Discuss Technology, Discovery, Environment and Science http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:31:22 -0500 1440 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=63492
The company reckons that it can stop up to $1 billion a year in credit card fraud with its new revolutionary invention.
]]> Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:34:07 -0500 63492 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=63491 Scientists have developed an emotional robot capable of mimicking facial expressions in real time, a development that opens up the possibility of lifelike robotic companions one day. Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:29:57 -0500 63491 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=62805
New Gadgets
This week, Google opened Gmail to further user modification by allowing users to integrate Google Gadgets in Gmail's left-hand navigation bar.

The company has provided two sample Gadgets -- Google Docs and Calendar (modular mini applications). While one provides a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you in a meeting, the other shows recently opened Google Docs files and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail.

Emoticans
Emoticons have been available on Google Chat for quite some time, but this month they made their appearance on Gmail

Gmail Mobile version 2.0
Google has introduced Version 2.0 of Gmail for Mobile for J2ME-supported devices such as the Nokia N95, as well as BlackBerry phones.

Google Goggles
For late night party drunkers Google has come up with a free email service that will check if users are really sure of want they are sending in the late night Friday email.

Canned Responses
These will allow Gmail users to save a reply they are writing as a `canned response' and then quickly select one of these responses while replying to a future e-mail.

Canned Response feature is ideal for those tired of copying and pasting the same reply every time someone emails with a common question.

Contact manager
Google has also made a few changes to the contact manger in Gmail. As a part of this change, Google has moved previously auto-added contacts back into Suggested Contacts. Only contacts that a user has edited, imported or added to a group will remain in My Contacts.

Advanced IMAP controls
Advanced IMAP controls let users further streamline their Gmail IMAP experience. Users can choose which labels to sync in IMAP. This is useful if one finds mail client choking on Gmail/All Mail folder. The IMAP protocol allows messages to be marked for deletion, a state where a message is still present in the folder but slated to be deleted the next time the folder is deleted.
]]> Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:09:41 -0500 62805 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=62804 Flying cars may soon leap from the world of science fiction into reality.

A team at Moller International is designing a flying car, called 'Autovolantor', based on a 200,000-pounds Ferrari 599 GTB model, which it claims would be in the market in just two years' time.

According to them, the vehicle will have the ability to take off vertically and hover, thanks to its eight powerful thrusters which direct air down for take off. Vents then tilt so the car can fly forward.

The flying car is expected to be able to do 100 mph on the ground and 150 mph in the air. The calculated airborne range is 75 miles and ground range is 150 miles.
]]> Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:50:58 -0500 62804 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=61866
October 17, 2008
By Judy Mottl

Ahead of the hotly anticipated T-Mobile G1 smartphone's arrival in stores next week, early reviews show not everyone is convinced that the Android-powered handset is ready to take on the Apple iPhone or muscle onto the turf of Windows Mobile or the BlackBerry.

Yet among reviewers and industry watchers, there's still little doubt that the G1 offers big potential for driving smartphone innovation.

One of the earliest reviews of the HTC-manufactured device, which was first introduced by Google and T-Mobile last month, came from the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg, who called it a "worthy competitor" to the iPhone in his column this week. But Mossberg also saw several areas in need of improvement in its software and its hardware.

The New York Times's David Pogue described the handset's Android platform as "polished enough to give Windows Mobile an inferiority complex the size of Australia." Yet Pogue's scorecard similarly illustrated that the G1 isn't perfect. He gave it an A-minus for software, a B-minus for phone capabilities and a B-minus for network capabilities.

Avi Greengart, mobile device research director at Current Analysis, came to a similar conclusion on the G1 -- calling it an iPhone "challenger" that "falls short in every area."

The early reviews come as the mobile phone industry is seeking to come to grips with an influx of powerful, new devices. That's driven in part by competition: wireless carriers are finding themselves relying on increasingly advanced smartphones to woo more subscribers and increase revenue from lucrative non-voice services, like Web access. T-Mobile is the exclusive G1 carrier and AT&T is currently the exclusive iPhone network in the U.S.

Among those new consumer-oriented devices is the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone, which has rocketed in popularity since its debut a year ago and sparked a trend in consumer handsets toward touchscreens and easy access to third-party applications.

Not surprisingly, the iPhone also spawned a slew of competitors, among which the Google-backed Android platform is one of the most closely watched.

Hits and misses

And despite some initial criticism, the G1's early reviewers still find a good deal about it to praise.

"This is a competitive product," Greengart told InternetNews.com, noting G1's "beautiful" touchscreen. The G1 features a 3.2-inch LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 320 x 480 resolution. The iPhone has 3.5-inch widescreen, multi-touch display with 480 x 320 resolution.

Greengart also complimented the G1's Web browsing capability -- built off the same engine as the iPhone's, he said -- and its GPS application that provides real-time street views for navigation.

On the downside, Greengart wasn't impressed with the G1's girth, describing it as "heavier and bulkier" than the iPhone. The G1 weighs in at 5.6 ounces, and is 4.6 inches tall, 2.16 inches wide and.62 inches in thickness. Apple's iPhone weighs 4.7 ounces and measures 4.5 inches in length, 2.4 inches wide and .48 inches thick.

Greengart also noted that the G1 offers no easy way to sync with non-Google mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, which enterprise users may find frustrating. The latest edition of the iPhone connects to Microsoft Exchange for access to e-mail, calendar and contacts.

"What Android does offer with the G1 is [smartphone development] potential, and some of these [downsides] will hopefully change with development going forward," Greengart said.

It's that potential that some say could result in Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) ultimately striding ahead of Apple and other smartphone players, such as Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), Palm (NASDAQ: PALM), Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Motorola (NYSE: MOT), in the battle for smartphone sales and mobile service revenue.

Experts have lauded Google's Android platform for being one of the most open to date in smartphone development. Both the search giant and T-Mobile have promised they will not control third-party applications and development efforts -- allowing even Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications such as Skype. In contrast, Apple's iPhone is tightly controlled when it comes to application deployment, as is RIM's BlackBerry platform.

"Google needs to nurture the development community and provide tools and support for Android [to be a smartphone leading platform]," Greengart said, adding Google "needs to stay true to its promise of complete transparency."

In the meantime, the G1, the first of a slew of Android-based handsets expected within the next year, is the perfect smartphone for Google fans, Greengart said -- given how it provides easy access to Google's online services. In fact, G1 buyers must set up a Google account to activate the smartphone. Users of the current-generation iPhone, meanwhile, need to establish an account with Apple's music store, iTunes, for accessing music, video and third-party applications.

In his review this week Mossberg said the G1's physical keyboard -- which the iPhone lacks -- is the "biggest differentiator" between the two handsets. The G1 has a slide-out, five-row QWERTY keyboard, while the iPhone offers an on-screen keyboard.

Yet Mossberg called the G1 a "very good first effort" that will appeal to T-Mobile customers, as the carrier currently does not offer any other touchscreen smartphones.

The iPhone still reigns as the top multimedia smartphone, Mossberg added, noting the G1's music player, "while adequate, isn't as nice" as the iPhone's built-in iPod functionality. He also noted the G1's lack of a built-in video player, although a "rudimentary" one can be downloaded from the Android Market store for third-party applications.

Overall, Mossberg described the G1 as chiefly appealing to users who either want to stay with T-Mobile or who want a physical keyboard, "but want to be part of the new world of powerful pocket computers."

In his review the Times's Pogue also takes Google to task over the G1's music features, writing that it's where Android "really falls down." To transfer music to the device, G1 users must sync the device to a PC and manually drag and drop files from their computers.

Pogue also called the G1 "homelier" than the iPhone, which -- like many wares from the Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple -- has received high marks for its sleek product design.

"Nobody looks at G1 and says, 'Ooooh, I gotta have that,'" he wrote.

Source: http://www.internetnews.com/mobility/artic...ts+Weigh+In.htm]]> Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:44:45 -0400 61866 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=60364 www.h2daily.com would be a good source, any of you know any other like this throw here.
]]> Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:41:56 -0400 60364 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=60074 I have no high temp facilities at this time so I'm limited to low temp alloys.
Any suggestions or comments on how to accomplish this project?
]]> Sun, 21 Sep 2008 18:40:08 -0400 60074 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=59055
All these subatomic nightmares, and more besides, are pure science fiction ... with a bit of science woven in.

The black-hole nightmare in particular has touched off a wave of hysteria over the Large Hadron Collider, complete with lawsuits, tearful protests and death threats.

Several rounds of scientific studies, considering increasingly outlandish scenarios, have ruled out the black-hole threat. The evidence shows that the collider is absolutely safe, and poses no chance of cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the hysteria continues: Part of the reason for that is that scientists say it's conceivable that a less threatening breed of subatomic black holes could be created. But another factor is that there's so much science-fiction appeal to the tale of the black hole that ate the earth.

In fact, the idea goes back at least several years before Europe's CERN particle-physics lab even gave the go-ahead for building the LHC. Physicist/author David Brin used the black-hole scenario as a plot device in his eco-disaster novel "Earth," published in 1990 (and Brin has said the idea didn't originate with him).

Campaigners worked the cosmic-catastrophe theme into their opposition to Fermilab's Tevatron in Illinois (starting in the mid-1990s), the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York (starting in the late '90s) and the LHC (starting a couple of years ago).

Those real-life atom-smashers, in addition to the never-built Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, figure in a bevy of subatomic scare stories. Perhaps the eeriest one is "Einstein's Bridge," by University of Washington physicist John Cramer.

It's eerie on at least two counts:

• Cramer worked on the novel in the early to mid-1990s, before and after Congress' 1993 cancellation of funding for the Superconducting Super Collider. The Texas facility as well as the LHC (which was approved for construction around the same time) figure in the plot, along with some real-life and quasi-real-life characters from politics and particle physics. I won't spoil the plot, other than to say it involves aliens from two different metaverses and a desperate effort to go back in time and make sure the supercollider never got built. (The effort apparently worked.)
• Speaking of time travel, Cramer has been in the midst of a real-life experiment in retrocausality - a kind of backward flow of information from the future to the past. I first wrote about this experiment almost two years ago, and Cramer recently told me that he's still trying to get the apparatus to work. Perhaps what Stephen Hawking said is true: Nature abhors a time machine.

Cramer, who's also on one of the research teams using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, has often said that he'll write either a scientific paper or a novel about backward causality.

"If the experiment works, then I will be on to some very interesting roads to success," Cramer said, "but I'll probably end up writing the novel rather than making the discovery. In a sense, doing the experiment is background for the novel."

The Large Hadron Collider just might provide Cramer and other science-savvy novelists with new material for their stories. Probably not about world-threatening black holes, though. That plot has been around for years.

Like most scientists, Cramer says the same theory that suggests black holes might be created at the LHC also says they would fizzle out instantly - which he explained in his "Alternate View" column for Analog magazine, more than five years ago.

In fact, Cramer doubts that the LHC will ever find black holes. He's more hopeful that physicists will detect their main target, a fundamental particle called the Higgs boson.

"It's fairly likely that they will see the Higgs at some point, but it will be a while before they can make a case for it," he told me. "It's fairly unlikely that they'll find black holes. And it's also fairly likely they'll see something they didn't expect at all."

Are you looking for more thrills and chills? Here are 10 other novels that explore the fictional frontiers of particle physics. Some of them have already been featured as selections for the Cosmic Log Used-Book Club.

• "Angels and Demons": Dan Brown's thriller is set mostly in Rome, but the opening chapters - including the theft of an antimatter bomb - bring the sleuthing symbolologist from "The Da Vinci Code" to the Large Hadron Collider. The movie adaptation, starring Tom Hanks, is due out next year. Check out this reality check from CERN, and this update on how filmmakers came to the real LHC to prepare for the big-screen version.
• "Blasphemy": Here's another fast-moving thriller about a fictional supercollider named Isabella (a reference to the never-completed ISABELLE collider in New York). The physicists think they're hearing the voice of God, while militant Christians think Armageddon is nigh. What on earth inspired Douglas Preston to write this one? Click here for the spoiler.
• "Cat's Cradle": Kurt Vonnegut's classic is a 20th-century tale of the Midas touch. In this version, the catastrophe is brought on by ice-nine, a fictional form of water that freezes over even at high temperatures. The ice-nine concept has been evoked in the discussions over whether exotic bits of matter known as strangelets could turn everything it touches into strangelets as well - a doomsday scenario that experts have judged to be all wet.
• "Cosm": The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is the setting for Gregory Benford's novel about subatomic smash-ups that create little big bangs and new universes.
• "Final Theory": Mark Alpert's novel is one of the latest entrants in the subatomic-scare genre. It's based on the idea that Albert Einstein actually came up with a unified field theory - but saw that the applications were so deadly that it had to be kept secret. Some critics have seen parallels to "The Da Vinci Code," but the crucial scenes focus on the Tevatron rather than the Templars.
• "Flashforward": In Robert J. Sawyer's novel, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider set out to find the Higgs boson, but when they turn on the atom-smasher, they find instead that everyone on Earth blacks out for two minutes and gets a sneak preview of life 21 years later. Was it all just a hallucination?
• "The God Particle": Richard Cox's novel should not be confused with the nonfiction book of the same name that was written by Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman. In this tale, the quest for the Higgs boson at the Superconducting Super Collider sparks strange new powers in a regular guy who doesn't understand what's going on. Kind of like a "Heroes" episode.
• "A Hole in Texas": Herman Wouk ("War and Remembrance") blends politics, particle physics and a little hanky-panky in his novel about a veteran of the Superconducting Super Collider project who's called back into service when Washington fears that the Chinese might be working on a boson bomb.
• "Manifold: Time": The first book in Stephen Baxter's science-fiction trilogy suggests that faint messages can be sent back in time from the end of the universe, using coded neutrinos. And that's not all: If you read only one novel about spacefaring squids, this is the one.
• "Timescape": This Gregory Benford novel is also about time-traveling messages - in this case, faster-than-light tachyons sent back from an environmentally wrecked world in 1998 to a nuclear magnetic resonance experiment in 1963. How can you reconcile quantum mechanics with information flowing backward in time? Sounds like it's John Cramer's retrocausality experiment all over again.

Source: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/200...08/1360189.aspx]]> Tue, 09 Sep 2008 01:25:06 -0400 59055 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=58753 09.03.2008

Microsoft and Citrix Systems Inc. are close and getting closer when it comes to delivering virtual desktops to the enterprise.


Just one week after buddy Citrix disclosed its own application virtualization plans, Microsoft has detailed a virtual desktop infrastructure strategy with Citrix in a lead role.

Microsoft will release to manufacturing the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) this week. After that, Citrix and Microsoft will offer a joint virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) suite sometime this quarter. The VDI product will include Citrix XenDesktop 2.1, which includes the Citrix connection broker (Microsoft has decided not to build it own broker), running on Hyper-V, Microsoft VMM and other System Center products.

It's unclear today how Microsoft and Citrix will rationalize overlaps in their respective product lines when they debut the VDI suite. Both companies sell application and server virtualization products and terminal services on their own, for example.

The close alignment is good news for enterprises on several fronts, experts say. Citrix, via its Presentation Server, now called XenApp, has been in the business of virtualizing applications and desktops longer than anyone.

The virtual desktop is a great story for anyone who has already invested in Citrix, said Nelson Ruest, principal at Resolutions Enterprises Ltd., a Victoria, Canada-based consulting firm that specializes in Microsoft technology.

"XenDesktop runs on any platform," Ruest said. "We've had a lot of customers who use both Citrix and VMware so it's great to see that they can move forward with the investments they've already made."

And Microsoft is smart to hook its wagon to Citrix because the vendor's technology is used by more enterprises than any other vendor's to virtualize desktops, added Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a Boulder, Colo.-based consulting firm.

On the other hand, Microsoft has long been in the desktop lifecycle management business, which is a discipline that Mann said he believes will encompass desktop virtualization.

"Providing applications to the end user has always been a function of desktop lifecycle management, and the player I see leading this space is Microsoft, but there are others such as Symantec and LANDesk," Mann said.

Application Virtualization 4.5

Microsoft will also release to manufacturing Application Virtualization 4.5, the SoftGrid technology it acquired when it bought Softricity. It will be part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2008 R2 release, and be available in the next few weeks.

The release works with its line of System Center management products and has a feature called dynamic suite composition that allows virtualized applications to share middleware components. Two virtualized applications can now share a copy of a SQL Server database, for example, rather than having to configure and test the database for both applications.
In addition, a kink has been worked out that prevented two virtualized applications from talking to each other.

"All the major players -- ThinApps [now owned by VMware], Altiris' Software Virtualization Solution [now owned by Symantec] and Microsoft all had the problem of applications not being able to integrate when they were virtualized unless they were packaged together before they were deployed," Ruest said. "That was a big challenge they've all worked out."

Challenges ahead

Microsoft's Scott Woodgate, director of Windows client product management, said he believes that application virtualization will dominate the desktop just as hardware virtualization dominates the server today. Application Virtualization 4.5 should play a big role in the game, he said.

Well, perhaps not, unless Microsoft offers the technology to all customers and not just those with Software Assurance, Ruest said. MDOP and, in turn, Application Virtualization 4.5 is available only to customers with Software Assurance licensing maintenance agreements.

"If Microsoft makes [Application Virtualization] 4.5 generally available as its own SKU, then it could take the world by fire," he said.

More licensing tweaks

Last month, Microsoft introduced broad licensing changes for application virtualization by allowing IT managers to move 41 server applications between servers and server farms without having to pay more for licenses. But, by comparison, it has made few changes in desktop virtualization.

Now Microsoft is tweaking its Vista enterprise desktop license. Today, IT shops can download a virtual machine with a corporate image onto a USB stick for employees to take home, for example. A corporate image can now be put on a contractor's laptop, and employees who own their own laptop can download a virtual machine that has a standard corporate image. All of these scenarios are now allowed under the customer's Vista enterprise desktop license agreement.

For service providers, Microsoft is licensing its Application Virtualization 4.5 technology to let third-party vendors stream applications to the client as part of its service provider licensing agreement.

Source: http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/tip/0,28...amp;uid=8199171]]> Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:42:22 -0400 58753 http://www.dreamteammoney.com/index.php?showtopic=53713

A biotechnology company based in north California declared on Wednesday 21 May that it will clone dogs for the five highest bidders in an auction conducted online. The offer has been criticized by some ethicists who worry that this could next lead to human clones. The BioArts International which is based in the Mill Valley will start the bid from $100,000 for the dog cloning service.

It is one infamous South Korean scientist found to have conducted fake research, who has been roped in by the firm to conduct the dog cloning. The chief executive of Bio Arts, Lou Hawthorne earlier operated a company called Genetic Savings & Clone which offered to clone pet cats for $ 50,000. The company shut down in 2006 as not many were keen on shelling out so much for the service.

Lou Hawthorne explained over the telephone that his former company also offered another service, that of the storage of pet DNA for future possible clones, which indicated that the demand for dog cloning was robust. Hawthorne said that the level of intensity on the dog side just dwarfed what they saw on the cat side. For its new project, BioArts has collaborated with a South Korean research team that recently cloned Missy, the dog of the Hawthorne's family that died in 2002.]]> Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:10:06 -0400 53713