Pierre, the French fighter pilot

Pierre, a French fighter pilot, takes his girlfriend, Marie, out for a pleasant little picnic by the river Seine. It's a beautiful day and love is in the air, so Marie leans over to Pierre and says: "Pierre, kiss me!".

So our hero grabs a bottle of red wine and splashes it on Marie's lips.

"What are you doing, Pierre?" shrieks Marie.

"Well, my name is Pierre, the French Fighter Pilot, and when I have red meat I like to have red wine!"

His answer is good enough for Marie and things begin to heat up.

So she says : "Pierre, kiss me lower."

Our hero rips off her blouse, grabs a bottle of white wine and starts pouring it all over her tits.

"Pierre, what are you doing?"

"My name is Pierre, the French Fighter Pilot, and when I have white meat I like to have white wine!"

They resume their passionate interlude and things really steam up. Marie leans over once more and softly whispers into his ear, "Pierre, kiss me lower."

Pierre tears off her underwear, grabs a bottle of Cognac and sprinkles it all over her bush. He grabs a match and lights it on fire.

Patting the flames out furiously, Marie screams, "PIERRE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!?"

"My name is Pierre, the French Fighter Pilot, and when I go down, I go down in flames!"

Top 20 Engineers' Terminologies And What They Really Mean

1. A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES ARE BEING TRIED

-- We are basically p*ssing in the wind.

2. EXTENSIVE REPORT IS BEING PREPARED ON A FRESH APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM
-- We just hired three kids fresh out of college.

3. CLOSE PROJECT COORDINATION
-- We know who to blame.

4. MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH
-- It works OK, but looks very hi-tech.

5. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AS DELIVERED IS ASSURED
-- We are so far behind schedule that the customer is happy to get it delivered.

6. PRELIMINARY OPERATIONAL TESTS WERE INCONCLUSIVE
-- The darn thing blew up when we threw the switch.

7. TEST RESULTS WERE EXTREMELY GRATIFYING
-- We are so surprised that the stupid thing even works.

8. THE ENTIRE CONCEPT WILL HAVE TO BE ABANDONED
-- The only person who understood the thing quit.

9. IT IS IN THE PROCESS
-- It is so wrapped up in red tape that the situation is about hopeless.

10. WE WILL LOOK INTO IT
-- Forget it! We have enough problems for now.

11. PLEASE NOTE AND INITIAL
-- Let's spread the responsibility for the screw-up.

12. GIVE US THE BENEFIT OF YOUR THINKING
-- We'll listen to what you have to say... as long as it doesn't interfere with what we've already done.

13. GIVE US YOUR INTERPRETATION
-- I can't wait to hear this bull!

14. SEE ME or LET'S DISCUSS
-- Come into my office, I'm lonely.

15. ALL NEW
-- Parts not interchangeable with the previous design.

16. RUGGED
-- Too darn heavy to lift!

17. LIGHTWEIGHT
-- Lighter than RUGGED.

18. YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT
-- One finally worked.

19. ENERGY SAVING
-- Achieved when the power switch is off.

20. LOW MAINTENANCE
-- Impossible to fix if broken.

Shy guy

A very shy guy goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage he finally goes over to her and asks, tentatively, "Um, would you mind if I chatted with you for a while?" She responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs, "No, I won't sleep with you tonight!" Everyone in the bar is now staring at them. Naturally, the guy is hopelessly and completely embarrassed and he slinks back to his table. After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes. She smiles at him and says, "I'm sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I'm a graduate student in psychology and I'm studying how people respond to embarrassing situations." To which he responds, at the top of his lungs, "What do you mean, $200?"

Beer Facts

I came across this article in my igoogle. I think its quite a good one:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

• It was the accepted practice in Babylonia 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month" - or what we know today as the "honeymoon".
• Before thermometers were invented, brewers would dip a thumb or finger into the mix to find the right temperature for adding yeast. Too cold, and the yeast wouldn't grow. Too hot, and the yeast would die. This thumb in the beer is where we get the phrase "rule of thumb".
• In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's".
• Beer was the reason the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It's clear from the Mayflower's log that the crew didn't want to waste beer looking for a better site. The log goes on to state that the passengers "were hasted ashore and made to drink water that the seamen might have the more beer".
• After consuming a bucket or two of vibrant brew they called aul, or ale, the Vikings would head fearlessly into battle often without armor or even shirts. In fact, the term "berserk" means "bare shirt" in Norse, and eventually took on the meaning of their wild battles.
• In 1740 Admiral Vernon of the British fleet decided to water down the navy's rum. Needless to say, the sailors weren't too pleased and called Admiral Vernon, Old Grog, after the stiff wool grogram coats he wore. The term "grog" soon began to mean the watered down drink itself. When you were drunk on this grog, you were "groggy", a word still in use today.
• Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle", is the phrase inspired by this practice.

YCL does it again; abducts, tortures college staffers

There is no end to Maoist atrocities. Once a thief, always a thief. This is another news about Maoists abduction and toture.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Cadres of Maoist affiliated Young Communist League (YCL) abducted five persons including doctors and directors of the Biratnagar-based Nobel Medical College Sunday and physically tortured them for more than 14 hours in their custody before releasing them the next day.

Expressing alarm over the incident, Maoist leaders have said that action should be taken against those involved in the abduction and torturing of the six people. The party also made it clear that some of its cadres were misled by the disgruntled side of the college's management committee to take their vengeance against the six persons.

The abducted doctors and college authorities told a press meet organised in the capital city Tuesday that before releasing them their captors had threatened to kill them within hours if they disclosed anything about their abduction to the media.

"Last Saturday Maoist leader Barsha Man Pun (Ananta) had phoned us in Biratnagar and asked us to come to Kathmandu to settle the dispute regarding college shares with Prachanda and Baburam," Dr Gyanendra Giri, chairman of the college board of directors, told reporters at the conference, "Just as we came out of the airport on Sunday a group of about 30 Maoist cadres forcefully pushed us inside a jeep and took us away with them."

Dr Giri said they were then taken to Kamindanda of Kavre and after being blindfolded they were mercilessly beaten up from head to toe. "The YCL cadres did everything except kill us," he said. The other victims include members of the college's board of directors Navaraj Pandey, Umesh Pandey, Aditya Khanal and Janak Rijal. They were all freed at 4:30 am on Monday.

The victims claimed that the Maoists tortured them on the instruction of Dr Sunil Sharma, who had a dispute with board members regarding college shares after he was dimissed from membership of the board of directors as per a court verdict. They said YCL Valley chief "Sagar" and Maoist central leader "Ananta" were directly involved in their abduction.

According to Dr Giri, prior to the press meet Maoist chairman Prachanda and his deputy Dr. Baburam Bhattarai had apologised to them for the involvement of YCL cadres in the incident during their meeting at Maoist headquarters in the capital.

"Now we know that Sunil Sharma misled our cadres including Sagar. So we will take action against them," Dr Giri quoted Prachanda as saying.

According to Dr Giri, Bhattarai had requested not to disclose the affair to media and committed himself to supporting the victims. nepalnews.com ag Nov 21 07

Male Snake

Beauty and Beer

Two fellows have been at the bar now for quite a while, downing several mugs of beer, the first one had quite a bit by this time. They both look at the far end of the bar, in the direction of an unattractive woman who came in a while back.

The first fellow looks back at the second fellow and says, "Ya know, that woman is looking better and better, isn't she?"

The second fellow takes another look at the woman, then looks back at his friend and says, "Well, I guess what they say is true, then, eh?"

The first fellow asks, "Well, what DO they say?" The second fellow answers, "Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder!"

Passionate Kiss

After a long time, I found a joke that is really funny. Here is it for you:

----------------------------------------------------

After just a few years of marriage, filled with constant arguments,
Banta and his wife Preeto decided the only way to save their
marriage was to try counseling. They had been at each others throats for
some time and felt that this was their last straw.

When they arrived at the counselor's office, the counselor jumped right
in and opened the floor for discussion.

"What seems to be the problem?"

Immediately, Banta held his long face down without anything to say. On
the other hand, Preeto began talking 90 miles an hour describing all the
wrongs within their marriage.

After 10 minutes of listening to the wife, the counselor went over to
her, picked her up by her shoulders, kissed her passionately for several
minutes, and sat her back down.

Afterwards, Preeto sat there - speechless. He looked over at Banta who
was staring in disbelief at what had happened.

The counselor spoke to Banta, "Your wife NEEDS that at least twice a
week!"

Banta scratched his head and replied, "I can have her here on Wednesdays
and Saturdays."

Roles of gods in modern world

Brahma
Systems Installation


Vishnu
Systems Administration & Support


Lakshmi
Finance and Accounts consultant


Saraswati
Training and Knowledge Management


Shiva
DBA (Crash Specialist)


Ganesh
Quality Assuarance & Documentation


Narada
Data transfer


Yama
Reorganization & Downsizing Consultant


Chitragupta
IDP & Personal Records


Apsaras
Downloadable Viruses


Devas
Mainframe Programmers


Surya
Solaris Administrator


Rakshasas
In house Hackers


Ravan
Internet Explorer WWWF


Kumbhakarna
Zombie Process


Lakshman
Support Software and Backup


Hanuman
Linux/s390


Vaali
MS Windows


Sugreeva
DOS


Jatayu
Firewall


Dronacharya
System Programmer


Vishwamitra
Sr. Manager Projects


Shakuni
Annual appraisal & Promotion


Valmiki
Technical Writer (Ramayana Sign off document)


Krishna
SDLC ( Sudarshan Wheel Development Life Cycle )


Dharmaraj Yudhishthira
ISO Consultant (CMM level 5)


Arjun
Lead Programmer (all companies are vying for him)


Abhimanyu
Trainee Programmer


Draupadi
Motivation & Team building


Bhima
MAINFRAME LEGACY SYSTEM


Duryodhana
Microsoft product Written in VB


Karna
Contract programmer


Dhrutarashtra
Visual C++


Gandhari
Dreamweaver


100 Kauravas
Microsoft Service Packs and patches

Call these a law

Strange Sex Laws:

• In the quiet town of Connorsville, Wisconsin, it's illegal for a man to shoot off a gun when his female partner has an orgasm.
  

• It's against the law in Willowdale, Oregon, for a husband to curse during sex.
  

• In Oblong, Illinois, it's punishable by law to make love while hunting or fishing on your wedding day.
  

• Pennsylvania bans oral sex while wearing low quality brands of lipstick. It has been determined that low quality lipstick is a cause for penis cancer.
  

• No man is allowed to make love to his wife with the smell of garlic, onions, or sardines on his breath in Alexandria, Minnesota. If his wife so requests, law mandates that he must brush his teeth.
  

• Warn your hubby that after lovemaking in Ames, Iowa, he isn't allowed to take more than three gulps of beer while lying in bed with you -- or holding you in his arms.
  

• Bozeman, Montana, has a law that bans all sexual activity between members of the opposite sex in the front yard of a home after sundown-- if they're nude. (Apparently, if you wear socks, you're safe from the law!)

• In hotels in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, every room is required to have twin beds. And the beds must be a minimum of two feet apart when a couple rents a room for only one night. And it's illegal to make love on the floor between the beds!
  

• The owner of every hotel in Hastings, Nebraska, is required to provide each guest with a clean and pressed nightshirt. No couple, even if they are married, may sleep together in the nude. Nor may they have sex unless they are wearing one of these clean, white cotton nightshirts.
  

• An ordinance in Newcastle, Wyoming, specifically bans couples from having sex while standing inside a store's walk-in meat freezer!
  

• A state law in Illinois mandates that all bachelors should be called master, not mister, when addressed by their female counterparts.
  

• In Norfolk, Virginia, a woman can't go out without wearing a corset. (There was a civil-service job-- for men only-- called a corset inspector.)
  

• However, in Merryville, Missouri, women are prohibited from wearing corsets because "the privilege of admiring the curvaceous, unencumbered body of a young woman should not be denied to the normal, red-blooded American male."
  

• It's safe to make love while parked in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Police officers aren't allowed to walk up and knock on the window. Any suspicious officer who thinks that sex is taking place must drive up from behind, honk his horn three times and wait approximately two minutes before getting out of his car to investigate.
  

• Another law in Helena, Montana, mandates that a woman can't dance on a table in a saloon or bar unless she has on at least three pounds, two ounces of clothing.
  

• Lovers in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, should avoid satisfying their lustful urges in a parked car. If the horn accidentally sounds while they are frolicking behind the wheel, the couple can face a jail term.
  

• In Carlsbad, New Mexico, it's legal for couples to have sex in a parked vehicle during their lunch break from work, as long as the car or van has curtains to stop strangers from peeking in.
  

• A Florida sex law: If you're a single, divorced or widowed woman, you can't parachute on Sunday afternoons.
  

• Women aren't allowed to wear patent-leather shoes in Cleveland, Ohio-- a man might see the reflection of something "he oughtn't"
  

• No woman may have sex with a man while riding in an ambulance within the boundaries of Tremonton, Utah. If caught, the woman can be charged with a sexual misdemeanor and "her name is to be published in the local newspaper." The man isn't charged nor is his name revealed.

Prenuptial Agreement

A secretary for a foreign embassy was entertaining a wealthy foreign ambassador during lunch at a very expensive restaurant in New York.

The ambassador was so enthralled by the beauty and presence of this secretary that he asked her to marry him. The secretary was startled, but remembered that her boss told her never to insult foreign dignitaries, so she decided to let him down easy.

"I'll only marry you under three conditions."

"Anything, anything," said the ambassador.

"First, you must buy me a 14-karat gold wedding band with a 72 carat diamond, along with a 28-inch studded matching necklace for our engagement."

Without hesitation, the ambassador picked up his cellular phone, called his personal accountant, told him the instructions, and said, "Yes, yes, I buy, I buy!"

The secretary thought that her first request was too easy, so she thought of a more difficult situation.

"Second, I want you to build me a 58-acre mansion in the richest part of the Hamptons along with a 40-acre summer home in the sweetest vineyards of France."

The ambassador picked up his phone, called his personal broker in New York, then called another broker in France, and after his quick conversation, he said, "Yes, yes, I build, I build!"

The secretary was very startled, and knew she must think of a final request that would be impossible to live up to.

"Finally," she said. "I'll only marry you if you have a 10-inch penis."

A sad face befell the ambassador, and he cupped his face in his hands. After weeping in his native language for a few minutes, the ambassador slowly lifted his head and said, "Ok, ok, I cut, I cut!"

Creators admit UNIX, C Hoax

I hope this is just another 1st April prank.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nicklaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading `Bored of the Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien `Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called `A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P(" "),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating `VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesman have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.
Computerworld 1 April
contributed by Bernard L. Hayes

Direct link to this joke is http://www.joketribe.com/96/February/UNIXHoax.

If computer languages were car!

If computer languages were car!

* C is a racing car that goes incredibly fast but breaks down every fifty miles.


* C++ is a souped-up racing car with dozens of extra features that only breaks down every 250 miles, but when it does, nobody can figure out what went wrong.



* Java is a family station wagon. It's easy to drive, it's not that fast, and nobody wants to drive it.



* C# is a competing model of family station wagons. Once you use this, you're never allowed to use the competitors' products again.



* Perl is supposed to be a pretty cool car, but the driver's manual is incomprehensible. Also, even if you can figure out how to drive a perl car, you won't be able to drive anyone else's.



* Python is a great beginner's car; you can drive it without a license. Unless you want to drive really fast or on really treacherous terrain, you may never need another car.



* Ruby is a car that was formed when the Perl, Python and Smalltalk cars were involved in a three-way collision. A Japanese mechanic found the pieces and put together a car which many people think was better than the sum of the parts.



* Fortran is a pretty primitive car; it'll go very quickly as long as you are only going along roads that are perfectly straight. It is believed that learning to drive a Fortran car makes it impossible to learn to drive any other model.



* Cobol is reputed to be a car, but no self-respecting driver will ever admit having driven one.



* Assembly Language is a bare engine; you have to build the car yourself and manually supply it with gas while it's running, but if you're careful it can go like a bat out of hell.

Prank starts 25 years of security woes

NEW YORK - What began as a ninth-grade prank, a way to trick already-suspicious friends who had fallen for his earlier practical jokes, has earned Rich Skrenta notoriety as the first person ever to let loose a personal computer virus.

Although over the next 25 years, Skrenta started the online news business Topix, helped launch a collaborative Web directory now owned by Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape and wrote countless other computer programs, he is still remembered most for unleashing the "Elk Cloner" virus on the world.

"It was some dumb little practical joke," Skrenta, now 40, said in an interview. "I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I'd rather be known for this. But it's an odd placeholder for (all that) I've done."

"Elk Cloner" — self-replicating like all other viruses — bears little resemblance to the malicious programs of today. Yet in retrospect, it was a harbinger of all the security headaches that would only grow as more people got computers — and connected them with one another over the Internet.

Skrenta's friends were already distrusting him because, in swapping computer games and other software as part of piracy circles common at the time, Skrenta often altered the floppy disks he gave out to launch taunting on-screen messages. Many friends simply started refusing disks from him.

So during a winter break from the Mt. Lebanon Senior High School near Pittsburgh, Skrenta hacked away on his Apple II computer — the dominant personal computer then — and figured out how to get the code to launch those messages onto disks automatically.

He developed what is now known as a "boot sector" virus. When it boots, or starts up, an infected disk places a copy of the virus in the computer's memory. Whenever someone inserts a clean disk into the machine and types the command "catalog" for a list of files, a copy gets written onto that disk as well. The newly infected disk is passed on to other people, other machines and other locations.

The prank, though annoying to victims, is relatively harmless compared with the viruses of today. Every 50th time someone booted an infected disk, a poem he wrote would appear, saying in part, "It will get on all your disks; it will infiltrate your chips."

Skrenta started circulating the virus in early 1982 among friends at his school and at a local computer club. Years later, he would continue to hear stories of other victims, including a sailor during the first Gulf War nearly a decade later (Why that sailor was still using an Apple II, Skrenta does not know).

These days, there are hundreds of thousands of viruses — perhaps more than a million depending on how one counts slight variations.

The first virus to hit computers running Microsoft Corp.'s operating system came in 1986, when two brothers in Pakistan wrote a boot sector program now dubbed "Brain" — purportedly to punish people who spread pirated software. Although the virus didn't cause serious damage, it displayed the phone number of the brothers' computer shop for repairs.

With the growth of the Internet came a new way to spread viruses: e-mail.

"Melissa" (1999), "Love Bug" (2000) and "SoBig" (2003) were among a slew of fast-moving threats that snarled millions of computers worldwide by tricking people into clicking on e-mail attachments and launching a program that automatically sent copies to other victims.

Although some of the early viruses overwhelmed networks, later ones corrupted documents or had other destructive properties.

Compared with the early threats, "the underlying technology is very similar (but) the things viruses can do once they get hold of the computer has changed dramatically," said Richard Ford, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.

Later viruses spread through instant-messaging and file-sharing software, while others circulated faster than ever by exploiting flaws in Windows networking functions.

More recently, viruses have been created to steal personal data such as passwords or to create relay stations for making junk e-mail more difficult to trace.

Suddenly, though, viruses weren't spreading as quickly. Virus writers now motivated by profit rather than notoriety are trying to stay low-key, lest their creations get detected and removed, along with their mechanism for income.

Many of the recent malicious programs technically aren't even viruses, because they don't self-replicate, but users can easily get infected by visiting a rogue Web site that takes advantage of any number of security vulnerabilities in computer software.

Although worldwide outbreaks aren't as common these days, "believe it or not there's exponentially more malware today than there ever was," said Dave Marcus, a research manager for McAfee Inc.'s Avert Labs. "We find 150 to 175 new pieces of malware every single day. Five years ago, it would have been maybe 100 new pieces a week."

Symantec Corp. formed the same year Skrenta unleashed "Elk Cloner," but it dabbled in non-security software before releasing an anti-virus product for Apple's Macintosh in 1989. Today, security-related hardware, software and services represent a $38 billion industry worldwide, a figure IDC projects will reach $67 billion in 2010.

Even as corporations and Internet service providers step up their defenses, though, virus writers look to emerging platforms, including mobile devices and Web-based services like social-networking sites.

"Malware writers can't assume you are on PCs or won't want to limit themselves to that," said Dave Cole, Symantec's director of security response.

That's not to say Skrenta should get the blame anytime someone gets spam sent through a virus-enabled relay or finds a computer slow to boot because of a lingering pest. After all, there no evidence virus writers who followed even knew of Skrenta or his craft.

Fred Cohen, a security expert who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation in 1986 on computer viruses, said the conditions were right, and with more and more homes getting computers, "it was all a matter of time before this happened."

In fact, a number of viruses preceded "Elk Cloner," although they were experimental or limited in scope. Many consider Skrenta's the first true virus because it spread in the wild on the dominant home computers of its day.

"You had other people even at the time saying, `We had this idea, we even coded it up, but we thought it was awful and we never released it,'" said Skrenta, who is now heading Blekko Inc., a month-old startup still working in stealth mode.

And where was his restraint?

Skrenta replied: "I was in the ninth grade."

A View from the Top on Web 2.0

A View from the Top on Web 2.0

The recent publications of surveys on Web 2.0 usage by McKinsey, The
Economist or Forrester Research present interesting information on how
managers and CIO see the new technologies that have conquered the Web these
recent years. Let us look at their content before trying to analyse what
they could mean.

The McKinsey Quarterly

In January of this year, The McKinsey Quarterly conducted a survey on the
usage of Web 2.0 techniques with 2847 participants worldwide. Web 2.0 is
defined as a collection of technologies: Web services, collective
intelligence, peer-to-peer networking, social networking, RSS, podcast,
wiki, blog and mash-up. The most used technology was Web services (80%),
followed by collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking with a
percentage close to 50%. Those three technologies were also the one the
most cited when participants were asked to identify the three technologies
the most important for their business. Few participants say that their
companies are using more than two Web 2.0 technologies.

As far as satisfaction is concerned, 16% of the participants said that they
were very satisfied of the financial return on their investment in Web 2.0
technologies over the past 5 years and 35% were somewhat satisfied. Only 6%
were dissatisfied. For most of the respondents, the Web 2.0 tools were
mainly used to manage collaboration internally (75%), then to interface
with customers (70%). Interface with suppliers and partners concerns only
51% of the participants. In the discussions with participants included at
the end of the paper, blogs and RSS are the most mentioned tools to
communicate with customers.

The Economist Intelligence Unit

The report "Serious Business: Web 2.0 Goes Corporate" was produced by the
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The survey asked 406 senior executives
for their views on Web 2.0. The vast majority of respondents (79%) said
they saw potential of blogs and social networks to improve revenues and
reduce costs. In spite of this desire to cash in, many businesses cited a
lack of understanding of the technology as a barrier to using it. Over a
quarter of respondents said their IT departments lacked the competence
level to implement Web 2.0 applications effectively. While there may be
barriers to embracing Web 2.0, the study found that businesses expect it to
play a key role in how they communicate, both internally and externally.
The report found that 68% of executives considered it to be the single
biggest factor changing the way their company interacts with customers
while 49% said it would be the biggest factor affecting how employees
interact with each other and the business.

Forrester Research

A majority of IT buyers see Web 2.0 in a positive light, but CIOs would
prefer to buy the emerging technologies from larger incumbent vendors. That
is the situation according to a recent survey by Forrester Research of 275
IT buyers in June on Web 2.0 technologies. About 16% said they are hearing
about Web 2.0 from vendors all the time, and 50% said vendors pitch Web 2.0
technologies to them from time to time. Close to all respondents, 97%, said
they were familiar with Web 2.0, which is defined as a category of
technologies that includes wiki, blog, RSS, podcast, content tagging and
social-networking tools. Forrester says as the market grows it will
consolidate, which could please enterprise CIOs. Earlier this year, the
poll of about 120 enterprise CIOs on the Web 2.0 market found consolidation
is ideal for their plans with the technologies.

"Overall, 61% of respondents indicated that they would prefer both a suite
solution and a large incumbent vendor," Forrester concluded. "The deck
appears to be stacked against small pure-play vendors. Integration issues,
longevity concerns and the occasional lack of polish send CIOs looking for
other options." Survey respondents also want the technologies integrated
into their back-end systems, which leads them to want to see Web 2.0 suites
from incumbent vendors. Forrester found that 93% of the CIOs survey using
six Web 2.0 technologies would rather get the products from such vendors as
Microsoft, IBM or Oracle than from smaller, pure-play vendors, such as
Socialtext, NewsGator or MindTouch.

So what?

Many managers and CIO have a distant view from the Web 2.0 technologies.
Some adopted these tools just because it is "cool" or their manager has
read in the last edition of "Business Week" that they should do it. These
organisations tend to see Web 2.0 as a technological issue, but the real
challenge is to provide valuable content and modify interaction with users.
Installing a blog or an RSS feed is not really difficult. It is however
another aspect when you have to blog regularly, provide interesting content
and manage the feedback created by the posts. It is also interesting to see
that Web 2.0 is seen by the business as mostly a new way to interact with
customers or inside the organisation. It is not yet considered as something
that could be used in B2B relationships or in internal business
applications. This explains also why you can read about the "technological
gap" of traditional IT departments versus these technologies and the fact
that buyers will prefer solutions by large vendors. In large IT
organisation, there is a hesitation to let developers use "new" technology
from new vendors, this can be linked to the time it took to open source
technologies to be widely adopted.

Sources:

The McKinsey Quarterly (March / July 2007
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?
ar=1913&L2=16&L3=16&srid=17&gp=0
free access with registration)

Web 2.0 baffles businesses, says survey @ theregister.co.uk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/24/web_2_baffles_businesses/

IT buyers positive on Web 2.0, survey says / itbusinesss.ca
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=44248

courtsey: Methods and Tools August Newsletter article

Manifesto for Realistic Software Development

After participating to and observing many software development projects in recent years, we have reached the sad conclusion that there will never be better ways of developing software on this planet. While the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development may look appealing for inexperienced developers, serious professionals know that the real world is not similar to the "Little House on the Prairie"

Our experience has taught us to value:

* Processes and tools over individuals and interactions
* Comprehensive documentation over quality software
* Contract negotiation over customer collaboration
* Following THE initial plan over responding to change

That is, while you could be very lucky to work in a project with the items on the right (intelligent developers and customers working together, what are these agilists smoking?!?), you will never be fired for applying items on the left (or if you are, this is very unlucky).


Source: http://www.waterfallmanifesto.org/

People's movement??? What people's movement????

Now now now, the Maoist supremo has announced a new schedule for people's movement against the current government of which the maoist is also a part. This, to me, is a joke actually. If Prachanda is talking about people who they have tortured, extorted and affected in any negative way, then it sure is a people's movement - a movement to completely wipe out Maoist/Prachandist from Nepal. Actually, I have supreme regards for the great leader Mao, but not for the Maoists of Nepal. They are a bunch of simple people disillusioned by some top notches who have misinterpreted the philosophy of Mao.

The maoist city contact office is just few houses away from my home. What I see there everyday is quite a shocking news. The leaders of Maoists come and go chauffeured in air conditioned SUVs like Bolera, Pajero, Landcruiser etc whilst the commoners of the party are still walking on the pavement. They still do their "morning routines" i.e. shouting their war cries and waking the neighbours in wee hours of the morning. They still have a difficult time meeting their daily requirements. The maoist leaders, on the other hand, have 50 guards for their security, live in an ultra apartment, drive in air conditioned SUVs and still they get to pose their authority on the commoners.

There was a news few days back about the lifestyles of the Maoist leaders nowadays in the valley. They are cleanshaven, wear pressed and new clothes and have all the modern luxury items at their disposal. Surprisingly, they are taking "gifts" from businessmen and people who were accused of wrong doings by the court.

Well, if I see all this, I think of one question - where has all those ideals and philosophy gone in the maoist leaders which they preached did during their decade long war?

And there is YCL (Young Communist League), a subsidiary wing of Maoist. This term has become quite a common name in the media nowadays. Everyday, in the news, there at least one news about YCL. The news about them get hardly positive at all. They are extorting businessmen, kidnapping, asking for ransom, holding off the daily tasks in the government offices in the districts and so on. Moreover, they think as they are above law and order and enforce some kind of terror in the people. It is happened that if I join YCL, then I can escape any imprisonment even if I committed a murder.

As I think, all is pointing to the early demise of Maoist. If there will be any people's movement next, then it will be to wipe out the Maoist from the face of Nepal. There is a saying : enough is enough. Maoists are getting extremes nowadays making demands of all sorts both in the government and outside on the streets.

It is high time that all the people come together and launch a "people's movement" as suggested by the Maoist Supreme, but this time it should be against them.

Maoists attack police post in Nuwakot; MPs denounce attack

A tiger never stops to eat flesh. This holds true for the maoists. They are used to blasting off infrastructures and looting.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Maoists attack police post in Nuwakot; MPs denounce attack

A group of around 30 Maoist cadres attacked a police post at Fikuri of Nuwakot district Thursday afternoon and got away with two rifles and a pistol.

The Maoists beat up three policemen who were at the post when their colleagues went out, reports say.

They also looted 114 bullets from the police post.

The district police office has deployed a police team to Fikuri for investigation. Other details were not immediately available.

Meanwhile, lawmakers have denounced the Maoist attack in the police post.

Speaking at the parliament this evening, MP Prakash Saran Mahat said the Maoists were trying to disrupt constituent assembly polls by engaging in violent activities. He asked the government to investigate the incident and punish those involved in it.

MP Rajendra Lohani said the attack on police post in Nuwakot indicated that the Maoists had not fully renounced violence.

Maoist lawmaker Hit Bahadur Tamang said his party would launch investigation into the incident before anything officially. nepalnews.com mk/ ia Aug 09 07

Maoist dissidents accuse leadership of abandoning revolution

Problem with leadership??? Or too much exposure in media??? Politiocos/so called revolutionists turning into Paris Hilton type celebrities????

-------------------------------------------------

Maoist dissidents accuse leadership of abandoning revolution

A group of Maoist dissidents have started coalescing accusing the leadership of abandoning the revolution.

“If the current attitude persists, this will mean abortion of revolution,” claimed Laxman Tharu aka Roshan, who is said to be the coordinator of CPN-Maoists - United Rebels Front. He had earlier defected from the Maoist party where he used to head the Tharu wing.

Claiming that his group will continue the revolution, Tharu boasted in his talks with Kantipur TV that he has army strength of three battalion at his immediate disposal. Saying there are 4000 workers with him, Tharu added that PLA fighters in cantonments are also in his contact.

“Most of the deserters have come into our contact,” he further claimed.

The front has given a month long ultimatum to the Maoists to walk out of the government. It has demanded destruction of India-constructed dams, which have caused flooding on the Nepali side. It has also demanded action based on Rayamajhi commission report and has threatened to take “people’s action” if the government does not pay heed to their demands. nepalnews.com sd Aug 04 07

Potter, at the Speed of Light

NEW YORK -

Laurence J. Kirshbaum, the former head of Warner Books, remembers publishing one of the biggest sensations of its time: Alexandra Ripley's "Scarlett," the authorized sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind."

Ripley's novel, with its answer to a decades-old tease - whether Scarlett and Rhett end up together - was a guaranteed, instant best seller, an object of fascination awaited by millions. And it deserved the fullest first printing that the market could handle, in 1991: 500,000 copies.

"It made sense at that level," says Kirshbaum, now a literary agent, who added that printing any more books right away would have been "unreasonable."

The rollout for the final Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," makes the fuss for "Scarlett" look primitive. Potter's first printing was 12 million. Its sales after the first hour exceeded the first printing of "Scarlett." After 24 hours, worldwide sales had topped 10 million, with 8.3 million in the United States alone.

But the numbers do more than capture the special appeal of "Deathly Hallows": They reflect how the market has changed. Production and communication systems were far slower at the time of "Scarlett," Amazon.com did not exist, superstores were only getting started and price clubs weren't selling nearly as many books as they are now.

No book before "Deathly Hallows" sold so quickly. No book could have.

"With 'Potter,' you have almost a perfect storm of events," says Steve Ross, president and publisher of Collins, a division of News Corp.-owned HarperCollins. "You have changes in technology and capacity, the synergy that worked so effectively between the books and the movies, and, most importantly, ... they were books of startling quality."

"I surely would hesitate before trying to do something like 12 million copies for Dan Brown's next book, but thanks largely to 'Potter,' we can think about numbers we wouldn't have imagined before," says Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group, which released the mega-selling "The Da Vinci Code."

Creating Potter demand was easy; a brief announcement of the release date, July 21, immediately sent "Deathly Hallows" to the top of best seller lists. Supply was the challenge, coordinated in the United States by a trio at Scholastic Inc. who worked together on the last four Potter books: Ed Swart, director of operations and distribution; Andy Yablin, vice president of global logistics; and Francine Colaneri, vice president of manufacturing and corporate purchasing.

The release of "Deathly Hallows" was a timed worldwide gala, with the guest of honor embargoed until midnight. Scholastic's planning began at least a year ago, even before Rowling had finished the book, when Colaneri began consulting with printers about possible production dates, getting a sense of when they could handle such an unprecedented order.

Colaneri would not say exactly when Rowling turned in her manuscript - the publication date was announced in February. But she did say that thanks to digital scanning (instead of using film, under the old system), the time spent getting a template ready was cut in half from what it would have been a decade ago - "a matter of weeks," she says of the current pace.

Scholastic benefited from technology that didn't exist in the 1990s. E-mail meant that lengthy, complex documents could be transmitted instantly, and legibly, unlike a fax or letter. Satellite tracking allowed the publisher to know the exact location of every delivery truck.

"We could see that a trailer was stuck in traffic and running two hours late," Yablin says. "We could then ring up a store and tell them when to expect the delivery. In the old days, we had to wait to hear from the store."

Book production itself was accelerated, Colaneri says. Before Potter, lengthy hardcovers had to pass through binding equipment twice and then were joined together. Starting with the fifth Potter, the 600-plus-page "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," manufacturers altered their presses to allow the entire text through at one time.

"That's something that happened because of Potter," Colaneri says.

Since the first Potter book came out, in 1997, every aspect of the business - from shipments to retailing - has consolidated and expanded. Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble each received more than 1 million pre-orders, unimaginable a decade ago. There are fewer (but larger) printing companies, truck carriers and wholesalers.

"From strictly a distribution perspective, fewer distributors or distribution center delivery destinations at increased volumes per destination is clearly more efficient," says Swart, who added that "It should be remembered that the early Harry Potter books were first sold and embraced by the independents and the traditional bookstore chains, and only after they attained their eventual popularity were they picked up by the wider distribution network."

The numbers for "Deathly Hallows" were historic for any book, but especially for hardcovers. Random House, Inc. spokesman Stuart Applebaum was a publicist in the 1970s for Bantam Books, a leading paperback publisher, when it had enormous success with "The Exorcist" and "Jaws."

Helped by blockbuster movie adaptations, both books sold millions of copies, including at supermarkets and other nontraditional outlets. But paperbacks - smaller and cheaper - were distributed far more widely at the time than hardcovers. And they sold millions over a period of months, not hours.

"It wasn't conceivable for a hardcover book to have that kind of sales, even for a book as sought after as `Jaws,'" Applebaum says. "At that time, the mass market paperback was the format for multimillion sellers. But the mass merchandisers weren't selling as many books, and at the same velocity, as they do today."

A decade ago, the maximum first printing for a hardcover would have been about 1 million or 2 million, for a new John Grisham or Stephen King, says Laurie Brown, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Harcourt. Each new Potter effectively raised the roof - from 3.8 million copies for Book 4, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," to 10.8 million for Book 6, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," to 12 million for "Deathly Hallows."

"Everything has to be firing at full power, all the time, for something like Potter to work," Brown says. "We all wonder whether there will be a `next' Harry Potter, but one thing we learned from this is that each Harry that came out helped us practice for the next Harry."

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam's Speech in Hyderabad

This is the speech India's outgoing president Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam gave in Hyderabad. It is very thought provoking and very much true. This too applies to our country Nepal. I request my fellow citizen to read this and take it by heart.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Think.

"I have three visions for India. In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of freedom. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.

My second vision for India is development. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self- reliant and self-assured. Isn't this incorrect?

I have a third vision- India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closely and consider this the great opportunity of my life.

I see four milestones in my career:

Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India's first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist. After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India's guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994. The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss. The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon. One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients.

There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram calipers and took them to the orthopedic center. The children didn't believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. Load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss! Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them.

Why?

We are the first in milk production.

We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.

We are the second largest producer of wheat.

We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan; he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so negative?

Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?

I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation. Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read;

Otherwise, choice is yours.

You say that our government is inefficient.

You say that our laws are too old.

You say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.

You say that the phones don't work; the railways are a joke, The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.

You say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.

You say, say and say.

What do you do about it? Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name - Yours. Give him a face - yours. You walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are. You pay $5 (approx. Rs.60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Peddler Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM.

You comeback to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity. In Singapore you don't say anything, Do you?

You wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai.

You would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah.

You would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, "see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else."

You would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, "Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost."

You wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand.

Why don't you spit paan on the streets of Tokyo?

Why don't you use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston?

We are still talking of the same you.

You who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India?

Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr.Tinaikar, had a point to make. "Rich people's dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place," he said. "And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels?

In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen do that here?" He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.

We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues Like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? "It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forgo my sons' rights to a dowry." So Who's going to change the system?

What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and you. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money. Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too....I am echoing J.F.Kennedy's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.....

"Ask what we can do for India and do what has to be done to make India what America and other western countries are today."

NASA Selects SGI to Provide Largest Shared-Memory System in the World

SGI Altix 4700 with 4TB Memory To Power NAS Technology Refresh Program
July 23, 2007: 09:00 AM EST

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SGI and NASA today announced that the agency has selected a record-setting SGI(R) Altix(R) supercomputer in its evaluation of next-generation technology to meet future high-performance computing (HPC) requirements. The system was acquired as part of NAS Technology Refresh (NTR), a four-phase procurement process that eventually will replace the Columbia supercomputer system, powered by SGI Altix.

NASA's new SGI Altix system is expected to be installed in August at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The new system will be the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of Linux(R) -- creating the largest Linux single system image (SSI) in the world. A larger SSI can accelerate scientific research by making all of the system's processors and memory available to solve a single problem, or several problems at once.

Driven by 1,024 Dual-Core Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, the new system will generate 13.1 TFLOPs of compute power. The system's dual-core processors allow more computing power per square foot, enabling NASA to pack more computing power into its supercomputing center. NASA also acquired an ultra-dense 240TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage 10000 system to efficiently handle the massive data storage requirements.

The multi-faceted NTR evaluation includes assessments of supercomputer performance on a broad set of NASA applications, programmability and usability, ease of administration, reliability, and the quality of the partnership with the vendor in solving problems and advancing technology. The NAS facility technology upgrade effort used a comprehensive benchmark suite to characterize system performance on NASA-relevant applications and to measure job throughput for a workload in a complex HPC environment.

"Supercomputers play a critical role in many NASA missions, including new space vehicle design, global climate studies and astrophysics research," said Dr. Piyush Mehrotra, who leads the NAS applications group and is steering the technology upgrade effort. "We look forward to evaluating SGI's latest HPC offerings as part of our long-term technology refresh effort."

The SGI Altix architecture accommodates the broad range of the projects pursued by NASA scientists, whose work demands both cluster and shared-memory computing architectures. NAS supports scientists and engineers throughout the United States who work on projects such as designing spacecraft, improving weather and hurricane models, and understanding the behavior of the sun. Many NASA projects require large, complex calculations and sophisticated mathematical models that can be efficiently handled only by a supercomputer.

"NASA scientists already rely on SGI Altix systems for a range of research, from designing safer, more advanced spacecraft to understanding the long-term effects of climate change," said Robert "Bo" Ewald, CEO, SGI. "These researchers pursue work that is essential not only to the United States, but to the world at large. SGI looks forward to continuing to work with NASA as it seeks leading-edge HPC compute and data management solutions to meet its evolving needs."

SGI | Innovation for Results(TM)

SGI is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a complete range of high-performance server and storage solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI solutions help customers solve their computing challenges whether it's enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at http://www.sgi.com.

SGI, Altix, the SGI cube and the SGI logo are registered trademarks of SGI in the United States and/or other countries worldwide. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries. Intel and Itanium are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding SGI technologies and third-party technologies that are subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to rely unduly on these forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future or current performance. Such risks and uncertainties include long-term program commitments, the performance of third parties, the sustained performance of current and future products, financing risks, the ability to integrate and support a complex technology solution involving multiple providers and users, and other risks detailed from time to time in the company's most recent SEC reports, including its reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.

$100 Laptop Goes into Mass Production

Original link: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2007/gb20070724_323018.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
-----------------------------------------

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation has announced that its ruggedised laptop, the XO, is going into mass production.

The laptop will be manufactured in Shanghai by Quanta. The production line will be turned on in August for testing procedures, and the first mass-produced laptops for use in schools will be made in October.

The XO laptop, which OLPC plans to sell eventually for $100 per machine, is designed to improve the educational opportunities of children in the developing world. The costs of manufacture are currently estimated by OLPC at $175 per laptop.

OLPC's chief technology officer Mary Lou Jensen said: "Next year we should have a cost-reduced version. We're trying to take innovation in electronics, drive costs down and not use bloated software. This is the opposite of what the PC industry does traditionally."

The laptops have been designed to withstand extremes of heat and moisture, and to be energy efficient in harsh environments. The screen, which OLPC claims is bright enough to read in sunlight, stays on while the rest of the motherboard turns off, saving energy. Laptop batteries can be recharged using a rip cord, a crank, a pedal, a car battery, or solar panels - in fact, anything that can produce between 10 and 20 volts of electricity, Jensen said.

The organisation has no immediate plans to begin commercial production or licensing of its technologies, although it has been approached by major electronics manufacturers, according to Jensen.

OLPC said it has received orders for three million machines but refused to say which countries are involved.

The Sugar open source operating system used on the laptops still has some minor bugs, according to Jensen. "Firefox got better and better after it was released. There's always bugs in any operating system," she said, "but the software is running just fine."

OLPC last week added Intel to its board. The organisation plans to continue to use AMD processors in its laptops but it is currently "working with Intel to figure out how to create complementary product lines", Jensen said.

Solar House has sparked interest across Germany

I found this news in Mathaba. I think its quite interesting news.

-------------------------------------------------------

---

Solar house has sparked interest across Germany

Posted: 2007/07/19
From: Source


With its focus on solar energy, Rolf Disch's house demonstrates the progress that can be made by promoting, developing and using renewable energy.

International Herald Tribune (AP)

FREIBURG, Germany — Solar architect Rolf Disch's house looks like an upside down Apollo spacecraft and serves as a testing ground for his design ideas. Its large windows look out on his projects realized throughout Freiburg.

The home slowly turns with the sun, to charge a billboard-sized solar panel on the roof, and the waterless toilet emits an occasional malodorous whiff. Hanna Lehmann, Disch's wife, said she does not mind these features but admitted she would like to have a freezer, which would eat up too much electricity for her husband.

"I miss my Campari on ice," she said.

Disch and Freiburg are pioneers in energy saving, and a growing number of eco-tourists flock here to admire his house, known as the Heliotrope, from the Greek words for "sun" and "turn." Across the city, solar panels are on everything from the soccer stadium to entire neighborhoods with homes that produce more energy than they use.

"Energy was too cheap for people to take it seriously, but with the rise in energy costs and the IPCC report people see that they have to look for other solutions now," Disch said, referring to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which documented scientific evidence for global warming.

With its focus on solar energy, Freiburg demonstrates the progress that can be made by promoting, developing and using renewable energy. But the city of more than 200,000 in the sunny southwestern corner of the country also is an example of how far technology in the solar sector has to go — it produces less than 1 percent of its electricity from the sun.

Residents boast that Freiburg's solar power roots go back to a protest in 1975 against plans for a nuclear plant.

"They didn't want nuclear power in their backyards and fields," said Thomas Dresel of the city's Environmental Protection Agency, noting that not only students but farmers demonstrated.

The protest also drew experts who helped develop alternative energy solutions, Dresel said. The region now has more than 900 solar installations and is home to leading research institutions and companies working to make renewable energy more practical.

In 1981, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems was founded in Freiburg, and a number of like facilities followed. Fraunhofer now employs some 500 people and is Europe's largest solar energy research institute.

Germany as a whole has followed Freiburg's lead in trying to save energy, encouraged by the environmentally friendly Green Party that was in former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's governing coalition. In 2000, Germany decided to phase out nuclear plants by 2020, and it has adopted legislation promoting the development and use of renewables.

Renewable energy made up more than 5 percent of the country's total primary energy supply in 2006, according to its Federal Environment Ministry. The government's goal is to increase the share of electric power sourced from renewables to 12.5 percent by 2010 and 20 percent by 2020.

Wind energy remains the country's leading renewable for electricity generation, but the use of solar has increased to approximately 750 megawatts installed in 2006, up from 83 megawatts in 2002, according to the German Solar Industry Association.

The solar industry is becoming a €5 billion ($6.9 billion) a year business that builds more than 50 percent of the world's installed solar panels. About 43,000 people work in the industry, according to the association.

The federal government has spent more than €1.3 billion (US$1.74 billion) in photovoltaic research since the late 1990s.

"Germany is technologically leading in solar technology, most solar plants are installed here and, what is even more important, are produced here," said Carsten Koernig, head of the German Solar Industry Association. "And this is the decisive factor, because other countries will follow and then we want to supply these huge growth markets with solar technology 'made in Germany.'"

In Freiburg, the city government started encouraging saving power as early as 1986 when it called for greater energy efficiency, new technology and more renewable sources. Karin Schneider, Fraunhofer's spokeswoman, said this decision was "a direct reaction" to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine the same year.

"The community here was very open to renewables," she said. "And there has always been a good collaboration between us, the city council and other institutes and facilities."

Freiburg's regular sunshine — over half the year is sunny — is better for the city's image as an innovator of solar energy than for increasing the electricity generated. Dresel said the level of sunshine gets significantly higher much farther south, "but it doesn't really matter if we're here or in the rest of Europe."

Although the vast majority of residents still live under traditional tile roof homes, those built in the renovated Vauban district have been required to follow low-energy standards.

Vauban includes passive houses — with triple-thick glass windows and walls of compressed natural materials — that help create all the energy they will need. These cost around 15 percent more than a conventional house, according to Disch.

The passive houses are located within a district with strict limits on car traffic, where families on bikes take up the streets, some pulling carts to carry goods and others leading their dogs on leashes.

Some critics ridicule the scene, joking that passive home residents make their own breakfast cereals, shunning store-bought brands. Others find irony shining from the solar panels mounted on a parking garage.

Despite the jokes, a renewable-minded culture has been developing among Freiburg's people.

"Plus energy" apartments designed by Disch atop the Solar Ship, a mixed residential and commercial building that contains an organic grocery and his architectural firm, each have solar panels that create four times more energy than the flats consume.

The headquarters building of solar panel maker Solar-Fabrik applies similar techniques for the workplace. It features a photovoltaic facade and a generator run on vegetable oil that together creates all the energy needed for the building.

The power company Badenova says about 10 percent of its customers now opt for a higher bill to support greater use of regional and renewable energy.

Another initiative combines solar technology and sport. The city's soccer team showers after games with water heated by solar panels on the stadium roof. The team gave season tickets to investors in the project.

Other panels on the stadium earn money by feeding electricity into the power grid and were financed by a partnership of local team SC Freiburg and Badenova, which offered public shares in the project.

For all Freiburg's efforts to use renewable energy, Dresel of the Environmental Protection Agency admits with a half-kidding reluctance that solar only comprises 0.74 percent of the city's electricity supply.

"For the time being, its still very small, but the qualitative aspect is very strong," Dresel said. "This creates momentum for the future."

Renewable energy in the Freiburg region makes up almost 4 percent of energy production. The city has set a target of 10 percent of renewable usage by 2010. Freiburg already has set some low energy requirements for home buyers.

It helped that Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act, passed in 2000, set a healthy price to be paid for renewable energy fed into the electricity grid, and that figure was revised upward in 2004.

But even in this pioneering city for renewable energy, Disch complains that he has to be as creative in getting money for his projects as he is in designing them.

"It's getting less difficult," he said, "but it's still hard."

Maoists to abstain from voting on budget

A monkey never makes his/her own house neither allows other to make their house. This is what maoists of Nepal are proving themselves to be. They are protesting the budget prepared by the govt. of which they are also the part.

---------------------------------------------

Maoists to abstain from voting on budget

The CPN-Maoists have decided to refrain from the voting on the budget presented by the government of which it is a part. Analyzing that the coalition government of which the party is an important constituent ‘may fail if it votes against the budget’, the Maoists will ‘facilitate’ in ratifying it by abstaining from voting on the budget.

Chief Whip of the CPN-Maoist Dinanath Sharma had by calling a press meet Tuesday made public the party’s 16-point objection on the budget. “The budget is not in tune with the spirit of the people’s war and the people’s movement,” he said.

The coalition partners have expressed dissatisfaction over this decision of the Maoists and have termed it a dualistic nature of the Maoists. nepalnews.com ag July 18 07

Use YCL to provide security for CA election, says Prachanda

I think Prachanda thinks himself as the only smart guy here in Nepal. That bullshit brag.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Use YCL to provide security for CA election, says Prachanda

Maoist chairman Prachanda has said that using only the Armed Police Force (APF) to provide security for the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections would be 'suicidal.'

He said that Maoist-affiliated Young Communist League (YCL) should also be mobilised alongside the APF for the purpose.

Talking to reporters in Butwal on Monday morning, Prachanda claimed that even former US president Jimmy Carter – during his visit to Nepal last month – had suggested using YCL and police together.

Prachanda conceded that his party's relation with UNMIN had soured a bit in recent weeks over the second stage verification of PLA. He said he suspects there is conspiracy not to integrate PLA into Nepali Army (NA).

Prachanda also slammed the government for allocating budget to the King. nepalnews.com sd Jul 16 07

Political Joke

We used to tell this joke with some modification pointing to the sardar community. I hardly knew this would fit in with the nepali politicians. Here is the nepali politicians' version.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Being under tremendous pressure to keep the alliance of political parties together and not knowing who was capable of helping him run the country the PM (Girija Prasad Koirala) took a trip to India and on his trip he had a 'Darshan' with Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. During the meeting he asked her, "How do you manage to keep the alliance of parties together and run the country so well and so effortlessly?

"That's easy," she replied, "I identify the intelligent leaders in the alliance and keep them close to me and always take their guidance and advise."

"But how can I tell whether they are intelligent or not?" the PM inquired.

"You ask them a riddle," she replied, and with that she pressed a button and said, "Would you please send Manmohan Singh in."

When Manmohan arrived, Sonia said, "I have a riddle for you to answer for me. Your parents had a child and it was not your sister and it was not your brother. Who was this child?"

Manmohan replied, "That 's easy. The child was me."

"Very good," said the Sonia, "Thank you. You may go, now."

So the PM came back to Kathmandu and called his main coalition ally Madhev Nepal, hoping he would pass the riddle test as he really wanted and needed him in the days ahead to keep the alliance together. He said to him, "I have a riddle for you, and the answer is very important. Your parents had a child and it was not your sister and it was not your brother. Who was this child?"

Nepal replied, "Yes, it is clearly very important that we determine the answer, as no child must be left behind when we build the new inclusive Nepal. Can I deliberate on this for a while?"

"Yes," said the PM, "I'll give you four hours to come up with the answer."

So Nepal went and called a meeting of the rest of the seven parties, other than the Maoists as he didn't want them to know such an important question let alone the answer, and asked them the riddle. But after much discussion and many suggestions, none of them had a satisfactory answer. So he was quite upset, not knowing what he would tell the PM.

As Nepal was going back to Baluwatar, he saw Prachanda approaching. So he said, "Comrade, can you answer this riddle for me. Your parents had a child and it was not your sister and it was not your brother. Who was the child?"

That's easy, said Prachanda, "The child was me."

"Oh thank you," said Nepal, trying not to let him know what a big problem he had solved and brushed him aside, rushing off with a big smile to Baluwatar.

So Nepal got to Baluwatar he went rushing in to see the PM and he proudly said, "I think I know the answer to your riddle. The child was PRACHANDA!"

"No, you idiot!" shouted the PM in disgust, "You can not even solve the riddle how can I count on you… The child was MANMOHAN SINGH !!!"