In rememberence for the victims of the Virginia Tech tragedy

We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness ... We are the Hokies ...
-- Nikki Giovanni, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, poet, activist

Read the spirited address of Nikki to the students of Virginia Tech.

ॐ शांति शांति
वासुदेव कुटुम्बकम ('The whole of earth is a family')

Nice Web 2.0 video that your grandmother can understand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

How long will I take to transfer a petabyte from my home

1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes = 1000,000 gigabytes = 1000,000,000 megabytes = 8000,000,000 megabits

My DSL connection is 2Mbit/sec on average

So to transfer 1 petabyte from my home it will take approximately 127 years!

USPS can do it much faster than this for sure if you have a drive with that storage ;-)

Gore challenges Embedded Designers at ESC 2007

Source EE Times

Al Gore's keynote address at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose stressed the role of his audience in dealing with the climate crisis, which he referred to as "the moral imperative of our day" and compared it to the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. "For the most part, the effect of population on our climate is balancing itself out over many years, while technology has dramatically accelerated the rate of which the climate has been affected over the past 50 years," he said. "We need to have a much finer-grain mix of money and intelligence in generating our public policies that affect this crisis." Designers must rethink systems to eliminate the "grossly inefficient systems running or energy economy," and create architectures that are built around the idea of energy efficiency, he said. Among his recommendations was to incorporate parallel processing in our day-to-day lives to "alleviate inefficient computing paradigms." Gore also noted the loss of interest in science and engineering among U.S. students, and that designers can impact this trend by displaying the way engineers can change the world and avoid crisis. If the threat level posed by climate change could equal that of Sputnik, the concept could achieve a "moral authority" for change, he said. "Once the possible threat was understood, President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon was achieved fairly quickly."

Technology future is bright

Technology advocate and innovator Ray Kurzweil discussed the law of accelerating returns with Houston Chronicle science writer Eric Berger before his speech at the University of Houston on Wednesday. During the interview, Kurzweil said the future, or the overall impact of information technology, can be predicted because we know it doubles in power every year. "We multiply the price performance, the capacity, and the bandwidth of all these different technologies by a factor of a billion in the next 25 years--if you look at how influential these are already--you can imagine what it's going to be like when they're a billion times stronger, and how profoundly it's going to impact our lives," he said. Kurzweil expects human intelligence to be mastered, as several hundred more brain regions will be modeled and simulated in the next 20 years. He does not view the emergence of artificial intelligence in our world as machines taking over, but as an extension of human civilization. "This is already a human-machine civilization. Our machines are part of our world, and they already extend our intelligence," Kurzweil said. "Every time you use a search engine you're expanding human intelligence, and very little science can be done today without computers. And as computers become more intelligent and more powerful, we're expanding our horizons. In my mind, that's really what it means to be human." Kurzweil also elaborated on his vision for health and longevity, which he discusses in his book, "The Singularity Is Near."

Open Source GPLv3

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) will release the third discussion draft on the GNU General Public License on March 28, amid questions of whether the license will be doomed by the attempt to prevent loopholes like the one Microsoft and Novell were able to exploit to form an alliance. According to GPLv3, "If any entity that distributes the software arranges to protect a particular group from patents regarding that software, it must protect everyone," says open source expert Bruce Perens. However, Linux-Watch editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols says that "getting clauses into GPLv3 that will block similar deals from happening in the future, while avoiding cutting legitimate software patents uses off at the knees, is going to be almost impossible." However, the FSF does not see "any legitimate use for software patents," and this philosophy is consistent with GPLv2, explains Perens. He expects large patent holders to use GPLv3 so far as they can retain a reasonable number of patents. Novell could continue using GPLv2 patents, but could go no further as the rest of the free software world moves forward. For GPL to "freeze on one version would act to erode its protections over time," says Perens. The Association for Competing Technology says GPLv3 will make it very difficult for Microsoft and Novell to use the license, and that it would not allow them to provide customers with the certainty they are asking for regarding intellectual property. Perens points out that the Linux community should not assume that GPLv3 would prohibit the Linux kernel from running on systems that use DRM, or that the license will require manufacturers to give up intellectual property. Perens expects the Linux kernel to go to GPLv3 in the next couple of years, but even if it does not he expects the license to have a major effect.