42 trillion calculations per second

Silicon Graphics trumpeted a new speed record with the Columbia supercomputer it built for NASA. SGI clocked the full 20-server system at a sustained speed of 42.7 teraflops (42 trillion calculations per second).

//OTI

Team work!

Wow... thats more like a team


// Courtesy: Shehnaz

Firefox+Google Browser Target Microsoft

Up and coming web browser Firefox is looking to secure allies as it prepares to challenge Microsoft's Internet Explorer for browser dominance. One of the potential partners being spoken of is search engine Google.

Speculation about Google launching their own browser began when people learned of the Gbrowser.com domain registration. However, this speculation changed when an article by Mozilla News revealed that a Google-branded Firefox browser may be in the cards. According to the article:

http://mozillanews.org/?article_date=2004-10-19+01-52-31
http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20041029FirefoxBrowserTargetsMicrosoft.html
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-10-28-firefox-makes-friends_x.htm

Google fix second phishing vulnerability

This is the second news item pertaining to Google Security that I have come across within these 24 hours. Surprisingly both articles addressed 2 different vulnerabilities...

1) Google Desktop vulnerable by using structured Javascript to canonize pages
2) Google Main website vulnerable as pointed out in this article...

Jim Ley surprisingly published the vulnerability and the exploit online onhis home page http://jibbering.com/2004/10/google.html

Google claims we are secure now... Jim Ley doesnt agree :P
//ysm


Google have fixed a phishing vulnerability that was discovered by Netcraft on Wednesday. Google notified Netcraft that they had closed the vulnerability today at 06:30 BST, making this less-than-two-days response much faster than the two years reported by Jim Ley when he discovered a separate but similar bug.

Both problems would have allowed fraudsters to inject their own content onto Google’s web site, making the content appear to be published by Google. This is a very effective form of phishing, as people are more likely to trust content if it appears to be hosted on a familiar domain.

The vulnerability was in the application used to search Google’s own web site, which was on the host googlesite.google.com, which now appears to be unreachable. Searches now appear to run from the parent google.com site instead.

Interestingly, while confirming the fix, Netcraft discovered another application error, which this time revealed fragments of the source code, file structures and application logic that powers the mysterious search behemoth, which we have in turn reported back to Google. At a glance, it is not clear whether the web application stack trace would be useful to an attacker, however, it does confirm the widely held belief that Google are users of the Python programming language.

Source: netcraft

Imax to open in Pakistan

I remember my first visit at Imax Theatre at Houston...
Too bad it's opening in lahore
Nice: its opening in Pakistan... :)

Imax Corp. said Monday it has signed a deal to install an Imax theatre in Pakistan. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

The Canadian big screen movie company said the theatre will be part of a shopping and entertainment park the government is developing in Lahore.

The park is expected to open by September 2005.

Seek-A-Geek

LOLz!
Now this is what you call funny!
Just read this funny article linked from the Spider blog...

A MUST SEE for all the girls out there :P
http://www.completeevil.com/geek.html

"How to catch a geek in 24 hours" (english version)
"Geeks patain sirf chaubees ghantoon main" (urdu version)
"Geeks pakriyo, rugo chauweeeh kalakun main" (sindhi versio)

I'll be on the look out for the above books and similar titles :D lolz!

Tick Tick Tick…

1st Ramadan...

I enjoyed the wait for my favourite month but the start of the month was some how not the way I planned. Inshahallah Allah will guide me back on the Path...

Right now I really feel like quoting something from "In the end..."
Although its nothing related to Ramadan, but somehow it reminds me about the importance of time...

"All I know
Time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on, but didn't even know
Wasted it all just to watch you go"

I hope I use these 30 days to come back on track... InshaAllah...

British Music Industry Wins Round in P2P Fight

The British music industry has scored a legal victory with a High Court ruling that requires Internet service providers to provide names and addresses of British citizens who share copyrighted music over peer-to-peer computer networks

Two music industry trade associations in the United Kingdom have won a court case that clears the way for them to force Internet service providers to turn over the names of people who use peer-to-peer music trading Web sites.

Read more at
http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_title=British-Music-Industry-Wins-Round-in-P-P-Fight&story_id=27626

High Court Rejects Recording Industry's P2P Appeal

"The Internet in and of itself is based on peer-to-peer technology, and copyright infringement goes on all day on the Web," said P2P insider Wayne Rosso regarding the Supreme Court appeal. "What should we do -- filter the Internet?"


The U.S. Supreme Court today chose not to hear an appeal from the recording and film industries regarding file sharing.

The Recording Industry Association of America had invoked copyright law in an attempt to force ISPs such as Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to hand over the names of customers who might be swapping protected songs.

Verizon argued that the RIAA must file a formal lawsuit to get customer names. A year ago a federal appeals court sided with Verizon, insisting that the RIAA must file anonymous "John Doe" lawsuits to get customer names.

Today's high court move lets that ruling stand. The justices offered no comment on the case.

Reade more at http://www.technewsworld.com/story/High-Court-Rejects-Recording-Industrys-P2P-Appeal-37261.html

Searching "P2P" on clusty... check out the clusters in the left bar...

(Google)² - (Yahoo!)² = (Google + Yahoo!) (Google - Yahoo!) = A9 = Clusty

It doesn't get any simpler than this!

(Google)² - (Yahoo!)² = (Google + Yahoo!) (Google - Yahoo!) = A9 = Clusty

A9 and Clusty are here to stay...

A9 was hardly a month old that Vivísimo Inc. decided to come into the picture by having a child! They named her "Clusty"...

This weekend, I decided to spend some time with these two children and see what's all the fuss about...

I had done a few searches on A9 before so I decided to start off the play with Clusty... Personally I also liked her name!

Just as i typed clusty followed by a CTRL+Enter in my foxy...
I was a little surprised looking at that dark blue interface and blogger like tabs. I thought to my self; when will these people learn? People come to search engines when they are looking for what they need! Not the buttons and links they are required to click to searc! Didnt they read HTML for Dummies?

Having had a nice look at the interface I decided to give the baby a little test...
I started with the "Open your mouth... hahaha", searching "P2P"... Ha ha, I giggled from the inside laughing at the non-sense I was expecting from the baby...

So how did the baby respond? OMG... Clusty was *VERY* intelligent!
I was really surprised to know there is something better than Google!

Yesh! Somehow the results page had convinced me that all those dark colors and difficult to find tabs had some use... Maybe they were really right by choosing not to read "HTML for Dummies"...
I know now, they were no dummies!

The results easily ruled out Google being called No.1... I was so surprised that I am forced to put a screen shot of what you can expect from this little child!

Believe me, click the picture... It's really worth it...

The search results always started with answering the first "W" of all those "Double U's"... Yes straight away it answered "What is P2P" followed by highly focused results for what I precisely needed!

Now thats what you call information...

Instead of that phrase "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,530,000 for P2P " we usually get to see on Google I saw
"Top 262 results of at least 2,484,907 retrieved for the query P2P"

All right the total number of results were less that what google had...

2,484,907 Vs 5,530,000? But believe me that only indicates who has more garbage...

Clusty filtered out 262 results for you from the total 2,484,907?
"Hain?, Sirf 262?"; you must have asked yourself just as I did...
Ask your self one more thing...
How many times did you go past 10 pages (100 results) on Google Search?

Well, duh! Clusty just filtered the garbage for you... It started with "What" followed by popular and high ranked (Probably by their bots) links... However, it does let you look in the garbage if you like... After all "One man's garbage is another man's treasure" :P

Besides this, the Intelligent left side bar saying "Cluster By" automatically arranged all the results into Groups also called "Clusters"... E.g. "Members", "Blogs", "Projects", "Software" etc!

I ended the test by having a few searches on "Pakistran", "Karachi" and the most intersting on my name "Yasir Suleman Memon"... I must say I was really impressed by the way it clustered sites featuring my name! V. Impressive!

Now just imagine that... Go and feel it at Clusty.com!! This is somewhat of what I wanted to do when studying Artificial Intelligence in my bachelors...

Some how I wanted to use NLP and search prediction techniques to predict what the searcher wants based on some demographic information and previous search history and the links that were visited from the searched links....
Somehow I see Clusty as a part of what I wanted to make a year back...

However work on clusty began 4 years ago when Yahoo! broke Google from Yahoo! searh..

I think i'll probably edit this post and add more stuff relating to A9 and some other things about clusty when I get more time (I dont know when)...

Also have a few posts on Google SMS, Google Labs, Hello, Blogger, FireFox, GoogleXplorer that I want to complete

What do Knives and P2P have in common?

Just an email with this quoute I wrote to my group...
One of my friend's said the quote was nice... I didnt know I can quote and still manage to get a compliment! Thanks friend :)
I thought I better quote my self before someone else quotes me :P

>>
http://www.itic.ca/DIC/News/2004/10/05/P2P_Statistics_Sept_2004.en.html

btw RIAA has picked up pace in cracking down on "people who share
copyright material"...

not the P2P companies...

"We make knives... It's upto you to decide what to do with them (kill
people, cats, chickens, play throw in the circus or cut tomatoes...).
In either case we cant be held responsible.."

//Sent to Aquaz

GMAIL improvements...

I guess its been more than five months now that I shifted to GMAIL for my personal emails...

The experience so far has not been that bad! Well... actually they deserve more than just "Not Bad"... I must say its "Good"!

Having used "Yahoo! Mail" and unlimited spaced POP3 accounts on "Microsoft Outlook" for more than 7 years, GMAIL came to me as a big surprise!
It's good to see all those updates popping up in their Beta service and competition going up...

Just right now I was surprised to see this Atom RSS feed button and forward email options on the GMAIL site...
Now this one goes to all those Incredimail, Outlook POP3 fans (Try reading your GMAIL RSS Feeds with FeedReader; An open source software available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/feedreader/
Thats not it... I just got a DRP and a "Hot Site" for my email account with GMAIL! Every email I get on "yasirmemon at gmail dot com" also gets forwarded to "mysecretaddress@myhost.com"...

Besides that, I just installed this new GMAIL Notifier... No more do you need to keep those browser windows open to be notified of new emails comming your way! Also no more irritating Outlook Express compose screens when you click an email link. Ammazingly you get your very own GMAIL compose screen in your favourite browser whenever you click those "mailto:" links you see while browsing...

...come closer

psst..come closer, i'll tell you a secret...

..you can't touch me.

don't worry about me, i'll be fine. always am, always will be. been through a dozen forest fires worst than the largest burn you've ever felt, been strolling through a hurricane worse than any whirlwind your mind can imagine. and me? barely touched...not a scratch. been playing this game too long to trip now, been walking this road too long to let any of it even dream of approaching. it's a neat trick, if you can do it. go ahead, do your worst, and i'll still be walking down that little path of mine. you can't touch me.

victim? hell no. martyr? don't make me laugh. you've seen a million like me come and go. but not one quite me.

and when that last tree falls, and the final wind blows, and you breathe your last, hold your last hand, whisper your last secret, i'll still be walking.

tired? maybe one day.

i am folded,
and unfolded and unfolding
...i am fine.
//An inspiration... "i am fine..."