Google have just announced the creation of a toolkit and set of browser extensions to allow web applications like Gmail, Google maps and potentially all other applications. It works in the same way that printer spoolers do in operating systems:- Work is done offline, and then connected online and synchronised.
Google announced the set of open source tools at Google's global developer day, seeing over 5,000 programmers attend meetings and seminars worldwide. Google hope that the invention of these tools
Initially, the tools will enable Google Reader to work offline, but the more obvious candidates for offline execution are the documents and spreadsheeting applications – expect this in the not too distant future.
For a demo, install google gears, then go to one or all of these:
Simple Database Demo – Store and retrieve values in the database
Simple ResourceStore Demo – Capture a URL and display it while offline
Simple ManagedResourceStore Demo – Capture a versioned set of URLs atomically and update them together
Simple WorkerPool Demo – Perform a long-running computation without blocking the browser UI
Here is an 'article' generated from the keyword 'internet':
The Internet is good, but not because it cannot be regulated. The Internet is a global network connecting millions of computers. That is, traffic on the Internet is much more like a series of small telegrams passing back and forth. The Internet is one of the youngest and fastest growing media in today's world. The internet is the next OS, and Google is becoming a primary force behind it. Google Says The Internet Is Haunted. The internet is not evil. The Internet is in its 11th year of annual doubling since 1988. Because of Firefox and its accessibility features, the time that I spend surfing the Internet is more fun and productive again.
After all these years, Internet is indeed becoming the best service platform ever.
Apologies to any website which I have pulled content off of here, but I'm using their content for a good cause.
The software that produced this piece of text is called Instant Article Wizard, and is devaluing the efforts of good writings on the internet. COpyright is easily being breached, and is extremely easy to find out if your website has been reproduced elsewhere.
www.CopyScape.com
Enter your URL in, and it'll quickly give you a report of similar wordings on other websites on the web.
The RIAA and the US attorney general are at it again in the USA.
They have submitting a bill to congress with a proposal to increase the sentence for Copyright Infringement to life imprisonment in a lovely US jail.
Their excuse? Terrorism of course!
" life imprisonment for copyright offences which endanger life and Homeland Security reporting to the RIAA when someone tries to sneak a pirated CD across the border "
This is not all! In the new bill the following measures are being proposed:-
- 'Attempted' Copyright Infringement – 10 years
Simply trying to download a chart-topping hit from Britney Spears counts for 10-years in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
- Using Pirated Software – Life
They're so desperate to stop people from 'stealing' non-tangibe material that they're willing to put you in the slammer for longer that a consecutive rape, kidnap and murder charge.
- Allow of wiretaps to suspected copyright infringers
- “Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Ass. of America. That would happen when CDs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance" are attempted to be imported.” (CNet News)
The US Government and the RIAA knows no bounds. They cannot distinguish between a 12-year old kid giving a DVD to his mate, and a mass-producing factory pumping out 10,000 DVDs a day. There's a stark difference in the amount of 'theft' that's occurring, but not in their money greedy eyes there isn't.
In fact, with this new law you would do less time robbing a bank (7 years) and then going to the shops and buying the CDs and DVDs! Madness!
Get some perspective!
In a desperate last attempt to help me revise my first year course, I'm going to publish rewritten notes to help someone revise Computer Science topics – this first post will be about Internet Communications. Sorry that I'm deviating away from the usual blog theme of my website!
There are many different areas to look at when thinking of Internet Communications. In this revision page, I will go through the following:
- Quality of Service
- Layer system of protocol
1. Quality of Service (QoS)
Following is a rough list of network services that computing can achieve.
- Shared Resources
- Storage
- Programs
- Databases
- Printing
- File transfer
- Email and instant messaging
- World-wide-web access (through 'The internet' or an Intranet)
- E-commerce
- Voice and/or video transfer
- Peer-to-peer services
- Scatter-gather networks (Bittorrent and others)
Quality of Service is measured using the following metrics:
- Throughput
- The overall speed of data transfer, taking into account all protocols and losses.
- Delay
- The time taken for the first bit to arrice and its destination.
- Bandwidth
- In modern terms means an amalgamation of throughput and delay.
- High bandwidth -> High throughput, Low delay
- Low bandwidth -> Low throughput, High delay.
- Jitter
- The variation in delay between packets/frames.
- Packet loss
- Defined as the probability that a given packet will never reach its intended destination.
- Error rate
- The proportion of arrived bits with error
- Can be burst errors, or random errrors
- Availability
- Measured in % uptime
- Maintainability
- How easy are faults to repair when things fail?
- Security
- What do you want to protect your data against?
- Cost
- The overall cost of using and maintaining the network
A high-definition, wide-screen, full motion video has:
- 1366 x 768 pixels per frame
- 24 bit of colour per pixel
- 100 frames per second
If the video is transferred without compression, we need a throughput of no less than 2.5 Gbps!
2. Layer system of protocols
To aid maintainability and logical thinking, the internet protocol is broken down into 'layers'. Lowest to highest.
- "Transfer of bits" — Physical layer (most important)
- Voltage, sampling, wireless etc. The physical voltages and currents of electronic bits.
- "Perfect data delivery" — Data link layer
- Error correction, repeat requests, CRC etc…
- "Choosing the route" — Network layer
- Path control & routing, addressing scheme, IPv4/6, segmentation & reassembly of frames
- "Reliable end-to-end delivery" — Transport layer
- Further error, flow and sequence control
- "Right program" — Application addressing layer
- Achieved through ports, ie. (182.16.10.30) :80 – http, :21 – ftp, :6842 – msn etc…
- "Make it useful to the user" — Application layer
- User interface, web browser, email client, applications
T
he team who bring us Ubuntu, Kubuntu and everything *ubuntu, have announced the creation of a new flavour to their line of open source operating systems — Ubuntu Studio. This is from the website:
Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.
We provide a suite of the best open-source applications available for multimedia creation. Completely free to use, modify and redistribute. Your only limitation is your imagination.
Only time will see how successful it is against the multimedia market leader Mac.
The following is a list of the easiest and strongest ways to make you Google Adwords more effective:
- Plan the ad
This may sound obvious, but so many people don't do it. Plan the ad's words and selling point carefully before making the ad. This will avoid nearly all grammatical and spelling errors.
- Use rhythmic techniques
To spice up the mental sound of an advert, you can use Haiku – a traditional Japanese poetry writing technique. In Haiku, each line has a set number of syllables usually 5 on first then 7 then 5 again and so on. Here's an example of Haiku:
Easy RevisionLearn from the Computing Pros,
Storm through your exams!
www.Microplop.com
This ad may not stand out straight away but if read,
- Use punctuation to emphasise key words
Punctuation is often neglected in advertising, but it can make a real difference to the style, look and sound of your ad. Use the extended set of keys: , . ? / : ; # ~ + – ¬ | .It may be difficult to add these in some style of ads, but use your imagination. Be careful not to overdo it though.
- Use metaphors, similes, alliteration and personification – the basis of emotive writing. Look at appropriate wikpedia pages for help with these – I can't do it on here!
- Incorporate relavant dates within ads
Very, very few ads have dates like deadlines for offers etc. in. This is usually because the ad template is set once, and then never changed. Apply recent offers or deals that appear legitimately on your website for a CTR boost.
- Free culture
Use the word free legitimately and convincingly in your ad text to attract the people who just want free stuff, bless them!
If you are reading this on my website, and not on my feed or through facebook then your are seeing the third version layout of Microplop.com – hope you like it. It still needs a little tinkering here and there, but it's mostly complete. Feel free to comment below about what you think, it all helps.
Finally! We all have a chance to chuck that witch Paris Hilton in jail, and either:
- 'Lose' the key
- Throw key in big river
- Force Paris to 'ingest' key
- Make her go into a X-men/Magneto style prison – no chance of escape.
Any of the above is acceptable.
Sign the petetion to keep her in jail:
JAIL PARIS HILTON!
(currently 20,802 signatures)
DONT PARIS HILTON!
(currently 14,096 signatures)
All values correct at 18.08 BST, 9 May 2007
I have now finished and handed in my Chatbot final year assessment project for Programming at Reading University. Whenever I get the time I will release the source code, and executables for Windows and Linux as open source. The following is an extract from a reflection I gave on Reading's own Comptuing community, Redgloo…
I've leant alot about C++ whilst doing this project.
The main area that has signicantly improved my code during this project was in classes and objects. I have been able to manipulate them in such a way that means that I can reuse exactly the same classes later and still be completely relevant. I quickly setup a files class and object.
I quickly saw that implementing this class simplified my code significantly, and reduced my main() to only 16 lines of code.
In the end, the problem boiled down to only a few cruicial function:
1. Read()
2. Respond()
Written in C++ code as
respond( read () );
This was then encased within a do-while loop.
Before beginning the chatbot project, I had little clue about how to implement fiels in C++. But lots of coffee, skittles and visits to cplusplus.com later, I can basically do anything with them.
Half way through the problem, I soon came to realise that C++ is not the ideal language for chatbots to be written in. Unlike most modern languages, C++ is platform dependent (with larger programs anyway), has no regular expression in built functions and handles stings extremely badly.
Regular expression would have been a Godsend to this project, as they could have searched through a user's input for particular words. But i had to make do with setting up vectors of strings, and compairing two vector elements together methodically.
For those of you that don’t know, Pandora is a free, legal service that allows you to stream full length music tracks over the internet. You then input your favourite bands, groups or singers into Pandora. A complex algorithm will then return to you a list of bands that you might never have heard of, because they’re too obscure or that you’ve never heard of them.
It has allowed me to double my legal music catalogue, buying albums from artists that I would never have even considered.
So it greatly annoys me when Pandora announced this week that they are stopping they’re service of streaming music to users outside of the USA. They said in a statement,
“Delivery of Pandora is based on proper licensing from the content rights holders – we have always believed strongly in honoring the guidelines as determined by the artists, labels and publishers. In the U.S. there is a federal statute called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that provides this license for all the music you hear on Pandora. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent license outside the U.S.”
So from that statement we can clearly see that the only reason why Pandora can’t broadcast to outside of the USA is because of the DMCA. The DMCA is a US law signed by President Clinton in 2000, and it will be the cause of Digg probably being taken off-line soon.
It is all supposed to protect the good of the country (the World according to the USA that is).
Restrictions to import and export of games, videos and digital content has long been controlled and has long been circumvented by techies. Region codes on DVDs and DRM infections in all downloadable media content simply have no place in the modern global economy.
America, it’s laws and it’s ’special interest committees’ such as the RIAA are beginning to police the World, and dictate what we in other countries are allowed to watch or listen to.
How can we stop them?
