IT Masala

MySpace News has now gone live.Built on technology developed by Newroo (which News Corp. acquired last year), MySpace news combines the aggregation functionality of Google News, with user voting similar to Digg.

From London's Times newspaper (owned by News Corp.):

MySpace is going into the news business with a service that will scour the internet for news stories and let users vote on which ones receive the most exposure.

This approach blends elements of Google News and sites such as Digg and Netscape, which rely on readers to submit stories and determine their prominence.

They have said MySpace News won't favor News Corp-owned content, and, according to the site's FAQs page .

Also from the Times:

It also marks the site’s ambitions to become a web portal like Yahoo!, providing its users with a front door to the internet.

Soon MySpace will be one among the complete portals like Google, Yahoo providing everything under one roof…this is real competition starting up !!… Anyway the users are at a high gain , more the competition , more the benefit to the user !! …Yep !

[ MySpace News ]

Growth takes off in a big way: Jet will have more than 50 per cent market share of domestic air traffic. 

The deal for Jet Airways buying Air Sahara is through. Air Sahara has been valued at around Rs 1,450 crore.
 
Harish Salve, the legal representative of Jet, said Rs 400 crore has to be paid to Air Sahara before April 20.

The deal was signed by Saroj Dutta representing Jet and Pallav Agarwal representing Air Sahara.

[ via News Sources ]

• Green is gold at Cool Products Expo [CNET]
  "In the midst of some of the most innovative new products around, sustainability was the guiding principle. "
• Ubuntu's new Linux sports debugging tool [CNET]
  "'Feisty Fawn' version of Ubuntu, due April 19, can automatically report crashes to help programmers stamp out bugs."
• Comcast to acquire movie tickets site Fandango [CNET]
  "Cable operator plans to build a new entertainment site called Fancast.com, coming this summer."
• MySpace blocks Photobucket videos and slide shows [CNET]
  "Will the decision to ban content from photo-sharing site spill over to the scores of companies catering to MySpace users?"
• Basics: Feel the Vibe, Literally [NYT]
  "Games add body-shaking chairs and puffs of wind."
• A Navigation System Shows a Good Listener Isn't So Hard to Find [NYT]
  "Most navigation systems talk to you. The Magellan Maestro 4050 also listens."
• State of the Art: A Faster Wi-Fi World Is Coming [NYT]
  "Makers of Wi-Fi routers boast of 5 times the speed and 15 times the range, but be sure to read the footnotes."
• The Blogosphere, Where a Tawdry Culture Goes to Die [Wired]
  "The Luddite: Incivility in the blogosphere? What do you expect from a bunch of navel-gazing narcissists?"
• Microsoft, Google trade barbs on enterprise search [InfoWorld]
  "Officials of Microsoft and Google traded comparisons of their enterprise search products to their rival's during a technology conference in San Francisco Wednesday."
• The Army's looking for a few good online gamers [USATODAY.com]
  "Starting in June, the Army will sponsor a "national gaming" area as a way to tap into the site's 9.2 million players per month of everything from shooter games to pro baseball. It hopes to find candidates for recruitment among the 17- to 24-year-old males who are 80% of the gamers on the site - young men hard to reach with advertising."

• YouTube competitor in the works from News Corp. and NBC [techspot]
  News Corp. and NBC would like to believe as they today announced the upcoming launch of an online video service
• Skype Hampered by New Trojan Horse [ pcworld ]
  Internet phone network afflicted for second time.
• White Computer Setup [Elegant Technology]
  An almost-perfect pearly-white setup, including polystyrene cup and white, doily-like mouspad. But sir, that desk is brown.
• Why Faked Sentience in Hindering AI [The Guardian]
  Because we want it to be like us, we won't let it be like itself.
• Organic electroluminescents get brighter [The Inquirer]
  New technologies aim to put life into your LCD monitor: literally.
• Google News thinks "Zune" Is a Typo [Yahoo!]
  Did you mean "Zone?" asks the news-focused face of the world's most successful search engine. Is this the first Google antibomb, where instead of going elsewhere, you end up going nowhere?
• AMD and Intel haven't got a clue [The Inquirer]
  Bad headline, great point: at the end of the day, we don't care about the drill, we care about the hole. Sane consumers don't read benchmarks, they play games. So why is so much tech PR aimed at a tiny market of specification whores?
• US company offers Wi-Fi-proof paint [The Register]
  Tinfoil not included.

Harvard University's most famous dropout is to get a degree from the university. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who dropped out of the university in his junior year, will be awarded an honorary degree in June this year when he will speak at the university's commencement ceremony.

Gates, who left the university to start Microsoft and create history, would have been part of the Class of 1977, which is to celebrate its 30th year. Gates came to Harvard as a freshman in 1973. He had already tried his hand on programming and software and had written codes for computers. It was at Harvard that he helped develop a version of BASIC for the first microcomputer, the MITS Altair.

He soon quit the studies and started working full time for the company he and his childhood friend Paul Allen had founded when the duo were in their early teens.

Today, Gates is the richest man in the world and has also decided to step down from the day-to-day chores at the company he founded to devote full time for the philanthropic organization he and his wife established, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

via [ earthtimes ] 

Indian-born Srinivasa S R Varadhan was Thursday named winner of the Norwegian Abel Prize, known as the "Nobel Prize for mathematics".

His contribution :

Varadhan’s theory of large deviations provides a unifying and efficient method for clarifying a rich variety of phenomena arising in complex stochastic systems, in fields as diverse as quantum field theory, statistical physics, population dynamics, econometrics and finance, and traffic engineering. It has also greatly expanded our ability to use computers to simulate and analyze the occurrence of rare events. Over the last four decades, the theory of large deviations has become a cornerstone of modern probability, both pure and applied.

“Varadhan’s work has great conceptual strength and ageless beauty. His ideas have been hugely influential and will continue to stimulate further research for a long time”, to quote the Abel Committee.

Award : 

He is expected to receive the Abel Prize from His Majesty, King Harald V of Norway, in Oslo on May 22nd. The honour is accompanied by a prize of $850,000.

This is the second time in three years that an NYU mathematician has been the recipient of the Abel Prize: in 2005, Professor Peter Lax of the Courant Institute was awarded the Abel.

About Prof Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan  :

Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan is currently Professor of Mathematics and Frank J. Gould Professor of Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

Prof. Varadhan - a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society and the Third World Academy of Sciences - has been the recipient of many awards and honours, including the Birkhoff Prize (1994), the Margaret and Herman Sokol Award of NYU's Faculty of Arts and Science (1995), and the American Mathematical Society's Leroy Steele Prize (1996), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He received his B.Sc. Honours degree and M.A. from Madras University, and his Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta.  

Biography via [ The Abel Prize ] 

• Yahoo Health partners with educational video network [CNET]
  "HealthiNation to provide streaming video content to Yahoo's health portal."
• Vista Anytime Upgrade to become transferable [CNET]
  "Microsoft said late last week that it will make a change to the licensing terms for Windows Vista…"
• Alleged loophole lets users bypass Vista activation [CNET]
  ""A flaw in the product activation code for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system makes it easy to bypass the registration process indefinitely."
• Blog Divulges Details About Next Windows OS [PC World]
  "Microsoft employee in Denmark places a presentation on the company's web site that divulges new information."
• Cell phones embrace Wi-Fi [CNNMoney]
  "Top-of-the-line cell phones may offer Internet access, but not even the do-it-all Apple iPhone comes with the ability to make calls over Wi-Fi."
• Yahoo's mobile search now available to all [InfoWorld]
  "Yahoo opened up its mobile oneSearch offering to anyone with a phone who can access the Internet."
• You Don't Know Jack is Back [Wired]
  "The popular '90s trivia-quiz video game is resurrected online, complete with Cookie, the wisecracking emcee."

Apple has announced that it has now begun shipping Apple TV, a wireless device that allows you to play music, movies, photos and more on a widescreen TV.

According tp Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, “Apple TV is like a DVD player for the Internet age- providing an easy and fun way to play all your favorite iTunes content from your PC or Mac on your widescreen TV.” 

In the technology world, conventional wisdom says that we’ll soon be saying R.I.P. for the DVD. Internet downloads are the future, baby. No driving, no postpaid envelopes. Any movie, any TV show, any time.

Features: 

Apple TV has a 40GB hard drive, which can store up to 50 hours of video, 9000 songs, 25,000 photos or a combination of each. It is capable of delivering high-definition 720p output.

Apple TV iTunes 7.1 or later, running on a Mac with Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or later, or a Windows PC with Windows XP Home/Professional.

Apple ships with HDMI, component video, analog and optical audio ports. The Apple Remote ships with Apple TV at no extra cost. Apple TV can also auto-sync content from one computer or stream content from up to five additional computers directly on to the TV without any wires. It can do so using high-speed AirPort 802.11 wireless networking.

Pricing: Apple TV, which includes the Apple Remote will be available for a price of $299.

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

“His contribution was immense, and it influenced the work of many, including me,” Frances Allen, a retired research fellow at I.B.M., said yesterday.

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

“You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”

via [ nytimes ]

What is E8 : E8 is a complex structure with 248 dimensions. It took 4 years of prep work by 18 mathematicians and computer scientists and 3 full days of computer time to solve a matrix with over 205 billion parts that contained 60 times more data than the Human Genome Project.

Math team solves the unsolvable E8. The researchers behind the work explain in a press announcement:

Lie groups come in families. The classical groups A1, A2, A3, … B1, B2, B3, … C1, C2, C3, … and D1, D2, D3, … rise like gentle rolling hills towards the horizon. Jutting out of this mathematical landscape are the jagged peaks of the exceptional groups G2, F4, E6, E7 and, towering above them all, E8. 

Professor of mathematics Peter Sarnak at Princeton University said of the team’s result: “This is exciting. Understanding and classifying the representations of Lie Groups has been critical to understanding phenomena in many different areas of mathematics and science including algebra, geometry, number theory, Physics and Chemistry. This project will be valuable for future mathematicians and scientists." [See: http://aimath.org/E8/.]

David Vogan, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, is one of the team of mathematicians that worked on E8. He described their work as: “…as complicated as symmetry can get.” [BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6466129.stm]

The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1994 by John Fry and Steve Sorenson. Its goals are to expand the scope of mathematical knowledge through research projects, sponsored conferences, and the development of an on-line mathematics library. The home Web page of AIM is http://www.aimath.org/.

A brief mathematical description of E8 appears at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_%28mathematics%29.

More information about E8 appears at the article “Mathematicians Map E8”: http://aimath.org/E8/