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Top news


2010: Raja, Tata & Radia figured prominentlyLegal battles involving corporate czars like the Ambanis and Tatas figured prominently in the Supreme Court in 2010, but it was the Niira Radia controversy that threw the light on the corporate prowess in certain quarters of the government.
Rocket failure hits India's prospects in satellite launch market India's prospects of hard-selling its capability to launch commercial satellites received a setback when one of its heavy rockets exploded on Christmas day due to a puzzling snag in the first stage.
American companies eyeing India for hiringA tumultuous 2010 for Indian ParliamentBusiness


Wipro directed to pay $5 Million tax by High Court The Karnataka High Court directed software major Wipro to deposit $5 million by tomorrow evening as four percent Value Added Tax on the softwares they re-exported.
$83 Million fraud in Citibank Citibank is probing a $83 million fraud perpetrated by certain employees of the bank at its Gurgaon branch in India. The scam was engineered by an employee Shiv Raj Puri who was working as a Relationship Manager for the past seven to eight years.
Accor to create 3000 jobs in India next year Tech Mahindra partners Microsoft to offer solutions to telcos


Finance


Mop-up from IPOs, rights issues down 45 percent in NovAfter touching a high in October on account of the Coal India offer, the quantum of funds mopped up by India Inc through IPOs and rights issues in November dipped.
SBI's loans at concessional rates to farm sector SBI announced the concessional rates for dairy, poultry and horticulture sector, under which loans can be availed for 10 percent per annum.
Pulling PF while switching job may soon become a dreamSensex touches six-week high, adds 231 points on investors demand Technology


What's in store for the mobile market in 2011? The mobile market is spiralling toward growth with each year. So with the new year approaching fast, here are the top 10 mobile market trend predictions.
iPad 2 to launch in three versions? With speculations abound in the Web about the iPad 2, the latest one says that iPad 2 will be launched in three versions.
Nexus S upgraded to Android Gingerbread over the air Health chip to provide instant diagnoses


Startup city


No Profits from a profitable idea? Rethink on team buildingA great idea with a well set ROI proposition, still the business hasn't turned around profitable? It has to be the team.
Entrepreneurial Leadership Do they have the intelligence, the drive, the vision, the skills and the perseverance to take an idea or concept and develop it to the point where it will be accepted and even demanded by the market?Magazine


Cover Story Founded by techie Uday Challu and marketing professional Vishal Dhar in 2007, iYogi is the first direct-to-consumer services brand from India. It deploys a global service delivery platform answering tens of thousands of complaints every day.
Thinking of Hosting into Cloud? Think Twice

Cloud hosting is at its peak now-a-days and everyone is either setting up a private or public cloud or is in discussions to get into one.


US Indians


'Awadh visual culture' on exhibit at LA County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has brought many of the works of the visual culture of Awadh with its innumerable architectural designs to the public eye with its exhibition, 'India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow.'
U.S. Indian groups cry foul at Visa delay Close to 800 people gathered in Houston to protest delays in getting Indian visas to visit friends and relatives. Real estate city


BDA/ BBMP approved 4 BHK Luxury Villas with world class amenitiesNorthwoods is an exclusive setting with only 75 luxury villas spanning across 6 acres of land. Sitting at the very confluence of development, its location is its key USP.
Luxury Homes close to Manyata Tech Park, Hebbal North BangaloreGOLDEN PALMS-home to 390(2,2.5 & 3 BHK) elegantly designed apartments all offering luxurious spaces with unhindered ventilation & spectacular view of the green vistas.


CXO Insights


The Great Indian Testing Dream..!
Pradeep C, CEO, Edista Testing Institute
Software Testing sure does present a great opportunity for growth for major Indian IT Service Providers.
A Case for Policy Initiative for Indian Fabless Company
Ganapathy Subramaniam, CEO, Cosmic Circuits
The worldwide semiconductor market is around $275 billion, and the India market is around $8 billion. Featured communities


WEB DEVELOPER COURSE SiliconIndia is offering web developer course where the Candidates can learn HTML, CSS, JAVA SCRIPT, PHP &MYSQL.languages.For each section, there are tutorials, extra study material, video class..
Science and Technology Welcome to the realm of science. It is the only place where we can find the answer to the most difficult question asked ever-what is the Ultimate Truth? Well, answering that is still


Blogs: Editor's choice


Character protects life Character is said to be "the stable and distinctive qualities built into an individual's life which determine his or her response
Seven blunders that will always haunt India It is a standard practice all over the world that the burden of proving one's status as a bonafide citizen of a country falls onFeatured questions


Which job profile is better programmer or Project manager ?I'm working on a project right now that would benefit most from being in Ruby Rails, but the project manager doesn't
Why a man is puzzled, even after getting success?Happiness is a package which may include things like personal happiness, family life and also professional success.


Most read jokes


What happened to my dog? A lady rushes into the veterinarian and screams, "I found my dog unconscious and I can't wake him -- do something."
A complicated breakfast order! A resident in a posh hotel breakfast room called over the headwaiter one morning and said with a wonderful and cheerful smile.Humor of the day


Blessing on the Birthday A wife invited some people to dinner. At the table, she turned to their six-year-old daughter and said,
Women are extremely determined The FBI had an opening for an assassin. After all the background checks,interviews and testing were done, there were 3 finalists;



Videos


Not sure do I laugh or do I cry? Two little angels. A very cute baby video. Must watch!!
I'm not scared of Monsters, Right? A little girl, so brave.. She is not at all scared of Monsters. You want to be like her? Then watch this video of her's.

Book of the day


Complete Adventures Of Feluda Vol 2 -Buy Now
Nineteen memorable tales of detection featuring Stayajit Ray s master sleuth, Feluda Between 1965 and 1992, Satyajit Ray wrote.....
Complete Adventures Of Feluda Vol. 1 -Buy Now
The Feluda stories that Ray wrote are now available together in a two volume set, of which this is the first....

Seven steps to control your Facebook privacy

Exerting a complete lockdown on your Facebook information is a complicated task that someone should write a book about, and which would take eternal vigilance to maintain.

But casual users of the world’s most popular social networking website can take seven easy steps to safeguard sensitive personal information and prevent it appearing to other Facebook users, marketers and across the Internet.

1. Make friends with your Profile Privacy Page: spend 1 per cent of your Facebook time exploring what it can do for you.

2. Control your contact information: you should limit it to close friends or — better yet — nobody. Let people contact you via a Facebook message.

3. Your “friends” aren’t really your friends: they include acquaintances, family and professional contacts. Put people into different Friend Lists — private groupings of people who can be given different privacy settings.

4. Pay attention to photos: avoid the ultimate Facebook nightmare — being tagged in an embarrassing photo that everyone can then see.

This is a little confusing and can be found under the Friends, Tags and Connections section in the privacy settings.

5. Control who can see your albums via the photos privacy page.

6. Remove your Facebook info from search engines like Google via the search privacy settings page.

7. Log out of Facebook when you leave the site.

World Wide Web Consortium opens India office

The adaptation of a gamut of web standards to the Indian context, especially those connected with the use of local languages in cyberspace, is expected to get a boost following the opening of an office of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in New Delhi on May 6.

The W3C India Office will function under the aegis of the Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme, being implemented by the Department of Information Technology's Human-Centred Computing Division. TDIL has been working on the adaptation of W3C recommendations in India since 2006.

The W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. It is jointly administered by three host institutions — Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, United States, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, France and Keio University, Japan.

The W3C offices in different countries or regions are hosted by an organisation that is vendor-neutral such as a research institution, university department, or technology transfer institution. The TDIL is involved in the research, development, standardisation and spread of language technology in the country, with focus on the 22 recognised Indian languages.
Benefits for all

The W3C says its mission is to promote the development of the World Wide Web to its full potential “by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web.” This includes extending benefits accruing from the Web and related technology to all people “whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.”

The formulation of core standards relating to all kinds of technologies related to the web, and even broader approaches relating to its advancement, constitutes a key area of W3C's activity.

The country office is expected to broaden the organisation's base, by involving stake-holders in the region in its activities, help develop relationships with local technology or policy leaders and assist interested organisations in joining its fold.

It also will try to increase the “diversity of organisations” that are involved in its activities, in relation to industry, research, implementers, and user communities, and also promote international education and outreach programmes aimed at enhancing the W3C's profile in the country.

Apart from the Department of Information Technology, a handful of companies are presently among the members of the W3C. Member-organisations, including commercial, educational and governmental entities and individual members are usually those involved in the development or use of web technologies, or their deployment.

Internationalisation or paving the way for the use of web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures is a core focal area of the organisation's activities in different parts of the world. In India, language diversity throws up challenges in the development and promotion of web technology.

Understanding and satisfying the linguistic and cultural requirements of different communities, and gaining a better hold over the technological problems deriving from linguistic and structural differences is part of the mission.
Cascading Style Sheets

An example of how internationalisation will help in improving the rendering of web pages in local languages relates to Cascading Style Sheets, which are used to format text, colours and layout in web pages.

The specifications brought out by the W3C have to be adapted to ensure that the use of CSS results in text in Indian languages being rendered properly by browsers.

Facebook's new Open Graph strikes gold with websites

Talk about instant results. Facebook's social plugins under its new core API Open Graph, introduced at its F8 Developer's Conference in San Francisco last month, have truly struck gold. More than 50,000 websites have plugged in the new widgets within the first week and that number is growing fast. The entire web is reeling under a ‘Facebook-like' icon infestation.

With it, Facebook CEO and the world's youngest billionaire Mark Zuckerberg hopes to redefine web experience, with an eye on keeping Facebook the default login for web users in general.

Developers around the world, even while praising the sheer simplicity and ease of use of the new social tools – websites requiring to add the ‘facebook-like' widget will need to copy-paste and add just a single code to their website's HTML header – they also caution that there is no need for brouhaha. There might not be much ‘open' about Open Graph over the simple fact that it still requires users to have a Facebook account.

Essentially with the introduction of new social streams – ‘Like it,' ‘Friends Feed' and ‘Recommendations' – that can be hooked into websites, Facebook is trying to re-define the way social networks work. Until now, social networks worked as third party services that users and web administrators logged into and accessed for information. What ‘Open Graph' envisages is an all-pervasive social network, constantly feeding and integrating meta data.

According to Mr. Zuckerberg, the web is defaulting to social and hence the changes.

By integrating the new streams on their websites, web administrators are in effect allowing small social networks.

But like all Facebook initiatives so far, this move too has raised some concerns about privacy and security. Chris Messina, a San Francisco-based software professional who runs Citizen Agency, a consulting firm focused on effective and appropriate use of social media combined with open source values and practices, writes on his blog factoryjoe.com: “…those ‘like' buttons only work for Facebook. I can't just be signed in to any social web provider…it's got to be Facebook. And on top of that, whenever I ‘like' something, I'm sending a signal back to Facebook that gets recorded on both my profile, and my activity stream.”

Another controversy is about a policy change to allow the developers to store user data for more than 24 hours so that the new tools become popular. Whilst this has raised eyebrows within the Facebook community, the social network has clarified that only such data that users share under ‘public settings' would be open for developers to store.

New fibre-optics technology to speed up internet

It may look like a piece of gel but it’s a new nano-based telecom technology “enabler” that can make computers and the internet hundreds of times faster.

The technology, that may be in use only five or 10 years in the future, is being designed by Koby Scheuer of Tel Aviv University's (TAU) School of Electrical Engineering.

Mr. Scheuer has developed a new plastic-based technology for the nano-photonics market, which manufactures optical devices and components. His plastic-based “filter” is made from nanometre (a billionth of a metre) sized grooves embedded into the plastic.

When used in fibre optics cable switches, this new device will make our communication devices smaller, more flexible and more powerful, he says.

“Once Americans have a fibre optics cable coming into every home, all communication will go through it - telephone, cable TV, the Internet,” adds Mr. Scheuer.

“But to avoid bottlenecks of information, we need to separate the information coming through into different channels. Our polymeric devices can do that in the optical domain - at a speed, quality and cost that the semi-conductor industry can't even imagine,” Mr. Scheuer says.

In the next decade, fibre optic cables that now run from city to city will feed directly into every individual home. When that technology comes to light, the new plastic-based switches could revolutionise the way we communicate.

“Right now, we could transmit all of the written text of the world though a single fibre in a fibre optics cable in just a few seconds,” says Mr. Scheuer.

“But in order to handle these massive amounts of communication data, we need filters to make sense of the incoming information. Ours uses a plastic-based switch, replacing hard-to-fabricate and expensive semi-conductors.”

Semi-conductors, grown on crystals in sterile labs and processed in special ovens, take days and sometimes months to manufacture. They are delicate and inflexible as well, Mr. Scheuer explains.

“Our plastic polymer switches come in an easy-to-work-with liquid solution. Using a method called ‘tamping,’ almost any lab can make optical devices out of the silicon rubber mould we've developed.”

His biggest hurdle, says Mr. Scheuer, is in convincing the communications industry that polymers are stable materials.

“There is a lot of prejudice in this industry against plastics. But this approach could take us to a new level of communication,” the researcher says, according to a TAU release.

He also notes that the process is not much different from the way that mass numbers of DVDs are produced in a factory - except Mr. Scheuer works on a nano, not a “giant” micro, scale.

His device can also be used in the gyros of planes, ships and rockets; inserted into cell phones; and made a part of flexible virtual reality gloves so doctors could “operate” on computer networks over large distances.

These findings were published in Optics Express.

Keywords: fibre-optics, nano technology, semi-conductors, tamping

NASA Spacecraft Tracks Raging Saturn Storm

As a powerful electrical storm rages on Saturn with lightning bolts 10,000 times more powerful than those found on Earth, the Cassini spacecraft continues its five-month watch over the dramatic events.


Scientists with NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission have been tracking the visibly bright, lightning-generating storm--the longest continually observed electrical storm ever monitored by Cassini.

Saturn's electrical storms resemble terrestrial thunderstorms, but on a much larger scale. Storms on Saturn have diameters of several thousand kilometers (thousands of miles), and radio signals produced by their lightning are thousands of times more powerful than those produced by terrestrial thunderstorms.

Lightning flashes within the persistent storm produce radio waves called Saturn electrostatic discharges, which the radio and plasma wave science instrument first detected on Nov. 27, 2007. Cassini's imaging cameras monitored the position and appearance of the storm, first spotting it about a week later, on Dec. 6.

"The electrostatic radio outbursts have waxed and waned in intensity for five months now," said Georg Fischer, an associate with the radio and plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. "We saw similar storms in 2004 and 2006 that each lasted for nearly a month, but this storm is longer-lived by far. And it appeared after nearly two years during which we did not detect any electrical storm activity from Saturn."

The new storm is located in Saturn's southern hemisphere--in a region nicknamed "Storm Alley" by mission scientists--where the previous lightning storms were observed by Cassini. "In order to see the storm, the imaging cameras have to be looking at the right place at the right time, and whenever our cameras see the storm, the radio outbursts are there," said Ulyana Dyudina, an associate of the Cassini imaging team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.

Cassini's radio plasma wave instrument detects the storm every time it rotates into view, which happens every 10 hours and 40 minutes, the approximate length of a Saturn day. Every few seconds the storm gives off a radio pulse lasting for about a tenth of a second, which is typical of lightning bolts and other electrical discharges. These radio waves are detected even when the storm is over the horizon as viewed from Cassini, a result of the bending of radio waves by the planet's atmosphere.

Amateur astronomers have kept track of the storm over its five-month lifetime. "Since Cassini's camera cannot track the storm every day, the amateur data are invaluable," said Fischer. "I am in continuous contact with astronomers from around the world."

The long-lived storm will likely provide information on the processes powering Saturn's intense lightning activity. Cassini scientists will continue to monitor Storm Alley as the seasons change, bringing the onset of autumn to the planet’s southern hemisphere.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

Color images of the storm are available at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://ciclops.org.

Software Helps Developers Get Started With PIV Cards

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed two demonstration software packages that show how Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards can be used with Windows and Linux systems to perform logon, digital signing and verification, and other services. The demonstration software, written in C++, will assist software developers, system integrators and computer security professionals as they develop products and solutions in response to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 and the FIPS 201-1 standard.


"We wanted to provide IT professionals with a model of one way that PIV cards can be used to support authentication to federal information systems," explains Donna Dodson, deputy director of the NIST Computer Security Division. "Our objective was not to say 'do the steps this way,' but to show an example of how you might proceed."

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 calls for government employees and contractors to use secure identity credentials to access federal facilities and computers. NIST worked with industry to develop the standards for the PIV cards that will be used for those purposes. Each card contains a unique number, two of the employee's biometric fingerprint templates, and cryptographic keys stored on an electronic chip embedded in the card's plastic body.

While each federal agency will implement the use of PIV cards on its own schedule, NIST computer scientists developed the software to demonstrate that PIV cards can work with common computer activities such as system logon. The typical process of keying in user name and password will be replaced with the user inserting his/her PIV card in a reader and entering a personal identification number (PIN). This secure logon could eliminate the need for passwords for other applications and could provide access to secure databases to which the user is authorized.

The PIV Crypto Service Provider (CSP) demonstrates Windows XP Logon with PIV cards. The Public Key Cryptography Standard #11 module was developed to operate in the Fedora Core 5 environment and to implement Linux Logon, signing and encrypting email (following the S/MIME standard) and Web site authentication (following the SSL/TLS standard), configured in Linux OS, Thunderbird and Firefox applications.

The software is available at http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/piv/download.html.