Our Global Positioning System (GPS) tells us exactly where we are, down to a few metres, but how do satellites that make up the GPS themselves know where they are?
They have to rely on a network of sites that serve as "You Are Here" signs planted throughout the planet. The catch is, the sites don't sit still because the planet is moving all the time, yet modern measurements require more and more accuracy in pinpointing where "here" is.
Accordingly, NASA is helping to lead an international effort to upgrade the four systems that supply this crucial location information. NASA's initiative is run by Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, US, where the next generation of two of these systems is being developed and built.
"In practical terms, we can't determine a location today and expect it to be good enough tomorrow-and especially not next year," says Herbert Frey, who heads the Planetary Geodynamics Lab at Goddard.
And Goddard, in partnership with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., is bringing all four systems together in a state-of-the-art ground station, according to a NASA statement.
"NASA and its sister agencies around the world are making major investments in new stations or upgrading existing stations to provide a network that will benefit the global community for years to come," says John LaBrecque, Earth Surface and Interior Program Officer at NASA Headquarters.
Measuring such properties of Earth is the realm of geodesy, a time-honoured science that dates back to the Greek scholar Eratosthenes, who achieved a surprisingly accurate estimate of the distance around the Earth by using basic geometry
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Bell Lab's 7 Great Inventions that Changed the World
We now live in a world dominated by innovative companies and technologies, and on the top list of inventions, stand the Bell Laboratories which played a major role in shaping the world of today. They were the pioneers in almost everything, from programming languages to cellular telephones.
Here we list some of the greatest innovations from Bell Laboratories which changed the world.
Transistor
UNIX Operating System and C Programming language
UNIX, which made the internet practical and which is the backbone for today’s many operating systems was developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs.
The C language, which brought expressiveness and efficiency to the programming languages was developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at the Bell Laboratories. The descendants of C language are now the most widely used programming languages in the world.
The first scientific paper on LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) was published by two Bell Laboratory scientists Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow. It later opened a new scientific field which is wide spread among many applications ranging from medical applications to the tiny device inside your DVD player.
Communication Satellite
The first orbiting communication satellite was built by Bell labs in 1962. The Telstar 1 was the first satellite to have ability to receive signal, amplify it and send it back to anywhere on earth, which first allowed the telephone calls to travel around the world. In 1947, Bell Labs invented the cellular technology, which later made the world “wireless.”
Solar Cells
Bell Labs in1954 created the first device that actually used Sun’s rays to create electricity. It was the precursor for many of the solar powered devices that we see now.
Fibre Optic cable
Bell labs built the first fibre optic cable system, which subsequently enabled the world to transfer millions of Giga bytes of data at lightening speeds
Digital Transmission and Digital Signal Processing
Bell labs pioneered digital transmission with the first digitally multiplexed transmission of voice signals in 1962. It also built the first single chip digital signal processor (DSP) in 1979 which is the core of today’s multimedia revolution.
Mozilla Building an Extreme Alternative to Android and iOS
For people who want to run all the applications under one roof- the web, Mozilla is building a new platform, exclusively based on the industry standard HTML5.
Mozilla will release the first open web device in association with Telefonica, the third largest carrier in the world.
The product will be based on Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko project, which focuses on making HTML5 as the standard platform for mobile devices.
“In a joint press conference, Telefonica revealed their intention to work with us to deliver the very first open Web devices in 2012. These devices, architected entirely on the Web and built based on an HTML5 stack with powerful Web APIs will mean significant advances in speed and cost reduction for mobile devices in the future,” Mozilla said in a post.
Many other companies including Deutsche Telekom, Adobe and Qualcomm are supporting Mozilla in building the open web platform. The company will also preview the open web apps and Mozilla marketplace this week, which will enable the creation and distribution of applications powered by HTML5, JavaScript and CSS, the open web standards.
Google is currently the leading developer of open source mobile operating system, the Android. HP also recently announced its plans on releasing WebOS as an open source platform. But with it’s completely web based platform for mobile, Mozilla is planning to do something bigger than what it did to computer with its Firefox.
Why Hasn't Facebook Dumped PHP Yet?
So it is common knowledge that Facebook started out with PHP. Sure, PHP is one of the world's most popular programming languages, but it is old. So why hasn't the world’s most popular social network switched languages to adopt Python or something more versatile?
Although it would be a pain to change everything from scratch, the most inevitable urge is to at least ask how the 845 million-strong network put up with the language for so long anyway.
Yishan Sparklepants Wong, a Facebook engineer who worked at the company from December 2005 (the company was founded in February 2004) and March 2010 answered the question on Quora, a website that allows you to ask questions and get connected to content.
According to Wong, “The reason Facebook hasn't migrated away from PHP is because it has incumbent inertia (it's what's there) and Facebook's engineers have managed to work around many of its flaws through a combination of patches at all levels of the stack and excellent internal discipline via code convention and style”.
He says that the worst aspects of the language are coded around and avoided, while coding style is rigidly maintained by means of a strict culture of code-review by one’s peers. "The preferred strategy”, he wrote, “is to write new components in a de-coupled manner using a better language of choice (C++, python, Erlang, Java, etc); this is easily facilitated by Facebook's early development of thrift, an efficient multi-language RPC framework”.
The overall effect boils down to the overall codebase slowly evolving away from depending heavily on PHP, and components written in PHP being tightly-controlled, by veteran members of the staff in disciplined ways.
In any case, the overall rule seems to be “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, and it seems to work well for Facebook.
Is BSNL Tablet a Retort to Aakash?
Aakash, the world’s cheapest tablet is beginning to face heat with its competitors (such as Ubislate and tablets from companies like HCL) slowly contending for the same Indian marketplace.
The Indian Government’s aim to launch a fully indigenous tablet has seen the launch of Aakash 2, but BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited—the government telecom company) associated with Pantel (an Indian company based in Noida) to produce tablets with better specs than the Aakash tablet. Pantel’s cheapest tablet (named Penta Tpad IS 701r) is priced within the margin of 500 rupees more than Aakash, thus proving to a worthy competitor in terms of cost—it comes at Rs 3,499.
BSNL has also joined with the Indian company to bring out two other tablets at higher cost—the Penta Tpad_ws704c is priced at Rs 10,999 and Penta Tpad WS802C is priced at Rs 12,500. They come with added features such as a SIM slot for 3G/2G connectivity, and GPS.
The delivery of the tablets is said to be made available after March 5, and the tablets will be available in retail stores and BSNL according to a report on Yahoo News.
Virendra Singh, the managing director of Pantel Technologies told The Mobile Indian “We have received more than one lakh pre booking orders over phone and online for the three tablets which we have launched in association with BSNL.” He also added that Pantel got an order for two lakh tablets from Sahara India apart from consumer-ordered devices.
6 Best Web Browsers
Selecting a web browser is a difficult task for many especially when there are many sophisticated ones around, each offering lightning speeds, high security and many add-ons.
In order to find the best browser, ComputerWorld tested the latest versions of six widely used desktop and laptop browsers on speed, safety, extra features and extension benchmarks. The results were interesting with a surprise third place winner RocketMelt 0.9, which is almost new and comes integrated with Facebook.
Here are the rankings of six browsers.
Safari came in the last position
Safari is a simple and adequate browser with solid security features. It didn’t score well on speed benchmarks but performed well with Windows machines. Organizing Safari without iCloud is troublesome. With the integration of browser sandboxing in Apple’s new Lion OS, the safari now has more security tools and features. It also came last in HTML5 testing.
Good: Solid security Network, Fastest mobile synchronizing while using iOS devices
Bad: Slow in loading pages built with HTML5 and JavaScript
Opera came in fifth position.
If you are looking for speed, this is the best browser for you. The beautiful feature in opera is “widgets”- light applications from games to RSS feeds, which runs on your desktop as separate programmes. The browser also has another tool called Opera Turbo, which compress the web pages to few bytes and enable easy browsing for users with slow internet connection. On the other hand, it is not much customizable and the interface takes a little time to getting used to.
Good: Quick loading, unique browsing experience with widgets.
Bad: Low in security options, not HTML5 friendly.
IE9 won the fourth position.
The browser from Microsoft was always lagging behind its rivals. But with the introduction of new features including the ability to block sites from collecting data on your browsing habits and the new Application Reputation app, which scans and warns about the downloads for malicious files, the browser finally overcome some of its rivals. It also has inbuilt cross-site scripting protection, which blocks scripts from suspicious websites. It came second in the HTML5 benchmark test, but finished last in processing JavaScript.
Good: Security features, faster HTML5 processing
Bad: Tab management, no themes and automated bookmark sync.
RockMelt, the not so popular browser surprisingly finished third.
It looks similar to chrome as it is built on Google’s chromium framework. The browser is completely integrated with Facebook and has many features to make the social-fans happy. A strip located on the browser will display your Facebook friend’s icons and their availability to chat. Within the browser, you can also choose apps for different websites that notify you of a newly posted comment. By signing in through Facebook, your bookmarks and settings are automatically synchronized through the Facebook account among computers and iOS devices that use RockMelt app, as the browser collects your browsing habits. It processed HTML5 faster than Chrome but many extensions that work on Chrome didn’t function in RockMelt.
Good: Automatic sync among computers, Make “Facebooking” easy, JavaScript and pages load smoothly.
Bad: Facebook sign-in required to use the complete features of this browser, little number of add-ons and extensions.
The most Versatile browser, finished second.
Firefox is a feature-filled browser and with the new version, it became more beautiful, with a simplified interface, which can be customized in many ways. The big advantage of Firefox is the thousands of add-ons, but with the addition of more add-ons, the browser tends to perform slowly. It finished first in HTML5 tests and third in loading JavaScripts. But it was little slower in loading web pages.
It will work with any security software and has a good pop-up filter, malware protection and support private browsing. The best feature is it will allow you to collect tabs into manageable groups like work, home etc which will come handy in many situations.
Good: Thousands of add-ons, excellent HTML5 performance
Bad: Slow page loading, too many add-ons slow down the browser.
Chrome turned out to be the overall best in browsers.
Chrome won the first place with its superb performance, ease of use, vast number of add-ons and extensions. It came first in the JavaScript and speed tests and it has many features other browsers lack. Its tabs are run as separate processes, so if one crash, it won’t affect the rest of the browser. It can translate any language into an understandable form with the help of Google Translate and is one of the most secured browsers as it is sandboxed. It can be customized in many ways with a number of themes, apps and extensions and unlike other browsers, you don’t have to restart Chrome after installing each apps. The main thing Chrome lacks is an integrated RSS reader.
Good: Fast loading, lets you close the broken or crashed pages without restarting browser, secured
Bad: Plain design, no integrated RSS reader
4 ways Windows 8 beats iOS and Android
Windows 8 debuted recently, and most reviews are raving about how good it is. Microsoft, in fact, even announced that the OS had made more than 1 million downloads in the first 24 the OS’ test version was released.
One report even stated that Microsoft could leapfrog Apple with Windows 8, but how does the OS compare against Android?
Well according to a report on Wired.com, the customer preview beats the best that iOS and Android have to offer for now. Here are 5 ways Windows 8 beats iOS and Android:
1. The Picture Password: The picture password feature has been talked about since Windows developer preview and the test version of Windows 8 has made it open to everybody to try out. This alternative system unlocking option is easy, convenient and a lot more fun to use compared to the other options traditionally used, according to Wired’s review of the Windows 8.
The same blog post also explained how this method could be even more secure than the traditional PIN-based security measures. “If the user is free to use any combination of taps, circles, and lines, then the total number of permutations is, 
where n is the length of the picture password, and m is the number of points of interest.” (We’ll leave you to do the math). “Assuming the average image has 10 points of interest, and a gesture sequence length of 3, there are 8 million possible combinations, making the prospect of guessing the correct sequence within 5 tries fairly remote,” the blog post said.
A report on Ars technica had Amol Sarwate, research manager at security management vendor Qualys, back Microsoft’s claim, saying “Based on your gestures, the circles you draw, the size of the circle, the direction of the circle, the lines that you draw on the screen, the machine creates a password which is virtually impossible to crack.”
The best part of this feature is that it’s as fast as channel browsing—but on your tablet.
If you have a number of apps open, the gesture-based app-switching feature allows you to move through the apps by swiping (or moving your mouse) back and forth along the edge of the (touch)screen to show you preview windows of the apps you have open. From there, the app is just a click or a touch away.
Now although iOS 5 for iPad too had a similar strategy to navigate through the open apps, you would either have to double-tap the icons of all the apps lined up, or you’d have to use four fingers to swipe your way to the app you need. In comparison with the gesture needed to navigate through Windows 8, it’s unnatural.
Swiping with just a finger-- and allowing you to do it with ease is another elegant, quick and involuntary solution that makes the Windows 8 OS score.
This is another way the Windows 8 OS beats the iOS and Android—they have these icons pinned to the user interface no matter what app you are on.
A number of iOS apps have the navigational buttons persist across the app's entire user experience. And even apps that don't do this have a thin bar at the top of the screen showing data connection strength, the time, and other things. These icons are permanently locked to the iOS home display.
In the case of the Android Ice Cream Sandwich there are three virtual navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen that persist all over the UI. Most of the time there is also a bar across the top of the screen (which mimics the iOS screen) in addition to the buttons at the bottom of the screen.
Windows 8 gives you the best of both of these so that you can organize your apps tidily like you can on an iOS, but also do it with the freedom of personalization, and utility that was offered by Android.
Moreover, Android widgets usually have their own developer-specific themes and designs, so when you put them all together on your home screen, you could end up with a busy and chaotic patchwork-quilt-looking home screen. Windows 8, in comparison has live tiles which update information just like the Android widgets. Although you can organize them in any order they have a consistent look and feel, and you can choose whether they should be square or rectangular in shape.
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