ‘08′ and this one that pushed me to Xbox 360,” said Darnell Jefferson, 25, who was second in line at Best Buy, referring to the hit football game made by Electronic Arts.

“Halo 3″ will enjoy the absence of another blockbuster game, “Grand Theft Auto IV”, whose October debut was delayed by publisher Take-Two Interactive Software until some time between February and April 2008.

The latest “Halo” has drawn wide praise from reviewers for its lush settings, cinematic story and breadth of features, positive buzz that pushed Microsoft shares up as much as 3.35 percent on Monday, their biggest one-day gain since April. The stock ended 1.5 percent higher at $29.08 on Nasdaq.

George Garcia, 32, said he had waited in line for 12 hours and planned to stay up all night playing the game.

“I knew it would deliver,” Garcia said.

(Additional reporting by Scott Hillis in San Francisco and Robert MacMillan in New York)

Google says global web privacy rules needed
By David Ljunggren Reuters - Tuesday, September 25 06:10 am

A general view of the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California May 15, 2007. National regulators need to agree on a basic set of global privacy protections for the Internet within the next five years, a senior official with web searcher Google said on Monday.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - National regulators need to agree on a basic set of global privacy protections for the Internet within the next five years, a senior official with web searcher Google said on Monday.

Peter Fleischer, the firm’s global privacy counsel, said three quarters of countries had no Internet privacy standards at a time when the amount of sensitive personal and financial data on the Web was soaring.

Google — itself criticized for the threat it poses to personal privacy — says the firm’s business agenda, the world economy and the Internet could suffer unless more is done to ensure basic privacy on the Web.

“What we’re saying is that the Internet is making this particularly urgent and that the Internet develops at a different speed than the speed at which traditional lawmaking and policy-making discussions take place,” Fleischer said.

“I think this is something that needs to happen within five years. That’s just us saying what we think is realistic as an urgent action,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Google, unhappy with what it calls a patchwork of conflicting privacy rules in some countries and a complete lack in many others, is pressing for action amid criticism about the enormous access to personal information on the Web.

“I think everyone has acknowledged that the status quo is not good enough any more,” said Fleischer.

Google wants countries to adopt privacy principles agreed by several Asia-Pacific countries. Fleischer said some backed this idea while others wanted to focus on what the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is doing.

“That’s fine. The important thing from Google’s perspective is that there is a focus and debate around moving forward on global privacy standards,” he said.

“If we can … improve the standards in three quarters of the countries in the world, regardless of which model they follow, that is a huge step forward.”

He said perfect harmonization was unlikely, but the basic model could combine laws, codes of conduct and best practices.

Even if nations did not agree on standards within five years, Google would consider it progress if some countries without Internet privacy rules took action, said Fleischer.

“We’re playing a very long game here. We believe we’re working for the success of Google services over a very long period of time … and one of the things that everybody needs to improve is an understanding of privacy,” he said.

What’s the world’s fastest supercomputer used for?
by Julia Layton

Protein molecules are the building blocks of the human body.

The world’s fastest supercomputer will probably never be known as the world’s fastest supercomputer. RIKEN’s MDGrape-3 is the first machine to break the petaflop barrier — that’s 1 quadrillion calculations (floating-point operations, to be specific) per second — and it’s three times faster than the currently ranked fastest computer in the world, IBM’s BlueGene/L. But MDGrape-3 is so specialized that it can’t run the software used to officially rank computing speed. What it can do is determine the effect of any chemical compound on one of the most intricate systems in the human body in a couple of seconds.

MDGrape-3 is designed for pharmaceutical research, specifically molecular dynamics simulation. In developing drugs, pharmaceutical companies have to analyze thousands on thousands of chemical compounds to find out how they’ll affect the protein-bonding structures in the human body. Protein structures called enzymes are the building blocks that do all of the work within a cell, and the way these proteins bond with any drug compound introduced into the human body determines the body’s response to that drug. MDGrape-3 produces simulations of these molecular interactions. What takes most computers hours or days to analyze takes MDGrape-3 a few seconds. This functionality is invaluable in drug research, and it could drastically cut the research time involved in the development of new cures. A subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Merck has already booked time on the machine.

This is the look of Teraflop Wafer

Structurally speaking, MDGrape-3 is a parallel computing system consisting of two main sections: a primary server unit and a specialized-engines unit. The latter component is a cluster of 201 engines running proprietary chips developed by Riken specifically for MDGrape-3. It’s this huge set of engines, running 24 MDGrape-3 chips each, that does the heavy protein-analysis lifting. Each chip has a maximum processing speed of 230 gigaflops (one billion operations per second). The primary server unit manages the engine cluster. This parallel server setup runs two different types of processors: 65 servers run dual-core Intel 5000-series Xeon processors, 256 per server; and 37 servers run 3.3-GHz Intel Xeon processors, each with 2 MB of level 1 cache, at 74 processors per server. This hardware structure enables the 1-petaflop speed, which is the machine’s theoretical maximum for certain processes.

MDGrape-3 took $9 million and about four years to build. And it’s actually very efficient — a total cost of $9 million breaks down to about $15 per gigaflop. The slower BlueGene/L cost about $140 per gigaflop to build.

Teraflop Chip

BlueGene/L, which tops out at a theoretical 360 teraflops (trillion calculations per second), is also a biotechnology-specific machine. The advances in speed marked by these two supercomputers is indicative of a general trend in technology toward biologically-slanted systems. Some say the trend really started with the successful mapping of the human genome in 2000. Regardless of what spurred the current biotechnology race, most experts agree that the logical end of the surge is a state of DNA-based medicine. In several decades, we could make an appointment with our doctor for a quick DNA analysis to find out what diseases we’re at risk for and pop a single, gene-targeting pill that eliminates all of those foreseeable risks.

What is the world’s fastest computer?

To put things in perspective, let’s start with the computer sitting on your desk — the computer you use on a day-to-day basis to browse the Internet, handle spreadsheets, create documents, etc. Most people have something like a Pentium computer running Windows, or a Macintosh. A computer like this can execute approximately 100 million instructions per second. Your particular machine might be twice that fast or half that fast, but that’s the ballpark.

The fastest computer in the world is much faster than that, and it is sitting right on top of your shoulders! The human brain is an amazing computing device and the fastest processor available right now. Let me give you an example:

Your desktop computer is just starting to get to the point where it can “understand” speech and take dictation, translating spoken words into written words. It can only understand one speaker, and that speaker has to train it for about 20 minutes, and the dictation software will still make a lot of mistakes. So 100 million instructions per second can barely handle dictation.

Your brain, on the other hand, can understand any number of speakers. It needs no training and will make zero mistakes. It may even be able to understand multiple languages! And the speech processing portion of your brain is just one small part of the whole package — your brain can also process complex visual images, control your entire body, understand conceptual problems and create new ideas. Your brain is made up of about one trillion cells with 100 trillion connections between those cells. We might take a rough estimate and say it is handling 10 quadrillion instructions per second, but it really is hard to say.

In the 2006 TOP500 list, which ranks supercomputers by speed, the top three supercomputers are as follows:

• IBM’s BlueGene/L - 360 teraflops
• IBM’s BGW - 115 teraflops
• IBM’s ASC Purple - 93 teraflops

Another supercomputer called MDGrape-3, built by the Japanese company RIKEN, has a theoretical maximum speed of 1 petaflop (1 guadrillion operations per second), which is three times faster than the BlueGene/L. But MDGrape-3 can’t run the official ranking software of the TOP500 list, so BlueGene/L remains at the top of the list at 360 trillion operations per second, which is pretty fast…but it’s still not as fast as your brain.

What are system resources, and why do I run out of them?

 

In many cases, an “out of memory” message is misleading, since your whole system really did not run out of memory. Instead, certain areas of memory (Microsoft calls “heaps”) used by Windows have run low on space.

Windows maintains an area of memory for operating system resources. The maximum size of this area is 128K, in two 64K areas. Windows 95/98 uses this area of memory to store fonts, bitmaps, drop-down menu lists and other on-screen information used by each application.

When any program begins running, it uses up some space in the “system resources” area in memory. But, as you exit, some programs do not give back system resources they were temporarily using. Eventually the system will crash as it runs out of memory. The crash happens sometimes if you start and close many programs, even the same ones, without a periodic reboot. This is what Microsoft calls a resource leak or memory leak.

When you tell your system to exit a program, the program is supposed to give back the resources (memory) it was using. But, because programs are written by humans, mistakes can happen and the program may not give back all to the operating system. This failing to “give back” is the “memory leak,” eventually leading to a message that your computer is low on resources. Memory leaks can also be caused by programs that automatically load every time you boot your Windows system. In Windows 95/98 you can see the list of active programs via the usual Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence. The Windows Startup folder contains programs that launch every time your system boots. In Windows 98, set the folder contents with MSCONFIG. In Windows 95, click the right mouse button on the Task Bar, click Properties, click Start Menu Programs, click Advanced and look for the Startup folder in the left pane.

The system resources problem is something you might have to live with until the misbehaving application is found. If you are sure a certain application is causing the problem, be sure to contact the software vendor.

You can keep track of your system resources via the handy tool at Start >> Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> Resource Meter. If you do not have a copy, you can download it at UtilMind Solutions. The resource meter adds the “fuel gauge” to your Windows task bar, to help you keep track of your system’s resources. As the bar graph gauge turns from green to yellow, then the dreaded red, you know you have a problem! But you need to remember that the resource meter also consumes what you are trying to conserve: system resources.

The best preventive maintenance is to periodically reboot your Windows system.

No conspiracy, no need to buy memory, unless you only have 4M of RAM. Buying memory does not fix the “system resources” problem, because its size is fixed at 128K, no matter how much physical memory is installed.