I found a very interesting comic strip on buying windows vista at joyoftech.com. Here it is (click on the image to enlarge it):

Happy buying!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Above is the latest MAC vs PC Ad called “Office”. It is airing in UK.

The entire collection of MAC vs PC ads can be found here.

Source: techeblog

Popularity: 3% [?]

Pandasoftware recently published an article listing the top 10 viruses for the year ending 2006. I ran some computation on the numbers reported to come up with the following graphs and conclusions:

Fig (1): Out of the top 10 viruses, what type of virus constituted what number (Click to Enlarge Image)

Fig (2): Percentage out of the total infection, contributed by our top 10 (Click to Enlarge Image)

Fig (3): Total percentage infection by virus type among just the top 10 (Click to Enlarge Image)

I came to the following conclusions:

Read more »

Popularity: 4% [?]

There is a posting on Techcrunch about an image sent to Mike which you can print, cut and fold to create your own non-working iPhone.

A posting on sneakmove.com also tells you how to create a paper iPhone. Here is the pdf file for the iPhone image.

There is a mention of this at techeblog also.

Image from Gizmodo which you can print to create your phone (click to enlarge first)

There is an interesting post on iPhone unboxed here.

Seems like this paper iPhone is really picking up. If apple does not bring down the price for the iPhone, some of us will have to satisfy ourselves with this paper version only

Popularity: 4% [?]

A  1 millimeter robotic “microhand”, controlled by gas pressure, has been created by Chang-Jin Kim at UCLA.

It is the world’s smallest robotic hand and could find extensive application in microsurgery and minimally invasive surgery (a field which is currently dominated by grippers and tools that are mounted at the end of long, rigid aluminium rods). It is being deemed safe for biological operations. It runs on gas pressure thus it can be used in both dry and wet environments.

The “microhand” measures one millimeter across when closed into a fist. It consists of four “fingers,” each of which is made from six silicon wafers, with polymer balloons doing the work of “muscles” at the wafers’ joints.

Each balloon is connected with narrow channels through which air is pumped in or out. When a balloon is inflated, the distance between two joints decreases, and the finger flexes inward. Upon deflation, the fingers relax. And with selective inflation and deflation, researchers are able to manipulate the fingers into clasping or releasing an object.

An article published by Chang-Jin Kim titled “Microhand for biological applications” can be obtained here.

Popularity: 4% [?]

• HP Home has a free $10 Barnes & Noble Card for completing their HP Smart Printing Services Survey (they might call you)
• Dell Inspiron 1501 AMD 15.4 Notebook $499 shipped free
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• Sanus Systems Accurate View Turntable for 13-inch TV, Black ($0.98) In-store pickup
• Meritline.com has the Digital Workout Monitor/Digital Pedometer for $5.99, $7.00 off their regular price. Use coupon code “HW2000877OFF” to get the discount. Shipping is Free, and this offer ends 1/27.

Popularity: 5% [?]

As per Wikipedia:

A Google bomb is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.

Googlebombs very rarely happen for common queries, because the lack of any relevant results for that phrase is part of why a Googlebomb can work.

In an Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posting google said that they had come up with an algorithm to detect Goolgebombs in many different languages. They have achieved this by improving their analysis of the link structure of the web. It does not guarantee a complete fix but does minimize the impact of many Goolgebombs. Now, it will return articles about Googlebombs instead.

Some googlebombs (also called “linkbombs” as they are not limited to Google) that became very famous:

• A search for “miserable failure” or “failure” on September 29, 2006 brought up the official George W. Bush biography number one on Google, Yahoo! and MSN and number two on Ask.com.
• On June 2, 2005, Yooter reported that George Bush is now ranked first for the keyword ‘miserable’, ‘failure’ and ‘miserable failure’ in both Google and Yahoo!.
• On September 16, 2005, Marissa Mayer wrote on Google Blog about the practice of Google bombing and the word “failure.”.
• On January 6, 2006, Yooter reported that Tony Blair is now indexed in the U.S. and UK versions of Google for the keyword ‘liar’.

Popularity: 7% [?]

There seems to be a lot of confusion among the general user community about what is Peer-to-Peer (P2P). I could not find good resources on this and information even though it was there, was scattered all over. I will try to make an attempt to present all that information in a brief article over here.

What is P2P?

P2P is a class of applications that take advantage of resources – storage, cycles, content, human presence – available at the edges of the Internet. [Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com)]

P2P refers to a class of systems and applications that employ distributed resources to perform a critical function in a decentralized manner.[Milojicic et al. (HP)]

(image source: http://www.junginger.biz)

PIE (stands for Presence, Identity and Edge Resources) is the term used to describe the core elements of any P2P application.

Edge Resources:
Peer-to-peer networks make use of resources at the edge of the Internet. These devices at the end can be transient. P2P applications need to take care of the following properties of the edge resources: CPU power, disk storage, connectivity, reliability, bandwidth and location.

Identity:
Peer-to-peer networks must be able to identify uniquely the resources that are available. IP addresses of resources can be used to uniquely identify them but the lack of enough IP addresses (a problem due to be solved by IPv6) has forced P2P systems to come up with their own naming schemes that are not dependent on IP addresses.

Presence:
It is the ability to tell when a resource is online and when it is not.

A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both “clients” and “servers” to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server. A typical example for a non peer-to-peer file transfer is an FTP server where the client and server programs are quite distinct, and the clients initiate the download/uploads and the servers react to and satisfy these requests.

P2P Usage

Peer-to-peer networking enables or enhances the following scenarios:

• File-sharing applications
• Distributed databases
• Distributed computing
• Collaboration
• Distributed games
• Instant messaging
• Ad hoc networks
• Streaming

Advantages of peer-to-peer networks

• Performance is better. Since peers talk to each other directly and there is no central server, so the load is only on those two machines unlike in client-server where all the clients have to connect through a central server, so if the number of connections increase, the server gets bogged down and becomes slower. (e.g. yahoo chat uses client-server model but Skype uses P2P)
• No single point of failure for data replication: distributed nature of peer-to-peer networks increases robustness in case of failures by replicating data over multiple peers, and by enabling peers to find the data without relying on a centralized index server. (Torrents wok on same principle, so if you are downloading a video file from a user, you are also connected to few other users who has the same file or have more of that file that you and you start downloading from all of there users. If one of them goes does you can also continue downloading from others.

Types of P2P Networks

• Centralized (e.g. Napster)
• File-sharing system
• Almost distributed system
• The location of a document is centralized
• The “transfer” is peer-to-peer
• Problems
• Robustness
• Scalability

• Distributed (e.g. KaZaa)

• Structured (e.g. CAN)
• Based on distributed hash tables (DHTs)
• No flooding
• Exact matches

• Unstructured (e.g. Gnutella)
• Two phases
• Localization + exchange
• No server
• Open source
• Distributed search
• The query is flooded
• Loop avoidance
• Limited TTL (not all nodes are visited)

Conclusions

P2P has applications in bioinformatics, education and academics, military, business, TV, Teleccommunications. It is an upcoming area but still has lot of secutiry issues which need to be resolved. But in the era of server cpu chewing applications, P2P is a welcome technology which will not only take the load of servers but in the process improve the quality of sharing of file and multimedia.

Popularity: 5% [?]