Archive for the 'Google' Category
AT&T has brought down new Terms of Service for its network customers. From now on, AT&T can terminate your connection for conduct that “tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” So AT&T customers aren’t allowed to write/podcast/vlog critical things about AT&T, its billing-practices, or its coopera
read more | digg story
« 
There
’s a growing happiness gap between men and women, says this New York Times article. According to new research, women today report being less happy than men
read more | digg story
« Technorati Tags: women
There
’s a growing happiness gap between men and women, says this New York Times article. According to new research, women today report being less happy than men
read more | digg story
« Technorati Tags: women
A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together
to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope.
The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China
and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per
second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said
that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to
instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that
‘the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely
separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.’ So he’s
almost right by cliaming they created ‘a telescope almost as big as the
Earth.’
You can see above a map showing the location of the seven telescopes
involved in this networking experiment (Credits: Image created by Paul
Boven, Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) in The Netherlands;
Satellite image: Blue Marble Next Generation, courtesy of NASA Visible Earth) For more clarity, here is a link to a CSIRO page where you’ll have access to a much larger version of this map (3,456 x 2,048 pixels, 3.81 MB).
The CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation)
news release adds that the initial data was captured by a single
22-meter dish located near Coonabarabran in New South Wales, known as
the Mopra telescope. This telescope is operated by the Australia Telescope National Facility (ANTF) and you can find more details here.
The observations were then transmitted to Xi’an, China, ‘where they
were watched live by experts in advanced networking at the 24th APAN
(Asia-Pacific Advanced Network) Meeting,’ and streamed to Europe.
The technique used to link the various telescopes is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI, Wikipedia link). According to Tasso Tzioumis,
VLBI operations and development manager at CSIRO’s ANTF, this technique
used to take weeks or months. “‘We used to record data on tapes or
disks at each telescope, along with time signals from atomic clocks.
The tapes or disks would then be shipped to a central processing
facility to be combined,’ Dr Tzioumis said.”
For more information, you can take a look at the European VLBI Network. And if you want to see some pictures of the telescopes involved in this experiment, you can read this Environment News Service article, “First Instant World Telescope Views Distant Galaxy.”
You’ll also find that the EXPReS project, known formally as the Express
Production Real-time e-VLBI Service, aims to implement up to 16
simultaneous 1 Gb per second network connections between the central
processor at JIVE and partner telescopes across Europe, Asia,
Australia, South Africa, South America and the United States by 2009.
It looks like astronomers are highly connected people…
Sources: CSIRO news release, September 5, 2007; and various websites
You’ll find related stories by following the links below.
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Google« Do you know about Google Updater?
There is a good chance you have it installed on your computer already
as it’s bundled with other Google products like the browser toolbar.
Well, in what seems to be an obvious attempt to steal even more users
away from Microsoft Office products, Google just added “StarOffice” to
the the list of available downloads that can be installed and updated
automatically through Google Pack. If you download it directly from
Sun, it will cost you around $70, however Google appears to be giving
it away for free — or at least there isn’t a nag screen or an obvious
way to upgrade to a full version.
Web applications like Google Docs are very useful in many
circumstances, but for power users who need, or prefer, a fat client to
do their work — there was no real choice but to keep using Microsoft
Office if they don’t know about this suite.
StarOffice, which includes their own version of Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, is developed by Sun — but Google has been throwing resources at it
since October, 2005. I am going to assume there is a plugin under
development that lets users create documents on their PC and
synchronize them with their online counterpart through Google Docs.
StarOffice already has hooks into Google’s search and desktop
capabilities.
It should be interesting to see if this move helps Sun get more
exposure for StarOffice. What do you think? Are you surprised Google
made this product available through the Google Updater? Will this
affect Microsoft in any way?
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Google« Though it’s not specific to Gmail, or easily exploitable by users
outside your network, a session hijacking demonstration by Robert
Graham showed hackers how to take over a users email account by simply
sniffing network traffic and stealing cookies. In the demonstration,
George Ou volunteered an email address
he created to be hacked into — and it didn’t take long. Within seconds,
the attacker was able to use a point-and-click interface to get access
to this account and send a message from it.
The demonstration highlights how easy unsecure network traffic can
make for some very simple session hijacking. One way you can avoid
having your Gmail account taken over by people on your network is to
use the SSL version — be warned though, any website that relies heavily
on cookies for authentication remains vulnerable.
If you don’t have Greasemonkey installed, or you still use Internet Explorer, get used to typing “https://www.gmail.com”
to check your email — doing this will safeguard yourself from prying
eyes through network sniffing. If you have Firefox, you can install this Greasemonkey script to ensure your session always remains in “secure mode”.
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Google« Google is looking to pay out
some very decent commissions to Americans that become “Google Business
Referral Representatives”. How much are they looking to spend? Well, up
to $10 dollars for each business identified. It’s not hard work either
— pull up to a business, take some pictures, and write down some
information (like the address). You could rattle through tens or
hundreds of businesses per day depending on how hard you work.
Now, let’s put this into perspective. According to a quick Google
search, there are over 24 million businesses in the United States
today. If this number is accurate, Google must be prepared pay out
between $48 to $240 million dollars for this information. If I had as
much money as Google, I would wonder why it took me so long to figure
this one out. This is loose change when you consider they are spending
several billions on companies like YouTube and DoubleClick — and the
quality of information they will get will be top notch.
Exactly a year ago, minus about a week, I suggested that Google do this very thing.
Last August, they launched “Google Coupons”, a service that I thought
could be useful if businesses actually knew about it. I doubt they
explicitly listened to me, but I’m glad they decided to give this a
shot — I really do think it’s the best way to get the word out to local
businesses.
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Google« It sounds like Google will be announcing
a Canadian version of Google Finance — they announced it a bit too
early and replaced the original article article with a “woops, check
back soon” statement.
Oops. We hit the button too soon. Watch for news about Google Finance in Canada next Tuesday.
But thanks to the internet (or Google should I say?) once it’s on
the web, it’s usually permanent — no matter how hard you try. So here
is the full text of their “deleted” post for your enjoyment.
Posted by Dion Loy, Google Finance engineer
We’re pleased to introduce Google Finance Canada, a localized version
of Google Finance tailored specifically, as you might guess, for
Canadian investors. Canadians are the second largest group of Google
Finance users, and as a Canadian myself, I’m excited to see Canadian
financial information presented in the familiar easy to use Google
Finance format. This new edition includes:
Top financial news from Canadian sources
Search with a preference for Canadian companies
Front-page high level economic data from the Bank of Canada
Portfolios in Canadian currency (or the currency of your choice)
Equity data from the Toronto Stock Exchange, TSX Venture Exchange, and Canadian mutual funds
In addition, stock quotes and charts for Canadian-listed companies are now available through the Google.com web search
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Google« Google has introduced some new interface elements to Google
Spreadsheets that make it easier to lock rows and sort columns. The new
sortbar is a
draggable break between your headers and data — it’s an intuitive way to create locked columns and to sort rows.
Another new feature is quick add. When you highlight a group of
numeric cells, you will find their sum in the lower right corner — this
change makes using spreadsheets a bit more interactive by allowing the
user to perform a simple calculations without writing formulas like
“=SUM(A5:A8)” in another cell.
Previously, Google Spreadsheets was only available on supported
browsers — now, regardless of your browser (supported or not), you are
at least able to view your spreadsheets. It’s too bad this application
isn’t 100% compatible with all browsers, but this is a good compromise
for now.
Read more about the new features here.
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Google« Technorati Tags: google
Highrankings.com that gives us some juicy details about what it takes to get a good rank on Google and what tools we can look for soon. Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, attended the annual SEMNE (Search Engine Marketing New England) and “spilled the beans” on some things we can expect to see.
A new META tag will soon provide a way for webmasters to have time sensitive information appear in Google results for only as long as they are needed — there are many practical applications for this including pages that may contain sale information (ie. Item is on sale until August 31st). That sale page would be absolutely useless after August 31st, so why should it remain indexed?
Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!
If you wanted to do something like this in the past, you would have needed to maintain a very large robots.txt file — which I am sure nobody would want to spend their time doing.
Of course, this tag will not be supported by other search engines right away, but it never hurts to start using it where it makes sense. I am guessing the syntax will be something along the lines of <META name=”unavailable_after” content=”Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:01 GMT”>.
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Google« Technorati Tags: google, free, web, search engines, man
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