YASSINE WORLD

Finally, A Rich American Destroys The Fiction That Rich People Create The Jobs

2011-12-14T04:53:00.000-08:00

Henry Blodget | Dec. 12, 2011, 10:38 AM | 187,589 | 444

Image: 60 Minutes

America's real job-creators...who can't afford to create any jobs.

In the war of rhetoric that has developed in Washington as both sides blame each other for our economic mess, one argument has been repeated so often that many people now regard it as fact:

Rich people create the jobs.

Specifically, entrepreneurs and investors, when incented by low taxes, build companies and create millions of jobs.

And these entrepreneurs and investors, therefore, the argument goes, can solve our nation's huge unemployment problem — if only we cut taxes and regulations so they can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs.

In other words, by even considering raising taxes on "the 1%," we are considering destroying the very mechanism that makes our economy the strongest and biggest in the world: The incentive for entrepreneurs nd investors to build companies in the hope of getting rich and, in the process, creating millions of jobs.

Now, there have long been many problems with this argument starting with

Taxes on rich people (capital gains and income) are, relative to history, low, so raising them would only begin to bring them back in line with prior prosperous periods, and
Dozens of rich entrepreneurs have already gone on record confirming that a modest hike in capital gains and income taxes would not have the slightest impact on their desire to create companies and jobs, given that tax rates are historically low.

So this argument, which many people regard as fact, is already flawed.

But now a super-rich and super-successful American has explained the most important reason the theory is absurd, while calling for higher taxes on himself and people like him.

Image: National Taxpayers Union

THE TRUTH ABOUT TAX RATES: Click to see how low today's really are.

The most important reason the theory that "rich people create the jobs" is absurd, argues Nick Hanauer, the founder of online advertising company aQuantive, which Microsoft bought for $6.4 billion, is that rich people do not create jobs, even if they found and build companies that eventually employ thousands of people.

What creates the jobs, Hanauer astutely observes, is a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company's customers.

The company's customers buy the company's products, which, in turn, creates the need for the employees to produce, sell, and service those products. If those customers go broke, the demand for the company's products will collapse. And the jobs will disappear, regardless of what the entrepreneur does.

Now, of course entrepreneurs are an important part of the company-creation process. And so are investors, who risk capital in the hope of earning returns. But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of customers' ability and willingness to pay for the company's products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that "rich entrepreneurs and investors" create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

(Or, to put it even more simply, it's like saying that a seed creates a tree. The seed does not create the tree. The seed starts the tree. But what creates the tree is the combination of the DNA in the seed and the soil, sunshine, water, atmosphere, nutrients, and other factors that nurture it. Plant the seed in an inhospitable environment, and it won't create anything. It will die.)

So, then, if what creates the jobs in our economy is, in part, "customers," who are these customers? And what can government policy do to make sure these customers have more money to spend to create demand and, thus, jobs?

The customers of most companies, Hanauer points out, are ultimately the gigantic middle class — the hundreds of millions of Americans who currently take home a much smaller share of the national income than they did 30 years ago, before tax policy aimed at helping rich people get richer created an extreme of income and wealth inequality not seen since the 1920s.

She'd like to create jobs. But she can't afford to anymore. Click to see how extreme inequality has gotten.

The middle class has been pummeled, in part, by tax policies that reward "the 1%" at the expense of everyone else.

(It has also been pummeled by globalization and technology improvements, which are largely outside of any one country's control.)

But, wait, aren't the huge pots of gold taken home by "the 1%" supposed to "trickle down" to the middle class and thus benefit everyone? Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?

Yes, that's the way it's supposed to work.

Unfortunately, that's not the way it actually works.

And Hanauer explains why.

Hanauer takes home more than $10 million a year of income. On this income, he says, he pays an 11% tax rate. (Presumably, most of the income is dividends and long-term capital gains, which carry a tax rate of 15%. And then he probably has some tax shelters that knock the rate down the rest of the way).

With the more than $9 million a year Hanauer keeps, he buys lots of stuff. But, importantly, he doesn't buy as much stuff as would be bought if that $9 million were instead earned by 9,000 Americans each taking home an extra $1,000 a year.

Why not?

Because, despite Hanauer's impressive lifestyle — his family owns a plane — most of the $9+ million just goes straight into the bank (where it either sits and earns interest or gets invested in companies that ultimately need strong demand to sell products and create jobs). For a specific example, Hanauer points out that his family owns 3 cars, not the 3,000 that might be bought if his $9+ million were taken home by a few thousand families.

If that $9+ million had gone to 9,000 families instead of Hanauer, it would almost certainly have been pumped right back into the economy via consumption (i.e., demand). And, in so doing, it would have created more jobs.

Hanauer estimates that, if most American families were taking home the same share of the national income that they were taking home 30 years ago, every family would have another $10,000 of disposable income to spend.

That, Hanauer points out, would have a huge impact on demand — and, thereby job creation.

It's time we stopped mouthing the fiction that "rich people create the jobs."

Rich people don't create the jobs.

Our economy creates jobs.

We're all in this together. And until we return to more reasonable tax policies that help the 99% instead of just the 1%, our economy is going to go nowhere.

Al-Jazeera et le triomphe de la propagande télévisuelle

2011-11-03T14:08:00.001-07:00

Al-Jazeera, la chaîne d’information qatariote qui s’est imposée en 15 ans dans le monde arabe comme une source originale d’information, s’est soudainement engagée dans une vaste opération d’intoxication visant à renverser les régimes libyen et syrien par tous les moyens. Ce revirement, démontre Thierry Meyssan, n’est pas le fruit de la conjoncture, mais a été préparé de longue date par des personnalités qui ont su cacher leurs intérêts personnels au grand public. Révélations...

La chaîne qatariote Al-Jazeera a annoncé la démission de son directeur général, Wadah Khanfar, et son remplacement par un membre de la famille royale, cheikh Hamad Ben Jassem Al-Thani, le 20 septembre 2011.
Cheikh Hamad est un cadre de Qatargas. Il a travaillé pendant un an à Paris-La Défense au siège de Total. Il présidait par le passé le Conseil d’administration d’Al-Jazeera.
Cette nouvelle est présentée dans la presse atlantiste de trois manières différentes : soit comme une démission forcée et une reprise en main de la chaîne par l’État, soit comme une vengeance de l’Autorité palestinienne après la diffusion des Palestinian Papers, soit enfin comme une conséquence des fuites de Wikileaks exposant certaines des connexions de M. Khanfar avec les États-Unis.
Si toutes ces interprétations peuvent contenir une part de vérité elles masquent la raison principale : le rôle du Qatar dans la guerre contre la Libye. Ici, un retour en arrière est nécessaire.

L’origine d’Al-Jazeera : une volonté de dialogue

Al-Jazeera a été conçu par deux personnalités franco-israéliennes, les frères David et Jean Frydman, après l’assassinat de Yitzhak Rabin, dont ils étaient proches. Selon David Frydman [1], l’objectif était de créer un média où des Israéliens et des Arabes pourraient débattre librement, échanger des arguments, et apprendre à se connaître, alors que ceci était interdit par la situation de guerre et bloquait toute perspective de paix.
Pour créer la chaîne, les frères Frydman bénéficièrent d’un concours de circonstances : la compagnie saoudienne Orbit avait conclu un accord avec la BBC pour créer un journal télévisé en arabe. Mais les exigences politiques de la monarchie absolue saoudienne se révélèrent vite incompatibles avec la liberté de travail des journalistes britanniques. L’accord fut résilié et la majorité des journalistes arabisants de la BBC se retrouvèrent au chômage. Ils furent donc récupérés pour fonder Al-Jazeera.
Les frères Frydman tenaient à ce que leur télévision soit perçue comme une chaîne arabe. Ils parvinrent à convaincre le nouvel émir de Qatar, Hamid bin Khalifa al-Thani, qui, avec l’aide de Londres et de Washington, venait de renverser son père —accusé de sentiments pro-Iraniens—. Cheikh Hamad bin-Khalifa comprit rapidement les avantages qu’il pouvait tirer à se trouver au centre des discussions israélo-arabes, qui duraient depuis un demi-siècle déjà et s’annonçaient encore longues. Au passage, il autorisa l’ouverture à Doha d’un bureau du ministère israélien du Commerce, à défaut de pouvoir ouvrir une ambassade. Surtout, il vit l’intérêt pour le Qatar de concurrencer les riches médias saoudiens pan-arabes et de disposer d’un média qui critique tout le monde, sauf lui.
Le montage financier initial prévoyait à la fois une mise de fonds des frères Frydman et un prêt de l’émir de 150 millions de dollars sur 5 ans. C’est le boycott des annonceurs organisé par l’Arabie saoudite et l’absence de revenus significatifs de la publicité qui a conduit à modifier le schéma initial. En définitive, l’émir est devenu le bailleur de fonds de la chaîne et donc son commanditaire.

Des journalistes exemplaires

Durant des années, l’audience d’Al-Jazeera a été tirée par son pluralisme interne. La chaîne s’enorgueillissait de laisser dire une chose et son contraire. Sa prétention n’était pas de dire la vérité, mais de la faire surgir du débat. Son émission phare, le talk show de l’iconoclaste Faisal al-Qassem, intitulé « L’Opinion contraire », se régalait à bousculer les préjugés. Chacun pouvait trouver des motifs de se réjouir de certains programmes et d’en déplorer d’autres. Peu importe, ce bouillonnement interne a eu raison du monolithisme de ses concurrents et a bouleversé le paysage audio-visuel arabe.
Le rôle héroïque des reporters d’Al-Jazeera en Afghanistan et durant la troisième guerre du Golfe, en 2003, et leur travail exemplaire contrastant avec la propagande des chaînes satellitaires pro-US, transforma l’image de la chaîne d’une station polémique en média de référence. Ses journalistes payèrent au prix fort leur courage : George W. Bush hésita à bombarder les studio de Doha, mais fit assassiner Tareq Ayyoub [2], arrêter Tayseer Alouni [3] et incarcérer Sami el-Hajj à Guantanamo [4].

La réorganisation de 2005

Cependant les meilleures choses ont une fin. En 2004-05, après le décès de David Frydman, l’émir décida de réorganiser complètement Al-Jazeera et de créer de nouveaux canaux, dont Al-Jazeera English, alors que le marché mondial se transformait et que tous les grands États se dotaient de chaînes d’information satellitaires. Il s’agissait clairement d’abandonner l’effervescence et les provocations du début, de capitaliser une audience atteignant désormais les 50 millions de téléspectateurs, pour se positionner comme un acteur du monde globalisé.
Cheikh Hamad bin-Khalifa(photo) fit appel à un cabinet international qui lui avait dispensé une formation personnelle en communication. JTrack s’était spécialisé dans l’entraînement des leaders arabes et d’Asie du Sud-Est pour leur apprendre à parler le langage de Davos : comment donner aux Occidentaux l’image qu’ils ont envie de voir. Du Maroc à Singapour, JTrack a ainsi formé la plupart des responsables politiques soutenus par les États-Unis et Israël —souvent de simples fantoches héréditaires— pour en faire des personnalités médiatiquement respectables. L’important n’est pas qu’ils aient quelque chose à dire, mais qu’ils sachent manier la langue de bois globale.
Toutefois, le Pdg de JTrack, ayant été appelé à de hautes fonctions gouvernementales en Afrique du Nord, il dût se retirer avant d’avoir achevé la transformation du Al-Jazeera Group. Il confia la suite des opérations à un ancien journaliste de Voice of America qui travaillait depuis plusieurs années déjà pour la chaîne qatariote et appartenait à la même confrérie musulmane que lui : Wadah Khanfar.
À la fois professionnellement compétent et politiquement sûr, M. Khanfar s’attacha à donner une couleur idéologique à Al-Jazeera. Tout en donnant la parole à Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, l’ancien porte-parole de Nasser, il fit de cheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi —qui avait été déchu de sa nationalité égyptienne par Nasser— le « conseiller spirituel » de la chaîne.

Le virage de 2011

C’est avec les révolutions en Afrique du Nord et dans la péninsule arabique que Wadah Khanfar a brutalement modifié la ligne éditoriale de sa rédaction. Le Groupe a joué un rôle central dans l’accréditation du mythe du « printemps arabe » : les peuples, avides de vivre à l’occidentale, se seraient soulevés pour renverser des dictateurs et adopter des démocraties parlementaires. Rien ne distinguerait les événements de Tunisie et d’Égypte, de ceux de Libye et de Syrie. Quant aux mouvements du Yémen et de Bahreïn, ils n’intéresseraient pas les téléspectateurs.
En réalité, les Anglo-Saxons se sont efforcés de surfer sur des révoltes populaires pour rejouer le vieil air du « printemps arabe » qu’ils avaient organisé dans les années 1920 pour s’emparer des anciennes provinces ottomanes et y installer des démocraties parlementaires fantoches sous contrôle mandataire. Al-Jazeera a donc accompagné les révoltes tunisienne et égyptienne pour écarter la tentation révolutionnaire et légitimer de nouveaux gouvernements favorables aux États-Unis et à Israël. En Égypte, il s’est même agi d’une véritable récupération au profit d’une seule composante de la contestation : les Frères musulmans, représentés par le prêcheur star de la chaîne… cheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Indignés par cette nouvelle ligne éditoriale et par le recours de plus en plus fréquent au mensonge [5], certains journalistes comme Ghassan Ben Jedo claquent la porte.

Qui tire les ficelles de l’info ?
Quoi qu’il en soit, il faut attendre l’épisode libyen pour que les masques tombent. En effet, le patron de JTrack et mentor de Wadah Kanfhar n’est autre que Mahmoud Jibril (le "J" de "JTrack", c’est "Jibril"). Ce manager aimable, brillant et creux, avait été conseillé à Mouammar Kadhafi par ses nouveaux amis états-uniens pour piloter l’ouverture économique de la Libye après la normalisation de ses relations diplomatiques. Sous le contrôle de Saif el-Islam Kadhafi, il avait été nommé à la fois ministre du Plan et directeur de l’Autorité de développement, devenant de facto le numéro 2 du gouvernement, et ayant autorité sur les autres ministres. Il mena au pas de charge la dérégulation de cette économie socialiste et la privatisation de ses entreprises publiques.
À travers l’activité de formation de JTrack, Mahmoud Jibril avait noué des relations personnelles avec presque tous les dirigeants arabes et d’Asie du Sud-Est. Il disposait de bureaux à Bahreïn et à Singapour. M. Jibril avait aussi créé des sociétés de négoce, dont une chargée du commerce du bois de Malaisie et d’Australie avec son ami français Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Mahmoud Jibril(photo) avait suivi ses premières études universitaires au Caire. Il y avait fait la connaissance de la fille d’un des ministres de Nasser et l’avait épousée. Il avait poursuivi ses études aux États-Unis, où il avait adopté les thèses libertariennes qu’il essaya d’introduire dans l’idéologie anarchiste d’el-Kadhafi. Surtout, M. Jibril avait rejoint la confrérie des Frères musulmans en Libye. C’est à ce titre qu’il avait placé les Frères Wadah Kanfhar et Yusuf al-Qaradawi à Al-Jazeera.
Durant le premier semestre 2011, la chaîne qatariote est devenue l’instrument privilégié de la propagande pro-occidentale : elle a nié autant que possible l’aspect anti-impérialiste et anti-sioniste des révolutions arabes et a choisi dans chaque pays les protagonistes qu’elle soutenait et ceux qu’elle conspuait. Sans surprise, elle a soutenu le roi de Bahreïn —un élève de Mahmoud Jibril— qui faisait tirer sur la foule, tandis que cheikh al-Qaradawi appelait à l’antenne au Jihad contre el-Khadafi et el-Assad, accusés mensongèrement de massacrer leur propre peuple.
M. Jibril étant devenu le Premier ministre du gouvernement rebelle libyen, le sommet de la mauvaise foi aura été atteint avec la construction dans des studios à Doha de répliques de la Place verte et de Bab el-Azizia où furent tournées de fausses images de l’entrée des « rebelles » pro-Us dans Tripoli. Que n’ai-je lu comme insultes lorsque j’ai annoncé cette manipulation dans les colonnes de Voltairenet.org ! Pourtant Al-Jazeera et Sky News diffusèrent ces fausses images le second jour de la bataille de Tripoli, semant le désarroi parmi la population libyenne. Ce ne fut en réalité que trois jours plus tard que les « rebelles » —presque exclusivement les Misrata— entrèrent dans Tripoli dévastée par les bombardements de l’OTAN.
Il en va de même avec l’annonce par Al-Jazeera de l’arrestation de Saif el-Islam Kadhafi et de la confirmation de cette capture par le procureur de la Cour pénale internationale Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Je fus le premier, sur les ondes de Russia Today, à démentir cette intoxication. Et là encore, je fus l’objet de quolibets dans certains journaux jusqu’à ce que Saif el-Islam vienne réveiller en personne les journalistes enfermés au Rixos et les conduise sur la vraie place Bal el-Azizia.
Interrogé sur ces mensonges par le canal arabe de France24, le président du Conseil national de transition (CNT), Mustafa Abdul Jalil revendiqua une ruse de guerre et se réjouit d’avoir ainsi accéléré la chute de la Jamahiriya.
Quel avenir pour Al-Jazeera ?
Le détournement d’Al-Jazeera en instrument de propagande pour la recolonisation de la Libye ne s’est pas fait à l’insu de l’émir de Qatar, mais sous sa houlette. C’est le Conseil de coopération du Golfe qui, le premier, a appelé une intervention armée en Libye. Le Qatar a été le premier membre arabe du Groupe de contact. Il a acheminé des armes pour les « rebelles » libyens, puis a envoyé son armée au sol, notamment lors de la bataille de Tripoli. En échange, il a obtenu le privilège de contrôler tout le commerce des hydrocarbures effectué au nom du Conseil national de transition.
Il est encore trop pour savoir si la démission de Wadah Khanfar marque la fin de sa mission au Qatar, ou si elle annonce une volonté de la chaîne de retrouver la crédibilité qu’elle avait mis 15 ans à gagner et 6 mois à perdre.

Thierry Meyssan

BDS Victory: Alstom loses Saudi Haramain Railway contract worth $10B

2011-10-27T15:40:00.001-07:00

The BDS National Committee (BNC) has declared a long sought-after victory as Alstom lost the bid for the second phase of the Saudi Haramain Railway project, worth $10 billion US dollars, after pressure from the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, including effective campaigning from the newly launched KARAMA, a European campaign to Keep Alstom Rail And Metro Away.

In 2008 the BNC, the largest Palestinian civil society coalition, with partners in Europe and Israel, launched the Derail Veolia and Alstom campaign, due to the two companies’ involvement in Israel’s illegal Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR) project, which explicitly aims to “Judaize Jerusalem,” according to official Israeli statements, by cementing Israel’s hold on the illegal colonial settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in and around Jerusalem. Since then, Veolia has lost more than $12B worth of contracts following boycott activism in Sweden, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere. Alstom, too, suffered substantial blows when the Swedish national pension fund AP7 excluded it from its investment portfolio, after having been excluded from the Dutch ASN Bank due to the company’s involvement in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and has recently announced its intention to withdraw from the project.

The decision is in line with a decision adopted by consensus at the Arab Summit held in Khartoum in 2006 which condemned in the JLR project and called on “the two French companies [Alstom and Veolia] to immediately withdraw from the project,” and demanding that punitive measures be taken against them “if they don’t comply.” The Arab Summit also urged the French government to take the necessary measure in this respect to honor its obligations under international law. In March 2010, the UN’s Human Rights Council denounced Israel’s JLR project for being “in clear violation of international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.”

In commenting on the fierce competition between the Alstom-led consortium and its Spanish-led rival over the second phase of the lucrative Haramain Railway project, Emirati newspaper, Al-Ittihad, referred to “multiple factors” affecting the decision to award the contract, suggesting that political factors may have been taken into consideration.

The BNC and several partners have used private and public channels to urge the Saudi leadership to exclude Alstom from the second phase of this large project which will connect by rail Mecca with Medina after Alstom had won the much smaller contract for the first phase.

In 2009, BNC member organizations, Stop the Wall and the Civic Coalition to Defend Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem, have produced in-depth research about Alstom’s involvement in Israel’s illegal JLR project. Copies were sent to Saudi officials, prompting Palestinian leaders to address Saudi authorities urging them to exclude Alstom from their contracts.

Jamal Juma’a, Stop the Wall coordinator and BNC Secretariat member commented on the news saying: “This huge victory will be celebrated in the BDS campaign worldwide. We are hopeful that this will be the first of many decisions to kick Alstom out of the Arab world and beyond, sharply raising the price of its collusion in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights.”

“The campaign to derail Veolia and Alstom will continue until they have ended their complicity with Israeli apartheid, and have paid reparations for the damage their actions have caused.”

“The global Derail Veolia and Alstom campaign has sent a strong message to corporations aiding Israel’s violations of international law: the price of their complicity will be extremely high.”

“We are deeply grateful to all our global BDS partners who made this happen through three years of diligent and effective campaigning.”

Alstom loses Saudi Haramain Railway contract worth $10B | BDSmovement.net

Quotes About Life

2011-10-01T08:10:00.001-07:00

Quotes About Life

“Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”
― Dr. Seuss

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”
― Maya Angelou

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Albert Einstein

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”
― John Lennon

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
― Albert Einstein

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.”
― André Gide

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
― Woody Allen

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
― Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Reality continues to ruin my life.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.”
― Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight

“I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.”
― Jimi Hendrix

“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
― Lewis Carroll

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“This life is what you make it. Not matter what, you're going to mess up sometimes, it's a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you're going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends - they'll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, somg go. The ones that stay with you through everything - they're your true best friends. Don't let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they'll come and go too. And babve, I hate to say it, most of them - actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can't give up becuase if you give up, you'll never find your soul mate. You'll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn't mean you're gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life's a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
― Anne Frank

“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.”
― Albert Einstein

“Who are you to judge the life I live?
I know I'm not perfect
-and I don't live to be-
but before you start pointing fingers...
make sure you hands are clean!”
― Bob Marley

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller - Pamphlet

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Virginia Woolf

“But better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Where there is love there is life.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid.”
― John Wayne

“I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.”
― Woody Allen

From : http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/life

Why Google Plus is about to change the Web as we know it

2011-09-28T03:49:00.001-07:00

Takeaway: After a series of failed attempts at social networking, Google may have nailed it with Google+. See why and how it could have a major impact on the future of the Web.

This is the way Google always wanted social networking to work, and this time the company may have pulled it off.

Google’s previous social attempts have been unmitigated train wrecks, if we’re being completely honest. Open Social failed because Google couldn’t get Facebook and other social networks to buy into the idea of a shared social identity. Google Wave missed the target by not being useful enough to attract any users. Google Buzz freaked people out by naively overstepping its bounds on privacy.

So, when Google unveiled its latest social experiment last week — called Google+ — I was extremely skeptical. Still, Facebook is so malignant in terms of privacy and such a mess to use and configure that I was more than happy to give Google+ a try. I just expected that it would be a speed-dating relationship like most of my product reviews and destined to last no more than a few weeks at the most.

Damn, was I wrong. After almost a week, I fully expect this Google+ thing to turn into a long-term relationship. I mean, we’re not buying matching workout suits or anything yet, but this is definitely more than just a crush on the hot, new thing.

To start, Google+ is what Google calls a “field trial” — a fancy way to say that it’s still in beta. For now, it is open mostly to technology industry insiders and the press. Google reasoned that since reporters were going to be writing about Plus anyway, they might as well let them kick the tires. Wise move.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s SVP of Social and the head guy in charge of Plus, said, ”We chose the initial seed very carefully. We wanted a lot of diversity, so we have people that represent over 42 of the world’s languages… We’re trying to really test the product, make sure that we meet people’s privacy expectations, that the systems are working, [and] that we can scale. We’ll slowly grow that initial seed as we’re ready.”

The other Google executive running the Plus project, Bradley Horowitz, added, ”Field trial is the right term. That’s not a euphemism. There’s a lot of rough edges in there and a lot of learning we have to do. The feedback we got in the first 24 hours is tremendous.”

Even with its rough edges and without the masses of humanity having access to Google+, the core experience is pretty powerful, and it’s easy to see where Google is going with this.

As I wrote over the weekend while diving into Google+, the most attractive part is how easy it is to find, add, and organize your friends (I cited that as the main reason you won’t hate Google+). The friend issue is the heart of all social networks, although it’s so obvious that it’s often overlooked. In fact, Twitter still isn’t very good at it, Facebook is a little better, but both of them now look like neophytes compared to the way Google+ does it.

The friend feature on Google+ is called “Circles,” and it turns out to be an intuitive mashup of friending (from Facebook) and following (from Twitter). Circles are basically sets of friends that you can drag and drop into groups, mirroring your existing social circles — Family & Friends, Colleagues, Local Techies, etc. — rather than just the one big lump of friends you have on Facebook that can result in moments of “worlds colliding,” since you have to share all of your updates with all of your friends. On Google+, you can selectively send updates to different circles, and you can quickly click between the news streams of your different circles.

You can also make circles for people you don’t necessarily know but are interested in following their updates (e.g. Tech Journalists, Famous Engineers, Web Celebrities, etc.). This is where Google+ echoes Twitter, because people don’t have to follow you back in order for you to add them to one of your Circles. At that point, you’ll see all of their public updates, and most of these folks make the majority of their updates public in order to be seen by more people (it’s the whole social media narcissism meme, and it has already transplanted itself on Google Plus).

The real killer feature to Circles in Google+ is how easy it is to find and add friends. Everywhere you see a user’s name or avatar you can simply mouse over it, click “Add to Circles,” and then select which circle to add them to. On Twitter, it took me about three years to find about 200 really interesting people (mostly in technology and the media) worth following. It took me less than three days to find that many on Google Plus. Of course, most of them are the same people, so Google+ has the advantage of speed by letting us quickly re-coagulate our existing social graph on the new service.

I’m not predicting Google+ will replace Facebook and/or Twitter. This will definitely not be a zero sum game. Facebook has the most to lose from Google Plus, but it’s going to be years before Aunt Jenny and your plumber show up on Google+ the way they recently showed up on Facebook (and it’s possible they never will). All three of these social networks — Facebook, Google+, and Twitter — will still be going strong three years from now. People will gravitate to them for different reasons. They’ll go to Twitter for news and to cyber-stalk celebrities. They’ll go to Facebook for private networking, water cooler chats, and games.

So, where will that leave Google+?

I’m glad you asked, because that’s the real point here (sorry to bury the lede). To start, Google+ is mostly going to be made up of digital influencers — technology executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals, as well as social media mavens and technophiles in the press. Don’t underestimate the power of this broad group. It’s the same group that has catapulted Twitter and Foursquare into mainstream consciousness in recent years. A large percentage of this group is already in the “initial seed” of Google+ users, and they are the ones who have been raving about it for the past week. Look for a lot of them to decrease (but not eliminate) their Facebook usage and spend more time on Google Plus.

However, once you get past the technorati, then the story is going to get really interesting, because in the long run, Google+ is going to be less of a destination and more like the connective social tissue of the Web. I’m talking about social networking moving beyond a walled garden like Facebook or even a controlled ecosystem like Twitter.

Pieces of Google+ are likely to be decentralized with tentacles extending across the Web, the mobile Web, and various computer, smartphone, and tablet platforms. In some ways, Facebook and Twitter have started doing this already. They’ve put share buttons and boxes on external sites. They’ve launched client apps for multiple platforms. Facebook has even allowed sites to use the Facebook platform as their engine for user comments. However, the ultimate goal for Facebook and Twitter is to drive users back to their sites where they can be monetized.

Google has a different goal. It needs all of this social data about what people like, how they are socially related, what content they share the most, what context they share it in, and more in order to power its search engine and better organize the world’s information. That means Google’s social motivations have little to do with driving people back to plus.google.com. It’s ultimately about enhancing search and not allowing Facebook to hoard so much of the world’s social data.

That’s why Google has already submitted it’s iOS app to the Apple App Store. That’s why it is already talking about opening up Google+ Hangouts (group video chat) to other video services and clients. It’s why Google is putting little +1s all across the Web and in its search results (even though they aren’t very well connected to Google+ yet). In order to satisfy its appetite for social data, Google ultimately needs Google+ to be ubiquitous across virtually all platforms — both in terms of accessing the service from devices but even more so in terms of micro-connections to the service from third-party apps and sites.

Think of +1 integrated into mobile content apps, Q&A sites, blog comments, product reviews, music services like Pandora, etc. Now, imagine reading a product review, giving it +1, and then instantly seeing what all of the people in your “Tech Pros” circle have posted about that product — all without leaving the site you’re on. That’s where I see Google going with this, and that’s where this could permanently change social networking on the Web into a much more integrated experience. And if Google+ succeeds, it would likely force Facebook and Twitter to move in a similar direction.

Nevertheless, one big question here is how far will Google go with the open strategy? Can it avoid the temptation of giving Google+ pre-eminence to its internal platforms, such as Android, Chrome browser, Chrome OS, Gmail, and others? Will it build great apps and functionality for other platforms as well? For example, will it build a client for Windows Phone 7, even though Microsoft is its biggest rival in search? Will it work with Apple to make FaceTime (which has also promised open standards) compatible with Google+ Hangouts? Those are the kinds of litmus tests I’m going to be watching for.

Still, “Google+” is the perfect name for this, because it’s ultimately an add-on and a force-multiplier to the existing Google experience, especially its search engine but also to the broader Web in general. Google+ will be a social layer on top of the existing Web. At least that’s the vision. This time, Google might just pull it off.

By Jason Hiner

July 5, 2011, 3:32 PM PDT

Why Google+ will never back down on real names

2011-08-31T12:49:00.000-07:00

Pete Cashmore says the fear of losing the identity wars to Facebook is too great for Google to back down.

Google's new social network, Google+, is shaping up to be a hit for the search engine giant.

And yet Google continues to court controversy with its real names policy, which asks users to represent themselves with their real names or risk having their accounts suspended.

Critics say the move is harmful to political activists, victims of harassment and numerous other groups for whom using a real name online might pose a safety risk.

So why is Google being so stubborn about this issue and risking bad PR for the sake of a minor technical change? Why not just allow usernames, as Twitter already does?

'Identity service'

The answer may lie in comments made over the weekend by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. During an interview in Edinburgh, Scotland, NPR's Andy Carvin asked Schmidt to justify Google's real-names policy.

"He replied by saying that G+ was build (sic) primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information," Carvin explained in a posting to Google+.

"Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it. It's obvious for people at risk if they use their real names, they shouldn't use G+. Regarding countries like Iran and Syria, people there have no expectation of privacy anyway due to their government's own policies, which implies (to me, at least) that Schmidt thinks there's no point of even trying to have a service that allows pseudonyms."

In short: It's all about identity. More to the point: It's all about Facebook.

Facebook's 'online passport'

Facebook is the biggest "identity service" on the Web, and the company is already on track to building what amounts to an "online passport."

This passport is incredibly powerful: Due to Facebook's international nature, it's truly a global ID rather than a national one. And it provides something traditional IDs do not: A network of trusted friends.

It's this system -- Facebook Connect -- that allows any website or application to sign you in instantly without a lengthy sign-up form. Forget passwords. All you need is Facebook. What's more, Facebook's dominance of online identity could give it the lead in numerous industries.

Online advertising? Easy: Facebook's identity system could allow websites to serve you more personalized ads anywhere on the Web, with a high degree of certainty that your profile information is accurate.

Why Google+ will never back down on real names - CNN

Sony is back :) Sony Tablet S: starting at $499.99, arriving September

2011-08-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

Sony's first tablet, now officially called the Tablet S, is set to hit stores in the middle of September at a price of $499.99.

The Tablet S will feature a 9.4-inch touchscreen, a unique wedge-like shape and run on Google's Android Honeycomb operating system -- which is also featured on competing Motorola Xoom and Samsung GalaxyTab 10.1 tablets.

The $500 price matches that of the entry-level, wi-fi-only, 16-gigabyte Apple iPad. And for that price, Sony's Tablet S will come with an iPad-matching 16 gigabytes of storage and wi-fi-only connections to the Internet. A 32-gigabyte model is set to be released as well at a cost of $599.99.

Both the 16-gigabyte and 32-gigabyte Tablet S units became available for pre-order on Wednesday with a listed release date of "on or about" Sept. 16.

The Tablet S was first given the code name of the Sony S1 in April when Sony debuted the device alongside a second tablet, the Sony S2. Well, the S2 has a new name too -- the Sony Tablet P.

But unlike the Tablet S, the Tablet P isn't arriving in September, but rather some not-yet-announced date later this year. It's also not yet available for pre-order and a price hasn't been disclosed either.

The Tablet P also features a look unlike any other tablet on the market, with dual screens and a clamshell-like ability to open and close on itself.

The two touchscreens are 5.5-inch displays and the Tablet P will run on both wi-fi networks and AT&T's 4G network.

Both the Tablet S and Tablet P will be equipped with front and rear cameras for video and photo taking.

Sony Tablet S: starting at $499.99, arriving September - latimes.com

SKYNET : SyNAPSE, IBM envisage le cerveau gravé sur du Silicium

2011-08-22T05:51:00.000-07:00

IBM a conçu deux CPU qui sont structurés comme un cerveau humain même s’ils sont encore loin d’en avoir les capacités (pour le moment). Ces deux puces s’inscrivent dans cadre du projet SyNAPSE ( Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics). Celui-ci pourrait bien être à l’origine d’une nouvelle ère dans l’informatique. Non, il ne s’agit pas de science-fiction.
Il s’agit de deux puces expérimentales. Une architecture imitant celle du cerveau permettrait de développer l’informatique cognitive. La machine qui embarquera un tel CPU pourrait traiter l’information à la manière d’un cerveau humain, ce qui lui permettrait d’apprendre et de conclure. Elle serait aussi plus efficace que les actuels ordinateurs : consommation plus faible et encombrement réduit.
On pense bien entendu à HAL dans 2001, l’odyssée de l’espace.
Chacune des deux puces expérimentales est gravée en 45nm et dispose de 256 neurones. L’une dispose de 262,144 synapses qui sont programmables. La deuxième puce possède 65,536 synapses ayant la capacité d’apprendre. Dans un ordinateur, les interconnexions sont fixes ; le CPU est tel qu’il a été gravé alors qu’avec ce nouveau type de CPU, les connexions peuvent évoluer soit par apprentissage, soit par programmation (on a les deux cas ici avec ces deux puces expérimentales).
A l’avenir, IBM envisage de créer des CPU avec des dizaines de millions de neurones et des trillions (un trillion est un milliard de milliards) de synapses. L’ensemble consommerait un kilowatt et occuperait un volume de deux litres. Un cerveau possède toutefois 10^11 (100 milliards) de neurones et 1000 synapses par neurone.
De tels ordinateurs seraient capable de résoudre des opérations sur lesquelles les ordinateurs actuels bloquent. La puissance de calcul phénoménale qu’ils développeraient leur permettraient de traiter des millions d’informations et de prédire très précisément la météo et des catastrophes naturelles par exemple.
Mais le plus incroyable, c’est peut-être la capacité qu’auraient ces ordinateurs à ne plus être dépendants d’un informaticien puisqu’ils auraient la faculté d’apprendre par eux-mêmes et de tirer des conclusions.
Le Super-ordinateur Watson de Big Blue, s’il n’embarque pas ce type de CPU, avait déjà laissé entrevoir un tel comportement cognitif.

Moroccan F-16s Atlas falcons Arrival At Benguerir Air Base

2011-08-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

The Atlas Falcon

The Beginning :

Moroccan F16 : F-16D Flies In Fort Worth

Morocco, the twenty-fifth nation to operate the F-16, ordered twenty-four Block 52 aircraft in 2009. The two-tone light brown scheme with gray underside is unique to the Moroccan Air Force.

Training in US

Royal Moroccan Air Force Maj. Mouloud Chihani performs a preflight check on an F-16 Fighting Falcon at Tucson International Airport, Ariz., before a training mission July 7, 2010. Major Chihani and three other Moroccan pilots are the first F-16 pilots in their air force and will lead the way to establish a new squadron of F-16s when they return home in July 2011. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jack Braden)

Departure to Morocco

First Four Lockheed Martin F-16s Produced For Morocco Depart On Ferry Flight

FORT WORTH, Texas, August 1st,

2011 -- The first four of 24 new Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] advanced Block 52 F-16s produced for the Royal Moroccan Air Force have left the Lockheed Martin facility in Fort Worth, Texas, en route to Morocco. An arrival ceremony will be held in Morocco later this week.

Arrival

Lockheed Martin Delivers Morocco’s First Advanced F-16s

MARRAKECH, Morocco, August 4th, 2011 -- The Royal Moroccan Air Force (RMAF) unveiled the first four of 24 Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] F-16 aircraft in a ceremony today at Ben Guerrir Air Base in Morocco. Senior representatives from the Moroccan and U.S. governments and air forces were present for the historic event.

This is Morocco’s first experience with the F-16 so the package being provided by the U.S. government is comprehensive. Morocco will acquire a Block 52 configuration of the F-16C/D aircraft tailored to meet the specific requirements of the RMAF. The sale includes the aircraft, mission equipment and a support package provided by Lockheed Martin and other U.S. and international contractors. The new aircraft will supplement the RMAF’s existing fleet of fighter aircraft and will contribute to the upgrade and modernization of the RMAF.

“The delivery of these aircraft places Morocco among the very elite group of air forces of the world who operate the advanced multirole F-16,” said Ralph D. Heath, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics business area.

Moroccan F16 Block 52 details & history

The Block 50/52 is the current production version of the F-16 Fighting Falcon. It features the Improved Performance Engines, either the F110-GE-129 for the Block 50 or the F100-PW-229 for the block 52. The F100-PW-229 is lighter and more powerful than earlier F100s, and had been flying at Edwards AFB since mid-1990 in test ship #81-0816. Both engines are rated at 29,000lbs of thrust (129kN).

This version first appeared in late 1990. It was unofficially designated F-16CJ/DJ for the same reason as the Block 40/42 unofficial designation. The first Block 50/52 F-16 rolled out of the Fort Worth facility on October 31, 1991 (#90-0801). Production of this version is still ongoing and will be expanded well beyond 2005 with the latest aircraft delivered to Greece and Israel.

Structure & Avionics

The standard avionics fit for the Block 50 includes:

Honeywell H-423 Ring Laser Gyro Inertial Navigation System (RLG INS) for rapid in-flight alignment;
GPS receiver;
Data Transfer Cartridge with a larger capacity (128KB) to accommodate the planned avionics growth;
Improved Data Modem for faster data transmission;
AN/ALR-56M advanced RWR;
AN/ALE-47 threat adaptive countermeasure system;
digital terrain system data transfer cartridge;
cockpit compatible with night vision systems;
advanced IFF interrogator;
Upgraded Programmable Display Generator (UPDG);
MIL-STD-1760 data bus for programming new-generation PGMs;
Horizontal Situation Display (HSD) for increased situational awareness and tactical flexibility on all missions.

The Block 50/52 also carries the Westinghouse AN/APG-68 V(5) radar, which offers longer range detection against air targets and higher reliability. The radar has a programmable signal processor that employs very high-speed integrated circuit (VHSIC) technology. The latest batches of Block 50/52 carry the same radar, but versions V(7) and V(8), which offer even greater performance envelopes. The VHF/FM antenna is now incorporated into the leading edge of the vertical fin and has an extended operating distance. The cockpit also includes 2 monochrome MFD's (soon to be replaced by the MLU's color displays) and a FOV HUD.

The Block 50's have the capability to fire the AIM-120 AMRAAM, the new AGM-65G Maverick missile and the PGU-28/B 20mm cannon round. The Block 50/52 is capable of carrying the new JDAM munition, the AGM-154A/B JSOW and is the first F-16 version to integrate the AGM-84 Harpoon antishipping missile. The AGM-137 TSSAM stand-off attack missile was also foreseen in its weaponry, but subsequently cancelled. The aircraft can launch the Harpoon in line-of-sight, bearing-only, and range/bearing modes. The addition of the Harpoon gives the F-16 a significant standoff range anti-shipping capability, especially when combined with optional 600-gallon fuel tanks.

The first Block 50 F-16 was delivered to the USAF in November of 1991. Over 300 have been delivered by early 1997, to four different customers. New production Block 50/52 aircraft ordered after 1996 also include selected features from the MLU program: color multifunction displays, a three-channel video tape recorder, and the modular mission computer.

Modifications & Upgrades

Wild Weasel

F-16CJ Block 52D #91415 aircraft from USAFE's 52nd FW operate as Wild Weasels. This specimen's equiped with wingtip Amraams, Sidewinders on stations 2 and 8, and AGM-88 HARM (starboard) and Shrike (port) anti-radiation missiles. Note the AN/ASQ-213 Harm Targeting System pod on the starboard intake station. (USAF photo)

The F-16CJ/DJ Block 50D/52D have the HARM avionics/Launcher Interface Computer (ALIC) resulting in a full autonomous employment capability of the HARM missile. This capability adds the SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) mission to the already extensive list of missions the F-16 is capable to perform.

The aircraft features full integration for the advanced AGM-88 HARM II and Shrike anti-radiation missiles, a Lockheed Martin Pave Penny laser ranger pod and the Texas Instruments (now Raytheon) AN/ASQ-213 HTS (HARM Targeting System). The pod is mounted on the starboard intake hardpoint and contains a super-sensitive receiver that detects, classifies, and ranges threats and passes the information to the HARM and to the cockpit displays. With the targeting system, the F-16CJ/DJ has full autonomous HARM capability. The HTS pod can be omitted however - in that case, RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft support the F-16 in sorting and prioritizing targets in dense threat environments.

Two HARM missiles are normally carried on a typical SEAD mission, however, 4-missiles loads are currently being test-flown at Eglin AFB.

Deliveries of the Block 50D/52D began in May 1993. All but the earliest Block 50 models have been upgraded to Block 50D standard.

Block 50/52 Plus

One of the latest HAF, F-16C Block 52, #501, taxiing. (LMTAS photo)

The Block 50/52 Plus is a version which has special provisions for the adverse weather delivery of the Boeing JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition). The update includes an add-on tail unit containing a synthetic aperture radar, providing guidance to 1,000lbs Mk.83, 2,000lbs Mk.84 and the 2,000lbs BLU-109 warhead. Other features include passive missile warning, terrain-referenced navigation, and provisions for the 600 US gal (2,271 litre) external fuel tanks and conformal fuel tanks.

Other features of the aircraft include an on-board oxygen generating system (OBOGS), the AN/APX-113 advanced electronic interrogator/transponder IFF system, helmet-mounted cueing system (HMCS), ASPIS internal electronic countermeasures suite (full provisions), the Northrop Grumman APG-68(V)9 radar, which is the latest version of the F-16C/D radar. This radar features significant improvements in detection range, resolution, growth potential, and supportability. Furthermore, application of advanced processing techniques enhances the radar's ability to operate in dense electromagnetic environments and resist jamming better than all previous models.

The V(9) version of the AN/APG-68 radar provides both improved air-to-air capabilities and air-to-ground capabilities. These include:

30 percent increase in detection range;
Improvements in false alarm rate and mutual interference;
Four versus two tracked targets in the Situation Awareness mode (a search-while-track mode);
Larger search volume and improved track performance in Track While Scan mode;
Improved track performance in Single Target Track mode;
Two-foot resolution in new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mode, which allows autonomous delivery of precision, all-weather, standoff weapons;
Increased detection range in Sea Surveillance mode;
Improved target detection and map quality in Ground Moving Target Indication mode.

In general, this radar offers a 5X increase in processing speed and 10X increase in memory compared to the current AN/APG-68 radar and provides large growth potential.

The first production V(9) radar, which was delivered in April 2002, will be installed in the first Greece Block 52+ F-16. Also the new Israeli F-16s will be equiped with it.

The latest Israeli F-16 block 52 will furthermore be equiped with a video data link and Conformal Fuel Tanks manufactured by Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), advanced avionics and a helmet-mounted display manufactured by Elbit, an advanced electronic warfare suite manufactured by Elisra and advanced weapons and sensors manufactured by Rafael. This makes these aircraft are becoming more and more an Israeli domestic product.

Production

Production of the block 50/52 totals 813 airframes up to now. Manufacturing started in 1991 and is still ongoing. Block 50 aircraft were delivered to the USAF, Turkey, Greece and Chile, whilst Block 52 aircraft were delivered to the USAF, South Korea, Singapore, Greece, Poland and Israel. Of the total number of Block 50/52, still 260 are waiting delivery to the customer (July 2003).

Specifications (standard Block 50/52)

Engine: One Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 turbofan, rated at 17,000 lb.s.t. dry and 28,500 lb.s.t. with afterburning or one General Electric F110-GE-129 turbofan, rated at 17,155 lb.s.t. dry and 28,984 lb.s.t. with afterburning.

Performance: Maximum short-endurance speed: Mach 2.05 (1353 mph) at 40,000 feet. Maximum sustained speed Mach 1.89 (1247 mph) at 40,000 feet. Tactical radius (hi-lo-hi interdiction on internal fuel with six 500-lb bombs) 360 miles. Maximum ferry range 2450 miles with maximum external fuel (excluding 600gal. tanks or CFT's) .

Dimensions: wingspan 31 feet 0 inches, length 49 feet 4 inches, height 16 feet 8 1/2 inches, wing area 300 square feet.

Weights: 18,238 pounds empty, 26,463 pounds normal loaded (air-to-air mission), 42,300 pounds maximum takeoff.

Sources : Lockheed martin press, release, F16-net, flickers pic.

Compiled by YASSINE

How Google+ is built ,Facebook killer

2011-07-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

If you’re curious about all things Google+, you’re in luck. The project’s technical lead, Google engineer Joseph Smarr, is currently hosting an online question and answer session about the service — and he has already shared a number of details about Google+’s development, technology, and plans for the future.

On Monday, Smarr opened himself up for questions on Q&A website AnyAsq.com, a Y-Combinator-backed site reminiscent of Formspring.me where users can invite others to “ask me anything.” People sign in to post questions on AnyAsq through their Twitter accounts, but a host’s responses can be longer than 140 characters.

Smarr has already answered 270 queries, and as of press time, his AnyAsq page is still open for questions. Here’s some of what he has revealed so far:

Google+ fast tracked its development from the start
“We put extra emphasis on engineering speed/agility–we try to release code updates on a daily basis while still keeping quality/stability/latency as high as you’d expect from Google.”

New features are absolutely on the way
“…Personally I’m eager for many of the features other Google+ users have asked for recently: smarter ranking/collapsing/filtering in the stream and notifications… integration with more Google products… and an API so I can start hacking on cool uses of circles, etc.”

Hashtags are on Google+’s radar
In response to a question about adding hashtags to help filter Google+ posts, Smarr responded: “Personally, I want this too.”

There was some fancy footwork on the programming front
“A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it’s an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive.”

Although none of Smarr’s responses have been shockingly revealing, the AnyAsq activity is just the latest example of how Google has worked hard to project an air of openness throughout the entire Google+ launch. Where the now-defunct Google Wave was developed with an air of secrecy that ultimately confused users as to its purpose, Google’s strategy with the Plus project has been one of transparency and agility — a “done is better than perfect” attitude. So far, it’s been a refreshing approach. The challenge for the future will be maintaining that flexibility as Google+ grows.

HPS décroche un important marché en France

2011-06-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

Le groupe HPS renforce son activité à l'international. L'entreprise spécialisée dans les solutions monétiques vient de signer une convention avec le Cedicam en France. Il s'agit d'un groupement d'intérêt économique (GIE), filiale du groupe Crédit Agricole France. Une plateforme technique traitant l'ensemble des flux monétiques pour le compte de 39 caisses régionales du Crédit Agricole, du Crédit Lyonnais ainsi que trois banques à l'international (Grèce, Italie et Pologne). En termes de volume, le Cedicam a traité, en 2010, plus de 1,44 milliards de demandes d'autorisation. Ce qui représente près de 35% de parts de marché en France et fait du Cedicam, le numéro 1 de l'activité d'acquisition des commerçants en France. C'est en août 2010 que le Cedicam avait passé commande pour la solution PowerCard de HPS pour remplacer la solution qui était installée au niveau de ses caisses régionales. Le contrat vient d'être signé entre Mohamed Horani, président du groupe HPS et Bernard Noe!, DG du Cedicam. «D'un montant de 5,3 millions d'euros, le projet consiste en une refonte globale de toute l'activité back-office commerçants et automates du Cedicam, qui à terme, pourra disposer d'une plateforme d'acquisition la plus aboutie de toutes les grandes banques européennes», explique Horani. Après la réception de la commande, le groupe HPS a procédé au benchmark de la solution PowerCard dans les laboratoires d'IBM à Montpellier. Une étape importante avant la livraison du produit fini. « Des tests de performance ont été effectués pour qualifier la, robustesse et les capacités de notre solution quant à la gestion des gros volumes. Les résultats ont été probants», ajoute-t-on auprès de HPS Group. La solution s'est révélée en mesure de gérer 350.000 commerçants avec 3.000 utilisateurs simultanés et un pic on-line de 250 transactions par seconde. Autre performance de la solution, des traitements batch de 6 millions de transactions par heure et un historique de 6 mois, soit un total de 1,2 milliard de transactions. « La qualité de ces résultats a conforté le choix de la solution PowerCard par le Cedicam, une plateforme reconnue parmi les meilleures solutions de paiement électronique au monde par le Gartner, leader américain dans le domaine des études IT », poursuit Horani. Après la phase tests, des workshops ont été organisés avec l'ensemble des acteurs du Cedicam. L'objectif était de définir leurs besoins métiers ainsi que les meilleures solutions pour y répondre. «Cette importante étape a été clôturée avec succès et célébrée lors de la cérémonie qui a eu lieu le 26 mai pour sceller le partenariat entre le Cedicam et HPS Group», conclut le président du groupe HPS. Aujourd'hui, le spécialiste marocain de la monétique démarre la phase d'intégration de la solution au niveau du système d'information du Cedicam et la reprise de l'ensemble de l'activité back-office commerçant sur la plateforme PowerCard.

(Source : L'Economiste) 06/06/2011

L’Iphone bientôt chez Meditel – Meditel to sell Iphone

2011-05-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Ce n’est plus qu’une question de jours. Méditel vient de décrocher le contrat de commercialisation de toute la gamme iPhone d’Apple, notamment l’iPhone 4.

Cette nouvelle serait le fruit delongues négociations directes avec la firme américaine et avec le soutien de son partenaire industriel, France Telecom.

Pour Méditel c’est une nouvelle phase commerciale stratégique qui s’ouvre, d’autant plus que les conditions du contrat lui conféreraient, en tout cas dans un premier temps, une sorte d’exclusivité. Ainsi, pour ratisser large, Méditel promettrait des offres commerciales alléchantes, incluant des formules à zéro dirham.

Gulf countries welcome bid fromJordan, Morocco to join GCC bloc

2011-05-11T05:29:00.000-07:00

Image Credit: WAM

The news of the Kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco possibly joining the Gulf Cooperation Council states was met with shock and awe amongst users of social media networks within minutes of its announcement. Shaikh Mohammad leads the UAE delegation at the annual Consultative Summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh on Tuesday. Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz and Abdul Latif Al Zayani, GCC Secretary General, also attended. The developments in Yemen and the GCC mediation, the situation in Libya and Syria were on the summit’s agenda.

Manama: The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) could be the umbrella for all the monarchies in the Arab world after the six-member alliance on Tuesday welcomed bids by the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco to join it, its secretary general Abdul Latif Al Zayani said.

The foreign ministers of the six countries were tasked to start negotiations with their Jordanian and Moroccan counterparts to complete the required procedures, according to media reports from Riyadh where the leaders of the GCC states held their one-day annual advisory council.

The summit has no specific agenda, unlike the official annual rotating summit, usually held in December.

Deep impact

The membership of Jordan and Morocco would also have a deep political, social, economic, security and defence impact.

Jordan is geographically linked to Saudi Arabia and both kingdoms share terrestrial borders that stretch more than 700km.

Yemen has often said since the 1990s that it wanted to join the alliance, but several factors have hampered a positive response to its requests.

The Gulf Cooperation Council includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Bloc of monarchies

The bloc of monarchies was created in 1981 to coordinate political and economic policies. Following a meeting Tuesday in Riyadh, Gulf Arab leaders welcomed Jordan's request to join.

A statement on the Jordanian news agency said Jordan is seeking a free trade agreement with the GCC.

The six countries are seen as among the most influential of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' members.

They have relied on their oil wealth to secure political and economic clout. Last month the GCC sent troops into Bahrain, which is facing a rebellion against its monarchy.

Why Microsoft Is Buying Skype for $8.5 Billion

2011-05-10T11:07:00.001-07:00

Skype CEO Tony Bates

Updated at 12 midnight. Microsoft has bought Skype for $8.5 billion, in an all-cash deal. The deal closed a few hours ago. ~~is close to finalizing a deal to buy Skype for between $7 billion to $8 billion~~. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the news after we had first reported it yesterday. The announcement is likely to come out later today or tomorrow morning, according to several reports. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, is said to be a big champion of the deal, the largest in the history of the company. Ballmer and Skype CEO Tony Bates will host a press conference in a few hours.

Skype has been up for sale for some time, thanks to some very antsy investors. My sources indicated both eBay and Silver Lake Partners have been getting nervous about the delayed initial public offering and have been pushing for a sale of Skype. Facebook and Google were said to be earlier dance partners for Skype, and Microsoft was a late entrant and is now close to walking away with the prize.

It won’t surprise me if Microsoft comes in for major heat on this decision to buy Skype — and the software company could always botch this purchase, as it often does when it buys a company. The Skype team is also full of hired guns who are likely to move on to the next opportunity rather than dealing with the famed Microsoft bureaucracy.

I also don’t believe Facebook and Google were serious buyers. Google, with its Google Voice offering, doesn’t really need Skype. In essence, I feel Microsoft was bidding against itself. Even then, I personally think this is a bet worth taking, especially for a company that has been left out in the cold for so long.

Skype gives Microsoft a boost in the enterprise collaboration market, thanks to Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities, especially when competing with Cisco and Google.

It gives Microsoft a working relationship with carriers, many of them looking to partner with Skype as they start to transition to LTE-based networks.

It would give them a must-have application/service that can help with the adoption of the future versions of Windows Mobile operating system.

However, the biggest reason for Microsoft to buy Skype is Windows Phone 7 (Mobile OS) and Nokia. The software giant needs a competitive offering to Google Voice and Apple’s emerging communication platform, Facetime.

Guess Who’s the Big Winner

The biggest winner of this deal could actually be Facebook. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking giant had little or no chance of buying Skype. Had it been public, it would have been a different story. With Microsoft, it gets the best of both worlds: It gets access to Skype assets (Microsoft is an investor in Facebook) and it gets to keep Skype away from Google.

Facebook needs Skype badly. Among other things, it needs to use Skype’s peer-to-peer network to offer video and voice services to the users of Facebook Chat. If the company had to use conventional methods and offer voice and video service to its 600 million plus customers, the cost and overhead of operating the infrastructure would be prohibitive.

Facebook can also help Skype get more customers for its SkypeOut service, and it can have folks use Facebook Credits to pay for Skype minutes. Skype and Facebook are working on a joint announcement, and you can expect it shortly.

Why Did Skype Want To Sell?

Skype had filed for an IPO, was going to do about a billion dollars in revenues, and was on its way to becoming profitable. So why sell? Silver Lake and eBay were both getting impatient and wanted to lock in their profits. Some sources also believe Skype’s revenues had stalled.

The company had bet heavily on is video sharing service. The premium version of video calling and sharing was a way for Skype to increase its average revenue per user and move into the enterprise market. However, given Skype’s DNA is that of a consumer Internet company, the challenges aren’t a surprise.

So Who Made What?

Using the $8.5 billion price as the likely sale price, eBay gets $2.55 billion for its 30-percent stake in Skype. So in the end, eBay did make money on the Skype deal.

The Skype Founders

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the co-founders, with their 14-percent stake, take home about $1.19 billion. Damn, these guys know how to double-dip!

Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) own 56 percent of the company, and that stake is worth $4.76 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz had three percent of the deal and made $205 million profit on their $50 million initial investment.

Oracle vs HP : Affaire Itanium : les clients HP montent au créneau

2011-04-19T04:30:00.001-07:00

La décision d'Oracle de lâcher Itanium provoque l'ire des clients de HP. Le club d'utilisateurs Connect fait savoir son mécontentement dans un communiqué et interpelle la firme de Larry Ellison, lui demandant de reconsidérer sa position.

Les clients d'Oracle et de HP tout à la fois ne sont pas contents. Dans un communiqué publié vendredi le club Connect, qui revendique 52.000 clients du constructeur, dénonce l'abandon d'Itanium par l'éditeur.

« Le matériel HP occupe la deuxième position sur le marché Unix, devant les équipements d'Oracle Sun, avec des milliers de clients ayant investi des milliards dans les systèmes HP Integrity fonctionnant avec HP-UX et des logiciels Oracle. La décision d'Oracle d'arrêter ses futurs développements sur la plateforme Itanium coûtera à ces clients des millions en perte de productivité, bloquera une concurrence équitable et étouffera l'innovation dans l'industrie », peut-on lire sur le document.

On y découvre par ailleurs quelques propos bien sentis de clients mécontents. Et tous anglo-saxons..

« Vous n'avez pas à utiliser la coercition pour tenter de faire quitter à vos clients une plateforme robuste et éprouvée », s'emporte le responsable business développement de l'intégrateur Gibraltar Solutions.

« Obliger les clients à changer de plateforme impactera notre stratégie et nos partenariats. Nous sommes reliés à HP et à Oracle qui sont des partenaires significatifs de notre activité. Que l'un de ces partenaires dicte notre stratégie en matière de plateforme est inimaginable », fulmine le vice-président et responsable technique du bijoutier Suttler.

« Nous sommes actuellement en train de migrer une application vers OpenVMS I64 V8.4, utilisant Oracle 10g2R. L'annonce d'Oracle nous oblige à explorer d'autres options en matière de base de données », menace la SSII Computer Consulting System Services.

Le communiqué, qui pointe par ailleurs vers un certain nombre de témoignages vidéos d'intégrateurs et de revendeurs consternés, encourage les membres de Connect impactés par l'abandon d'Itanium à transmettre leurs doléances au club utilisateurs.

Do's and Don'ts of Requesting a Raise

2011-04-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

Do's and Don'ts of Requesting a Raise

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

2011-03-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

Comment When I saw the news on Wednesday morning, I thought I had picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Or maybe Oracle did. Either way, Oracle’s announcement that it is halting development on HP-UX/Itanium versions of its products touched off a firestorm of phone calls, emails and tweets that just won’t let up.

TPM covered the basics in his excellent story here. Snarky ‘Itanic’ jibes in the headlines aside, HP-UX based Unix systems are in use in a large number of customer data centers, as are IBM Power Unix systems and Oracle SPARC boxes.

These big iron boxes have moved from being the hot new thing a decade ago into more of a mission-critical, mainframe-esque role in mid-sized and large data centers. What first struck me about the Oracle press release is the claim that “Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing end of life”.

Funny, that directly contradicts what I’ve heard for years directly from Intel and HP. Intel has been more forthcoming about Itanium roadmaps, dates and specifications than at any time in recent memory. Oracle, by contrast, has reinforced its reputation as the North Korea of the server business … only without the charisma and cool Texaco flag.

Why would Intel publicly discuss Itanium roadmaps if it was near end-of-life? Why would it tell Oracle one thing about its plans and HP, industry analysts and the press another? Why would Intel do something that would make them look either deceptive or stupid? Answer: it wouldn’t. Intel doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

Gold in them thar processors

Intel is making good money on Itanium processors – more than enough to justify future development. HP is making good money on Integrity (HP-UX + Itanium) systems. Hell, even Oracle is making money on software installed on HP-UX systems. In fact, it is making even more since it tweaked licensing terms to jack up database pricing on HP Unix systems. So if everyone is making bank (including Oracle), why disrupt things now?

This is what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s

I think that Oracle simply wants to cut a competitor out of the Unix running and make a play for their installed base. I’ve been in the enterprise server business for more than 15 years now (God, I’m old). For the last five years, I’ve run comprehensive Unix vendor surveys among data center respondents.

They compare the major Unix vendors (HP, IBM and Sun/Oracle) on a wide variety of technical and customer support criteria. In general, IBM and HP tend to beat Sun/Oracle on the majority of questions, which include OS qualities, RAS, performance, and vendor support. (We’ll publish the results from our most recent survey in coming weeks.)

Our survey respondents also indicate that Oracle’s installed base isn’t very comfortable with Oracle’s plans, the way the company communicates those plans, or the support they receive This is quite a change from the Sun days, when most respondents may not have been all that wild about the systems, but they seemed to always like the company and the support it provided.

Let’s say I’m right, and Oracle is playing every card they can to build up its hardware business and drive customers away from HP. Why stop there? How long until it announces it is halting development on IBM AIX versions of its software? Or change the licensing terms to make it even more expensive to deploy on Power vs. any Oracle alternative? Taking it a bit further, is there an Oracle plan to find a way to charge customers a bit more if they run Oracle software on Dell, HP, or IBM x86 hardware? Maybe crank up the support costs a bit higher?

Lock-in

To me, this is the reality of what Ellison meant when he said that Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s. Oracle wants to have the incredible margins that IBM enjoyed back then. It wants to have that lock-in that IBM had in the days when there were few alternatives and even fewer standards that would allow customers to easily move from vendor to vendor.

But we don’t live in the 1960s, or even in the 1990s. Back in the 90s and early 00s, Oracle had the power to push server vendors out of the business simply by announcing that it was moving its DB port to a vendor’s OS to second-tier status. If Oracle dropped support of an OS entirely, it was the kiss of death – something that was widely speculated about in vendor and customer communities.

But it’s a different world today. There are a lot of alternatives for HP-UX customers to consider. The current version of IBM’s DB2 database, for example, is fully supported on HP-UX. There is also a difference in vendor scale today. It used to be easy for Oracle to bully small vendors like Sequent, Pyramid, Data General, NCR and even DEC. They could even intimidate the Unix brands of larger companies such as HP and IBM.

But today’s systems vendors are larger, more diversified and have more options. Customers today are different too, more sophisticated and not as frightened when it comes to changing systems, databases, or applications. Perhaps most importantly, customers have greater control than ever over their IT choices.

Will Oracle’s gambit work? Will it result in greater system sales? Higher database sales on their own iron? Or will there be a backlash from customers who now see the Ghost of Christmas Future – Oracle tightening the screws and reducing their options until they buckle under and start buying Oracle iron to run Oracle software?

It’s too early to tell. But based on what I’m hearing from clients and what I’ve seen in my own research, I’m betting on backlash. ®

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

Good Mood: 10 Ways To Get Yourself Back Into On

2011-03-21T04:14:00.001-07:00

Good moods are great - but sometimes it can be hard to maintain those moods. Here are some tips on keeping your days upbeat and positive.

Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? Or feeling depressed for no particular reason? And are you positive that this is not the way you want to go through your day? Here are a few quick mood fixers to get you going in a better mode.

Take a bubble bath. I know that seems more like an evening treat, but that's exactly why it helps on a bad morning. The warm water soaks away any small aches and pains, and the bubbles and scent relax your mind. Close your eyes. Just inhale, feel the warm water embracing you. Take a deep breath - use scents that stimulate and yet relax, like lavender.

And then you dry off, don't forget to treat yourself to some fragrant bath powder. That way you can enjoy the lingering after-effects of your soothing bath all day long.

Put on something nice - one of those things you are saving "for good." Often the way we dress reflects our mood. Putting on shapeless, baggy clothing only reinforces the negative. Take a moment to look nicer and you'll discover that you feel nicer, too.

Give yourself permission to take a break. Take a look at your to-do list - even if it's only a mental list. Take one item off of it - and spend the time you would have spent on that chore relaxing with a cup of tea and that magazine you've been promising yourself you would get to.

Making a deliberate choice to not do something eases our conscience. Simply not getting to it often makes us feel guilty - usually without reason.

Write it out. Whatever it is. Clear your mind by getting it out of yourself and onto a piece of paper. Write out the vague worries, the chores, the things that you are frustrated with, the reasons why you think you're in a bad mood.

And now that you have all those negatives on the paper instead of just in your mind, take a few minutes more to list three good and positive things. Hold onto those and leave the rest on that piece of paper.

Reward yourself. Promise yourself a walk in the garden. When you're racing through the supermarket treat yourself to a bouquet of flowers along with the groceries. Call an old friend for a chat. Make these rewards - one reward for each chore that you manage to get through.

Get it out of the way. Often when we wake up disgruntled it's because we know that the day holds at least one chore we're not happy about doing. So just do it. Get it out of the way and over with. The whole rest of the day will be spent with a feeling of relief instead of overhanging guilt.

Count your blessings - Yeah, I know - it sounds like sermonizing. But when we are feeling down it is because we're letting the negatives outweigh the positives. Making a list of the positives reminds us that all is not misery. While you're at it, make a list of the things you like about yourself. You can throw the paper away if you like - but remember those good things when the bad seems to be descending.

Look for that silver lining. It may sound Pollyanna-like, but in almost every situation there is a bright spot. It may be miniscule compared to everything else that seems to be pressing on you - but it is there. Find it. Concentrate on it. If you can't find it alone, call a friend and let them help you to search for the good aspects. Friends often have to listen to us bemoaning things - think how pleasant a change it will be for them to help you focus on the positive.

Name five people that you love. Take a few minutes to call one of them, or send them a postcard. Promise yourself that you will treat the next person on the list tomorrow.

Tackling the whole list will make you feel pressured instead of relieved. Remembering five people who are worth loving will make you feel better, and doing something for one of them will make you feel better still. The promise to take care of the others later is simply a matter of giving yourself permission to take time to think of nice things you could do for the others on your list.

Do something nice for someone else. It is amazing, but this one act can bring us more relief from depression than anything else. It focuses your mind on something outside of yourself, makes someone else happy - and therefore makes you feel positive and giving. It doesn't have to be something big. Just something that person will appreciate.

An even bigger spirit lifter is to do something nice for someone anonymously. Send flowers to a friend - but don't sign the card. Imagining their pleasure and all the fun they will have speculating about their mysterious benefactor will keep you smiling all day.

Of course few of us have the time to do all of these - some days are too hectic for leisurely bubble baths or long journal entries. But if you notice, some of our mood lifters are very personal treats and some involve treating others.

9.0 Japan earthquake shifted Earth on its axis

2011-03-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

Scientists in Pasadena say data from the temblor will show how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under the other, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Seismologists look at a seismograph showing the magnitude of the earthquake in Japan on a monitor at the British Geological Survey office in Edinburgh, Scotland. (David Moir / Reuters / March 11, 2011)

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

March 13, 2011, 10:02 a.m.

Friday's earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan was upgraded to a magnitude 9.0 by the Japan Meteorological Agency, the Kyodo News agency reported Sunday.
The agency's scientists probably had access to new data, said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough. "If they've upgraded, I expect USGS might follow suit," she said, adding that it was not unusual for magnitudes to move up or down by 0.1, because large earthquakes can be tricky to measure.
"It's not surgical precision," she said.
Other details are emerging. The quake probably shifted the position of Earth's axis about 6.5 inches, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, in an e-mail.
The temblor also should have caused Earth to rotate somewhat faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds, he said.
Down the road, data from the quake will provide an unusually precise view of how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under another, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest, scientists said.
Interactive map: Track hundreds of temblors before and after the great quake
The rich detail comes from an extensive network of sensors placed at sites across Japan after that country's Kobe earthquake of 1995, a magnitude 6.8 quake that killed more than 6,000.
"The Japanese have the best seismic information in the world," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards project at the U.S. Geological Survey, at a Saturday news conference at Caltech in Pasadena. "This is overwhelmingly the best-recorded great earthquake ever."
Already, just over 36 hours after the quake, data-crunchers had determined that the temblor's force moved parts of eastern Japan as much as 12 feet closer to North America, scientists said, and that Japan has shifted downward about two feet.
Jones said that USGS had determined that the entire earthquake sequence -- including associated foreshocks and aftershocks -- had so far included 200 temblors of magnitude 5 or larger, 20 of which occurred before the big quake hit. She said the aftershocks were continuing at a rapid pace and decreasing in frequency although not in magnitude, all of which is to be expected.
Researchers have many items they hope to study.
Caltech seismological engineer Tom Heaton said the tragedy would provide unprecedented data on how buildings hold up under long periods of shaking.
"We had very little information about that before now," he said. Though precise numbers are not yet available, he predicted that the data would show that buildings in Japan shook for a full three minutes.
Many of the lessons will apply to other parts of the world than California, because the state's fault topography is different from that involved in the Japanese quake. The data are relevant, however, to the Pacific Northwest, where the Cascadia Subduction Zone extends 600 miles south from British Columbia.
Geological evidence as well as historical records of tsunami deaths in Japan -- from giant waves believed, based on modern analysis, to have come from a Cascadia quake -- suggest that the most recent large earthquake in the Pacific Northwest occurred in 1700.
Another massive quake in the Pacific Northwest is "inevitable," the USGS's Jones said, though it may not occur for hundreds of years.
"They have an opportunity," she said. "This will help the Pacific Northwest understand what they should be ready for. I wouldn't be sleepless in Seattle, but I'd be studious."
eryn.brown@latimes.com

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Improving ROI of your time: 18 simple questions you should keep asking

2011-02-22T06:29:00.000-08:00

February 20, 2011, 7:57 AM PST

Takeaway: Your time is precious. Life is too short. Fortunately, there is something you do to dramatically improve return on your time.

“Of course, I can help you with your IT strategy,” I said to a caller. “Since you mentioned that this is urgent, can you meet for an hour? The next week? The week after? Well, when will you have the time?”

No organization or individual has unlimited resources, and we certainly cannot buy more time, no matter how much we are prepared to pay. Yet the calendars of executives, managers, and professionals are booked solid with activities that don’t belong there in the first place: phone calls to “touch base,” meetings “to be in the loop,” projects that shouldn’t have started in the first place. With the “wrong” items taking up all the space, there is no way for the “right” things to get the attention they deserve.

Your time is precious. Life is too short. Fortunately, there is something you can do to dramatically improve return on your time. I would like to share with you a handful of simple questions you should be asking in a variety of business situations. Is this a comprehensive list? Of course not, but I am being respectful of your time.

On receiving a proposal or request to initiate an action or project — anything that will require investment of time from you or your team

You don’t want to spend any time on half-baked ideas, projects that are misguided or that generate no value, or complex solutions to simple problems.

1. Why? The old consulting technique of posing this question five times in a row might at times annoy the other party. That should not matter to you as much as the fact that you have just gotten to the bottom of an obscure problem.

2. What other alternatives did we consider? People forever jump to solutions before the problem at hand is well understood. IT is notorious at throwing complex technology and processes at simple issues. Challenge yourself and others to look at all potential solutions.

3. How does it align with our strategy/values/key priorities? Projects are often initiated for the wrong reasons, such as sudden availability of funding or someone’s flight of fancy. Nip them in the bud.

4. Why is this important at this time? Timing is everything, as the old adage goes. Why now?

5. How would you like me to be involved going forward? This is how you save yourself from being dragged into endless meetings. Let the other party state their preference, and if it does not match your expectations, offer an alternative that would meet the same objectives at a lesser cost to you.

6. What would be the best outcome from your perspective? This is one of the best questions to ask a client or a sponsor of a project. Getting them to state it explicitly will enable you and your people to concentrate on the right things. Additionally, you will be able to measure progress toward what is considered to be a success.

7. Who else needs to be consulted before we proceed? I have seen numerous projects initiated on the whim of a self-appointed sponsor, just to be stopped soon thereafter by someone with more clout within the organization. The effort of all participants could have been directed to a more worthy cause.

8. Is there business on the table? As an IT leader, you often get offers to collaborate, to get together to participate in a committee, and so on. These are potentially huge time wasters. Asking a polite but pointed question helps to protect you from the time vampires.

In a meeting - planning, problem solving, group decision making

The typical problem here is the inefficiency due to lack of facilitation skills, deficiency of the process, or the obscure objective. I have no patience for these things and neither should you.

9. How do we know that? What evidence do we have? You want to hear objective facts. Massive projects are launched based on attribution bias, and countless hours are spent on solutions to problems that don’t exist. You don’t want to be a part of that.

10. Are we disagreeing on the goal or on the method of implementation? This is the best question I know to get control of a disagreement. You will find that it is the implementation that is a problem, not the final goal. Getting an acknowledgment of that sets you on a path to a speedy resolution. Otherwise, you will spend hours listening to bickering.

11. What are the next steps? There is a rampant problem of meetings and discussions from which participants emerge without a sense of what is expected of them in the light of the conversation that just happened. This is a horrible waste of time and energy.

12. Who should be responsible for this step/item? This is similar to the previous point. You want to make sure that accountability is clearly defined.

13. What is the agenda of the meeting? How can we prepare to make it more productive?

14. May I summarize? I learned this technique from Dr. Alan Weiss. It is great for controlling a conversation, especially if it is starting to look like a runaway train. You will be able to wrap up and move the group onto the next topic.

15. Is this A or B ? Frame the conversation through a series of dichotomous questions to focus people on the key concern and not on the vast confusing perimeter. Is the problem with performance or functionality? Is it all functionality or a specific area? Is it geographically dispersed or concentrated? This will save you hours of unstructured discussions.

16. Can you please elaborate/explain? If you don’t understand an argument, ask to clarify. This is never a sign of an inadequacy but a sign of confidence.

17. What’s the right thing to do? This is a great question to ask to accelerate resolution of a difficult or contentious issue. It works remarkably well.

18. Is there further information available on this issue? If you have a group discussion on your hands that seems to spin around the same issue and there seems to be no interest of moving on, simply ask the audience if there is any new information on this issue, point out that it has been discussed at length, and move everyone onto the next topic.

By TechRepublic

Lookout Identifies Which iPhone And Android Apps Want Your Sensitive Data

2011-02-10T04:29:00.000-08:00

Lookout, a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, is announcing the results of its App Genome Project, a continued effort to map and study mobile applications to identify security threats in the wild, and determine how apps are using users’ personal data.

The App Genome Project has already scanned nearly 300,000 free applications, and fully mapped nearly 100,000 applications available in both Android Market and the App Store.

Early findings show differences in the sensitive data that is typically accessed by Android and iPhone applications and a proliferation of third party code in applications across both platforms.

For example, results found that Android applications are generally less likely than iPhone apps to be capable of accessing a person’s contact list or retrieving their location, with 29% of free applications for Android having the ability to access a user’s location, compared to 33% of free applications on iPhone. Of course, this isn’t a huge difference, but again, this is early data.

Additionally, Lookout says that nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access people’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%). The App Genome Project also found that a large proportion of applications contain third-party code, which is used generally for advertising or analytics. The project found that 47% of free Android apps included third-party code, while that number is just 23% on iPhone.

Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected application indentifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer. Lookout, which just raised $11 million from Accel, Khosla and others, says the growth in smartphone adoption, mobile app downloads and increased consumer awareness of mobile security threats have helped make the offering a popular and necessary option for users.

For now Lookout, which is on more than 400 mobile networks in 170 countries and recently topped one million users, is only available for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Lookout has over 80% of its users on Android and BlackBerry with the remaining users on Windows Mobile. And 70% of users are in the US.

VMware ouvre la porte aux clouds hybrides avec vSphere

2011-02-10T04:21:00.001-08:00

VMware d’annoncer officiellement vCloud Connector, un plug-in gratuit pour vSphere qui doit simplifier la mise en oeuvre de clouds hybrides.

vCloud Connector permet aux utilisateurs d’infrastructures vSphere de migrer de manière transparente leurs machines virtuelles entre nuages publics et privés. Un module qui vient compléter vCloud Director : celui-ci, anciennement connu sous le nom de code «projet Redwood» permet d’assurer le provisionning et la gestion de clouds privés et publics. Sylvain Sioux, directeur technique de VMware France, nous expliquait, lors du lancement de vCloud Director, que cette solution permet de créer des pools de ressources virtuelles - machines virtuelles, réseau (avec plan d’adressage IPv4 interne), et stockage - comme autant de mini centres de calcul virtuels avec, chacun, ses stratégies d’administration, son niveau de service et sa tarification. Mieux, au sein d’un même groupe, il est possible de créer des vApp, un ensemble de plusieurs machines virtuelles dédié, par exemple, à la production d’un service précis. Avec, là encore, un plan d’adressage IP interne spécifique et une exposition, à l’extérieur, des seuls ports TCP/UDP utiles à l’exploitation du service produit, avec, en prime, une couche de translation d’adresses IP.

Une couche d'abstraction

De son côté, vCloud Connector doit offrir une vision de plus haut niveau, regroupant l’ensemble des machines virtuelles sans distinguer celles qui fonctionnent dans le cloud privé de celles qui s’exécutent sur une infrastructure en nuage publique. Bref, on parle là d’un niveau d’abstraction supplémentaire. Et pour VMware, c’est bien là tout l’intérêt : «en tant qu’administrateur vSphere, votre boulot consiste à vous assurer que le service est fourni par votre Cloud, peu importe qu’il le soit grâce à des ressources internes ou externes», explique l’éditeur. Pour autant, vCloud Connector permet bien de transférer automatiquement des machines virtuelles d’un nuage privé à un nuage publique et vice-versa. Enfin presque.

Car, comme le précise VMware, «il ne s’agit pas de vMotion à longue distance», à savoir transférer des machines virtuelles en activité : il s’agit de commutation entre copies de machines virtuelles dans le nuage privé et dans le nuage public.

Source MagIT

Does Merit Pay Really Work?

2011-02-08T15:32:00.001-08:00

B Y C A R O L E E C O L T E R

The idea of merit pay seems simple enough. If you pay high-performing workers more than low-performing ones, the former will stay and keep producing at a high level, while the latter will leave or have incentive to improve. And it can work like that-if employees are clear on exactly what it takes to earn a higher raise, if there are no other factors but performance in pay decisions, if there are enough funds to pay out significant differences in raise amounts, and if managers have the confidence to "bite the bullet," be honest, and stand up to emotional pressure.

If, if, if....still, based on the experience of several co-ops and independent natural food stores I've worked with, I believe that under the right circumstances, merit raises can fulfill their promise.

The eye of the beholder

Edward Lawler, one of the most respected and prolific academic experts in human resources of the past 30 years, describes the conditions that permit the effective use of money as a motivator:

employees attach a high value to pay,

employees believe good performance will result in higher pay,

employees have enough control over the job that their own efforts can have a material impact, and

superior performance leads to more positive than negative results (e.g. more acceptance than rejection by coworkers).

Notice how much these factors depend on the "eye of the beholder." Employee attitudes have a lot to do with the success of merit pay programs. Perhaps comments I've gleaned from employee surveys can shed some light.

In workplaces where non-management employees earn raises through seniority only, there is always a faction calling for merit raises. Frederick Taylor, founder of the school of scientific management, wrote, "The common tendency to 'take it easy' is greatly increased by bringing a number of men together on similar work and at a uniform standard rate of pay...When a naturally energetic man works for a few days beside a lazy one, the logic of the situation is unanswerable. 'Why should I work hard when that lazy fellow gets the same pay that I do and does only half as much work?'" A century later I hear that sentiment expressed in practically so many words by co-op employees. But would their supervisors and co-workers share their self-assessment? Would their performance warrant the maximum under a merit pay system? And would denying a "lazy" coworker a raise or giving her/him a smaller raise do anything to improve performance?

Fighting over crumbs?

I wish the employees who long for merit-pay paradise could hear the complaints of employees at co-ops where a merit pay system exists. They might hear about vague or subjective criteria, alleged management favoritism, disparities between departments, late evaluations and therefore late raises, and demoralization from fighting over "a lousy 15 cents per hour." This last may be the most serious obstacle to realizing the purpose of merit pay.

The paltry amount of money at stake in many co-ops' merit programs is due to factoring seniority and cost of living when determining the size of the total raise. If your co-op has experienced high turnover, you may feel that longevity is worth paying for. You may wish to reward the people who come to work every day, even if their performance leaves a lot to be desired. You may also wish to protect employees from the impacts of the rising cost of living, especially housing, which may make it hard for them to afford to live within commuting distance of the store. These are reasonable aims for a pay program. But by taking up so much of a pay increase budget, and by diluting the message of a raise, they blunt the potential impact of merit pay.

For example, if all employees are guaranteed a raise of at least $.25/hour with top performers getting raises of up to $.50/hour (a common formula I've encountered in co-ops), the difference between a high performer and an acceptable performer comes to three percent for an employee earning $7.50 an hour. Maybe the symbolic reward of knowing they are regarded as a high performer and therefore got the highest possible raise is enough for the employees who earn it. But what about all the others? Were they expecting a 50 cent raise, too? What will happen to their motivation over the next year?

Automatic "merit" raises

Then there are the workplaces (and they are legion) where so-called "merit raises" are actually automatic. Employees come to expect the maximum and are outraged to receive any less. Managers may succumb to rating inflation on performance reviews. While sometimes this is due to cowardice or inertia, some managers feel that the pay is so low, they need to give their people the top allowable increases just to keep them.

I am reminded of something one of my earliest mentors told me 20 years ago: Merit pay only works when people are already making enough to meet their basic needs. If employees are just barely making ends meet, they won't be motivated to higher performance by merit pay. They'll only be dissatisfied not to get the maximum possible raise.

Performance reviews are often a casualty of a not-well-thought-out merit pay system. I don't believe that performance reviews can simultaneously fulfill their potential both for determining pay increases and for establishing future goals. The former role tends to overshadow the latter. The goal-setting function of the performance review gets lost in the employee's anxiety about the amount of the anticipated raise. Furthermore, the evaluation criteria may not be job-specific enough or the rating scale may be too vague (one person's "5" is another person's "3") for employees to feel fairly treated. While this ambiguity would not be a problem if a rating were only a platform for discussion, it becomes a very big problem when it is the basis for denying an employee a raise of the size he or she expected.

When using performance reviews to determine pay increases, you are looking backward, rewarding the employee for what has already been done. Social scientists have long noted that to motivate behavior, a reward must be perceived to be a direct consequence of that behavior. Employees need a "line of sight" between their pay increase and the performance that earns it. In studies of employee motivation, the impact of a pay raise is said to average eight weeks-two weeks in anticipation of the raise and six weeks after receiving it. If you want to motivate employees to their best level of performance for the long haul, you need a forward-looking mechanism that encourages people to work toward a reward.

Separate performance and pay reviews

There is a solution to this dilemma-separating the performance review from the pay review. For example, on the six-month anniversary of hire, employees get a performance review with feedback on their strengths and areas for improvement. At the end of the review meeting, manager and employee both agree to a limited number of specific performance goals. For strong performers, the goals could be more developmental than remedial. Six months later, on the one-year anniversary of hire, employees receive a pay review. At this meeting the manager informs the employee of the amount of her or his raise, based on progress observed toward the goals.

This approach prevents the tendency I've observed for annual goals to be set and then forgotten. Perhaps not incidentally, I've noted that in co-ops with separate pay and performance reviews where I've done employee surveys, I don't hear grousing about how pay raises are awarded. Throughout this article I've been focusing on non-management employees. For management and other professional jobs, merit pay seems well accepted and easier to implement. People in these positions are usually higher-paid, and their "line of sight" is likely to be annual, not just from one paycheck to the next. Also, the difference between good and poor performance in these jobs can significantly impact the whole co-op.

My conclusions

If you can't afford significant pay differences between high and low performers, or if you believe that your staff is underpaid in relation to the cost of living in your labor market, I suggest that you postpone the implementation of merit pay for non-management employees. Instead, give everyone predictable seniority raises and reward the high performers with positive feedback, new responsibilities, and promotions. Put your managerial time and attention into better coaching and counseling of employees with performance problems, and more timely corrective action, including removal of poor performers who demoralize the rest of the workforce. It won't bother employees so much that everyone is earning the same raise if no one is visibly screwing up and making everyone's job harder.

If you do implement merit pay, separate the performance and pay reviews by at least several months. At the time of the pay review, base your pay raise decisions on progress observed toward the goals set in the performance review. Also, make sure your pay ranges are wide enough to allow for significant differences in amounts of raises.

There is no pay system on earth that will satisfy all your employees. But you can have a pay system that supports your goal for a high-performing and motivated staff.

Carolee Colter is a consultant to cooperatives and community-based organizations.

11G Data Guard Setup project - Oracle Wiki

2011-02-07T06:59:00.000-08:00

11G Data Guard Setup project - Oracle Wiki

Performances Appraisal 'Remember money isn't everything!' :)

2011-01-28T00:59:00.001-08:00

PA cartoon

From the web by YAS

HP s'allie à la CDG pour 1.500 emplois dans l'offshoring à Rabat

2011-01-26T05:12:00.001-08:00

Écrit par Maroc éco

« Entre l'offshoring que prétendent faire les centres d'appels et ce que réalise le groupe HP au Maroc, il y a un grand gap », annonce d'emblée le top management de la filiale marocaine du groupe mondial. Et à lui d'ajouter « alors que les centres d'appels se limitent à vendre la minute en recrutant des opérateurs moins chers qu'en Europe, le géant mondial des technologies de l'information, installe l'ensemble des plates formes d'Outsourcing au niveau de ses centres à Rabat ».

Si l'on prend l'exemple des réservations d'hôtel pour le groupe Accor, un centre d'appel classique se limite à recevoir l'appel et envoie l'information brute au donneur d'ordre pour la traiter. Le projet que développe HP, via filiale EDS au Technopolis de Rabat, en partenariat avec la CDG, se base sur une plate forme complète.

En effet, les informations recueillies à l'issue des appels des clients sont traitées localement. Les données transférées du Maroc vont directement vers les terminaux des hôtels Ibis, Novotel et les autres enseignes de la marque pour être utilisées par les clients finaux (les employés des hôtels). De ce fait, une bonne partie de la valeur ajoutée est concentrée localement. Actuellement, le centre commun d'EDS et la CDG emploie 450 personnes. Des sources proches du dossier assurent que le nombre d'emploi passera à 1.500 à moyen terme.

En parallèle, à cette perspective d'investissement HP cherche à élargir son offre vers d'autres services aussi bien dans le BPO que dans l'ITO. Paie, comptabilité, maintenance des systèmes d'informations, « tous les services externalisables sont une cible idéale pour nous », assure notre source. Encore faut-il maintenir le modèle d'outsourcing basé sur la concentration de la plus grosse part de la valeur ajoutée au niveau local. A noter que le modèle d'offshoring du groupe HP au Maroc ne se limite pas à l'export. Le groupe tient à réaliser les 30% de chiffre d'affaires au niveau local, comme la loi lui autorise à le faire.

How to use LinkedIn strategically

2011-01-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

Takeaway: LinkedIn is a great tool for getting your profile out in front of potential employers. And with the addition of some new apps, it just got better.

I think a lot of people think of LinkedIn as just a more staid version of social networking. And I think the gainfully employed often neglect their LinkedIn pages in favor of its more scintillating cousin, Facebook. After all, would you rather hear who a former colleague is now connected to or read trash-talking among your Facebook friends?

Okay, maybe that’s just me.

The fact is, LinkedIn is a great tool for what are perhaps the most important aspects of searching for a job-networking and online presence. And with the addition of some new LinkedIn apps, these have become tasks have become even easier to do.

First of all, you can put your work profile up there for the world to see. While you still should send targeted resumes for positions you want to apply for, LinkedIn gives everyone a snapshot of your capabilities. So if a potential employer is just looking around before he or she even posts an opening, you’re out there. Here are some tips for using LinkedIn to its greatest advantage:

Avoid overused keywords just as you would on a resume
LinkedIn late last year released its top 10 overused buzzwords used in U.S. member-profiles. Avoid:
extensive experience

innovative

motivated

results-oriented

dynamic

proven track record

team-player

fast-paced

problem-solver

entrepreneurial

Take advantage of new LinkedIn apps

I found three apps that I think are invaluable:

WordPress

This app will synch your WordPress blog posts automatically with your profile. It offers a filtering option if you don’t want to share every entry with your LinkedIn connections-you can just use a special LinkedIn tag.

Events

The Events application adds a box to your profile that shows what events people in your network are attending. This helps you find events based on your industry and job function. You can sort by most popular events, search for events, and create new ones.

SlideShare Presentations

With this app, you can share presentations and documents with your LinkedIn network and upload portfolios, resume, conference talks, PDFs, marketing/sales presentations. If you’re really adventuresome, you can upload a video of yourself.

By Toni Bowers January 24, 2011, 4:07 AM PST

Moroccan F16 : F-16D Flies In Fort Worth

2010-12-11T11:03:00.001-08:00

Morocco, the twenty-fifth nation to operate the F-16, ordered twenty-four Block 52 aircraft in 2009. The two-tone light brown scheme with gray underside is unique to the Moroccan Air Force.

By YAS

Phosphate: Morocco's White Gold

2010-11-17T08:15:00.001-08:00

Phosphate is used in everything from fertilizer to rechargeable batteries. And Morocco's King Mohammed VI has cornered the market

In Moroccan Sahara, phosphate goes to port via a 62-mile-long conveyor belt Michael Fay/National Geographic/Getty Images

By Brendan Borrell and Daniel Grushkin

Dwight Eschliman/Apostrophe

In May 2009 a petite brunette from Paris wearing black heels scrambled up a pile of mine tailings on the outskirts of the Moroccan town of Khouribga. From up there, Béatrice Montagnier, a hotel specialist with the hospitality consulting firm Horwath, took in the view: parched plains scoured by bulldozers; an old warehouse baking in the sun; a jumble of two-story concrete block homes with a rectangular minaret beyond them. She spun around 360 degrees snapping photos with her pink cell phone and imagining the future: a planned 800-acre resort project that would attract visitors from around the world. How many hotel rooms would they need? she wondered. Should it be three stars or four? And where would the museum be going? There was one issue—project funding—about which Montagnier had no questions. The estimated $1 billion needed to build the resort would come from the ground beneath her feet.

Miners have been working in Khouribga for almost a century, but only now is the area poised to become central to the global economy. Back in the 1920s pioneers started tunneling through the earth here, digging through layers of sediment formed under an ancient sea, looking for phosphate-rich rock and occasionally plucking out the tooth of a 30-million-year-old shark. The phosphate extracted from the rock, used in fertilizer, detergent, food additives, and more recently lithium-ion batteries, sold for decades in its raw state for less than $40 per metric ton. Those days are gone. It's currently trading at about $130.

This is good news for King Mohammed VI, 47, who owns more than half the world's phosphate reserves. James Prokopanko, chief executive officer of Plymouth (Minn.)-based fertilizer giant Mosaic (MOS), has called Morocco the Saudi Arabia of phosphate, with all that implies about the King's power to influence prices and economies. Mohammed's strategy, by most accounts, is to drive the commodity's price higher yet—which means the cost of making everything from corn syrup to iPads will be going up as well.

Mohammed VI is the unofficial overseer of the state-owned phosphate monopoly, Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), Morocco's largest industrial company. He is also the power behind Montagnier's visit to Khouribga, which lies on the Plateau des Phosphates, halfway between the modern city of Casablanca and the salmon-colored souks of Marrakech. Today it is a scrappy mining town of 160,000 that doesn't even merit a mention in Fodor's. That's about to change, says Montagnier, repeating the words of her client: "It's time to give back to Khouribga what the earth gave to us."

The project will be called the Mine Verte, or "green mine," and it will be a fantasyland glorifying the country's mineral inheritance. The plans are grand, in the Dubai style. As is the fashion these days in Arab monarchies, the Mine Verte will be environmentally sustainable, thus the "green." Fossils hidden in OCP warehouses will be displayed in a sparkling museum powered by wind and sun. A depleted mine will be transformed into gardens, performance spaces, and housing for OCP employees and other visitors, all designed by top French and Moroccan architects working with London-based environmental consultants BDSP. Plans for a "mega-amusement park" on the premises include an equestrian center, a cable car, and an indoor ski slope on a pile of mine waste. Even bungee jumping made the list; the King is a thrill-seeker, fond of jet-skis and sports cars, who once flew his Aston Martin DB7 to London for repair. In all, the Mine Verte will be a glittering monument to geologic good fortune.

Phosphate: Morocco's White Gold - BusinessWeek

Dell Inspiron M5010 AMD 2.1GHz, 3GB, 320GB

2010-09-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

For more detailed configuration and pricing feel free to Contact Vendor

Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3

2010-09-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

By Jon Stokes |

A 300mm Power 7 processor wafer

In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves.

In this short article, I'll walk you through the floorplan of two chips with similar transistor counts—the Sun's Niagara 3 and IBM's POWER7. Most CPU geeks will already know a lot of the information I'll give below, but many readers will appreciate having it all together in one place.

Niagara 3: threads and I/O

Sun's Niagara 3

Sun's 1 billion-transistor, 16-core Niagara 3 processor is a great example of modern multiprocessor-turned-SoC (system on a chip). Everything about this design is focused on pushing large numbers of parallel instruction streams and data streams through the processor socket at once. The shared cache is small, the shared pipes are wide, and the end result is a chip that's all about maintaining a high rate of flow, and not one that's aimed at collecting a large pile of data and chipping away at it with heavy equipment.

Each of the 16 individual SPARC cores that make up Niagara 3 support up to eight simultaneous threads of execution, for a total of 128 threads per chip. Logically, the chip is laid out so that all of the cores communicate with a unified 6MB L2 cache via a crossbar switch that's placed in the middle of the chip. This combination of cores and L2 connected via a switch forms the basic compute architecture of the SoC.

So that the chip can talk to the outside world, the L2 caches are connected to a variety of I/O interfaces: memory, PCIe, 1G/10G Ethernet, and coherency links. All told, those links can push a total of 2.4Tb/s worth of data through a single Niagara 3 socket—that's a lot of bandwidth, but you need it to feed that many threads. Let's take a quick look at each of these I/O links in turn.

Coherence: Niagra 3's coherence links are the equivalent of the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) on Intel's Nehalem parts, or of HyperTransport for AMD. These links can be used to connect up to four of the chips together without any additional routing chips (this is what's meant by saying Niagara 3 can be used in a four-socket glueless configuration). Each Niagara 3 chip has two 1.6GHz coherence controllers, which are connected to six coherence links. Each individual link consists of 14 unidirectional lanes that give the link a total bandwidth of 9.6Gb/s.

Memory: Also attached to the L2 is are two DDR3 memory controllers, each of which hosts two memory channels, for a total of four channels of DDR3.

PCIe and Ethernet: A PCIe controller supports two 5Gb/s PCIe ports, and an Ethernet controller supports two 1G/10G Ethernet ports.

IBM's POWER7

IBM's POWER7

At 1.2 billion transistors, IBM's new 45nm POWER7 processor is only a little bigger than Niagara 3, but it couldn't be more different. If Niagara 3 is an army of guys with shovels, POWER7 is a giant bulldozer.

POWER7 has only half the cores (eight) and one quarter of the threads (32) of Sun's chip, but that doesn't mean it falls short in the horsepower department. Each POWER7 core has a ton of very fast execution hardware, and the overall layout of the machine's very wide execution core is a straightforward evolution of the design that I first described in a series of articles on the PowerPC 970. (I talked more about POWER7's execution core in an earlier article comparing it to Intel's Tukwila Itanium.)

Where Niagra 3 keeps a large number of relatively weak cores busy by moving data onto and off of the chip using ample I/O resources, POWER7's approach to feeding a smaller number of much more robust cores is to cache large amounts of data on-chip so that the cores can grind through it in batches. This being the case, POWER7 has the most remarkable on-chip cache hardware of any processor on the market.

First in the chain is the 32KB L1 data cache, which has seen its latency cut in half, from four cycles in the POWER6 to two cycles in POWER7. Then there's the 256KB L2, the latency of which has dropped from 26 cycles in POWER6 to eight cycles in POWER7—that's quite a reduction, and will help greatly to mitigate the impact of the shared L3's increased latency.

The POWER7's L3 is its most unique feature, and, at 32MB, it's positively gigantic. IBM was able to cram such a large L3 onto the chip by making it out of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) instead of the usual SRAM. This decision cost the cache a few cycles of latency, but in exchange IBM got a 3.5x improvement in power efficiency and a 3x improvement in cache density. IBM has actually been talking up the use of eDRAM for on-chip cache since at least 2002, so in this regard POWER7 represents the fruition of years of work on this approach.

On the I/O side, POWER7 features two DDR3 memory controllers that can do up to 100GB/s total. The chip's SMP links (the same as Niagara's coherence links) can do 360GB/s (or almost 2.9Tb/s) of bandwidth, but this amount appears to be divided between internal and external SMP links. The chip doesn't contain the other I/O options—PCIe or Ethernet—that Niagara has.

Ultimately, these two server-class processors show that there are two very different ways to spend a billion transistors, and each design will be good for different applications. Sun's Niagara is aimed at networked server operations where lots of simultaneous, lightweight requests have to be serviced—databases, Web servers, and the like. In contrast, POWER7 has the horsepower to grind through a smaller number of more compute-intensive tasks at a high rate of speed. Both parts have their place in the server ecosystem of 2010.

The New Segregation Debate

2010-09-20T15:53:00.000-07:00

Can educating girls and boys separately fix our public schools, or does it reinforce outmoded gender stereotypes?

(Page 1 of 3)

Peter M. Fisher / Corbis

If you thought charter schools and ending teacher tenure were controversial fixes for the American school system, see what happens you bring up the idea of educating boys and girls separately. With male academic achievement declining by almost every measure, and their scores possibly dragging down national averages, administrators are taking a fresh look at same-sex classrooms and the concept that boys and girls might do better when they’re apart. Why is it such a hot-button topic? Well, because it goes against 30 years of thinking, and smacks of “separate but equal” education.

The advocates of the single-sex approach are surprising, as are the foes. Among many liberal thinkers, gender segregation sounds like regressing to a time when girls were educated in finishing schools and had access to neither the number, nor caliber of schools available to boys. Plus, the notion that boys and girls learn differently—touted by some as the primary rational for gender separation—goes against one of feminism’s (at least the 1970s version) main messages. To say that there is something inherently different between boys and girls is, for many, tantamount to saying that women are the weaker sex.

For these reasons, Democratic politicians spent decades fighting vehemently against loosening legislation to allow public schools to offer same-sex classes. But in 2001, Sen. Hillary Clinton linked the issue to class—citing an unfairness in the fact that single-sex education is available as a choice only to those who can afford private-school tuition. Clinton, a graduate of all-women’s Wellesley College, joined forces with Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to successfully bring about legislative change. Since then, the number of public schools offering same-sex classes has grown from 11 to 540—still a relatively small figure in the big picture, but a jump of more than 4,000 percent nonetheless.

Related: America's Best High Schools 2010 »

This number would be even bigger were it not for the ACLU, which has successfully convinced dozens of districts not to adopt single-gender classrooms. “Our concern is that once you separate boys and girls you are telling them that there is some inherent difference such that they need to be educated separately,” says Lenora Lapidus, head of the women’s-rights arm, which is spearheading the investigation. “When public schools do this, it’s the government reinforcing gender stereotypes.” Lapidus’s division also has open cases against districts they believe are violating the admittedly loose terms of the ammended legislation—in those cases, their beef is that single-sex classes are being forced on children, and parents aren’t being given a legitimate coed option. But Lapidus says that she believes public schools shouldn’t offer single-sex classes under any circumstances—whether it’s a choice or not.

The ACLU’s opposition perplexes advocates of separate classrooms. “The ACLU has become increasingly deranged over the years,” says Leonard Sax, the head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. “And by deranged I mean out of touch with reality.” Sax also can’t understand why the National Organization of Women (NOW), which advocates choice in reproductive rights, would be against giving parents more options when it comes to education. “We are the pro-choice movement in this debate—we don’t believe that every child should be in same-sex classrooms, but every parent should have a choice.”

But what are parents choosing exactly? In some cases they’re getting not just separate rooms for girls and boys, they’re getting a modified curriculum and even classroom structure based on what proponents see as gender differences in learning. And that’s where things get thorny. According to Sax, some of the most successful all-boys classrooms have been those in which boys are allowed to move around. He cites one classroom that uses desks that can be raised or lowered, so boys can lie on the floor, sit, or stand up while they work. Girls’ classrooms, meanwhile can encourage quiet study, which some say is intrinsic to female behavior and caters to girls’ strengths. The question is whether this is catering to strengths or encouraging old-school stereotypes.

Sax and others will hasten to add that while the crisis among boys may have gotten the most media attention in recent years, there continue to be areas in which girls lag behind, particularly in math and science. In computer science, the divide has increased in the last few decades—only 18 percent of those taking the AP computer science test are female, down from 34 percent in 1987. According to Sax, separating boys and girls in those subject areas can be beneficial to both genders, and that’s, in part, the source of his frustration with the ACLU. “If the single-sex format offends her delicate political sensibilities, what would she recommend?” he says of Lapidus’s position. “Or is she content that boys outnumber girls four to one in this country in the sciences?”

Whether or not it works is a contentious issue—those in favor cite research supporting it, those opposed dismiss that evidence as junk science. Pedro Noguera, a professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School, recently completed a study on same-sex education for boys of color and found no evidence that separating them was better. Noguera is critical of advocates like Sax, saying that their theories are “far-fetched” since they rely more on observations of student behavior, than hard science proving that childrens’ brains work differently depending on their gender. “The schools that developed for girls had a clear theory: girls needed to be empowered, needed to express themselves,” he says. “There’s no theory about why [same-sex education] is good for boys … It’s a lot of pseudoscience that is not rooted in anything.”

But Sax and others cite some compelling statistics: in one three-year pilot project in Florida, boys in a coed class scored 37 percent on the state standardized test, while those in a boys-only class scored 85 percent. The girls’ scores jumped too: from 59 percent to 75 percent. And teachers, by and large, seem to love it. They say they spend less time on discipline, and are better able to engage their students. Lapidus argues that such studies can be attributed to other factors, like smaller classrooms and better teacher training, and that teachers who advocate for gender-segregation are just “parroting back” what they’ve learned from Sax and others.

Regardless of the mixed research, the interest in single-sex classrooms shows just how desperate teachers and administrators are to find a cure to the oft-lamented "problem with boys." By just about every metric, boys are, and have been for perhaps a decade, lagging tremendously behind girls in terms of academic achievement. They consistently score lower GPAs, college-admissions rates, and fare worse in reading and writing. And it’s not just a problem for them; their scores aren’t helping the country’s plummeting academic ranking as compared to the rest of the developed world.

The gender gap goes far beyond high school. Today, women make up nearly 60 percent of college students and they’re much more likely to go on to pursue advanced degrees. In fact, higher education has become so tipped in favor of females that in November, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission launched a probe into whether colleges and universities were discriminating against women in favor of men in order to even out the balance.

Some blame female success itself for boys’ lagging achievement, arguing that girls have gotten ahead at the expense of boys. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers recently put it, “feminists are constantly trying to knock down doors that are already open. And it’s young men who pay the price.” Others, of course, argue against this kind of zero-sum thinking. Where boys might be falling behind by academic metrics, girls are more likely to report high stress levels, eating disorders, and behaviors like cutting. “Boys have problems, girls have problems,” Sax says. “Both are disadvantaged, but they’re disadvantaged in different ways.”

After seeing the same gender issues in Milford, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, Gary Knell began looking into possible solutions for his school district—which has 6,200 students enrolled in kindergarten through high school. Last year, Knell organized a “gender survey” of students, teachers, and community members, measuring their feelings about how to treat the issue. Seventy percent of the 232 parents who responded agreed that gender differences should be addressed at the schools, but less than a quarter said that the district should consider single-sex classrooms. In contrast, 34 percent of the 232 middle-school students who responded said they would participate more and at a higher level in a single-sex classroom. That parents are less amenable than their kids isn’t entirely surprising. “Whenever we talk about differences, there’s a politically correct mode that differences mean someone is inferior and someone superior,” Knell says. “[But] boys and girls are different. We should recognize that and modify our teaching approaches.”

Ultimately, figuring out what method is best for boys and girls may mean identifying and tearing down gender stereotypes where they begin—with the kids themselves. And figuring out what a boy thinks it means to be a man, and what a girl thinks it means to be a woman, are questions that are probably too big for most public school to take on. But even if some adults are hesitant on the topic, the kids aren’t afraid to speak bluntly. “Boys want attention,” a sixth-grade boy in Milford says. “And they don’t really want an education. They want a cool job when they grow up. Like being a rock star or a basketball player.” His female classmate agrees. “For guys I think that if you’re really smart and you get good grades, it’ll be like, ‘Oh you’re a nerd!’ But girls, you’ll get like a pat on the back if you get all As. I dunno, guys just don’t think it’s that cool.” Therein lies a problem for which there may be no quick fix.

Find the author on the Web at The Equality Myth.

The New Segregation Debate - Newsweek

Project Success Factors

2010-09-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

Before we begin, let’s take a look at the factors that can make or break projects. As you
move forward, keep these factors in mind so that your project will start out on a positive
note. If these success factors do not exist in your organization, perhaps more up front work
will be needed before you begin your project management journey.

Project Success Factor 1

In order for project management to be successful within an organization, it must have top
down, senior-level or executive support. The project owner must support the benefi ts of the
project, accept responsibility for funding and budget status, concur with project and charter
requirements, sign off on risk plans, and be knowledgeable of the status of both planned
and actual results.

Project Success Factor 2

Clients and users must have ownership of the project. This is demonstrated by providing
resources, being involved in the project initiative, signing off on requirements once the plan
is completed, signing off on the schedule, participating in the risk management processes,
and concurring with scope changes.

Project Success Factor 3

Business processes must be fully known. The project manager and the team must demonstrate
knowledge of business processes. Many projects are generated due to a business
problem, and the team must understand that problem and defi ne how the project solution
will change business processes. When there are changes, the impacts should be documented
and fully understood by the client. Process improvement metrics must also be identifi ed so
that it can be determined whether the project has met its intended purpose relative to the
business problem.

Project Success Factor 4

Projects should be chosen based on a sound business plan that is completed for a particular
stage or effort. The infrastructure and business solution units must be identifi ed and
synched with the corporate plan and economically validated.
Introduction xxiii

Project Success Factor 5

The project scope should be clearly defi ned and identifi ed in the project charter. Impact
analysis relative to budget and schedule must be performed when scope changes occur, and
the focus of the team must be limited to approved changes only. Owners must step up to
the risks and benefi ts for all scope changes.

Project Success Factor 6

An effective change control process must exist that is followed by all stakeholders. The
project manager must regularly review all changes and their impacts with the owner, who
must approve change requests and associated funding.

Project Success Factor 7

The business drivers must be fully identifi ed and agreed upon by the owner and user community.
In other words, the project must add value to the business. The solution elements
of the project should be traced back to business drivers, with success criteria defi ned at the
onset and benchmarked at each phase. A means to collect data should be established so
that the metrics can be demonstrated.

Project Success Factor 8

There should be limited experimentation with new technology. Previous use must be demonstrated
prior to commitment for mission-critical projects. Previous industry application
must be demonstrated before application for customer-affecting projects. The appropriate
technology group must agree to support the technology in a deployed state.

Copy Rights :

Project Manager Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to PMP® Skills

Linda Kretz Zaval, PMP

Terri A. Wagner, MA, PMP

Abolish Software Patents

2010-08-09T01:55:00.000-07:00

I spoke on a panel last week at the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program titled “Re-examining The Patent System.” My panel was the last one and came after a few hours of stimulating discussion about the problems with patents, the problems with patent reform, and the reason our government is struggling so much with what to do.

When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, copyright and patents were just starting to be a major issue in the personal computer software business. I vividly remember attending a lecture in one of my classes by the general counsel of Lotus who was suing Borland for copyright infringement between Quattro Pro and Lotus 1–2–3. This was around the same time that Apple vs. Microsoft / Xerox vs. Apple lawsuits appeared, as well as the nonsense Ashton-Tate vs. Fox Software lawsuit. Forget about patents – this was about copyright!

Some of the research I did when I was a doctoral student at MIT was around the sources of innovation in the software industry. In the late 1980’s, the three primary mechanisms for protecting innovation were copyright, patents, and trade secrets. Copyrights (as evidenced by the legal action above) was the most active area and I – among many others – thought that copyrights were a problematic way to fundamentally protect software innovation, especially around look and feel (which was all the rage at the time.) Of course, with the widespread emergence of the GPL and open source, the dynamics of software copyright have changed radically in the past decade, which is likely part of the reason the focus has shifted to patents.

I personally think software patents are an abomination. My simple suggestion on the panel was to simply abolish them entirely. There was a lot of discussion around patent reform and whether we should consider having different patent rules for different industries. We all agreed this was impossible – it was already hard enough to manage a single standard in the US – even if we could get all the various lobbyists to shut up for a while and let the government figure out a set of rules. However, everyone agreed that the fundamental notion of a patent – that the invention needed to be novel and non-obvious – was at the root of the problem in software.

I’ve skimmed hundreds of software patents in the last decade (and have read a number of them in detail.) I’ve been involved in four patent lawsuits and a number of “threats” by other parties. I’ve had many patents granted to companies I’ve been an investor in. I’ve been involved in patent discussions in every M&A transaction I’ve ever been involved in. I’ve spent more time than I care to on conference calls with lawyers talking about patent issues. I’ve always wanted to take a shower after I finished thinking about, discussing, or deciding how to deal with something with regard to a software patent.

I’ll pause for a second, take a deep breath, and remind you that I’m only talking about software patents. I don’t feel qualified to talk about non-software patents. However, we you consider the thought that a patent has to be both novel AND non-obvious (e.g. “the claimed subject matter cannot be obvious to someone else skilled in the technical field of invention”), 99% of all software patents should be denied immediately. I’ve been in several situations where either I or my business partner at the time (Dave Jilk) had created prior art a decade earlier that – if the patent that I was defending against ever went anywhere – would have been used to invalidate the patent.

When I made the assertion that we should simply abolish software patents entirely, I noticed a lot of lawyers heads moving vertically up and down. I took this as a good sign, especially since a number of them had gray hair (and a few were on the earlier panels and sounded very intelligent and experienced, especially for lawyers.)

After wrestling with software patents for the past 15 years, I’ve concluded that there simply is no middle ground. If we continue on the path we are on, patents will continue to increase in their overall expense to the system, everyone will feel compelled to continue to apply for as many (and as broad) patents as possible, if only for defensive reasons (one of Fred’s VC Cliche’s of the Week was “Patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some.”) Let’s take a page from geopolitical warfare and focus on global disarmament, rather than mutually assured destruction.

HP's Lesjak Inherits Slowing Growth, Job-Search Distractions - Bloomberg

2010-08-09T01:43:00.000-07:00

Cathie Lesjak, seen here in a 2006 portrait, has taken over Hewlett-Packard Co. temporarily after Mark Hurd quit last week. Source: Bite Communications via Bloomberg

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., talks with Bloomberg's Lizzie O'Leary and Matt Miller about today's resignation by Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd and the outlook for the company. Hurd resigned as CEO after an investigation found he had a personal relationship with a contractor who received pay from the company that wasn’t business-related. Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak will take over as interim CEO. (Source: Bloomberg)

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Hewlett-Packard Co. said Mark Hurd has decided with the Board of Directors to resign as chief executive officer immediately. The board has appointed Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak, 51, as CEO on an interim basis. Hurd is stepping down following an investigation by outside legal counsel and the general counsel’s Office surrounding a claim of sexual harassment against Hurd and HP by a former contractor to HP. The investigation determined there was no violation of HP’s sexual harassment policy, but did find violations of HP’s standards of business conduct. Bloomberg's Cris Valerio, Matt Miller, Lizzie O'Leary, Adam Johnson and Dominic Chu report. (Source: Bloomberg)

Cathie Lesjak, who took over Hewlett- Packard Co. temporarily after Mark Hurd quit last week, inherited a growth slowdown and a senior staff who may be distracted by jockeying for the top job.

Lesjak addressed reporters and analysts twice in her three days as interim chief executive, seeking to play down concerns about the shakeup. Hurd resigned after a probe found inaccurate expense reports and a personal relationship with a contractor named Jodie Fisher, who is a former actress and reality TV contestant. The stock fell more than 9 percent on Aug. 6 after the announcement.

Going into what has been HP’s biggest quarter, the computer maker forecast sales of $32.5 billion to $32.7 billion. That would be up about 6 percent from a year earlier, a slower rate than the past three quarters. The CEO search makes running the operations more complicated. Several outsiders will be considered for the CEO post, along with executive vice presidents Todd Bradley, Dave Donatelli, Ann Livermore and Vyomesh Joshi, said Abhey Lamba, an analyst at ISI Group.

“If one of them gets the job, what are the chances the other three stay on? That is the question HP has to deal with,” Lamba said. The New York-based analyst recommends buying the shares, which he doesn’t own himself.

Out of the Running

Lesjak, 51, took herself out of the running for the permanent post. The company’s goal is to find the best candidate for the job, she said.

Hurd’s replacement will have to follow through on his five- year run of dominating the personal-computer market and expanding into new areas. Under his guidance, Palo Alto, California-based HP unseated Dell Inc. in PCs and undertook more than $20 billion in acquisitions, pushing deeper into computer services, networking equipment and smartphones.

Candidates from outside HP include Steve Mills, who has run the software group at International Business Machines Corp. for a decade and recently took over the hardware division, and former Oracle Corp. executive Ray Lane, who’s now a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, according to analysts and recruiters.

Hewlett-Packard dropped 5 cents to $46.30 in regular New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 6. The shares have dropped 10 percent this year.

In May, Hurd reported quarterly sales that were about $1 billion more than analysts estimated. Revenue growth accelerated to 13 percent from the year earlier as the company shook off the recession. In the preliminary report for last quarter, which HP will release officially on Aug. 19, the company pegged sales growth at 11 percent.

Lower Forecast?

Its forecast for the current quarter suggests that management is being more conservative, possibly because of the CEO change, Lamba said.

The company investigated Hurd after receiving a letter from Fisher’s lawyer on June 29. Hurd turned the letter over to HP General Counsel Michael Holston within roughly a half-hour, according to a person familiar with the situation.

While the company determined that he didn’t harass Fisher, it found that she received numerous inappropriate payments from HP during her two years as a marketing contractor. Hurd and Fisher settled the case out of court, according to her lawyer, Gloria Allred.

The woman’s job was to organize forums for CEOs and chief information officers that gave customers access to Hurd and other HP executives. She would gather background information on invitees and introduce executives to one another.

Acting Career

Fisher didn’t have “an affair or intimate sexual relationship” with Hurd, she said in a statement released by her lawyer. Allred described Fisher as “a single mom focused on raising her young son. She has a degree in political science from Texas Tech and was recently the vice president of a commercial real estate company.”

Fisher worked on the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, Allred said. Fisher also has appeared as an actress in such films as 1992’s “Intimate Obsession,” “Body of Influence 2” and “Sheer Passion,” according to her Internet Movie Database page, which lists her age as 50.

HP said Hurd submitted inaccurate expense reports that concealed his personal relationship with Fisher. The expenses, which range between $1,000 and $20,000, were for meals and travel, and Hurd intends to pay back the amount, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ethical Guidelines

The investigation was led by Holston, along with outside counsel, under the supervision of the board, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

The board’s nominating and governance committee, which consists of board members Lawrence Babbio, Sari Baldauf, Lucille S. Salhany and G. Kennedy Thompson, is responsible for enforcing HP’s standards of business conduct, a set of ethical guidelines for employees that HP said Hurd violated.

In a conference call yesterday, Lesjak said Hurd’s resignation won’t affect customer relationships and that the depth of the company’s management is the best in its history. HP’s success over the past five years has been a team effort, not just Hurd’s doing, she said.

“There’s no question he did a very good job,” Lesjak said. “But he doesn’t do everything. He was one person.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Aaron Ricadela in San Francisco at aricadela@bloomberg.net; Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net

Observer cette semaine : les étoles filantes des « Perséides » et rassemblement planétaire

2010-08-09T01:41:00.000-07:00

Posté par Xavier Demeersman le 8/08/10 •

Perséides

Avis à tous les observateurs du ciel à l’oeil nu : maximum de l’essaim météoritiques »les Perséides » durant les nuits du 12 et 13 août et superbe rassemblement planétaire au crépuscule où Vénus, Saturne, Mars et un fin croissant lunaire sont invités.

Les 6, 7 et 8 août, nombre d’entre nous ont plongés leur regard dans la nuit incommensurable à la rencontre des étoiles, des mondes lointains, de l’Univers et aussi d’astronomes amateurs passionnés … Un événement annuel à l’initiative de l’AFA, qui depuis 20 ans orchestre les « nuits des étoiles » partout en France. Depuis ses débuts, la manifestation se déroule à des dates proches du maximum d’activité de l’essaim météoritique « les Perséides », la très célèbre « pluie » d’étoiles filantes estivales ! C’est, ainsi, des milliers de personnes qui se réunissent, le temps d’une soirée à la belle étoile … Tout cela est promesse de charme, de poésie, de connaissances, de culture et de rencontres …

Il y a une dizaine d’années encore, la « nuit des étoiles » avait droit à une ou deux heures de télévision, notamment sur France 2, or désormais, pour je ne sais quelle raison, l’organisation en a été abandonnée. On ne peut que regretter ce recul de la diffusion et du partage des connaissances !

Les Perséides

On a tous entendu parler des étoiles filantes que l’on peut voir l’été, de ces belles pluies scintillantes illuminant les douces soirées des vacances … Beaucoup oublient que ce n’est pas la seule occasion d’en surprendre dans le ciel nocturne. Tous les mois de l’année comptent leurs essaims météoritiques, certains sont plus denses et intenses que d’autres, comme « les Perséides » (août) et « les Léonides » (novembre). Leur nom provient de la position de leur radient : la région du ciel d’où semble provenir toutes ces « flêches » lumineuses. Ainsi, celles que l’on peut observer par dizaines autour du 12 août chaque année, semblent pour la plupart jaillir de la constellation de Persée …

Les étoiles filantes ont un nom trompeur. En réalité, elles désignent les météorites qui pénètrent dans notre atmosphère par vague de plusieurs dizaines, voire centaines ! Ces poussières ou minuscules fragments rocheux sont laissés dans le sillage des comètes, en l’occurrence la comète 109 P/ Swift-Tuttle pour « les Perséides », et dérivent dans l’espace interplanétaire. Fréquemment et régulièrement, ces nuées de particules cométaires croisent l’orbite terrestre et se laissent alors entrainer vers l’atmosphère de notre planète. En la traversant, ces poussières de comètes sont littéralement désintégrées et nous ne percevons plus que leurs traces lumineuses, parfois intenses, longtemps confondues avec la fuite de certaines étoiles … !

Quelle prévision d’activité pour le cru 2010 ?

L’essaim météoritique « les Perséides » a une activité qui démarre, chaque année, autour du 17 juillet et atteint son maximum le 12 et/ou 13 août. Les toutes dernières prévisions placent le « pic d’activité » le 13 août à 5 h 20 du matin avec, peut-être, un précédent quelques heures avant, à 1 h 40. Cela demeure très difficiles de prévoir avec une grande exactitude le maximum de chaque essaim météoritique. Reste que même si vous n’êtes plus éveillé lors du maximum, les heures qui le précédent ou le suivent peuvent offrir de belles surprises où, pas mois de 100 étoiles filantes par heure peuvent être débusquées … ! En outre, le ciel restera dépourvu tout au long de la nuit, de toute clarté de la Lune offrant ainsi d’excellentes conditions pour observer le ciel, pourvu, bien sûr, que la météo soit de la partie !

Vénus, Mars et Saturne au-dessus de l'horizon ouest au crépuscule

Rassemblement planétaire

Ces jours-ci, il n’y a pas que les étoiles filantes qui font parler d’elles et qui sont capables de nous émerveiller … Tous les soirs, au crépuscule, Vénus s’acoquine avec Mars (planètes très différentes mais partenaires de longues dates dans la mythologie !) sous le regard bienveillant de Saturne, quoique … et nous gratifient d’un splendide rapprochement visuel ! Les trois planètes se donnent en spectacle en ce début du mois d’août, accomplissant un ballet qui renouvelle chaque soirée leurs dispositions, notament la belle Vénus. Le 13 août prochain, après une longue nuit blanche passée à traquer les « perséides », nous pourrons admirer un jeune croissant lunaire accompagnant le trio planétaire. A vos appareils photos ! La « conjonction géocentrique » promet d’être superbe.

Illustrations et animations des deux phénomènes sur le site Shadow and Substance.

Pour en savoir plus sur « les Perséides » et obtenir d’avantage de prévisions : PGJ Astronomie.

Huge ice sheet breaks from Greenland glacier

2010-08-09T01:39:00.000-07:00

Thousands of icebergs calve from Greenland's glaciers every year

A giant sheet of ice measuring 260 sq km (100 sq miles) has broken off a glacier in Greenland, according to researchers at a US university.

The block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland.

It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962, said Prof Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware.

The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada.

If the iceberg moves south, it could interfere with shipping, Prof Muenchow said.

Cracks in the Petermann Glacier had been observed last year and it was expected that an iceberg would calve from it soon.

The glacier is 1,000 km (620 miles) south of the North Pole.

A researcher at the Canadian Ice Service detected the calving from Nasa satellite images taken early on Thursday, the professor said.

The images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf.

There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to "keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days," said Prof Muenchow.

He said it was not clear if the event was due to global warming.

Patrick Lockerby, a UK engineer with a background in material science, told the BBC he had predicted the calve on 22 July, posting images on the science2.0 website.

"I was watching the floating ice tongue wedged between two walls of a fjord for three quarters if its length with the last part at the outlet end wedged by sea ice. I thought once the sea ice was gone, the pressure would be too great and the tongue would calve."

He said there could be a beneficial outcome if the calving drifts to block the Nares Strait and effectively prevents the loss of more ice from the Lincoln Sea.

The first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record globally, scientists have said.

From :BBC news . ;)

Solar plasma aurora storm to hit Earth tomorrow!

2010-08-03T06:35:00.000-07:00

Burst sunspot could see Northern Lights over UK, US

By Lewis Page

Astroboffins are warning that a mighty "eruption" of superhot plasma has been blasted out of the Sun directly at the Earth. The plasma cloud is expected to reach Earth beginning tomorrow, possibly causing strange phenomena - including a mighty geomagnetic storm which could see the Northern Lights aurorae extend as far south as Blighty or the northern USA.

Duck's eye view of the plasma shotgun blast

According to boffins analysing results delivered from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite, Sunday saw a massive convulsion involving almost the entire face of the Sun facing Earth. The event was apparently centred on Sunspot 1092, a huge solar pimple so large as to be visible without the aid of a telescope.

It appears that the sunspot may have triggered a huge "coronal mass ejection" in which huge amounts of superhot plasma were spurted towards Earth accompanied by solar flares, tsunamis, magnetic filaments and other sun-wracking upsets across half the sun's surface.

"This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on August 4th," says astronomer Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time."

Normally a blast of radiation like this could be expected to wipe out much of the human race, but fortunately we are protected by the Earth's magnetic field. Instead the deadly solar plasma is expected to stream down the planetary field lines towards the poles, crashing into oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere and so lighting them up to form aurorae - the so-called Northern Lights.

Golub and his colleagues believe that the aurorae may be so intense as to be visible from the northern United States and other countries such as the UK which are normally too far south to see the Lights.

"We got a beautiful view of this eruption," enthuses the astronomer. "And there might be more beautiful views to come, if it triggers aurorae."

The Sun's activity generally rises and falls on an 11-year cycle: the last peak occurred in 2001, but since then the star has been going through an unusually prolonged calm spell. We've been overdue for some more action for several years, and Golub and his colleagues consider that Sunday's outburst may be a sign that the Sun is "waking up". ®

Man Claims to Own 84 Percent of Facebook

2010-07-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

A New York man has filed suit, claiming that he contractually owns 84 percent of Facebook.

In a court filing originally unearthed by The Wall Street Journal, Paul Ceglia claimed that he entered into a contract with Mark Zuckerberg, owner of TheFacebook.com and later chief executive of Facebook.com to buy 50 percent of the company for $1,000. According to the contract Ceglia alleges Zuckerberg signed, the two agreed to pay Ceglia an additional 1 percent of the company from that day until the Web site was completed.

In a statement to the Journal, Facebook called the suit "frivolous".

The suit, originally filed with the Supreme Court of Allegany County in New York, includes a copy of the work for hire contract allegedly signed by Zuckerberg. It details two business ventures: work performed for the Streetfax database and the related programming language, as well as the continued development and design of "The Face Book".

The contract is allegedly signed by both Ceglia and Zuckerberg.

The alleged contract would require that Ceglia, the purchaser, pay Zuckerberg $1,000 for each of the ventures. In return, Ceglia would own a 50 percent interest in the "software, programming language and business interests derived from the expansion of the [Facebook] service to a larger audience," and require Zuckerberg to perform the work for the StreetFax database.

It also includes the stipulation that Ceglia would be due an additional 1 percent of the company for every day past the due date, Jan. 1, 2004, that the Web site was delayed.

The filing also includes what appears to be a photocopy of a receipt for a check made out to a "Mark Zucherberg" [sic] for $1,000.

Lawyers for Zuckerberg and Facebook have attempted to move the hearing to the U.S. District Court in the Western District of New York.

PCmag.com

3D Integrated Water Cooling of a Composite Multilayer Stack of Chips

2010-07-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Motivation

The CMOSAIC project is a genuine opportunity to contribute to the realization of arguably the most complicated system that mankind has ever assembled: a 3D stack of computer chips with a functionality per unit volume that nearly parallels the functional density of a human brain. CMOSAIC's aggressive goal is to provide the necessarily 3D integrated cooling system that is the key to compressing almost 1012 nanometer sized functional units (1 Tera) into one cubic centimeter with a 10 to 100 fold higher connectivity than otherwise possible. Even the most advanced air-cooling methods are inadequate for high performance 3D-IC systems where the main challenge is to remove the heat produced by multiple stacked dies in a 1-3 cm³ volume, each layer dissipating 100-150 W/cm². State-of-the-art single phase liquid and two- phase cooling systems, using specifically designed microchannel arrangements, and employing coolants ranging from liquid water and two-phase environmentally friendly refrigerants to novel engineered nano-fluids offer significant advantages in addressing heat removal challenges leading to practical 3D systems. CMOSAIC aims at developing the engineering science base that will enable a new state of the art in high density electronics cooling.

Figure 1: 3D-IC with through-silicon vias (TSVs) and inter-layer cooling channels that is enclosed in a sealed case

Specifically, this project brings together internationally recognized experts of leading Swiss universities and industry (EPFL, ETH Zurich and IBM Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon) to thoroughly investigate this interdisciplinary problem at different levels (architecture, microfabrication, liquid cooling, two-phase cooling, nano-fluids). These experts are joining forces to research the related physics and to develop the necessary thermal/electronic computational tools/methods. The project includes an intensive experimental program, consisting of challenging flow visualizations and heat transfer measurements in microchannel systems of hydraulic diameter often comparable to or smaller than that of a human hair, with complex fluids flowing through them. It also targets the development of novel theoretical models explaining the physics and new electronics packing models together with new micro- manufacturing processes. The verification of the proposed novel approaches coming out of this project will be conducted using several prototypes that will be built and tested. With respect to the Nano-Tera.CH proposal, this project addresses the vertical axis of micro/nanoelectronics, particularly the aspect of system integration. Specifically, the results of this project will be a significant step toward "achieving system complexities that are two-to- three orders of magnitude higher than today's state-of-the-art", by developing the fundamental understanding, methods and tools required for efficient and reliable design of true 3D integrated circuit systems.

There are four main challenges to the continued development of the computer industry with respect to Moore's law that will be resolved here are: power density, interconnect speed, interconnect density and integrated cooling. Electrical interconnect density and communication bandwidth between chips have become highly critical for processors as the number of transistors per layer and the number of layers in a 3D stack increase. There is thus a direct spatial competion among the heat dissipating components (processors, memory, interconnections, etc.) on each layer, the placement of the vias connecting the layers, and the placement of the microchannel cooling channels, whose optimal solution is thus a 3D mosaic. The solution promises to be not only cost effective but also Kyoto friendly.

The Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies (LTNT) at ETH Zurich performs computational modeling of heat and mass-transfer in such microchannel networks. The investigation is conducted in close cooperation with IBM Zurich Research Laboratory which provides experimental data for the model development and validation.

Goals

1) Better understanding of conjugate heat transfer in micro pin array:

CFD modeling of flow and temperature around representative set of individual pin elements (conjugate heat transfer problem)

Study the inlet, outlet and wall effect on the heat transfer in micro pin array

Build an averaged two-dimensional model of the conjugate heat transport in individual layer

Optimization of heat transport in 3D stack via various arrangement of chips within the individual layers

Figure 2: Simulation of flow around a single pin

2) Modeling of power map optimized fluid network:

Porous medium approximation of flow in the layer between two wafers

Modeling of turbulent porous medium flow based on detailed simulations of turbulent flow around pillars. Non-equilibrium temperature models

Modeling of anisotropic layer porosity as an option to direct the flow to hot spots

Figure 3: Uniform and non-uniform TSV distribution

Antenne de l'iPhone 4: la lettre d'Apple décryptée

2010-07-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs et un schéma du système d'antennes de l'iPhone 4, le 7 juin (photomontage) P.SAKUMA/AP-SIPA

HIGH-TECH - Selon Apple, l'importance de la baisse apparente du signal est due à un problème d'affichage. Vrai, mais pas seulement, selon les experts...

De notre correspondant à Los Angeles

L'antenne de tous les maux. «Nous avons découvert que la formule que nous utilisons pour calculer le nombre de barres à afficher en fonction de la force du signal est totalement fausse», a expliqué Apple vendredi. Pour l'entreprise, il n'y a donc pas de problème structurel sur son iPhone 4. Simplement, une formule erronée qui affiche trop de barres quand le signal est déjà faible. Conséquence: une prise en main, «qui affecte la réception de tous les téléphones», selon Apple, donne parfois l'impression de perdre quatre ou cinq barres –alors que dans la réalité, la perte n'est pas aussi importante. Un peu comme si un thermomètre affichait 0° alors qu'il fait 18° dehors, et que de le tenir le faisait passer à 20°. Mais s'il y a bien un problème de thermomètre, le patient n'est pas en aussi bonne santé que le dit Apple, selon des tests d'experts. Explications.

«Tenir n'importe quel téléphone d'une certaine façon va réduire sa réception d'une barre ou plus», dit Apple.

C'est vrai, estime Richard Gaywood, titulaire d'un doctorat en antennes réseau. Les constructeurs ont abandonné l'antenne extérieure. Tenir le téléphone, surtout en recouvrant la zone de l'antenne interne, affecte donc la réception. Selon des tests du site Anandtech, celle de l'iPhone 3GS perd au maximum (en étant tenu fermement) 14,3 dB contre 17,7 au Nexus One et 24,6 à l'iPhone 4.

Les barres ne veulent pas dire grand chose

Le fameux «t'as combien de barres» n'a rien de scientifique. Il n'y a, en effet, pas de système international. Chaque constructeur est libre de faire sa propre cuisine. En clair, quatre barres chez l'un peut être mieux que cinq chez l'autre. Ce qui compte, c'est la force de l'atténuation du signal, en décibels (et ses variantes par milliwatts, en dBm). Attention, elle n'est pas linéaire mais logarithmique. Concrètement, cela signifie qu'un «petit» écart de 10 dBm traduit un facteur 10 dans l'atténuation du signal (et 20 dBm, soit 2 bel, un facteur 10² = 100).

La mauvaise formule d'Apple

Apple dit avoir utilisé la même formule depuis la première génération d'iPhone (certains spéculaient sur un changement avec l'iPhone 4 pour «masquer» artificiellement la mauvaise qualité du réseau de l'opérateur AT&T). Ci-dessous, le graphique réalisé par Richard Gaywood avec les mesures d'Anandtech.com.

On voit que la zone correspondant à cinq barres est très large: de -50 dBm (le meilleur signal) à -91 dBm. Cela signifie donc qu'un utilisateur se situant près d'une antenne-relais, dans le haut de la fourchette, reste à cinq barres, même avec une prise en main et une perte de 20 dBm . En revanche, pour celui dans le bas de la fourchette (ou pire, déjà à quatre barres), perdre 20 dBm l'emmène directement à 1 barre (soit une «baisse de qualité audio» dans le cas de l'iPhone 4, selon Anandtech) voire à perdre le signal. Traduction: ça coupe.

Le vrai problème

Tous les téléphones sont donc sensibles au contact. Certains plus que d'autres. Sauf que dans le cas de l'iPhone 4, les choses s'améliorent grandement quand il est tenu recouvert d'un étui-bumper de protection. Il ne perd plus que 7,2 dBm. Il fait même mieux que le Nexus One (7,7), mais moins bien que le 3GS (3,2). En clair, avec ou sans étui, il ne devrait pas y avoir de différence majeure. Selon Richard Gaywood (et d'autres experts), c'est là le signe «d'un défaut de conception» de l'iPhone 4, dans lequel l'armature métallique externe joue le rôle d'antenne externe complémentaire. Elle est constituée de deux parties (photo en tête d'article). Toucher la bande noire de jonction, en bas à gauche, semble créer des interférences... Qui disparaissent avec l'isolation d'un étui plastique (ou de scotch et de vernis à ongle, solution adoptée par certains bricoleurs).

La réception de l'iPhone 4 est-elle meilleure que celle du 3GS?

Oui, selon Anandtech. «La performance est bien meilleure avec l'iPhone 4 en cas de signal faible. J'ai pu passer de nombreux appels dans des zones où cela était impossible avec le 3GS», relate le site. En somme, le nouveau design améliore la réception... A condition d'accepter utiliser un étui à plusieurs dizaines d'euros pas vraiment esthétique. La mise à jour logicielle d'Apple ne changera rien au problème: les fameuses «barres» seront juste un peu plus représentatives de l'état du réseau. On revient à la case départ: ne pas couvrir le coin gauche de son iPhone, le protéger par une coque, ou le retourner à l'Apple store dans les 30 jours suivant son achat pour un remboursement intégral. «J'attends mon étui gratuit», raille Richard Gaywood. Un geste pour l'instant exclu par Apple.

par :Philippe Berry

Firefox Home : Mozilla met un pied dans l'App Store

2010-07-04T04:19:00.000-07:00

Est du feu dans l’app store :)

Quelle que soit la plateforme, Firefox Mobile n'est pas encore disponible en version finale mais Mozilla a trouvé un autre moyen de débarquer dans l'iPhone et l'iPod Touch puisqu'il a soumis au magasin en ligne d'Apple l'application Firefox Home.

(c) CNet Quelle que soit la plateforme, Firefox Mobile n'est pas encore disponible en version finale mais Mozilla a trouvé un autre moyen de débarquer dans l'iPhone et l'iPod Touch puisqu'il a soumis au magasin en ligne d'Apple l'application Firefox Home.

Même si la fondation Mozilla se défend de vouloir développer un navigateur pour l?iPhone, elle vient de soumettre l?application Firefox Home pour une entrée dans l?App Store.
Derrière cette application se cache en fait un outil de synchronisation qui permet de retrouver ses marque-pages ou son historique sur son téléphone. Cela nécessite d?installer et d?utiliser Firefox Sync sur son ordinateur afin que les données liées au navigateur soient sauvegardées sur les serveurs de Mozilla.
Ensuite, et c?est là, que c?est que c?est cocasse, on peut accéder à des onglets enregistrés sur son PC directement sur son iPhone. Sauf que le navigateur qui se lance n?est pas Firefox mais un navigateur qui utilise le moteur de Safari? Pour le moment, Apple n?a pas encore validé cette application. (EP)

Source : Nouvelobs.com

En Finlande, la connexion haut débit à 1 Mbit/s est devenue un droit

2010-07-04T04:18:00.000-07:00

Le pays scandinave est le premier à garantir par la loi un accès haut débit à tous ses habitants. Le gouvernement s'est aussi engagé à apporter la fibre optique dans tous les foyers pour 2015.

Législation

Depuis hier, les FAI finlandais ont l'obligation de fournir à chaque citoyen une connexion Internet de 1 Mbit/s minimum. Ce service universel est devenu un droit et c'est une première mondiale.

« Nous avons pris en compte le rôle d'Internet dans la vie quotidienne des Finlandais. Les services Internet ne servent plus seulement au divertissement », explique Suvi Linden, le ministre de la communication.

Pour autant, la tâche des fournisseurs d'accès ne devrait pas être trop ardue puisque 96% de la population est déjà connecté à Internet. Selon la BBC, il ne resterait que 4.000 domiciles à relier pour se conformer à la nouvelle loi.

La fibre optique pour tous dans 5 ans ?

Mais le gouvernement s'est lancé un défi encore plus ambitieux en promettant d'apporter le très haut débit 100 Mbit/s à tous les foyers pour 2015.

« L'objectif de ce projet est que presque la totalité (plus de 99% de la population) des résidences principales, des bureaux et des administrations publiques soient situés à moins de deux kilomètres d'un câble de fibre optique de 100 Mbit/s » indique-t-on dans une dépêche AFP. (Eureka Presse)

Source :Nouvelobs.com

Les 10 qualités du bon chef de projet

2010-06-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

Dans nos entreprises l'engouement autour de la gestion de projet n'est pas passée de mode. Bien au contraire, elle se développe et tend à supplanter la manière opérationnelle classique, de travailler. Si c'est une belle reconnaissance pour la méthode projet, c'est malheureusement aussi l'occasion de voir collés à la tête de projets importants des gens qui n'ont rien des qualités du chef de projet.
Et je ne parle pas seulement du manque de connaissance ou de maîtrise des outils et de la philosophie du management de projet, mais tout simplement des qualités que l'on est en droit d'attendre d'un chef de projet.
Quelles sont ces qualités ? Qu'est ce qui fait un bon chef de projet ?
1-La Responsabilité.
Who cares ? YOU care ! Le chef de projet est celui qui, plus que tout autre, croit en son projet, en sa valeur, son bien fondé, son intérêt pour l'entreprise.
S'il ne devait en rester qu'un ce serait lui, le chef de projet.
Cet engagement, cette attention aux choses est la marque primordiale des grands chefs de projet.
2-Initiateur de mouvement.
On arrive à rien tout seul. Plus qu'une maxime en l'air, cette phrase fait partie intégrante de l'identité du bon chef de projet. Il est protecteur de l'équipe, son équipe.
Le succès de chacun des membres du projet et son succès.
La réalisation des besoins des parties prenantes du projet son ses réalisations. Le chef de projet doit être comme une vague qui entraîne une partie de l'entreprise vers un but commun.
3-Humilité.
Il ne fait pas seul. Il a l'humilité de ceux qui sont conscient de l'impact de son engagement. Le résultat du projet est impermanent. Les choses changent (et même de plus en plus vite n'est-ce pas?) Le chef de projet est humble face à sa réalisation.
Enfin, de part l'essence même d'un projet, qui a un début, un milieu et une fin, il est amené à faire de l'humilité un composant essentiel de sa programmation personnelle.
Ceci peut s'étendre d'ailleurs à tous les grands managers, ou grands chefs d'entreprise. Ceux chez qui la réussite s'allie à l'humilité sont les plus grands. Ils ont conscience qu'une multitude de causes sont à l'origine de leurs succès et qu'il ne peuvent pas ne le devoir qu'à eux-même.
4-Confiance en soi.
C'est le corollaire obligatoire du point précédent. Initier un mouvement et le faire vivre demande cette confiance en soi. Rien d'exceptionnel, c'est là aussi une prise de conscience. Nous sommes tous capables de grandes choses, seulement ceux qui réalisent de grandes choses ont, eux, compris qu'ils le pouvaient. Ils ont essayé. Ils y sont arrivés.
Savoir conclure un projet et aller rendre des comptes demande aussi confiance en soi. Confiance en soi qui vient aussi de la confiance que les autres vous donnent parce que vous leur inspirez confiance en vous. L'œuf et la poule.
5-Exemplarité.
Rigoureux. Intègre. (Merci le dico des synonymes) Intransigeant avec soi-même et compréhensif avec les autres, voilà des caractéristiques du bon chef de projet. Moi je vois souvent des gens qui g*** après les autres alors que eux mêmes sont les pires des boulets. Ce qui me fait dire que malgré la multiplication des projets dans les entreprises, rares sont les entreprises qui possèdent de véritables chefs de projet.
6-Lucidité.
Le bon chef de projet sait rester concentré sur les activités réellement importantes. Il ne se perd pas dans les détails et sait emmener tout son monde à considérer l'objectif et les moyens de l'atteindre comme le seul objet d'attention valable. Fini les guéguérres et les rivalités d'ego. Tous ensemble dans la même direction. Voilà ce que sait faire le bon chef de projet.
7-Reconnaissance.
La beauté de ce métier c'est qu'il change tout le temps. Les sujets sont innombrables et les collègues sans cesse renouvelés. Par rapport à ceux qui font de la compta pendant 40 ans (y a-t-il des comptables dans l'audience de ce blog ?!) je trouve que les problématiques, les challenges sont sans cesse renouvelés. Lorsque le changement est choisi et non subi, alors on exerce le plus beau des métiers. Pour cela le bon chef de projet doit être reconnaissant. A qui ? A quoi ? Je n'en sais rien. mais cette reconnaissance est un fondamental de son être professionnel.
8-Curiosité.
Nouveaux sujets, nouvelles techniques. Le chef de projet est sans cesse remis en question par l'environnement professionnel. Le bon chef de projet est celui qui n'attend pas d'être challengé par les circonstances, ou pire, par des difficultés pour évoluer, se former et se perfectionner.
Il a la capacité d'apprendre. D'ailleurs le Project Management Institute ne s'y est pas trompé : il demande à chacun de ses membres ayant obtenu la certification PMP de montrer qu'ils continuent de se former en validant des PDU (Professional Development Units). Sans l'obtention du nombre nécessaire de PDU on perd sa certif'
9- Travailleur.
Le chef de projet est-il forcément celui qui allume la lumière le matin et l'éteint le soir en partant ? non pas forcément. Mais c'est quelqu'un d'extrêmement focalisé sur ses tâches. Qui les fait avec sérieux et rigueur. Comme si sa vie en dépendait (puisque la vie professionnelle de son équipe en dépend.)
Il est néanmoins conscient de l'importance de l'équilibre entre travail et vie privée. S'il ne se l'applique pas à lui-même, comment pourrait-il l'appliquer aux autres ? Or il se doit d'être le protecteur de son équipe.
10-Souriant.
Vous vous ne vous attendiez pas à ce que je finisse avec cette qualité là n'est-ce pas ? Et bien c'est pourtant la plus importante. Le sourire est la marque que les choses vont bien. De la conscience de la chance et de la juste place de son travail. Un chef de projet souriant c'est une équipe qui sourit, c'est un projet qui a toutes les chances de se réaliser, c'est la juste place de son travail dans sa vie. Si vous êtes membres d'une équipe projet regardez votre chef de projet. Sourit-il ? Si vous êtes chef de projet souriez !
Il existe trois types de chef de projet. Le Roi, celui qui donne ses ordres du haut de son trône et qui dispose d'une armée de vassaux pour les exécuter. Le Berger, qui mène son équipe à la réalisation du projet avec attention et professionnalisme. Enfin le Passeur, qui met tout le monde sur son bateau pour atteindre l'autre rive, et qui l'atteint en même temps que son équipe; tout projet l'ayant lui même fait évoluer.
Quel chef de projet êtes-vous ?

Auteur : www.managementetmoi.blogspot.com

Merci MJ :)

Priorities: Your Life Compass

2010-06-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

Every time-management seminar that you will attend teaches the importance of prioritizing your tasks. Task A is the most important, so plan to do it first. Task B is second in importance, so do it next, etc. Unfortunately, many of these time-management techniques get you so involved in managing the mundane tasks of life, that this is what we focus on. We are stuck in "the thick of thin things" to quote Dr. Stephen R. Covey.

The truth is, no amount of simple task prioritizing will help you achieve your dreams until you first determine the highest priorities of your life, then get those priorities to find their way into your daily tasks and the daily prioritizing process.

The key to successful life management is to pick your priorities. We all juggle a number of balls in the air at all times. We might call them work, family, health, friends, spirit, or education. And we try to get through life without dropping any of the balls. But, many of us never take the time to truly identify what the important balls are for us, and to decide how much we value each. Until we do this, we can never truly prioritize anything else. Here's how you do it . . .

1. Write out a brief statement that describes each of the balls that you try to keep in the air. We'll call them life-priorities. What is it? Why is it important to you? What would you like to accomplish in each area? Be sure to take the time to write this out!! Thinking it through in your mind might be easier, but it loses effectiveness if you do not write it down. Include a brief description of each life-priority, an explanation of why each is important to you, and a list of major objectives that you would like to accomplish for each.

2. Once you have written something about each life-priority, prioritize them. Choose which life-priority is the most important to you, second, third, etc. This is a critical step because, what happens when work and family events collide? If you know where each life-priority stands in relative importance to the others, it will help you to make appropriate decisions in the moment of choice. This doesn't mean that if you prioritize family over work, for example, you will always prioritize family events over work events. This depends on the relative importance of each task in that category. But, it does give you direction when making these important decisions.

3. Make sure each daily "to do" list includes not just the mundane, urgent tasks that constantly fill our lists. Be sure to add tasks that will help you accomplish a major objective for each life-priority. Make a point of adding at least one important task for each life-priority each week.

4. When planning your daily tasks, use your life-priorities as a compass that gives you direction. Determine which task is most important at any given moment, by measuring them against the priorities that you have written. Then do it!

5. Review your life-priority compass each week to be sure you are on track. Remember, what gets your attention, gets you. If you take the time to review and focus on your highest priorities each week, they will naturally point your life in that direction.

6. Dump the guilt. If you have decided to do something based on your life-priority compass, you have earned the right to stuff the guilt. Many people go through life feeling guilty. When they are at home, they feel guilty about not spending more time at the office. When they are at the office, the feel guilty that they are not at home with their family. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Using a life-priority compass takes away the guilt and leaves you free to use your emotions in more constructive ways.

I challenge you to develop your own life-priority compass that will become a scale by which you can measure everything you do. It will help you achieve more while giving you more peace of mind.

By Bill Mansell

Published 02/18/2009

HPS s’offre le français ACP Qualife

2010-06-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

Les appétits de HPS se co nfirment à l’international. L’acquisition de la société française ACPQualife permettra d’accroître les positions de l’entreprise de monétique sur le marché européen, l’une de ses priorités du moment.

C’est la première opération concrète de HPS dans le cadre de sa politique de croissance externe. Le chiffre d’affaires réalisé en Europe en 2009 est passé à 26% contre 10% l’année précédente. Aujourd’hui, l’objectif affiché est donc de consolider la position dans cette région. L’opération sera conclue en partie par un apport en cash représentant 40% du capital de ACPQualife. La seconde est une augmentation de capital de près de 37 millions de DH réservés aux actionnaires de la société française. ACPQualife est l’union de deux entités ACP et Qualife qui opèrent dans différents segments. La première est spécialisée dans l’intégration de solutions notamment dans la monétique, mais également l’édition de logiciels. Qualife assure la qualification des logiciels et leur test. Ce rapprochement viendra en support aux activités de HPS Europe. Selon Brahim Berrada, directeur financier de HPS, «cette opération nous permettra de renforcer notre offre d’intégration de solutions notamment. Le rapprochement devrait nous permettre de capitaliser sur l’expertise de ACPQualife afin de réduire les délais de développement». L’entreprise de monétique devrait capitaliser sur la forte présence de ACPQualife sur les marchés financiers. Celle-ci servira de base pour le développement du produit Powercard de HPS en Europe ainsi que le développement du logiciel Vision. D’ailleurs, la diversification de l’offre est l’un des principaux axes stratégiques de l’opérateur, ce qui rend plus pertinent l’acquisition de ACPQualife. La prise de contrôle de cette dernière devrait s’accompagner à court et à moyen terme d’autres acquisitions. «Nous avons certaines sociétés dans le viseur en ce moment», révèle Brahim Berrada. Côté Bourse, le marché est assez réactif face aux orientations stratégiques de la société. Depuis janvier, le cours HPS s’est apprécié de plus de 47%, atteignant un plus haut de 946 DH.

Mots clés Google : HPS, ACP Qualife

One Droid X killer feature the iPhone 4 lacks

2010-06-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

The iPhone 4 is racking up the superlatives and sales numbers, but the Motorola Droid X is coming, packing one killer feature the iPhone lacks.

Verizon will offer the Motorola Droid X with the 3G hotspot feature.

(Credit: Verizon)

Let me begin with a caveat: The Droid X is still untested in the field, so we won't know until after July 15 whether it harbors any serious user issues. That said, it already has me drooling over its impressive feature set and design.

Though the 4.3-inch display (in the case of already-small smartphone displays, bigger is better), the Flash 10.1 support, DLNA streaming, and the Texas Instruments 1GHz ARM processor are nice, the icing on the cake is the built-in Wi-Fi hotspot--or what Verizon calls the 3G Mobile Hotspot.

I've always been surprised at how many technologically savvy laptop toters still tether themselves to Starbucks or scurry around, seeking out the local Wi-Fi hotspot when on the road. Or worse, rely on the invariably abysmal Wi-Fi provided at conferences--and often at airports.

I began using laptop 3G on a regular basis a few years back with an HP 2510p ultraportable business notebook, which integrated the Verizon EVDO-A silicon inside the laptop. To me, putting 3G in a laptop was a godsend. It allowed me to work almost anywhere, anytime.

Eventually I moved to Verizon's MiFi mobile hotspot because I purchased an Apple MacBook Air (Apple doesn't offer any laptops with built-in 3G, which I have lamented in the past). But beyond the Apple issue, MiFi also has a serious upside: It frees you from being tied to one laptop--as current 3G contracts do when 3G is built into the laptop--because MiFi supports up to five devices.

Now the Droid X proposes to do MiFi one better. Instead of carrying around both a MiFi and a 3G smartphone, you have it all in one nice, attractive package. And, like MiFI, it supports up to five devices. Presuming that Motorola and Verizon have implemented this feature relatively well, it makes an already attractive Droid X almost irresistible, even with the extra $20 monthly fee tacked on for a 2GB data plan, as Verizon has stated. (Note that this is cheaper than most 3G data plans.)

After all, this is what true integration is all about. Taking something that was previously a discrete, external device (like a camera) and bringing it inside. And in spite of the media's round-the-clock laserlike focus on the iPhone 4 (which, admittedly, I participate in), I will be taking a good, long look at the Droid X.

Utilities try to get smarter about selling smart grid

2010-06-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON--It's probably not news to their customers, but utility company executives are now realizing that they're not great at marketing.

For years, the smart grid has been touted by policymakers, tech companies, and utilities as a way to make the grid more reliable, efficient, and cleaner. But for the most part, surveys show that consumers are still struggling to understand how a digital grid and two-way smart meters matter to them.

Having seen the backlash from smart meter installations in California, utilities are now acutely aware of how important it is to convey the benefits of new grid technologies, according to executives at the Kema Utility of the Future conference here on Thursday.

In many discussions, speakers said consumers need to come along for the years-long ride of adding new technology to the grid. To get consumers involved, utilities need to shift from treating them like a monolithic block of ratepayers to customers they want to retain.

"The relationship with homeowners is just beginning," Michael Morris, the CEO of utility AEP, said during a panel discussion. "There is no sex appeal to (playing) around with an electricity meter as there is streaming a baseball game on their iPhone or iPad, so we need to be a bit respectful of what that relationship is."

Utility customers in the U.S. expect reliable service and power when needed. But going forward, consumers will want better ways to manage and reduce their energy use for economic reasons, said Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers.

Although electricity prices have dropped significantly in the past two years because of the recession, the pressure on prices is upward given the worldwide demand on energy resources and growing electricity use in general. Helping consumers manage those price increases with efficiency measures is in the interest of utilities, too, since customers will feel more in control, Rogers said.

But just installing smart meters without a good informational and marketing campaign is a mistake, particularly if it's seen as taking choice away from consumers, he said.

"To make smart meters work, you have to follow up quickly with an audit and provide a suite of products that provide some benefit and make clear this isn't a 'Mother knows best' world. You can choose," Rogers said. "That reduces the chance of blowback."

Not about technology
Many of the features promised by smart-grid advocates can be done with existing technologies, but they do require participation from customers, as well as customer education. So rather than rush headlong into the smart grid, some companies are treading lightly and slowing.

Michigan utility Consumers Energy this month will roll out two programs geared at cutting back electricity usage in homes and in both cases, it's using relatively old technology to get it done.

"The intent is not to figure out if the technology works, it's more about the customer marketing message," said Stephen Hirsch, the manager of demand response programs at Consumers Energy. "The biggest barrier was the suspicion on the part of the customer as to why we are doing this. There seems to be a problem with the consumer understanding our business model."

A model of the smart grid, where energy flows in two directions and consumers have more control.

(Credit: EPRI)

In one demand-response program in the Grand Rapids area, the utility will reduce load on the grid during about 10 hot summer days a year by remotely controlling consumers' air conditioners. A signal sent over the utility's existing network will shift central air conditioners from running at 100 percent to 50 percent for four hours in the afternoon, which will result in a one- or two-degree temperature increase, Hirsh explained.

In exchange for shedding load during a time of stress on the grid, the customer gets a rebate. The benefit for the utility is that it does not have to purchase expensive electricity, which is often made with polluting "peaking plants," or have to build new transmission lines to meet peak demand. Cutting the utility's energy accrues to the consumer as it lowers its operating costs, Hirsh said.

Most consumers say they are willing to use a smart device, such as a smart meter, appliance, or thermostat, if it will help them better manage their energy, according to a recent poll by General Electric. And the combined impact of thousands of efficiency events can mean avoiding the construction of new power plants and power lines.

But for these products and programs to work, it has to be simple and easy to use for customers, and there need to be variable pricing that reflects the cost of energy on the wholesale market.

"We've got to make it simple so that it's programmable and you just set it once," said Terry Boston, the CEO of grid operator PJM. "We have to see how well the customer can interface with the grid and how their use patterns can impact the grid."

Finding what works
Emerging smart-grid technologies pave the way for people to have more control over their energy, letting a person, for example, use a smart phone to monitor electricity or turn on the air conditioning just before getting home.

How quickly the utility providers can adapt their businesses to deliver that sort of capability is a big question, said David O'Brien, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Public Service.

Photos: GE's smart grid kitchen of the future

"For a 100 years, utilities have been responsible for running the grid on our behalf. I've seen reticence to go into this very dynamic environment where customers are making thousands of choice on how to use electricity based on information," O'Brien said.

New technologies, such as smart meters, home energy dashboards, or microgrids with community storage, are also expensive and can be difficult to get regulators to sign off on. Baltimore Gas & Electric was shocked this week when the Maryland regulators rejected a smart-grid investment proposal because it did not demonstrate enough benefit.

In the meantime, utilities are experimenting with smart-grid programs, which received a boost from billions of dollar in stimulus spending. Beyond what the technology can do, utilities are eager to see how consumers react to a life where using energy means more than writing a check for a monthly bill.

Municipal utility Chattanooga Electric Power plans to let consumers view their electricity usage on a TV using IPTV, said David Wade, the executive vice president and chief operating officer.

"One of challenges is to understand how to implement software to provide options to customers where they don't have to sacrifice comfort and convenience and help them manage energy costs," he said.

Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin.

Fresh Blagues - Les Fonctionnaires

2010-06-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

Let's start fun

Blague 1
Il existe deux types de douaniers : les manuels et les intellectuels. Les manuels font signe de passer avec la main, les intellectuels font signe avec la tête.

Blague 2
L'inspecteur du ministère de l'Education demande à un postulant qui désire devenir maître d'école : Pouvez-vous me donner trois raisons qui vous motivent à devenir instituteur ?
Le candidat répond : Décembre, Juillet et Août.

Blague 3 Quelle est la différence entre un fonctionnaire et un chômeur ? Le chômeur a déjà travaillé lui.

Blague 4 Vous savez pourquoi les fonctionnaires font leurs manifs en défilant de République à la Bastille à Paris ?
Parce que c'est en descente.

Blague 5 Les fonctionnaires sont un peu comme les livres d'une bibliothèque. Ce sont les plus hautes places qui servent le moins.

Blague 6 Vous savez ce qu'est le jeu des fonctionnaires le lundi matin ? Le premier qui bouge a perdu. Il est 8h00.

Blague 7 Une Renault 5 des ponts et chaussées s'arrête sur une petite route de campagne suivie de peu par une fourgonnette cinq hommes descendent du fourgon et l'un d'eux s'adresse au chef dans la R5 :
- Chef on a oublié de prendre les pelles.
- Vous faites chier les gars. Attendez, je téléphone au dépôt. Le chef prend son combiné dans la voiture :
- Allo Marcel. Dis donc, il te reste des pelles au dépôt.
- Oui, répond le gars à l'autre bout du fil, il t'en faut combien ? Alors le chef se retourne vers le fourgon :
- Combien vous êtes ?
- Cinq ! Répondent les autres.
- Cinq reprend le chef au téléphone.
- OK, lui dit le gars du dépôt, tu les auras cet après midi.
- OK. Salut. Et il raccroche. Le chef se tourne a nouveau vers les gars :
- C'est bon on aura cinq pelles cet après midi.
- Ben chef qu'est ce qu'on fait en attendant ?
- Je ne sais pas moi. Appuyez-vous sur autre chose.

Blague 8

Dans une cour de récréation, trois gamins discutent :
Le premier dit : Oui moi mon papa, il est l'homme le plus rapide au monde.
Les autres : Ah bon !!!
Le premier : Ben oui, il fait Paris-Lyon en 2 heures.
Les autres : Eh !!
Le premier : Eh oui, il est conducteur de TGV.
Les autres : Ah bon. Silence et réflexion.
Le deuxième : Eh bien, moi mon papa il est l'homme le + rapide.
Les autres : n'importe quoi.
Le deuxième : mais non, mon papa il fait Paris-New York en 2 heures.
Les autres : tu déconnes hé hé.
Le deuxième : ben non, il est pilote de concorde hé hé. Silence.
Et le troisième qui ne se sent pas bien : Eh bien, moi mon papa il est plus rapide que vos papas.
Les autres : non, non ce n'est pas possible, que fait ton papa ???
Le troisième : Eh bien, mon papa est fonctionnaire, il termine son boulot à 5 heures, et à quatre heures il est déjà à la maison.
Blague 9
- Dis, Toto, il fait quoi comme boulot ton papa ?
- Fonctionnaire.
- Et ta maman ?
- Ben elle fait rien non plus...

Blague 10 Savez-vous pourquoi, au milieu des couloirs des bâtiments administratifs, il y a une ligne blanche ?
Pour que ceux qui arrivent en retard ne gênent pas ceux qui partent en avance.

Blague 11 Pendant une importante réunion du gouvernement, un ministre se penche vers un autre ministre et lui glisse à l'oreille :
- Dites moi, vous avez combien de fonctionnaires qui travaillent sous vos ordres ? Et l'autre répond :
- Oh ! Disons un sur dix...

Blague 12

C'est une société qui cherche un comptable. Elle passe une annonce et trois candidats se présentent. Le recruteur fait entrer le premier candidat. C'est un homme, à l'air austère.
- Bonjour Monsieur. Nous allons nous permettre de tester vos capacités, pour voir si vous avez le bon profil. Une place de comptable, c'est sérieux. Pouvez-vous compter jusqu'à dix ?
- Mais, bien sûr: Une deux, Une deux, Une deux....
- Ouh là là, c'est pas terrible. Que faisiez-vous avant ?
- J'étais adjudant dans l'armée de terre.
- Écoutez, on vous écrira.
La deuxième personne entre à son tour. C'est une femme, un peu niaise.
- Bonjour. Je vais vous demander de compter jusqu'à dix.
- Facile : Un trois cinq sept neuf...
- Dites donc, c'est pas fameux. Qu'est ce que vous faisiez avant ?
- Pervenche, mais je suis toujours restée sur les côtés impairs.
- Eh bien on vous écrira.
Le recruteur commence à être un peu tendu. Il fait entrer le dernier candidat.
- Bonjour Monsieur. Êtes vous capable de compter jusqu'à dix ?
- Sans problème : Un deux trois quatre cinq six sept huit neuf et dix.
- Formidable ! (j'en tiens un) Vous avez l'air du comptable idéal. Et... vous pouvez continuer ?
- Oui : Valet, Dame, Roi...
- Aie aie aie, ça se gâte, qu'est ce que vous faisiez avant ?
- Employé des postes !

Blague 13 Un postier avec une poupée sur le doigt (il a un panaris) entre dans un bar pour déposer le courrier du jour. Au fond du bar, il aperçoit une lueur rouge qui émane de derrière un paravent. Étonné, il demande au barman :
- Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette lumière rouge et ces paravents au fond du bar ? Le barman lui répond :
- C'est un ami à moi qui travaille là-bas ; c'est un guérisseur. Il fait partir des maladies pour lesquelles la médecine traditionnelle est impuissante !
- Oh... Eh bien tu lui paieras un verre de ma part ! répond le postier. Là-dessus, un maçon entre en boitant dans le bar car il a une patte folle. Lui aussi demande :
- Que se passe-t-il ici ? Le postier lui répond :
- C'est un guérisseur qui officie là-bas derrière. Il guérit même ce qui ne se guérit pas ! Le maçon dit au barman de lui payer une chope de bière sur son compte. Un peu plus tard, un routier entre dans le bar en marchant sur des œufs ; comme tout le monde le regarde interrogatif, il explique que ses hémorroïdes lui mettent les fesses en feu, puis il demande ce qui se passe au fond du bar. Le barman lui explique ce qui se passe. Alors le routier lui dit :
- Mets-lui une bière sur mon compte alors. Un quart d'heure plus tard, le guérisseur s'apprête à quitter le bar. Il passe près du maçon et dit :
- Je te remercie pour la bière. Je vois que tu as une jambe qui ne va pas très fort... et il applique ses mains sur la jambe du gars. Une minute plus tard, le maçon est en train se sauter à pieds joints et de courir partout dans le bar sans boiter ! Incroyable !
Juste après, le guérisseur passe près du chauffeur routier. Il applique ses mains sur les hanches du routier... et en quelques secondes, le feu qui lui brûlait le derrière s'éteint ! Finalement, le guérisseur arrive au niveau du postier qui s'enfuit en courant et sort du bar comme un coureur de 100 mètres. Le guérisseur lui crie :
- Qu'est-ce qu'il y a mon gars ? Reviens, je peux guérir n'importe lequel de tes maux !
- Justement ! C'est pour ça que je me casse ! braille le postier, "Moi je veux être invalide à 100 % !"

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First Look: Next-Gen Anti-Aircraft Missile Jammer

2010-06-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

A new device, called Boldstroke, is the solution to a problem the Army does not want to have: the threat of advanced shoulder-fired missiles to American helicopters. Here are the details.

BAE Systems' anti-aircraft jammer system.

There's a laser-guided antiaircraft missile jammer sitting on the table of the conference room in the office of Popular Mechanics. It comes in a medium-size box, weighing in at about 30 pounds, topped with a clear hemisphere housing a prominent mirror mounted on a 360-degree gimbal. Peering inside the dome, a viewer can see a network of other mirrors that bounce light from a laser housed below, directing the beam to the main lens affixed to the gimbal. This prototype is the only one in the world, and this is the first time its inventors, BAE Systems, have brought it out of the lab for a journalist to paw over.
The device, called Boldstroke, is the solution to a problem the Army does not want to have. The threat of advanced shoulder-fired missiles to American helicopters is a nightmare, one that hearkens to the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, where U.S. supplied Stinger missiles downed an estimated 250 Russian helicopters over two years. Shoulder-fired missiles with infrared tracking can rightfully take their place next to improvised explosive devices, sniper rifles and car bombs as gold-standard tools of asymmetric warfare.
Insurgents in Iraq have used SA-7s, shoulder-fired missiles tipped with infrared homing devices, against U.S. and British aircraft. But there are more sophisticated threats out there, like the SA-16, which has a sensitive seeker that adds ultraviolet tracking to IR seekers in order to ignore flares that aircraft fire to spoof the missiles. The SA-16 is available on the black market.
In 2008, something happened that triggered an increase in helo protection, and the Army commissioned BAE to fast-track a system that uses lasers to blind the seekers in infrared missiles. Exactly what prompted the request, called a Quick Reaction Contract, is classified. But it's not a leap to assume that intelligence reports or an actual attack set the wheels in motion. By the end of 2009 BAE delivered its first Advanced Threat Infrared Countermeasure (ATRICM) to the Army for use on its CH-47 Chinooks. ATRICM fires a pencil-thin multiband laser at frequencies that blind IR seekers scanning for targets in those same frequencies. The Pentagon recently confirmed to Aviation Week that the defensive system thwarted an IR missile attack on a Chinook, and BAE officials tell PM that the attack occurred within weeks of weeks of ATIRM's arrival in Iraq. The Army is on track to outfit its fleet of Chinooks in Iraq and Afghanistan with the protective system by the end of the year.
Helicopters are a deciding factor in both Iraq and Afghanistan—more so in Afghanistan, where roads are lacking and helos are used for resupply as well as combat missions. The crucial rotorcraft that ferries troops and supplies is the Chinook, but they depend on massive engines to haul their heavy loads. Those engines produce a lot of heat, enough to attract the attention of even modest missile seekers. “There is a huge IR signature from Chinooks,” says Ernest Keirstead, the director of BAE's Boldstroke program.
That brings us back to the prototype on the conference-room table. BAE has created Boldstroke to improve on ATIRCM. It's lighter, has fewer moving optical parts and uses mirrors instead of a physical “light pipe” to shoot its laser. Instead of three boxes, the entire unit is housed in one box. A helicopter with a Boldstroke system mounted on either side of the helicopter would have 360 degrees of protection. And the 360 gimbaled mirror is an improvement on the two-axis steering of the currently deployed ATIRCM.
The Boldstroke rollout is coinciding as simple, unguided rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) continue to take their toll on helicopters during takeoff and landing. In early June a NATO helicopter was felled by a pair of RPGs, killing four soldiers. It is not the first such successful attack. BAE officials say they have dedicated money in-house to investigating how to modify current detection systems that could warn pilots of the approach of an RPG. The key, again, is heat from the rocket, which could be tracked by BAE's existing thermal sensors. Instead of a laser countermeasure, the system could warn pilot where the missile is coming from and allow for some evasive action.
BAE has sunk $70 million over the last three years on upgrading its lab and production infrastructure at its Nashua, N.H., facilities. They are betting—with good reason—that more work will come their way as IR missile threats proliferate. That could mean deploying similar systems on commercial airplanes as well as a wider variety of military aircraft.

Retour "miraculeux" de Hayabusa la sonde spatiale japonaise

2010-06-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

REUTERS/Wakayama University Institute for Education on Space/Handout

La sonde Hayabusa lors de son entrée dans l'atmosphère.

La sonde Hayabusa, lancée par l'agence spatiale japonaise, est enfin rentrée sur Terre après un périple de 7 ans dans l'espace. Peut-être avec des fragments d'astéroïde.

Ceux qui avaient la chance de se trouver dans le désert australien dimanche 13 juin ont pu observer un spectacle inhabituel: la sonde Hayabusa s'est désintégrée en entrant dans l'atmosphère terrestre, libérant comme prévu une capsule. Censée contenir des fragments de l'astéroïde Itokawa, elle a atterri en douceur dans le désert grâce à son parachute. Pour Patrick Michel, astrophysicien à l'observatoire de la Côte d'Azur contacté par LEXPRESS.fr, "c'est un miracle que la sonde soit revenue".

Lundi 14 juin, l'équipe de l'agence spatiale japonaise à l'origine de cette mission a localisé la capsule et l'a envoyée dans un laboratoire d'analyse rapide. Les premiers résultats sont négatifs. Certes, "la probabilité que des échantillons aient été récupérés est très faible, mais ce n'est pas impossible", indique Patrick Michel. Le mécanisme de récolte n'a pas fonctionné correctement, mais un choc involontaire avec l'astéroïde a peut-être permis de récupérer quelques éclats.

La capsule va bientôt quitter l'Australie pour rejoindre le Japon pour des analyses plus poussées. "Cela va prendre un certain temps avant de savoir s'il y a des fragments ou non, avertit l'astrophysicien. L'objectif de la mission était avant tout de faire une démonstration technologique".

REUTERS/JAXA/Handout

La capsule a atterri en douceur dans le désert australien grâce à son parachute.

L'astéroïde Itokawa a été choisi car c'était "le moins coûteux à atteindre depuis la Terre". "En plus, il est super intéressant", estime Patrick Michel. Les chercheurs espéraient que les fragments de l'astéroïde soient représentatifs de la composition initiale du système solaire. Même si la mission Hayabusa n'a pas rapporté d'échantillons, d'autres études de ce genre sont en cours de développement au Japon et aux Etats-Unis mais manquent de financements. "Ce succès va peut-être jouer en leur faveur", espère Patrick Michel.

Mots clés Google : Hayabusa, japan

Salon de l'E3: Nintendo crève l'écran avec la 3DS

2010-06-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

Le président de Nintendo Satoru Iwata lors de la présentation de la Nintendo 3DS à l'E3 de Los Angeles le 15 juin 2010. REUTERS/Phil McCarten

Annoncée par un communiqué laconique il y a quelques mois, la Ninendo3DS (c’est son nom officiel) a été dévoilée mardi matin lors de la conférence de presse du constructeur japonais. Comme la Nintendo DS, elle s’ouvre comme un clapet et possède deux écrans. Celui du dessous demeure tactile, nécessitant l’usage du stylet. En haut de la croix directionnelle, un nouveau pad fait son apparition.

Un effet «impressionant» de profondeur

C’est l’écran du haut, de 3,5 pouces de diagonale

(9 cm, presque un iPhone) qui accueille l’effet 3D. Sur le côté, on peut ajuster cet effet grâce à un slider. Les premiers témoignages évoque un effet «impressionnant» de profondeur. La Nintendo 3DS conserve une caméra tournée vers l’utilisateur. La grande nouveauté, ce sont les deux autres caméras extérieures qui permettent de prendre des photos en 3D. Par ailleurs la console est connectée en permanence à Internet.

Le premier jeu annoncé sur cette console est «Kid Icarius Uprising», dont une bande-annonce a été dévoilée. Et Shigeru Myamoto travaille actuellement sur un «Nintendodogs + cats». Plusieurs éditeurs tiers développent actuellement leurs titres pour la nouvelle console. Les franchises «Metal Gear Solid» et «Resident Evil» feront notamment leur apparition dessus. Nintendo a également annoncé un partenariat avec Dreamworks, Disney et Warner, qui offre la possibilité de regarder certains de leurs films en 3D.

Mots clés Google : E3, Nintendo, 3DS

Apple vs. Android: Which OS Outpaces the Other?

2010-06-14T04:19:00.000-07:00

Apple has just reached its 10,000th native iPad application, doubling the size of the iPad App Store in just over six weeks. The milestone itself comes just two months after the release of the tablet device, though it's but a fraction of the total number of applications available for both Apple's iPad and iPhone: more than 200,000, as of Memorial Day last month.

As well, the company has started accepting contributions for iOS 4-compatible applications—the next iteration of the iPhone and iPad operating system is currently scheduled for a June 21 release, hitting devices but three days before the launch of Apple's newest product, the iPhone 4.

However, this call to arms comes with a catch: According to TechCrunch, developers of non-iOS-4 applications are allegedly experiencing longer approval times to get their products into Apple's App Store to begin with.

Elsewhere, Google's Android market has surged up to approximately 72,000 total applications, according to figures by AndroLib.com. There's been a steady increase of new applications as far back as the site records information, with 1,669 new apps hitting in July of 2009 compared to the 14,294 new applications arriving in May 2010.

According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, speaking at this week's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple receives more than 15,000 new application submissions each week. If accurate, Apple is generating roughly four times the amount of applications on a monthly basis over the competing Android platform.

Apple and the various Android manufacturers are shipping roughly the same amount of handheld devices, even though the sheer number of different Android-based phones on today's market trumps Apple's available iPhone offerings. According to Google's latest numbers from it's i/o conference, the company is activating approximately 100,000 new Android-based phones per day, or 9 million devices per quarter. Apple, by contrast, shipped 8.75 million iPhones last quarter.

NPD data released in early may indicated that Android has taken second-place spot behind RIM's OS in terms of smartphone operating systems used. Apple allegedly trails seven percent behind Android at 21 percent, though Jobs disagreed with the assessment in his WWDC keynote.

"There have been a lot of stats floating around, market research, studies. Some are okay, some are questionable," said Jobs, before showcasing a new report from The Neilson Company suggesting that the iPhone is actually second-place in the U.S. smartphone market.

Apple vs. Android: Which OS Outpaces the Other? | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

L'EHTP remporte le CMOS 2010

2010-06-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

Samedi, 05 Juin 2010 10:56

Plusieurs personnalités ont assisté, le Jeudi 27 Mai, à la cérémonie de clôture et de remise des prix aux lauréats des projets gratifiés dans le cadre de la troisième édition du Concours Marocain de l'Open Source (CMOS). A cette occasion, M. Mohamed Bennis, Président de L’AUSIM, a fait une allocution pour rappeler les orientations stratégiques de l’AUSIM dans le cadre du rapprochement ciblé entre les entreprises et les écoles d’ingénieurs, et ce, pour un développement accru des technologies de l’information dans notre pays.

Lors de cette cérémonie qui a été organisée conjointement par L’AUSIM et L’ENSEM (l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Electricité et de Mécanique), le palmarès du concours a été annoncé : 1er Prix : L'équipe de l'EHTP , 2ème Prix : L'équipe de l'ENIM, 3ème Prix : L'équipe de l’INPT.

La finale de ce concours -qui récompense l’innovation et la créativité dans le monde du logiciel libre- a été marquée par la participation, en plus des étudiants et des professeurs, de professionnels de qualité qui ont bien voulu répondre à l'appel et qui ont commenté et évalué les équipes participantes. Pour rappel, l’édition CMOS 2010, a mis en compétition sept équipes d’élèves-ingénieurs issues des filières informatiques des Grandes Ecoles d'Ingénieurs Marocaines.

Tous les prix et les cadeaux distribués aux équipes ont été offerts gracieusement par les sponsors du concours : L’ANRT, Action Informatique, Bull et CBI. Aussi, pour l’équipe qui a remporté le premier prix, l’AUSIM a offert la prise en charge de sa participation aux Assises de l’AUSIM qui se déroulement du 16 au 18 juin à Marrakech.

« Le rapprochement entre l’entreprise et l’école est plus que jamais nécessaire pour le développement des technologies d’information dans notre pays. Il est donc nécessaire de renforcer ce dialogue pour que l’on ait très tôt la connexion de l’élève ingénieur avec le monde de l’entreprise. L’AUSIM à travers son implication et sa participation effective dans plusieurs manifestations et projets en relation avec le monde de l’éducation, est prête à assurer son rôle de pont entre l’école et l’entreprise. Nous proposons aussi que l’AUSIM, à travers ses membres, participe activement aux conseils d’administration des écoles et universités. Nous matérialiserons ainsi davantage ce rapprochement. » Extrait de l’allocution du président de l’AUSIM

Mots clés Google : EHTP, CMOS, MAROC, l'EHTP, ENIM, INPT

Inside the iPhone 4--courtesy of Steve Jobs

2010-06-08T00:31:00.000-07:00

The iPhone 4 got a preemptive teardown on Monday courtesy of CEO Steve Jobs at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.

Though a pre-commercial version of the iPhone 4 was notoriously taken apart by Gizmodo--and no doubt other meticulous teardowns will follow--there's nothing like an official peek inside by Jobs to set the record straight.

Steve Jobs gave attendees at the Worldwide Developers Conference a peek inside the iPhone 4--something typically seen later from teardown Web sites.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

So, what's going on inside? Not surprisingly, one of the key goals is to pack more features and functionality into a smaller space: at 9.3mm thick, the device will be 24 percent thinner than its predecessor. And to make this point, an Apple video released Monday shows an animation of the Apple A4 chip package shrinking to accommodate a wider battery. This wide-and-thin battery motif can be seen across a number of larger Apple products, including the MacBook Air and the iPad.

And what about that A4 chip? Like the iPad, the A4 uses an ARM central processing unit, or CPU, designed by Intrinsity and manufactured by Samsung . The extra horsepower of the A4--compared with its slower cousin in the iPhone 3GS--and the accompanying graphics engine will help push around all of the additional pixels in the screen's high- density 940x640-pixel "Retina Display" --which has, incredibly, four times more pixels than previous iPhone models and boasts a 800:1 contrast ratio.

The iPhone 4 also now uses a Micro-SIM format, like the iPad, and accommodates 16GB or 32GB of Flash memory, also presumably from Samsung.

Apple is also touting the stainless steel enclosure and glass, which protects its precious internals. "A new grade of stainless steel that after machining is incredibly strong," Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of Industrial Design at Apple, said in the video cited above. "The steel frame functions as the antenna and primary structure, giving us more internal volume," he said. The screen's glass is "comparable in strength to sapphire crystal (and) about thirty times harder than plastic," according to Ive. Note that the glass is also used on the back of the iPhone 4, a testimony to its strength.

Mots clés Google : iphone, Android, Apple iphone, Google

World Cup: Scores , ranks and Results on Excel

2010-06-08T00:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a useful Excel spreadsheet for you to use to enter results for the World Cup matches. As you enter the results, the group standings are automatically updated. You can toggle between showing the placeholders for the knockout games (eg A1 vs B2), or the actual team names. You can also change the timezone used to display kick off times

For the automatic group updates to work, you need to make sure that Macros are enabled in Excel. When you open the file in Excel, you may see a warning message about macros, saying that they have been disabled – click the Options button and then select the ‘Enable content’ radio button.

Enjoy World Cup 2010

Its not how good you are , its how good you want to be

2010-06-08T00:11:00.000-07:00

My favorite book :) YOKOTEN

HPS rachéte 100 % de ACPQUALIFE :Les premières news officiels

2010-06-04T00:35:00.000-07:00

Le CDVM vise la note d'information relative à l'augmentation de capital de HPS par apport en nature

03-06-2010

Le Conseil Déontologique des Valeurs Mobilières (CDVM) porte à la connaissance du public qu’il a visé en date du 3 Juin 2010 une note d’information relative à l’augmentation de capital de HPS par apport en nature.

Cette opération, réservée aux actionnaires actuels de ACPQUALIFE SAS, société par actions simplifiée de droit français, sera réalisée par l'émission de 53.599 actions HPS à un prix unitaire de 690 Dhs en rémunération de l'apport de 60% du capital de ACPQUALIFE SAS.

Les principales modalités de l'opération sont les suivantes:

½ Nombre d'actions à émettre: 53.599 d'une valeur nominale unitaire de 100 Dhs ;

½ Prix d’émission : 690 Dhs par action;

½ Montant global de l’opération : 36.983.310 Dhs

½ Prime d'émission: 590 Dhs par action, soit une prime globale de 31.623.410 Dhs

Cette opération sera soumise à l’approbation de l'Assemblée Générale Extraordinaire de HPS prévue pour le 5 Juillet 2010.

Un extrait de la note d’information sera incessamment publié dans un journal d’annonces légales. La note d’information visée par le CDVM est :

- Remise ou adressée sans frais à toute personne qui en fait la demande ;

- Tenue à la disposition du public au siège de HPS ;

- Tenue à la disposition du public au siège de la Bourse des Valeurs de Casablanca

"La présente opération daugmentation de capital de la société HPS ouverte exclusivement aux
actionnaires de la société ACPQualife sinscrit dans le cadre dun rapprochement avec ACPQualife
sous forme dune acquisition par HPS de lintégralité du capital social de ACPQualife. Cette
acquisition fait partie intégrante de la stratégie de développement adoptée par HPS en vue de
consolider son positionnement sur les marchés où intervient ACPQualife et pérenniser le
développement de HPS et de ACP Qualife.
Les modalités juridiques et financières de lacquisition par HPS de 100,0% du capital social et des
droits de vote de la société ACPQualife sont comme suit :
! 40,0% du capital social et des droits de vote de la société ACPQualife seront acquis en numéraire
par HPS auprès des actionnaires de ACPQualife pour un montant de 2 206 882,31 euros ;
! 60,0% du capital social et des droits de vote de la société ACPQualife seront apportés en nature à
HPS par les actionnaires de ACPQualife, en contrepartie de lattribution dactions HPS, et ce dans
le cadre dune augmentation de capital par apport en nature ouverte exclusivement aux
actionnaires de ACPQualife et objet de la présente note dinformation.
A lissue des deux opérations décrites ci-dessus, HPS détiendra la totalité du capital social et des droits
de vote de la société ACPQualife, tandis que les anciens actionnaires de ACPQualife détiendront
7,6% du capital social et des droits de vote de HPS."

Voila toute la description de l'opération

Top 10 smartphones of 2010... for now

2010-05-28T03:25:00.000-07:00

The smartphone market is really taking off, with many compelling devices available on all four major U.S. wireless carriers. Matthew Miller shares his list of the best available and anticipated smartphones.

Last year I posted a couple of popular smartphone series, and I will be working on a follow-up to my Clash of the Touch Titans article in a month or so when a few of the rumored/anticipated devices are out and available. Prior to this past 2009 holiday season, I took a look at the smartphone selection for different carriers. With the explosion of smartphones in the market, I thought it would be appropriate to put together a mid-year list of the top current and announced smartphones of 2010. We know that some kind of new iPhone will be coming soon, but we are not sure if it will be for just AT&T or also for other carriers. We believe some flagship Google Android device will be coming to T-Mobile. Palm may release a new webOS device soon, and Samsung and others may release new Android devices. But all of this is still speculation and rumor, so we will stick with just the facts in this top 10 list. You can check out several product photos of these 10 devices in my image gallery, but I also highly recommend you visit your carrier store to get some hands-on time with a device before you make a huge monthly commitment.

Note: This article is based on an entry in BNET’s Smartphones and Cell Phones blog. It’s also available as a PDF download.

1: Sprint HTC EVO 4G

No other current smartphone can match the specifications of the Sprint HTC EVO 4G, and early reviews confirm it is really as good as the marketing materials say it should be. Specifications of this beast include a 4.3-inch 480×800 display, 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 4G integrated wireless radio that can be used to share the Internet via WiFi for up to eight devices, 8 megapixel camera capable of 720p HD video capture, HDMI video output, video calling capability (thanks to Qik), and Google Android 2.1 with HTC Sense. You also get free included Google Maps and Sprint Navigation, Sprint TV, and NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile.

The device launches on 4 June for only $199.99, with two-year contract and minimum voice and data plan of $79.99 per month that includes 450 Anytime minutes and free unlimited calls to mobile phones.

To share your Internet via WiFi you will need to pay $29.99 per month for unlimited data. By the way, the $10 extra data fee (over existing Sprint smartphones) lifts the 5GB monthly data limit so it is truly unlimited.

2: Apple iPhone 3GS

I know we are getting close to one year since the 3GS was released, but it is still a fantastic device that is doing very well in sales, with updates that keep making it a good choice. Apple announced its iPhone 4 OS update that is coming this summer, and the iPhone 3GS will be able to take advantage of all the new features and functionality. So your one-year-old device will get a nice makeover. The update should be free if past policy is an indication. You can buy the iPhone 3GS for $299 (32GB) and $199 (16GB) from AT&T, and these prices may drop when the new iPhone is announced, probably in June.

There are more than 200,000 applications in the Apple App Store, so you can pretty much find apps and games for just about anything. Many apps are powerful and functional, and games are comparable to dedicated gaming machines. Tons of accessories are available for the iPhone 3GS, so great deals can be found everywhere too. The iPhone OS is easy to learn and use so the device is perfect for new smartphone owners, and Apple has done a good job of updating existing hardware.

Specifications don’t always tell the whole story, but they do offer a baseline for measuring devices. The iPhone 3GS has an ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz processor with PowerVR graphics, 16 or 32 GB internal storage, 3 megapixel camera, and 3.5-inch 320×480 display. The iPhone 3GS may not have the highest specifications, but it is quite fast, the camera takes good quality photos and captures decent video, and no other keyboard works quite as well on a touchscreen device.

3: Nokia N8

It is pretty rare to find a Nokia smartphone offered by a U.S. wireless carrier, but you can find several that support T-Mobile and AT&T 3G wireless data networks. The upcoming Nokia N8 is the first smartphone in the world to provide 5-band 3G support so that you can connect to 3G data networks on T-Mobile and AT&T in the United States, along with 3G networks around the world. This is truly the first world phone and has some compelling specifications that best anything currently available.

The N8 is also the first Symbian^3 powered device. While the user interface doesn’t look much different from what we see in S60 and Maemo, it does have improvements that will probably appeal to Nokia and Symbian fans around the world and may even bring in some new fans.

Specifications include 5-band 3G data support, anodized aluminum casing in five colors, 3.5-inch 640×360 pixels resolution OLED display, 720p video recording capability, 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, internal 16GB memory with support for microSD expansion cards, HDMI port, USB, FM transmitter, 680 MHz processor, and USB On-the-Go so you can plug in USB devices to use them without a PC.

4: HTC Droid Incredible

One of the hottest phones available now that keeps selling out on Verizon Wireless is the HTC Droid Incredible. I had the chance to spend a few weeks with the Incredible and was ready to give up my Palm Pre Plus after experiencing the extreme speeds of the Incredible. It is the fastest Google Android device, shoot, the fastest smartphone, I have ever used, and everyone I have talked to has been happy with the device. The battery life is not the greatest, but this may also be a factor of how much people use it since it is so enjoyable to use.

Specifications of the HTC Droid Incredible include a 3.7-inch 480×800 WVGA AMOLED display, 8 megapixel camera, Android 2.1 with HTC Sense 2.5, 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, and 8GB internal memory and support for microSD expansion cards. The Incredible feels great in your hand with its unique back design and soft touch outer shell material.

The Exchange support is quite robust and of course, the Gmail experience is topnotch. Google Maps Navigation is a joy to use and gives you free voice-enabled navigation and directions. There is a lot to like within an Android device and the Incredible shows you what good hardware can do with a good operating system.

5: Google Nexus One

The Google Nexus One was launched during CES 2010 in January, and I had mine delivered during the event. The Nexus One is the best smartphone on T-Mobile that is also now available to support AT&T’s 3G network. I personally find the Nexus One to be extremely compelling and find it gets better thanks to the support of independent developers who allow you to quickly change the ROM of your device so you can customize it beyond compare. We also recently heard that the Nexus One will be getting the Froyo (Android 2.2) update, which will make it faster and even more capable.

Specifications of the Google Nexus One include a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, 3.7-inch 480×800 pixel resolution display, 5 megapixel camera, and dual mic for dynamic noise suppression. All the other standard high end specs, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G radio, microSD card slot, and GPS receiver are included as well.

I personally think the Nexus One hardware is more appealing than the Incredible, and I like the physical trackball that gives me colored notifications and the ability to select or place the cursor in specific locations. I purchased an extra battery and auto dock and am pretty committed to the Nexus One on T-Mobile as my primary device.

6: Palm Pre Plus

The Palm Pre launched on Sprint last summer and it hasn’t ever really taken off, even though I think the operating system is the best currently available. Verizon really made the Pre Plus a compelling device when it dropped the price down to just $49.99 and threw in the $40 per month Mobile Hotspot functionality. I debated about keeping mine until Verizon offered the WiFi capability and find it to be a compelling offer. Aside from that, the Palm Pre Plus is a nice smartphone option.

The Pre Plus is also now available on AT&T for $149.99 and is available on Sprint as the Pre (half the internal memory capacity). The Pre Plus has a great form factor for those looking for a capable touchscreen device with a hardware QWERTY keyboard, but the hardware is not the most robust and could be better.

Specifications of the Palm Pre Plus include a 3.1-inch 480×320 resolution display, integrated 16GB flash drive, 3 megapixel camera, and Palm webOS. The specs may not seem like much, but the user interface is fantastic and the notification system cannot be beat. Palm also provides a slick wireless charging system with the Touchstone charger. Its Synergy integration brings together all your networks and gives you access to all your friends and associates.

7: T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide

My first Google Android device was the T-Mobile G1, and I found the QWERTY keyboard to be one of the best on any smartphone. I was hoping to see an HTC created QWERTY Android device in 2009, but nothing was released. We now finally have a successor to the G1 being launched on T-Mobile on 2 June for $179.99. The T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide may not have the highest specifications, but it is a very capable device with a few cool new features not seen on any other Android device.

The myTouch 3G Slide has a 3.4-inch display, side slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 5 megapixel camera, 600 MHz processor, and Swype touch keyboard. The new Android features include the Faves Gallery, myModes, and Genius button. myModes is a cool way to set up your device to automatically change the customization of the HTC Sense interface based on time and/or location, so you can have it switch from business to personal mode after the workday ends.

8: RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700

BlackBerry devices are very popular, but compared to the latest and greatest smartphones available I couldn’t justify putting one any higher than this in my own list of top 10. I think the BlackBerry Bold 9700 (9650 on CDMA carriers) is an exceptionally good BlackBerry device, and if you are a fan of RIM devices you really cannot go wrong with the new Bold series. I have tried BlackBerry devices and do enjoy them but find the newer touch-focused devices to be more compelling.

The Bold 9700 includes a beautiful 480×360 high resolution display, 3.2 megapixel camera, awesome QWERTY keyboard and touch sensitive trackpad, and battery life that will provide service for about two days of heavy usage.

If carriers didn’t have so many restrictions on the SIM, I would probably have a Bold 9700 on T-Mobile. However, I don’t like to be restricted to one device or operating system, so I can’t make a BlackBerry device work for me at this time.

9: T-Mobile HTC HD2

The T-Mobile HTC HD2 has the best specifications of any Windows Mobile device, but unfortunately, awesome hardware and specifications don’t always make a device the best. I ended up selling my HD2 after a month because of constant lockups and instability. Just a week after I sold it, T-Mobile released a software update to fix these issues, and I have heard that the device is indeed more stable.

I honestly wish I had the device back now because the hardware really is fantastic and very similar to the HTC EVO 4G. The HD2 has a 4.3-inch 480×800 display, Snapdragon 1 GHz processor, 1GB ROM, 5 megapixel camera, and Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system. It comes with a 16GB microSD card and support for the Barnes & Noble eReader, BlockBuster on Demand, MobiTV, Gogo Inflight service, and Slacker Radio. The device is heavily focused on media and comes with the two Transformer movies loaded on the microSD card.

The T-Mobile HD2 keeps selling out and appears to be doing very well. If this HD2 had launched with the updated software, I would still be an owner and it would have been in the top five of my list for sure.

10: Motorola Droid

I know this device is several months old, but it really generated an extreme level of excitement for the Google Android platform. And with the latest software updates, it is as relevant as any of these other devices. Verizon’s Motorola Droid is still priced at $199.99 and hasn’t seen a fire sale price like the Palm Pre Plus. It is one of the few Google Android devices with a QWERTY keyboard and supports the thousands of Android apps with the Google Experience.

Specifications of the Droid include a 3.7-inch 480×854 WVGA display, 5 megapixel camera, Google Android 2.1 OS, Cortex A8 550 MHz processor, and included 16GB microSD card. It is debatable whether the physical QWERTY keyboard is worth the size sacrifice, but you can always get used to a keyboard over time.

Skype Mobile and NFL Mobile are two cool services included on the Verizon Motorola Droid. If you want a Verizon Android device with a keyboard, you might want to consider this. But I recommend you look at the HTC Incredible and give the software keyboard a try first.

Final thoughts on my top 10

As I was putting together this top 10 list, I found it interesting that five of the top 10 smartphones on my list work with T-Mobile’s 1700 MHz 3G data network and five with AT&T’s network, while three are available for Verizon and two for Sprint. Some work across multiple networks, but the GSM carriers look to have more available options. I was surprised that the smallest U.S. wireless carrier actually has some of the best high end smartphone options and may soon have more with a rumored flagship Android device.

I am seriously considering the Sprint HTC EVO 4G, Nokia N8, and myTouch 3G Slide. The Nokia N8 is almost a for sure thing, while my upcoming test of the myTouch 3G Slide will confirm whether I add this to my T-Mobile collection. To get the HTC EVO 4G, I would have to give up my Verizon Palm Pre Plus, so I think the best strategy will be to wait and see what Apple announces in early June. Armed with this information, I can make an informed purchased decision that may end up with my return to AT&T.

Jody Gilbert has been writing and editing technical articles for the past 20 years, including a stint with The Cobb Group/ZD Journals. She's been with TechRepublic since Day One. Read her full bio and profile.

Mots clés Google : Google Inc., High Tech Computer Corp., Google Android, Device, Palm Inc., Smart Phone, T-Mobile, Specification, Sprint Communications, Camera

The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours

2010-05-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

May 24, 2010 — Tony Wright

When Google launched its Pac-Man logo on Friday, we immediately heard amused groans in our tweet-streams. “Well, so much for my morning,” said one. “Google’s Pac Man logo just ruined millions of dollars in productivity today, nationwide,” said another.

Here’s what we all saw on Friday:

Given our repository of hundreds of millions of man hours of second by second attention data, we figured there’s no one better than RescueTime to tell the world about the cost of Google Pac-Man on that fateful Friday. Here’s what we learned.

The first thing to understand is that Google does not result in a lot of active usage, in terms of time. Yes, we all use Google. But a Google search only requires a few seconds, and we’re all pretty well trained to click one of the first few links. Add to that the fact that many people use Google as a navigation tool (“Googling “IBM” instead of typing in “www.ibm.com”). Nonetheless, it might surprise you that our average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views. That’s roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but next time you do a search, count to 11- it’s a long time.

This weekend, we took a hard look at Pac-Man D-Day and compared it with previous Fridays (before and After Google’s recent redesign) and found some noticeable differences. We took a random subset of our users (about 11,000 people spending about 3 million seconds on Google that day) The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.. Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)

$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).

For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.

$298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our Pac-Man data journey as much as we have. Next up in our on our data-hacking list, we’ll be digging in to find the laziest and most productive countries and cities in the world. Where do you think yours ranks?

The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours

Mots clés Google : Pac-Man

Android Challenges iPhone, Users Win

2010-05-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

As I sat in the audience at Google's I|O conference Thursday morning, I watched Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra and others unveil Android 2.2 "Froyo," an ambitious upgrade to the company's mobile OS. Gundotra began the keynote by framing Android as a moral crusade against "a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice."

In case anyone couldn't figure out who the man, company, device, and carrier were, he showed a slide that alluded to Apple's most famous commercial. Then, for the rest of the Android 2.2 announcement, Gundotra and others punctuated demos of impressive stuff -- such as dramatic speed boosts and Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities -- with asides about the iPhone and iPad that appeared to be intended to elicit snickers from the audience. Which they did.

Apple's WWDC conference kicks off in a little over two weeks. Like I|O, it'll be held at San Francisco's Moscone West. Apple hasn't even formally announced that the event will include a keynote, but I'm assuming there's a good chance I'll sit in the same auditorium I was in yesterday, listening to Steve Jobs talk about the next iPhone. Even if he never mentions Google by name, he'll surely aim some little jibes in the direction of Apple's competitors, if only during the inevitable prefatory bit where he updates attendees on iPhone's competitive position. Even if he doesn't, we already know that he thinks Android is out to "kill" the iPhone.

Google and Apple both seem to take the competition between Android and iPhone as an existential, company-defining battle. They're both pouring awesome resources into their work. They're building really good products which, for all their similarities, express strikingly different visions of what a mobile platform should be. And the market appears to be more than big enough for both companies to do well.

Mots clés Technorati : iPhone,Google,Apple,Android

It's great -- some of the fiercest, healthiest, most consumer-benefiting rivalry I can think of in the entire history of personal technology. (That history has surprisingly few examples of sustained competition between two giants, in part because one of the giants was so often Microsoft, who -- back in the day -- played hardball more ruthlessly than anyone, and usually against companies who made some truly boneheaded strategic missteps.)

On one side, you've got Apple, which has built the world's most usable, influential mobile operating system,. It's got the biggest and best selection of applications, even though Apple's developer agreement and App Store approval process seriously constrain what developers can do. The company says that keeping Flash off the iPhone is a good deed, and is willing to deny users basic features such as multitasking until it nails them. And it sells only one model of phone (unless you want the 2008 version), on one not-exactly-beloved U.S. carrier.

On the other side, there's Android -- a technically solid operating system which appears to have been designed by folks with minimal interest in issues of usability. (At yesterday's keynote, I kept waiting...and waiting...for news of improvements to the Android interface.) It's got a smaller collection of apps, but one that's growing quickly in both quantity and quality, with no micromanaging restrictions on developers. Google is embracing Flash, and adding features to Android that still feel a tad futuristic. (Android's about to get a built-in voice-recognition/text-to-speech autotranslation feature; the chances that Apple is working on anything similar are pretty much zero.) And there are a bevy of Android phones -- ones with varying sizes, specs, and features, on every carrier.

I'm not saying that nobody's allowed to grumble about these two companies and platforms -- hey, I own an iPhone 3GS and a Droid and have aired my share of gripes about both of them. But with both the iPhone and Android in such robust health, everyone who buys a phone gets to decide which vision to buy into. (Or, of course, to buy a BlackBerry, a WebOS phone, a Symbian one, or something else.) And by voting with their dollars, it's consumers -- not Google or Apple -- that will determine what the future of mobile computing and communications looks like.

Here's the future I'm hoping for: one in which both companies duke it out in the marketplace (not the courtroom) for years to come. So bring it on -- snarky comments, self-serving melodrama, and all.

10 conseils pour éviter de petits ennuis avec sa vie privée sur Facebook…

2010-05-22T02:25:00.001-07:00

Voici 10 petits conseils / astuces qui vous permettront de ne pas devenir n’importe qui en faisant n’importe quoi avec votre compte Facebook !

Créez des groupes et classez-y vos amis ! Cela vous permettra de mieux cibler vos messages et de ne pas envoyer vos dernières photos « mec bourré au nouvel an » à vos collègues ou Tati jeannette…

Désindexez vous ! Sans pour autant supprimer votre compte, il est possible de vous retirer du moteur de recherche. Allez dans vos Paramètres -> confidentialité -> Recherche et sélectionnez « Seulement les amis » par exemple. Ainsi, on ne vous trouvera plus sur Facebook, mis à part vos amis.

Toujours sur cette même pas, décochez la case « Créer un profil public« . Cela vous désindexera de Google. En effet, si cette case est cochée, n’importe qui, tapant votre nom dans Google, peut voir votre page Facebook dans les résultats

Autre truc assez gênant sur Facebook, c’est la possibilité pour vos amis d’uploader des photos de vous et de vous tagger à tout va… Evidement pendant ce temps, vous ne controlez plus votre image. Il est bien sûr possible de censurer le tag à postériori sur une photo mais le mieux, c’est d’interdire à tout le monde de trouver des photos ou vidéos taggées avec votre nom. Pour cela, allez dans Paramètres -> confidentialité -> Profil et sélectionnez dans la liste « Photos sur lesquelles vous êtes marqué(e) » -> « Personnaliser » afin de préciser que la seule personne autorisée à voir les photos taggées avec votre nom est vous seul !

Juste en dessous, il y a aussi une option qui s’appelle « Modifier les paramètres de confidentialité des albums photos« . Cela vous permettra de décider qui a le droit de voir vos photos ! Super pratique pour éviter que votre big boss ne voit les photos de votre bain de minuit, à poil, dans la fontaine du centre ville

Un truc que les gens adorent sur Facebook, c’est le petit coeur qui indique si oui ou non, vous avez divorcé, trouvé une nana ou un mec ou si vous êtes redevenu le bon célibataire acharné au bout de 3 jours de bonheur fougueux avec une strip-teaseuse de Tourcoing… Bref, la loose… Du coup, en allant dans Paramètres -> confidentialité -> Actualité et mur vous pouvez décocher la case « Supprimez la situation amoureuse« … ça vous évitera quelques problèmes je pense.

Evitez les applications douteuses comme celle-ci qui permettent de dire si vous voulez coucher avec l’un de vos amis, ou qui étale publiquement ce que vous pensez de untel ou untel…Etc… Bref, tout ce qui est ensuite rendu public aux autres et qui concerne la vie privée, évitez !!

Attention à vos coordonnées ! En effet, vous n’avez peut être pas envie de laisser votre n° de téléphone à tout le monde… Dans ce cas, allez dans Paramètres -> confidentialité -> Profil -> onglet coordonnées et faites vos réglages pour masquer par exemple votre n° de téléphone ou votre email à certains de vos contacts, groupes ou réseaux…

Toujours dans Paramètres -> confidentialité -> Profil n’oubliez pas de décocher la case « Mes amis peuvent écrire sur mon mur » afin d’éviter que vos pôtes boulets vous affichent publiquement ou caftent à la terre entière votre relation avec cette striptease de Tourcoing (oui encore elle, vous avez replongé, c’est mal !)

Et pour finir, parce que pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés, il est possible, toujours dans cette même page de profil, de limiter la visibilité de vos amis. En effet, cela peut être dérangeant pour vous que votre petite copine qui est dans vos amis, puisse voir l’arrivée de Raymonde, stripteaseuse de son état, dans vos contacts ! Bref, très pratique lorsque les amis de vos amis ne sont pas forcement vos amis… et vice versa (enfin, plus vice que versa d’ailleurs)

A bon entendeur !

par kourben

Mots clés Technorati : 10 conseils,vie privée,Facebook

Et si tout le monde fermait son compte Facebook?

2010-05-22T02:22:00.001-07:00

Après avoir attiré des millions d'internautes, le réseau social fait peur à certains...

Compte facebook fermé “Montage Le Post”

Si Facebook était un pays, il serait le 3ème plus peuplé du monde... devant les Etats-Unis.
Le réseau social créé en 2004 par Mark Zuckerberg compte plus de 400 millions d'inscrits. En France, il réunit pas moins de 15 millions de personnes.
Mais il fait face à des critiques de plus en plus nombreuses.
1. Quid de la vie privée ?
Depuis les derniers changements mis en place par Facebook, la protection de la vie privée est au coeur de la polémique. "Dorénavant, la plupart des informations personnelles sont publiques par défaut", explique France24 qui consacre un article au sujet.
Facebook est devenue une "pieuvre" qui connaît tout sur tout le monde et offre la possibilité à n'importe qui de connaître les infos contenues dans les profils, se plaignent des internautes.
Un schéma bien résumé dans cette infographie du NewYorkTimes qui liste tous les critères de confidentialité à activer (plus de 170 paramètres dans 50 catégories) pour protéger sa vie privée.
Mais attention... "en publiant sur Facebook, chacun perd le contrôle de ce qu'il publie", dénonce Hugo Roy sur son blog. Ce spécialiste d'Internet et des logiciels libres publie un billet intitulé "Pourquoi je n'utiliserai plus Facebook" dans lequel il rappelle que "chaque fois que vous publiez, vous remettez aux mains de Facebook vos données. En effet, vous ne savez pas, dans un an, ou même dans trois mois, comment Facebook va décider de changer ses paramètres."
2. Difficile de se désinscrire !
Inquiets, certains utilisateurs cherchent comment se désinscrire.
Impossible de les chiffrer exactement. Mais les recherches concernant le sujet ont apparemment bondi ces derniers mois sur Google, en ce qui concerne les requêtes en anglais ("delete facebook profile") ainsi que les recherches en français ("supprimer compte facebook")

Le moteur de recherche suggère d'ailleurs cette recherche aux internautes :

Supprimer un compte Facebook - capture d'écran Google

Et là, ce n'est pas simple, si l'on en croit ce papier de L'Express.fr. Le site propose de suspendre votre compte... mais pas de le supprimer. Il faut donc un peu de rechercher et quelques clics pour tomber sur LE bouton qui fera oublier votre vie à Facebook.
3. De la concurrence pour Facebook ?
Convaincus que les réseaux sociaux sont utiles et doivent être développées, des étudiants de l'université Courant Institute de New York veulent en lancer un tout nouveau. "Respectueux, libre et décentralisé", selon la présentation qu'en fait Pc Inpact, Diaspora pourrait devenir un sérieux concurrent de Facebook. Il promet en tout cas "un contrôle total" des internautes sur leurs données personnelles.
Encore faut-il que les fondateurs réunissent les sommes nécessaires à son déploiement... Un appel aux dons a été lancé : il a déjà permis de recueillir 100.000 euros en quelques jours, selon Le Monde.fr.
4. Une autre solution existe...
En attendant la mise en place d'une hypothétique nouvelle politique de protection des données personnelles par Facebook ou l'ouverture de son concurrent Diaspora, il est toujours possible de protéger sa vie privée.
Il suffit d'observer quelques règles de bonne pratique des réseaux sociaux.
Ce que résume Stéphane dans les commentaires du blog d'Hugo Roy : "Apprendre à utiliser Facebook d’une façon intelligente est bien plus productif que boycotter le réseau comme des autruches qui se mettent la tète dans le sable". Et le blogueur de proposer sa propre méthode : choix restreint de "friends", bons paramétrages de vie privée...
Le blogueur Korben avait également listé les "10 conseils pour ne pas devenir n'importe qui en faisant n'importe quoi sur Facebook".
Mais ces 2 méthodes oublient le conseil essentiel. Facebook ne pourra pas ni exploiter ni dévoiler les informations que vous ne lui livrez pas. 30 secondes de réflexion avant de lui confier les photos de votre dernière soirée alcoolisée ou les secrets de vos performances sexuelles, ce n'est pas du temps perdu.

Mots clés Technorati : Close facebook account

Google world dominance? Google says Android smartphones gain momentum

2010-05-21T04:21:00.000-07:00

Google says 100,000 Android phones are being activated every day and it's app library now boasts over 50,000 titles.

Attendees await the beginning of the unveiling of Google's Nexus One Android smartphone, the first mobile phone the internet company will sell directly to consumers, at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google said more than 100,000 smartphones running on its Android mobile operating system are now activated daily and its library of applications has grown to 50,000, underscoring rapid adoption of the devices.

The Internet search and advertising leader said on Thursday that searches on its mobile Internet search engine have quintupled in just the past two years.

At its annual developer's conference, Google executives outlined how the Android -- an operating system introduced last year in competition with Apple Corp's and Palm PALM.O> -- is gaining traction in the intensely competitive market.

Later on Thursday, Google, Intel Corp and Sony Corp announced a joint effort to develop Web-connected televisions for households.

The tie-up may extend Google and Intel's reach beyond the personal computer and into the roughly $70 billion television broadcasting ad market. Sony, whose erstwhile dominance in consumer electronics has been eroded by the likes of Samsung, could beat rivals to a potentially new generation of devices.

The multi-pronged effort will mark the latest attempt to bring the Internet to the living room, a vision that has attracted and challenged virtually every major player in the technology and consumer electronics industry for years, from Apple to Microsoft.

Google: A new consumer electronics power broker

2010-05-21T04:16:00.001-07:00

Six tech industry CEOs don't often appear in the same place at the same time. Google, the dominant search company of our time, has clout in consumer electronics as well.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--Could the long-awaited marriage of the television and the Web be blessed by a search company?

Google is at least going to make an attempt, unveiling the signature announcement of Google I/O 2010, Google TV, before a crowd of developers at the Moscone Center Thursday. While Google will need developer support to make Google TV happen, the message wasn't entirely aimed at them.

Instead, in convening a panel of some of the most important CEOs in the world of consumer electronics--Sony, Best Buy, and Intel, among others--Google declared its intention to shake up the world of consumer devices the same way it has disrupted countless other industries in its 12 years as an organization. Google is attempting to do what the PC and consumer electronics industries have tried--and failed--to do for years: bring the nearly unlimited content of the Web to the large-screen TV while preserving the tried-and-true television experience that has enraptured three generations of Americans.

If this effort succeeds, there will be a new power broker in consumer electronics. And Google will have found a way to move past its identity as The Search Company in order to focus on a future based around Web-connected consumer-oriented software.

It's far from a slam dunk: powerful entrenched industries tend to not like it when Google comes knocking on their door. And tech conference demos alone--especially buggy ones--do not sell a product. But after the failed attempts of the Wintel duopoly (remember that?) to accomplish this goal in the last decade, Google is pushing ahead with its own take on the problem at a time when people might be finally ready to listen.

So what is Google TV? Essentially, it's an Android-based operating system for televisions and set-top boxes that fulfills one of the key goals that eluded the PC industry years ago: seamless integration of Web content and cable or satellite content.

Intel and Microsoft wanted to put PCs in living rooms, attempting to dress them up to look like cable boxes or DVRs. However, people didn't want to buy another full-fledged PC simply to sit in their entertainment centers and drown out the movie with the sound of the cooling fan. And the Windows brand did not resonate with the consumer electronics set, who didn't want long boot times or PC weirdness when trying to fire up their favorite show.

Apple waded tentatively into these waters with Apple TV, providing a smaller and less obtrusive box for the living room but walling off the content experience to the iTunes Store and putting few resources behind the project. More recently, a host of other devices like Boxee, Roku, and Slingplayer have tried to deliver Internet content to the television, but they force the user to choose between "Internet mode" and "television mode," and it's amazing how reticent people are to hit a button to switch between input modes.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt (right) and vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra think that if they play their cards right, they could be a player in consumer electronics.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

So could Google TV break this logjam? The promise is certainly there: offering bored TV viewers a better way to search for things that interest them seems like a winner. And layering the Internet over existing television is an idea that has shown some promise, in things like Yahoo's work on TV widgets.

There are more than a few challenges. For one, nobody has any idea what these TVs and set-top boxes will cost relative to existing devices. People might be convinced to pay some sort of premium for this experience, but how much? These are uncharted waters.

And how will Google's search technologies be implemented in this product? Mark Cuban, founder of Broadcast.com and HDNet, and avid NBA playoff spectator (as opposed to participant), nailed it when he said Thursday "the success of Google TV will come down to one thing...PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV?...How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does."

But aside from the questions about Google TV itself, the announcement once again reveals Google's limitless ambition. This is a company that honestly thinks it can provide better technology products and services than anyone else in the world.

People laughed when Google got into mobile operating systems, wondering how a search company could break into a market dominated by old hands like Nokia and RIM as well as new upstarts like Apple (which at least had the benefit of decades of world-class software development). That seems to have worked out well for Google: it's the second largest smartphone operating system supplier in the U.S. at the moment, behind RIM and ahead of Apple.

There are few companies that could have assembled a CEO roster like the one Google put together Thursday. Coordinating the schedules of six major consumer electronics and computer industry CEOs must have taken a huge effort behind the scenes, and they weren't even all in Las Vegas in January for CES. It was quite a list: Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, Logitech CEO Jerry Quindlen, Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn, and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.

Web TV gadgets through the ages (images)

As we alluded to earlier in the week, Google is reaching a point in its evolution where it is bringing the tech industry into its own orbit. Consider this: Intel and Sony played second fiddle to Google Thursday in an announcement that highlighted their own failures to produce such a product.

And however Google's ruling triumvirate might feel about Apple CEO Steve Jobs and all he has accomplished over the years, Google could not have drawn clearer battle lines on Thursday: it wants to be as prominent a consumer electronics software company as Apple, and it is going about that strategy by marshaling industry support, rather than going it alone.

Mots clés Technorati : Google,A new consumer electronics power broker

Google Brings an Open Source Gun to the Video Codec Battle

2010-05-21T04:14:00.000-07:00

By Richard Adhikari LinuxInsider Part of the ECT News Network 05/20/10 12:01 PM PT

"HTML5 doesn't specify which video and audio codecs to use," according to Thomas Ford at Opera Software."That's why we have a codec war. First there was Theora, then H.264 and now there's WebM." WebM is Google's new open source media format, and it's going head to head with H.264, a standard favored by Google and Microsoft.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) on Thursday announced WebM, a royalty-free media file format for online video. With WebM, Google has thrown the gauntlet to H.264, the codec backed by rivals Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), among others.

Buried within the new format's FAQ was news about another Google project: Android. The next iteration of the mobile operating system, dubbed "Gingerbread," will be released in the fourth quarter of this year.

What Is WebM?

WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed for the Web. Its files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. Its file structure is based on the Matroska media container.

Vorbis is an open source audio compression technology that's an independent project of the Xiph Foundation. Matroska is a multimedia container format derived from a project called "MCF."

WebM files run on supported Web browsers or media players. Google Chromium will support WebM from Thursday, Opera Labs already supports WebM for several operating systems, and Mozilla Firefox will also support WebM files.

YouTube is supporting WebM, of course, and Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) is also backing the VP8 codec.

Brightcove has announced that one of its clients, The New York Times, will test WebM soon.

Google will release QuickTime and DirectShow plug-ins in the next few weeks that will allow many third-party encoding applications to produce WebM files. On Thursday it released a developer preview for the WebM project.

WebM versus H.264

In unveiling WebM, Google is locking horns with Apple and Microsoft, both of which support the H.264 codec. Cupertino and Redmond have suggested using H.264 and HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash for online videos. Flash, they declared, is creaky and outdated.

However, the battle's not just about the best technology. The real issue is money.

"HTML5 doesn't specify which video and audio codecs to use," Thomas Ford, a spokesperson for browser developer Opera, pointed out."That's why we have a codec war. First there was Theora, then H.264 and now there's WebM."

What's in it for the winner? Dominance of online videos, and that could involve some serious pocket change.

The H.264 codec uses patents that are owned by developer companies, including Microsoft and Apple. Users will have to pay fees to MPEG LA, a private company that administers the licenses for H.264, among others.

Google's WebM Licensing Terms

MPEG LA issues five-year licenses. In February, the company announced that it will not charge users of the H.264 codec royalties for the technology through to December 2015.

Further, there are fears that patent holders may sue users if a dispute arises.

Google may hope to undercut all these problems by making WebM a free and open source project and modifying its licensing terms. Its license is based on BSD and Apache, so licensees can use the VP8 code in both proprietary and open source software with few restrictions.

The main modification Google made to the licensing terms is that its VP8 license grants patent rights, and it terminates if patent litigation is filed alleging the code has been infringed.

"H.264 isn't a very good option because of the rights issues around it," Opera's Ford told LinuxInsider. "We can't pay a large licensing fee, and we needed a free alternative. Fortunately, Google stepped in with a free and open alternative."

Whither WebM?

Despite support for VP8 from several companies, Google may initially find it difficult to take on H.264.

"Unfortunately, VP8 isn't as good as H.264, and Apple is aggressively against it, which could be problematic given the heavy shadow Apple casts on this space," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told LinuxInsider.

However, support from Microsoft may mitigate Google's problems a bit.

"Microsoft has announced that it will build support for VP8 into Internet Explorer 9," Enderle said.

Hansel and Gretel

Rumors that Google's next version of Android will be named "Gingerbread" have been circulating on the blogosphere for months, but up until now Google has refrained from commenting on them officially.

With the unveiling of the WebM codec Thursday, Google announced that Gingerbread is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter and that this version of the operating system will support WebM.

"We expect many other Google products to adopt WebM and VP8 as they prioritize it with their other product requirements," reads Google's WebM FAQ.

VP8 is the video codec Google acquired when it bought On2 Technologies last year. It's used to compress video streams in WebM files.

Google Brings an Open Source Gun to the Video Codec Battle

Mots clés Technorati : Google,Open Source,Video Codec,Battle

Facebook sent some user data to advertisers

2010-05-20T04:17:00.000-07:00

May 20, 2010 9:13 PM PDT

Facebook's privacy policy promises, in no uncertain terms, that it doesn't "share your information with advertisers without your consent." Only "non-personally identifiable" data, it says, are shared.

But the social-networking site confirmed late Thursday that it has, at least in some circumstances, sent the user name of a Facebook member to its advertising partners. That can be used to glean a person's name, interests, and list of friends.

A Facebook spokesman told CNET that the apparent privacy leak has been fixed.

News of this data sharing, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday evening, could prove embarrassing to the social-networking site, which is already on the defensive after Washington politicians have been calling for regulatory action on privacy grounds and over a dozen advocacy groups have charged that Facebook engages in "unfair and deceptive" business practices.

Facebook's admission also may conflict with its previous statements. In a blog post last month, a company official wrote: "We don't share your information with advertisers unless you tell us to...Any assertion to the contrary is false. Period."

"We were recently made aware of one case where if a user takes a specific route on the site, advertisers may see that they clicked on their own profile and then clicked on an ad," the Facebook spokesman said on Thursday. "We fixed this case as soon as we heard about it. In addition, we have been working on ways to no longer include user IDs in Referer: URLs."

Browsers typically send a Web site, in what's called a Referer: field, the location of the page you last visited. This lets Web operators know where their visitors are coming from, and it's viewed as a perfectly normal and commonplace practice.

The rub: if you're logged into Facebook, the Referer: field can reveal your user name to advertisers.

Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who has a background in Internet advertising, described the problem in a new essay that says: "When a user views her own profile, or a page linked from her own profile, the "?ref=profile" tag is added to the URL--exactly confirming the identity of the profile owner." Facebook could eliminate any privacy concerns by configuring a different type of Referer: set-up, Edelman said.

Other social-networking sites

Other social-networking sites also included the Referer: field, but Facebook appears to be the only one that uses it--inadvertently or intentionally--to signal the identity of who's logged on.

That's not necessarily a privacy leak. If someone clicks on an theoretical advertisement on, say, Twitter.com/jessicaalba or Myspace.com/usher, the Referer: field won't reveal the identity of the reader.

And MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Xanga, and Live Journal downplayed the issue when contacted by the Journal, saying it was standard industry practice.

"While access to a MySpace 'FriendID' does not permit anyone access to information beyond what a user has already made publicly available, MySpace is currently implementing a methodology that will obfuscate the 'FriendID' in any URL that is passed along to advertisers," MySpace said in an e-mail statement.

Facebook acknowledged the issue and said it did not consider the data personally identifiable although it was nonetheless working to change its practice.

"As is common with advertising across the Web, the data that is sent in a referrer URL includes information about the Web page the click came from. This may include the user ID of the page but not the person who clicked on the ad. We don't consider this personally identifiable information and our policy does not allow advertisers to collect user information without the user's consent," a Facebook spokesman said in e-mail.

Edelman, however, says his analysis shows that the user name is frequently leaked. He pointed to a paper outlining precisely this issue written by AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers, which was presented at a conference in Barcelona last August.

It's unclear whether any advertisers have acted on the information they received, but Google's DoubleClick and Yahoo's Right Media told the newspaper they were unaware of the situation and had not used any such data. In Google's case, as a result of DoubleClick's 2002 settlement with state attorneys general, advertisers (and not Google) own the data.

Mots clés Technorati : Facebook