China developes fastest SuperComputer

China has developed a supercomputer that runs at more than one quadrillion (one thousand million million) calculations per second, making it the fastest one in the country, experts have said.The supercomputer named "Xingyun", has been developed in Tianjin, and works at double the speed of "Tianhe-1", the previous fastest machine in China.The Tianhe-1 was developed by the National University of Defence Technology in October 2009, Li Jun, president of the Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

"Its peak performance reaches nearly three quadrillion calculations per second, three times the peak speed of Tianhe-1," Li said.

Experts say one second of its work may take a whole day for a dual-core personal computer."Xingyun" is the server of "Dawning 6000", jointly developed by the company, Chinese Academy of Sciences Calculation Institution, and the South China Supercomputing Centre, for cloud computing and DNA sequencing purposes, officials said.By the end of 2010, "Dawning 6000" will be delivered to the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen in Guangdong province for use in information services in southern China, including Hong Kong and Macao.Beijing-based Dawning Information Industry Co Ltd was founded in 1995 and is the country's leading company in the field of high-performance computers.

2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Delight

Today’s the big day. TechCrunch turns five years old. And oh, there’s a huge football – no, not ‘soccer’ – event kicking off in South Africa too.

Many of you will be missing the opening match(es) while you’re out celebrating our birthday and 5 years of change on the Web all over the world, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to catch up from your mobile phone, or look up what went down on the Internet when – or if – you make it back home.Here’s our ultimate guide to how you can keep track of all things World Cup 2010 on the Web and/or through mobile applications. Sure, Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch Europe already posted a few pointers, and Nicholas Deleon from CrunchGear tried to compile an exhaustive list of websites, apps and podcasts as well.


INTERNET GIANTS
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Microsoft

Microsoft has detailed its plans for the World Cup two days ago.Bing Instant Answers aims to bring you all the latest details, the schedule, upcoming games, live scores group standings, and more. The results will show in the U.S. and 30 other countries (why not everywhere, we have no idea).Redmond also lets you visualize the World Cup teams on Bing.There is also a Bing Map App that will be displaying FIFA live data on Bing Maps, including team fixtures, results, news, photos, venues, a Photosynth hub for World Cup images, and a Twitter map that will display all of the World Cup related tweets.Finally, Bing has released a South Africa Bing Map imagery update, so you can see the stadiums where all the games will take place.

Google
Google is making it easy to keep track of the schedule and groups – just run a search for ‘world cup’ and the basic info will be displayed right on top. Also, there’s a cute easter egg to be found at the bottom, just in case you weren’t aware yet.YouTube sports a custom logo for the occasion (as does Google Search), and is shining a big spotlight on the World Cup on its homepage, too.Google also announced earlier that there’s new Street View imagery around seven new football stadiums in South Africa (see them in 3D here).

Yahoo
The logo on the Yahoo homepage today is animated for the World Cup kick-off, and leads to the company’s sports vertical, where Yahoo will be keeping track of news, photos, videos, results etc. Yahoo is also featuring shortcuts to relevant links when you enter certain search terms (e.g. world cup schedule).Yahoo has also launched a skinnable, themed toolbar (see Flickr) and has signed a deal with David Beckham to function as its brand ambassador and whatnot.

Facebook
Facebook today posted its ‘guide to the world cup’. The company is running a global competition to see which country has the most passionate football fans – you can check out the leaderboard here (Chile is winning right now).Facebook also has some official broadcast partners that enable users to share status updates and comments while you watch the events live on TV by using Facebook’s Live Stream social plugin. Partners, by country, are listed in the blog post and here.

NetApp overtakes HP, Dell

NetApp Inc surged past three rivals to move into second place in the market for external data storage equipment, whose overall sales grew 17 per cent to $5 billion in the first quarter, according to market researcher IDC.IDC said that NetApp was in a statistical tie with IBM and behind industry giant EMC Corp during the quarter ended March 31. NetApp's sales climbed 47 per cent from a year earlier to $550 million.While that was behind the $579 million posted by IBM, IDC said it considers the two tied because their total market share is within less than a percentage point of each other. IBM owned 11.7 per cent of the market during the first quarter, up from 11.2 per cent a year earlier, while NetApp's share climbed to 11.1 per cent from 8.8 per cent."That's a very big increase in market share," said IDC analyst Steve Scully. EMC's revenue climbed 38 per cent from a year earlier to $1.2 billion. Its market share rose from 21 per cent to 24.6 per cent, according to IDC.

Its sales were buoyed by revenue from Data Domain, a company it acquired in July. Scully said that NetApp's market share has been growing so rapidly because it has a broad range of products that appeal to small, mid-sized and large companies.
They all run on the same operating system, which makes it easy to upgrade as a company grows, he added. A year ago, NetApp ranked sixth-place in IDC's rankings behind EMC, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM, Dell Inc and Hitachi Ltd. NetApp's shares have doubled over the past year. Shares in its competitors have climbed between 10 per cent and 45 per cent.

IBM bags Electra Card deal

Technology giant IBM today said that it has signed a 10-year multi-million dollar agreement with ElectraCard Services (ECS) for providing business continuity services.The agreement, signed in March this year, will facilitate operational expertise and solution capability for ECS's disaster recovery infrastructure, IBM said in a statement.As part of the agreement, IBM will manage ECS infrastructure at the disaster recovery site, located at the tech giant's data point in Bangalore as well as its primary IT centre in Mumbai, making it one of the largest-managed resiliency service deals in India.IBM will enable ECS to align its IT initiatives, such as risk management, with the latter's continued business requirements while reducing capital expenditure, the company said.ElectraCard Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Opus Software Solutions, provides business-critical applications and third-party processing services for credit and payment management globally.

Highest Attrition rate in Wipro

Returning to normal for India’s third largest software services firm Wipro -- and peers like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services -- means not just recovering sales but also a return to the days of high staff attrition and wage pressures.Wipro saw attrition rocket to 17.1 per cent for the quarter, up from 8.4 per cent during April to June 2009. The company added net 5,325 employees during the quarter, bringing the total headcount to 108,071, and said wage hikes had cut into margins.

Wipro Ltd said quarterly profit jumped 21 per cent to Rs 12.1 billion ($269 million), as rising global demand for outsourcing spread from financial services to lagging sectors like technology and telecommunications.“We have seen another strong quarter of broad based, volume led growth,” Chairman Azim Premji said in a statement. “The business environment is returning to normal.”

Revenue for the January to March quarter was Rs 69.8 billion ($1.6 billion), 8 per cent higher than a year earlier. Wipro also recommended a dividend of Rs 6 a share and an offer of two bonus shares for every three.

James Gosling resigns from SUN(ORACLE SUN)

James Gosling has announced via his new blog that he resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd).Generally credited as the inventor of the Java programming language, Gosling created the original design for Java and implemented the first compiler and virtual machine for it. Gosling, who will be 55 this year, had been with Sun Microsystems since 1984. Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in January this year, following five months of investigation by the European Commission's Competition Commissioner.

Prior to joining Sun Gosling wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and while at Carnegie Mellon University he built a multi-processor version of Unix, as well as a number of compilers and mail systems.He doesn't yet have a new job, describing himself as "blissfully unemployed" on his bio. On his blog he states "I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting. "

Oracle Announces GlassFish Roadmap

There's been some concern amongst GlassFish users since Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems closed in January this year. Oracle possibly compounded the problem when it began to position the GlassFish application server as a "departmental" server, whilst WebLogic remained targeted at enterprise customers requiring performance and scalability. This is a similar strategy to that used by IBM with its two WebSphere Application Server flavours (Community Edition which is based on Apache Geronimo, and WebSphere Application Server). But many suspected that this would result in "enterprise" features, such as clustering support, being dropped from GlassFish. Perhaps reacting to this James Gosling, now CTO of Oracle's client software group, pointed out to an audience at the TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas that the GlassFish application server provided the first implementation of EE 6, and that the server is used in data centres and downloaded about a million times a month.
Another area of concern was around licensing. Oracle have stated that they will continue to develop GlassFish as open source software (mostly under GPL/CDDL as now), and will continue to offer the product as an open source offering called GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. In addition, Oracle will offer a commercial distribution (Oracle GlassFish Server) which will include closed source add-ons and full support from Oracle, in much the same way as Sun did prior to the acquisition.

Oracle Big Data

Big Data is the “modern scale” at which we are defining or data usage challenges. Big Data begins at the point where need to seriously start thinking about the technologies used to drive our information needs.

While Big Data as a term seems to refer to volume this isn’t the case. Many existing technologies have little problem physically handling large volumes (TB or PB) of data. Instead the Big Data challenges result out of the combination of volume and our usage demands from that data. And those usage demands are nearly always tied to timeliness.

Big Data is therefore the push to utilize “modern” volumes of data within “modern” timeframes. The exact definitions are of course are relative & constantly changing, however right now this is somewhere along the path towards the end goal. This is of course the ability to handle an unlimited volume of data, processing all requests in real time.

Revenue Comparison - Infosys Vs TCS Vs Wipro

Below is the revenue comparison of three pillars of Indian IT industry.

Infosys: Infosys reported a 3.6% dip in consolidated net profit at Rs 1,582 crore. Income from software services, products and business process management stood at Rs 5,741 crore during the quarter, a marginal decline over Rs 5,786 crore in the year-ago period as per Indian accounting rules. Revenue for the quarter dropped 0.8% to Rs5,741 crore year-on-year.

TCS: TCS posted a 33.9% jump in its net profit at Rs 1,824 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2009 as compared to the same period a year ago. Its revenue, too, jumped 5.1% on strong volumes of 6.6% to touch Rs 7,649 crore year-on-year.

Wipro: In the quarter ended December 31, Wipro posted a 21% rise in net profit to Rs 1,217 crore, compared to the corresponding quarter in the previous year. Revenue increased 5% to Rs 6,966 crore. Compared to the preceding quarter (Q2), net profit was up 4.7% and revenue was up 0.7%. Revenue from IT services increased to Rs 5,164 crore, up 2% from a year ago.

Is Twitter really blocked in China??

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams today said he had been told that his microblogging service has been partially blocked in China but had no confirmation."That's what I've been told," he said, adding that he had "heard reports on that" but that the company did not have direct confirmation.Williams said that China can use a firewall to block access to the service."There are ways for users to get around it, but I'm not an expert on that," he said, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.When asked about media reports that Twitter was developing ways to get around the firewall, Williams said he had been "misquoted.""We're not actively developing any way to get around it," he said, although he stressed that "we're for the free exchange of information."Asked if his company had noticed any cyber attacks, such as those launched against search engine giant Google from China, he said that no such moves had been detected.

Google will stop support for IE6

Google plans to suspend Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) support for its Gmail and Calendar services. Starting March 1, the search engine giant will start scaling back IE6 support for Google Docs and Google Sites.The company has said that it plans to stop supporting older browsers for the rest of the Google Apps suite, including Gmail.Incidentally, IE6 is not the only browser Google will stop support for. On the company's no-support list along with IE6 are Mozilla's Firefox 2.0, Apple's Safari 2.0 and Google's own Chrome 3.0.

For once, Microsoft too agrees with Google. The software giant endorses Google's advice to drop IE6. In a blog post, Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc said that the company supports this recommendation to move off Internet Explorer 6.In January, an undisclosed vulnerability in IE 6 was used in attacks that reportedly targeted more than 20 US companies, including Google, which blamed China. The vulnerability has since been fixed by Microsoft.

Dual Sim Phones from Nokia

Here is a good news for all those who love mobile phones those have capability of operating dual sim simultaneously because mobile phone major Nokia indicated that multi-SIM mobile handsets were on the anvil for the Indian consumers with expansion in demand.Currently company is looking at more than one SIM phone," Nokia Head (Activation, Media & Online Marketing) Viral Oza said at the launch of two handsets in the touchscreen segment.There were indications that the phone might be launched in 2010.Dual-SIM phones of other brands are receiving good response by the customers with over 100 million handset market in the country.

LG unveils 'world's thinnest LCD TV'

South Korea's LG Display said that it has developed the world's thinnest LCD television panel, measuring 2.6 millimetres (0.1 inches).The company, the world's second largest maker of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), said the panel uses an ultra-slim, edge-lit light emitting diode backlight system and proprietary optical film technology.It said in a statement the 42-inch panel weighs less than 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds), making it ideal for wall-mounted TVs.LG Display said it would showcase the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next year.

Twitter bans 370 passwords

Social networking site Twitter has banned 370 words it considers ‘too obvious’ to be used as passwords.Twitter rejects certain words like ‘123456’ and ‘password’ to be used as passwords because it thinks they are too easy to guess and put users data at risk, The Telegraph reported.Along with, names of famous cars such as ‘porsche’ and ‘ferrari’, and football teams like ‘Chelsea’ and ‘Arsenal’ are also banned. A few science fiction words are also a part of the banned word list of the website.‘THX1138’-- title of the first film by Star Wars fame director George Lucas, is banned. So is ‘NCC1701’ -- the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise -- and ‘trustno1’, Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files, the report said.A recent research by insurer CPP has shown that people are often too predictable when it comes to choosing passwords.Security experts advise that a strong password should consist of letters, numbers and even punctuation symbols. They should be changed regularly and one should not use the same password for their online services.

Now PC batteries will power cars

Japan's Panasonic Corp has developed a technology that binds together standard lithium-ion battery cells used in laptop PCs to power electric vehicles, taking aim at growing demand for green cars.The new technology will likely enable Panasonic to make electric car batteries at half the cost of lithium-ion batteries that are developed solely for electric cars, since it can use existing battery plants and production expertise, the company said.Mitsubishi Motors Corp's i-MiEV, the world's first mass-produced electric car, sells for 4.6 million yen ($51,000) before government subsidies due mainly to high costs for lithium-ion batteries.Panasonic, which vies with Sony Corp for the position as the world's largest consumer electronics maker, said it aims to commercialise the battery as early as in four years, but added it is too early to comment on sales targets.The newly developed batteries can also be used at home to store electricity generated by solar panels and fuel cells.

Google advisor found dead

Rajeev Motwani, a well-known Stanford University computer science professor who advised one of Google's creators, was found dead in his swimming pool.Stanford University said the 47-year-old professor apparently drowned on Friday at his home in Atherton, and his friends told the school news service he did not know how to swim.
Motwani's work using algorithms to search vast computer databases, like the Internet, is celebrated in Silicon Valley.Google co-founder Sergey Brin wrote on his blog that Motwani's counsel played a big role in his research, education, and professional development.

Now Android with Map Editor

Brian Cornell, a software engineer at Google developed the My Map Editor app that allows Android phone users to create and share maps using their mobiles and also to synchronize them in to their PCs.Tell you what, he has developed this app using just 20% of his time over a span of four months. The app sounds brilliant not only by the appearance but also application wise. The app is said to provide an excellent interface between the mobile and desktop.

The application lets users create, edit, share, and view personalized maps on their Android powered phone, as well as synchronize with the My Maps tab on Google Maps. “Create a map on your desktop computer using Google Maps and then take it with you on the go and update it on location. My Maps Editor by Google supports full editing functionality for markers, lines, and shapes on maps, plus the ability to mark your location using GPS or attach a photo directly from your phone.

TCS biotech software Bio-Suite

Now Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is eying life sciences as one of its growth engines. The firm is readying an exclusive software package for biological research.The package - named Bio-Suite - contains computational tools and algorithms, which help in deciphering vast amounts of genetic data and protein functions.The software is aimed at expediting the drug discovery as also bringing down the cost of research.

The TCS package is aimed at providing information about functions of genes and proteins and identifying new drug candidates through smaller samples.For Bio-Suite, we have sourced about 100 algorithms from various scientific bodies to build a software that helps in analyzing gene expression and drug designing.The algorithms are libraries containing data about the functions of genes and the proteins encoded by them.Using an algorithm makes the job of studying and identifying genes and proteins responsible for a particular disorder simpler.TCS is planning to exhibit their product at the forthcoming Biotech Israel summit. With the bioinformatics industry in India still at a nascent stage, the company is eying the $1.5-bn global market.

Next Version of Bluetooth

Here is a good news for all the bluetooth users because from the next year the gadgets are going to use Bluetooth 3.0 i.e the next version of bluetooth.With the help of Bluetooth 3.0 you can achieve 10 times faster data transfer in comparison to earlier bluetooth version.This version could be useful for moving music or movies from a PC to a cell phone or media player.Three major chip companies -- Atheros Communications Inc, Broadcom Corp and CSR PLC, said they had products that would work with the new high-speed option.Whenever data transfer is required between two devices the bluetooth chip borrows a Wi-Fi chip in the same gadget to make the actual transfer.When the transfer is not in process then bluetooth chip turns off the Wi-Fi chip,hence saving a a lot of power.This new version of bluetooth is still 20 times slower than USB cable data transfer, so it will likely be less than ideal for a complete music library or a long movie.

500 GB discs by GE

Very soon you will see discs that can contain 500 GB of data because GE(General Electrics) is going to launch these discs.The technology that is used in these discs is holographic technology and because of this these discs are also known as micro-holographic discs.The size of these discs is almost same as of the normal DVD discs.As all we know that blue ray discs already launched in market that can store about 25 to 50 GB of data.

The main reason behind the high storage of data on the micro-holographic discs is that they store information on the disc in three dimensions, rather than just pits on the surface of the disc.Here the capacity of the disk is directly proportional to the amount of reflectivity offered by the holographic material,that means higher the reflectivity higher the capacity of disc.Now we can say that the launching of these steps is a huge step toward bringing our next generation holographic storage technology to the everyday consumer.