New Facebook features not so appealing: Poll

LONDON: While social networking site Facebook has been a fascination for a lot of people at offices and homes for quite some time, its changed features have not found many takers. 
According to a poll, 86 percent of Facebook users hate the new changes to the website, the Daily Mail reported. 
Assuming the same figure across Facebook's users, the equivalent of 688 million people said that the social networking site should return to its previous form. 
Among teenagers the number was even higher and 91 percent said that Facebook was worse since the update. 
The poll, carried out by Sodahead.com, found that the overwhelming majority of Facebook's users wanted things to go back to how they were. 
Facebook introduced a series of changes last month, including the controversial "news ticker" which constantly tells you in real time what your friends are doing - seen as an inept attempt to keep up with rivals such as Twitter. 
But the reaction on the site - along with blogs and Twitter - was instant dislike and thousands complained that it was too cluttered and confusing. 
Among young people, 79 percent said the website should shed the update. Some 89 percent of women agreed, as did 78 percent of men. 
The changes to the site were unveiled by founder Mark Zuckerberg at the F8 conference in San Francisco - and drew an immediate negative reaction. 
The most controversial of the features has been the ticker, which sits at the top right hand corner of the screen and constantly rolls out news. 
There is another "Top stories" feature in which Facebook chooses which it thinks are the most important stories in your life and puts them at the top of your news feed.


courtesy economic times

SPECTRUM

A spectrum (plural spectra or spectrums^]) is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary infinitely within a continuum. The word saw its first scientific use within the field of optics to describe the rainbow of colors in visible light when separated using a prism; it has since been applied by analogy to many fields other than optics. Thus, one might talk about the spectrum of political opinion, or the spectrum of activity of a drug, or the autism spectrum. In these uses, values within a spectrum may not be associated with precisely quantifiable numbers or definitions. Such uses imply a broad range of conditions or behaviors grouped together and studied under a single title for ease of discussion.

In most modern usages of spectrum there is a unifying theme between extremes at either end. Some older usages of the word did not have a unifying theme, but they led to modern ones through a sequence of events set out below. Modern usages in mathematics did evolve from a unifying theme, but this may be difficult to recognize.

1st generation SPECTRUM

2nd generation SPECTRUM

3rd generatioon SPECTRUM

Courtesy Wikipedia

NASA Lands on Underwater "Asteroid"

Today a NASA crew is landing on an "asteroid"—about 60 feet (18 meters) under the sea.

In reality, members of the space agency's NEEMO 15 mission will test ways humans might one day visit asteroids by spending 13 days at an underwater laboratory in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Divers—including the one above using an anchored tether—have been preparing for the mission for months at the Aquarius Reef Base, a NOAA-owned site 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) off Key Largo (map).

Since 2001 crews with NEEMO (for NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) have completed 14 missions at Aquarius, mostly training astronauts for work on space shuttles and the International Space Station. The mission starting today is only the second that was primarily designed to test new equipment and operational concepts for deeper space exploration.

Specifically, NEEMO 15 aims to help astronauts figure out how to move around on and collect samples from near-Earth asteroids, many of which are relatively small compared with the moon or Mars and so would have almost zero gravity.

The project doesn't aim to test the actual anchors asteroid-walkers might use, since that technology is still in early stages of development. Instead, NEEMO 15 will evaluate different anchoring setups and how well people interact with them.

The "sea floor itself is being used in most cases to represent the surface of an asteroid," Steve Chappell, the deputy mission manager for NEEMO 15, said via email. In some places, fiberglass "rock walls" stand in for harder surfaces.

Courtesy NASA

Dead ROSAT SATELLITE is also going to fall down

Dead ROSAT SATELLITE is also going to fall down

ROSAT SATELLITE

If you see a large glowing object plummeting from the sky late Saturday or early Sunday, duck.

A defunct European satellite called ROSAT is headed straight for Earth this weekend—and chances are even higher that a piece of space debris could hit someone than the odds placed on a NASA satellite that fell from orbit last month.

The German Aerospace Center, which led the development and construction of ROSAT, estimates that the chance of anyone being harmed by debris from the satellite is 1 in 2,000. For NASA's UARS, the injury risk was roughly a third lower, at 1 in 3,200.

ROSAT is currently estimated to make an uncontrolled reentry during the early morning hours on Sunday, Greenwich Mean Time, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's space debris office.

But Klinkrad cautions that the satellite could enter Earth's atmosphere up to 24 hours earlier or later than the estimated time.

That's because shifts in radiation from the sun aren't 100-percent predictable. If solar radiation increases, there's more heating and expansion of the atmosphere, which would increase drag on the spacecraft and cause it to hurtle downward sooner than expected.

Don't Touch the Space Junk

Unfortunately, neither Klinkrad nor anyone else can say exactly where on Earth ROSAT is headed.

Debris could come down anywhere between 53 degrees north latitude and 53 degrees south latitude, an area that includes most of Earth's land mass, the German Aerospace Center's Roland Gräve said via email.

That could be a worry, because the satellite's 1.5-ton mirror is likely to survive the superheated trip through the atmosphere all the way to the ground, where it could make a major dent in whatever it strikes.

By contrast, the biggest piece of NASA's UARS spacecraft thought to hit the planet was a 300-pound (150-kilogram) chunk of the craft's frame.

In the end, the remnants of UARS splashed down into an isolated stretch of the Pacific Ocean, disturbing no one except perhaps a few fish. (See "NASA Satellite Debris Likely Fell in Ocean, May Never Be Found.")

Despite the higher odds, ROSAT is also unlikely to hurt anyone, scientists say, given the planet's large stretches of ocean and thinly populated areas.

"We accept risks in everyday life that are many orders of magnitude higher than the risks we incur from reentering space objects," ESA's Klinkrad said.

If bits of the satellite do land in a populated area, "they will be extremely hot," added the German Aerospace Center's Gräve. "This is why we recommend not touching any satellite parts" that do make it to the ground.

And any ROSAT debris, no matter where it's found, belongs to the German government, he said.

ROSAT Worthy of a Wake

ROSAT—short for Roentgen Satellite—launched in 1990 on a Delta II rocket to measure the x-rays emitted by objects such as neutron stars, dense stellar cores left behind by some supernovae.

The mission was supposed to last only 18 months, but the satellite kept chugging for eight years. Scientists finally shut it down in 1999 after its last functional scientific instrument accidentally pointed too close to the sun, blinding the sensors.

When ROSAT was on the drawing board in the 1980s, spacecraft designers didn't plan for the end of their vehicles' lives. So ROSAT was built without a propulsion system that would've allowed for a carefully choreographed demise.

"The attitude 20 years ago was still very much, Eh, space is big, and things that reenter probably won't hit anyone, so we won't worry about it," said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist who relied on data from ROSAT.

As far as McDowell can remember, nothing as big as the ROSAT mirror has smashed into the Earth's surface since the reentry of the Soviet space station Salyut-7 in 1991.

(Space debris pictures: "Five Unexpected Objects That Fell to Earth.")

The mirror is likely to come down intact in part because it's such a massive item, added University of Leicester physicist John Pye, who worked on the ROSAT program for nearly 20 years.

What's more, he said, the glass is a special heat-resistant variety, to keep the mirror from distorting the x-rays as its temperature changed in space.

Instead of being worried, however, the CfA's McDowell is feeling so nostalgic about the satellite's imminent death that he's planning a wake. There's just one problem: When to send out the invitations.

"I'm going to wait until it looks like it's going to come down," he said, "and then I'm going to email everybody: Anybody free? ... That's the trouble with these reentry celebrations. You're never sure when they'll be."

Courtesy NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY 

STEVE JOBS IN HEAVEN

IPv6 by next year, but won't see mass usage in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: “Today, the rate at which mobile and fixed line subscribers are growing in India, who in turn are going to consume a whole lot of data services over the network, does not sync with the number of IPv4 addressesallotted for the region. So, any company which is doing business over the Internet, which wants to maintain the services, will have to move on to IPv6, as IPv4 is fast exhausting,” says Truman Boyes, leader of the network architects that comprise Juniper Network’s Asia Pacific professional services consultancy team.

He was speaking to Deepa Damodaran of CIOL during an interview, recently. Excerpts:

CIOL: How is the adoption of IPv6 happening in APAC, especially India?

Truman: We notice that APAC is very aggressive in deploying IPv6 in production. India is leading the charge and we have a few projects that we are working currently.

When IPv4 addresses were allocated to different geographic regions, during the mid 1990s, Asia Pacific got a small handout of addresses, compared to other regions, particularly America, which got a substantially large address block

India today has 850-900 million mobile subscribers and adds about 11 million subscribers every month, we have never seen anything like this in other part of the world. So in order to sustain this growth, we need to have unique addressing for them .

So there is big push to stack IPv6 and IPv4 deployments. Some providers in India have even asked us about providing IPv6 networks.

There are other more cautious providers who are looking to have both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses in APAC, some providers are just looking to procure IPv6 and then provide some translation mechanism to connect the rest of the Internet for IPv4. So the actual consumer will get only IPv6 content in their mobile devices.

CIOL: So by when will the IPv6 content delivery and network deployment really happen in India?

Truman: Especially with the Indian Government mandate that all telecom service providers should have IPv6 network by March 2012, we are going to see a substantial uptake for IPv6 in India next year.
However, it will mean that only the networks will support IPv6, but not all consumers will have native IPv6 in their handset.

The growth rate is phenomenal. The deployment is happening and equipment is there. Most of the large providers have already deployed some kind of IPv6 capable network and the fact that the government is getting behind, this is a good sign. The US government placed pressure on everyone who does business with the government to provide equipments that are IPv6 compatible

And we are seeing the same happening in India and it is a good sign that the government and the whole industry is taking it seriously.

CIOL: So will India really move on to IPv6 withing six months?
Truman: There is going to be an interpretation of IPv6 compatible network by March. Within next year you will see an adoption of IPv6 in India.

However, I do not think that is going to have a huge effect on the content providers because majority of the consumers will still have IPv4 addresses. So will the servers and clients also, because there is no big push for them to move to IPv6.

IPv6 will be more seen in mobile industry or mobile subscriber handsets because those devices have very less variability. Whether it is an Apple IOS software, or an Android phone, almost all of its manufacturers have come down to two operating system as against the PC world, where it used to be only one, whether it is MAC or Windows.

Many consumers do not understand whether they are on IPv4 or IPv6 while they use Facebook or Google.
The uptake of IPv6 will be very small. As of now less than one per cent of the total Internet traffic runs on IPv6.

However, the growth rate in the last couple of years have been substantial.

Cost of IPv6 addresses is an interesting factor. APNIC which allots IP addresses in APAC does not allow the sale of IP addresses. Every organisation has to justify the growth of their organisation to get additional IP addresses allocated. The last of such IPv4 addresses for APAC have pretty much over.

So they are trying to create a free market system to sell IPv4 addresses. Going forward, there will be many more providers who will start looking at reducing cost and not incurring that cost by moving to IPv6.

The adoption of IPv6 though was talked about for the past 10 years, it has not taken off until recently because there were still IPv4 addresses and companies wanted to wait until it became a serious issue.

We have seen companies run out of IPv4 addresses in unplanned situations and had difficulty in getting additional IPv4 addresses. One will not want to be in that position because it is a very costly exercise to have services that is not functioning.

Asia is going to lead the way. India, China and Japan will lead the way in adopting IPv6 because they are going to run out of IP addresses first.

courtesy to CIOL

Upcoming changes to Reader: a new look, new Google+ features, and some clean-up

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That's why we will also be extending Reader's subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

Your subscriptions
Your shared items
Your friends
Your likes
Your starred itemsLike always, the new Google Reader will be a great place to read and share your feeds. And in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To. We're looking forward to launching the new features very soon.



Posted on Google webpage