Clipmarks | Mohir's 'internet' clips

Internet-Telescope Will Provide Movie-like Window on Universe

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:33:10 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: LSST is designed to be a public facility. The database and resulting catalogues will be made available to the public with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users. The public will actively share the adventure of discovery.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

"LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity — the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe."

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, partially funded by $30 million from Microsoft founders Bill gates and Charles Simyoni, the developer of Word and Excel, is projected for ‘first light’ in 2014 in Chile's Atacama Desert -the world's Southern Hemisphere space-observatory mecca. The 8.4-meter telescope will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3-billion pixel digital camera. The telescope will probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and it will open a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids and distant Kuiper Belt objects.

Tags: telescope, internet

Celebrity Meter

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 22:17:20 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Although there are a few different standards for highlighting links like these, most social networking sites, blog software and hosting services support one or more. They're relying on site builders to highlight such links by using special markup. Google uses this information to build a graph of all sites and their links to one another.

Rather than request the API from each site individually (Twitter followers, MySpace friends, etc.), Google provides a single RESTful API to send a simple query in one shot. While there are limits to this data (Facebook info is currently not available in this widget), the information we're getting is real and the friend information we're getting isn't a simple number but a list of live URLs that Google has vetted for us.

Clip Source: howto.wired.com

Are You Internet Famous? Use the Wired Celebrity Meter to find out how big a deal you really are. Our algorithm will dig through your personal pages to find out how many fans are following your online exploits.

Clip Source: 75.101.132.141

Wired Celebrity Meter

Clip Source: howto.wired.com

How it Works (short version) The Celebrity Meter scans URLs and scores internet fame based on:
- webpages linking to you
- your friends across social networks (just Twitter and MySpace for now)
- pages linking to your photos

The Celebrity Meter is an ongoing project and currently in beta. We are working toward adding additional networks.

How it Works (long version) Google crawls the entire internet every couple of weeks and has recently started to keep track of who is linked to whom on social networks, blogs and just about every page they crawl. This new service is called Google Social Graph.

Tags: internet, celebrity

5 easy ways to access your bookmarks anywhere

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:30:42 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: en.onsoftware.com

Having full access to your bookmarks wherever you are is now something that most users take for granted. Not so long ago, the only way to really ensure you had your bookmarks with you was to crudely send them to your e-mail account and access them from there. Nowadays, you’re almost spoiled for choice meaning it’s easy than ever to work on the move or check your favorite RSS feeds during a spare moment away from the home or office. And having a way to access your bookmarks from any location is a great way to avoid disaster if your hard drive fails and you lose everything. For desktop PC users, here are 5 of the best:

Foxmarks - The undisputed king for Firefox users - works seamlessly 24/7

Bookmarks Unifier - Export bookmarks to hard copy for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera

Mozmarks - An early predecessor to Foxmarks but with less synchronisation

Chipmark - Browser bookmarks plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox

Blinklist - Gives you access anywhere

Tags: internet, bookmarks

Terabit per second internet coming soon

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:41:18 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: nextbigfuture.com

Researchers at the University of Sydney have developed technology that could boost the throughput of existing networks by sixty to 100-fold without costing the consumer any more, and its all thanks to a scratch on a piece of glass.

After four years of development, University of Sydney scientists say the Internet is set to become on average 60 times faster than existing networks.

"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."

An initial demonstration proved it possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than existing local networks.

Tags: internet, technology

Two Spanish youths treated for mobile phone addiction

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:48:23 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Two students aged 12 and 13 are being treated for an addiction to mobile phones at a psychiatric centre in northeastern Spain, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported on Saturday.

"They came for their addiction to 'Messenger' (the Internet messaging system) but we saw that they also had a mobile phone addiction," Maite Utges, the director of the Lleida's child and adolescent mental health centre, was quoted as saying in the online edition of El Mundo.

The two youths had owned mobile phones for a year and a half and spent an average of five to six hours a day on them.

The parents of the two said their children used their phones with a total lack of control, which contributed to their failure in school studies, said Utges.

It is "not easy" to undo this habit and treatment for the two will take at least two years, Utges added.

The Spanish government anti-drug agency estimates 10 percent of adolescents in Madrid suffer from an addiction to their mobile phone or to the Internet,

Tags: addiction, mobile phone, im

Napster offers up 6 million DRM-free music tracks

Wed, 21 May 2008 17:17:32 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.gadgetell.com

Apple’s iTunes Store better watch it’s back, because here comes Napster with not just another online music service, but one that now offers a whooping 6 million DRM-free music tracks. With this number of available tracks Napster has now become the world’s largest major label MP3 catalog and the largest library of independent music worldwide.

Beginning today, all digital music that is downloaded from Napster will be a DRM-free MP3 that is compatible with any MP3 player or music phone, including yes you guessed it right, the iPod and the iPhone. Downloaded music will remain at 99 cents for a single track and $9.95 for most full albums. Most of Napster’s digital music is encoded at a 256kbps bitrate and shall include album art. In addition, users can freely browse Napster’s catalog without any obligation or commitment to purchase. Napster is also offering a web-based on-demand streaming service which users can access from anywhere using computer with Internet connection.

Tags: napster, itunes, internet, drm, music

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits and misses

Fri, 16 May 2008 12:37:07 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: technology.newscientist.com

Successful projects

The internet: Precisely who 'invented' the mass of linked computer networks that is today's internet is a moot point. But it wouldn't have happened without the ARPANET network built by DARPA in the 1960s. The idea was to make a "self-healing" communications network that still worked when parts of it were destroyed. It was the first network to transmit data in discrete chunks, not constant streams, and led to the development of the TCP/IP specification still in use today.

GPS

Speech translation

Stealth Planes

Gallium Arsenide

Failed projects

Hafnium bombs

The mechanical elephant

Telepathic spies

FutureMap

Orion: Set in motion shortly after DARPA was created, Project Orion aimed to drive an interplanetary spacecraft by periodically dropping nuclear bombs out of its rear end.

Tags: darpa, technology

Netscape: The Browser That Started it All Dies a Quiet Death

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:28:17 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Netscape: The Browser That Started it All Dies a Quiet Death

It birthed the web as we know it. But tomorrow, February 1, marks the demise of Netscape Navigator, the first commercial web browser.

Navigator will continue to function should you happen to have a recent copy stashed away. But American Online, which has been Netscape’s guardian during its long, downward slide in popularity, will no longer support the browser and will stop releasing updates. Support for all versions of the software will be off-loaded to the Netscape community forum. Netscape.com will continue to live on as a web portal.

How did it come to this? In two words, Internet Explorer.

When Netscape arrived back in 1994, the screeching wail of the dial-up modem was not yet a household sound. But the browser changed that and ignited the growth of the internet by making it easy for anyone to use.

Tags: netscape, internet, internet explorer, firefox, history

The 70 coolest FREE applications in existence

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:47:08 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.seopher.com

The 70 coolest free applications in existence

At the end of August I created a list of the 40 coolest free applications around which proved quite popular. As with all lists of this type the wisdom of the crowds brought forward numerous other suggestions that I'd overlooked for one reason or another - so here is the revised list.

As with the original list, the purpose is to collate some of the best free applications (and sometimes online services) that can be found on the Internet. I spend a lot of time on the Internet (through my work as a web developer) so it's always worth pooling a decent list of resources to those who are more fortunate to have time away from computers. See below for a brief list of what's covered:

Image, Image Editing and Graphics

Office

Web and web development

Development Applications (IDE's)

Operating Systems

Video Playback

Audio

Anti-Virus and Security

Downloading and Download Managers

Remote Access

Tags: software, internet, windows, free, freeware

What Is 'Internet Addiction' And What Is The Treatment?

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 15:32:35 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

What Exactly Is 'Internet Addiction' And What Is The Treatment?

Science Daily — Is your first craving in the morning for your computer mouse? Do you obsessively check email in the middle of the night?

If so, you may be among the ten percent of all Internet surfers afflicted with “Internet addiction disorder,” a pathological condition that can lead to anxiety and severe depression. To better diagnose and treat Internet addiction, Dr. Pinhas Dannon, a psychiatrist from Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, recommends that it be grouped with other extreme addictive disorders such as gambling, sex addiction, and kleptomania.

A senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Dannon is known worldwide for work in the area of gambling and addiction, a major research focus for him since 1995. His first article on kleptomania was published in 1996. He will present his new research findings on addiction at the National Gambling Council’s meeting in Las Vegas this November.

Tags: internet, addiction

DARPA wants to build a better Internet

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:42:12 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.engadget.com

DARPA wants to build a better Internet

DARPA sure doesn't seem to be lacking in ambition these days, funding invisible shields, bionic arms, and not one, but two different robot races. Now, it looks to be turning to its past for ideas, with it attempting to revisit its Arpanet glory days by issuing a call for "revolutionary ideas" to rework the current Internet, The Register reports. From the looks of it, DARPA thinks there's plenty of room for improvement, stating the goal of the program as nothing less than to "improve transfer speeds, network routing efficiency, reliability, simplify network configuration, and reduce cost," adding that it's also interested in new addressing schemes to supplement the current IP scheme. Those interested in taking a shot at it can hit up the link below for all the necessary information.

Tags: darpa, internet

AMA might label Internet as an addiction

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:44:53 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

AMA might label Internet as an addiction

The American Medical Association plans to vote on a recommendation to classify Internet and video-game addiction as a formal diagnosis.

The AMA said the heaviest game players are those who play MMORPGs -- massive multiplayer online role-playing games -- such as World of Warcraft. Those players are more likely to be socially isolated and probably addicted, The Orlando Sentinel said Thursday.

Steve Jones -- a communications professor at the University of Illinois and a research fellow with the Pew Internet and American Life Project -- said he is skeptical about calling it an addiction.

"Just because any activity might interfere with other activities is not enough to call it an addiction," he told the newspaper.

Jones said there have been concerns about technology dating back to the 1920s, when people were worried movies were causing children to spend too much time inside.

Tags: internet, addiction, ama

Study Finds 25 Countries Block Web Sites

Fri, 18 May 2007 14:11:29 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Study Finds 25 Countries Block Web Sites

At least 25 countries around the world block Web sites for political, social or other reasons as governments seek to assert authority over a network meant to be borderless, according to a study out Friday.

The actual number may be higher, but the OpenNet Initiative had the time and capabilities to study only 40 countries and the Palestinian territories. Even so, researchers said they found more censorship than they had initially expected, a sign that the Internet has matured to the point that governments are taking notice.

China, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam had the most extensive filters for political sites. Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen had the strictest social-filtering practices, blocking pornography, gambling and gay and lesbian sites.

In some countries, censorship was narrow. South Korea, for instance, tends to block only information about its neighboring rival, North Korea.

Tags: internet, free speech

PS3 to power medical research

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:39:14 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: news.cnet.co.uk

PS3 to power medical research

If you're lusting after the PlayStation 3 thinking it's just for playing games or watching movies, Sony wants you to know you can use the powerful device for something much more important.

Sony announced on Thursday that owners of any Internet-connected PS3 will be able to participate in a wide-ranging, distributed, scientific experiment led by Stanford University's Folding@home programme, which is seeking to better understand a process called protein folding and its relationship to several serious diseases.

Tags: ps3, internet, sony, medical, research