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The possibility of life on Mars has been debated almost since the invention of the telescope. Annual growth and shrinkage of the martian ice caps and seasonal changes in color were observed by astronomers such as Herschel and Whewell in the 18th and 19th centuries. Late in the 19th century, Schiaparelli reported the existence of linear features he called canali, and this led to speculation by Lowell (among others) that the Red Planet might host a civilization more advanced than our own. The arrival of instrumented spacecraft, beginning with Mariner IV in 1964, showed a cratered, dry, cold planet that looked almost as inhospitable as our Moon; but later missions provided  evidence of liquid water on Mars  in the recent past. This has led to speculation about whether simple forms of life, like bacteria, might exist on Mars. The thin atmosphere of Mars does little to block out damaging radiation from the sun, and the surface of Mars seems to be sterilized by caustic chemicals like hydroge...

Pink Tentacle reports  that researchers at Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed a system that can “reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor.” According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep. The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs. Then,...

The number of people using their mobile phones to access social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo and keep in constant touch with their friends has rocketed this year, according to new research  reported by Guardian . Almost all the handset manufacturers like  Nokia ,  Blackberry ,  Apple   releasing  new handsets and  smart phones  that are capable of high speed  internet  access and comfortable screen sizes for internet browsing. The combination of cheap or unlimited internet access tariffs and handsets which make it simple for people to log onto their favorite sites has created a boom in social networking, the study by Orange found. The mobile phone company did not even keep count of the number of its customers that were using their phones to access social networking sites a year ago, as there was little interest. By the end of September, however, 640,000 of its UK users were accessing a social networking site every month, clocking up 66m page views and in the company’s fou...

If you are one of the 110 million Nokia phone users around the world,  now you can  set up your  Ovi  email account directly on your Nokia phone using the recently announced   ‘Mail on OVI’  Beta. Mail on Ovi, the free email account from Nokia, is now ‘live’ and can be set up directly on Nokia phones without requiring a PC to get started. People who use Nokia Series 40 devices can create their own email address directly on their mobile phones. The Ovi email account gives a person all the features and functionalities of a typical PC-based email account. During the Beta period, consumers will be able to choose from 12 languages based on the settings of their device, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Hindi, Bengali, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia. Mobile phone users from India, Malaysia and the Philippines have been able to use the Beta service since November, with extremely encouraging results, and the availablity is now being extended to the rest of ...

The Linux operating system is the most successful open source project in history, but just how much is the software in a Linux distribution “ worth “? The Linux operating system is the most popular open source operating system in computing today, representing a $25 billion ecosystem in 2008.1 Since its inception in 1991, it has grown to become a force in computing, powering everything from the New York Stock Exchange to mobile phones to supercomputers to consumer devices. Linux foundation  estimated  the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution. For this estimation Fedora 9 distribution was considered. The approach was to download the source code and installing it properly on test machines and counting the number of source lines of code (SLOC). Finally, given all the assumptions, the SLOC and estimated production values for Fedora 9 are as follows. Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) 204,500,946 Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) (Basic COCOMO model,...

The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone’s control. New Year will  arrive a second late  when time across the globe is adjusted to account for the changes in the Earth’s rotation. A ‘Leap Second’ will be added onto the final minute of 2008 because the planet is gradually slowing down as it spins on its axis. The tweak will help correct the time-lag which shows up on ultra-accurate atomic clocks. Our planet rotates on its axis at irregular rates, and on average has been falling behind atomic time at a rate of about two milliseconds per day.  It now trails the official clock by about six-tenths of a second. As a result of this difference, atomic clocks can get out of sync with the Earth and periodically have to be adjusted.  Since it’s the atomic clocks that are used to set all other clocks, a Leap Second has to be added from time to time to make up the difference. It is the 24th time since 1972 that the adjustment has been made by the Paris based Internati...

A number of technologies have exploded throughout 2008, improving and influencing our daily life. Here is a quick look at some of the technology events that happened during 2008. Big Bang Experiment:  The Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing beams of protons or lead ions, each moving at approximately 99.999999% of the speed of light. On 10 September 2008, the proton beams were  successfully  circulated in the main ring of the LHC for the first time. On 19 September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets.Due to the resulting damage, the LHC will not be operational again until summer 2009. Supercomputer Performs Laser Cancer Surgery  : Lonestar, a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)  performed  a laser cancer surgery on a dog without the intervention of a surgeon. Bionic Eye  : Engineers at the University of Washington ...

I have had a love/hate relationship with the VMWare Server 2 beta for the last couple of months and today, I’m sorry to say we have parted ways. First up, my quarrel is not with VMWare products as a whole (I still love Workstation and ESX) but frankly with the poor interaction you get with VMWare in their own beta programs. It really is a far, far cry from the type of interaction and feedback you get in the Microsoft beta programs… I would have been able to live with the lack of interaction if I weren’t having any major problems with the product. But as such things go, I ran into one showstopping problem… It turns out that on  my  hardware (which is a big, tricked out server that cost a small fortune and which I am  not  replacing) VMWare Server 2 had major issues correctly virtualizing Windows Server 2008 x64. Just that one OS. Everything else worked fine: Windows 2003 x86 & x64, even Windows 2008 x86 ran without a hitch. It has to be said that this is not a generic problem, since...

A few months ago my beloved colleague Walter  gave  me the Beta version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to play with it until now. While most people enjoy their well earned vacation, I’m playing around with SCVMM. There are definitely things to be excited about: Ability to manage both Hyper-V and VMware farms Migrate virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts (maybe not a live migration, but a migration none the less! ) But the main thing to be excited about is the future integration within the System Center family. And their are also some irritating things: Hyper-V has just RTM’ed and SCVMM is still in beta. This means you got to install  update  after  update  to make everything work. When I try to install the integration services on Windows Vista it comes with the message: “Unsupported Guest OS - An error has occurred: The specified program requires a newer version of Windows.” Unfortunately I’m not yet in the possession of Windows 7…  I cr...

In an act of “ endeavoring to deliver a release with support [that] customers deem important ” VMware accidentally left a licensing timebomb enabled in the build that it shipped to customers about three weeks ago. The timebomb causes all installed licenses for ESX to be regarded as invalid on August 12, 2008. This in turn causes virtual machines to not be allowed to start from a powerdown or suspended state or allow virtual machines to be  VMotioned to another ESX host . VMware provides one way to prevent encountering the problem and one temporary workaround until they can provide a patch: VMware has released express patches to remedy the problem. Full repeat of VMware’s latest e-mail advisory: Dear VMware Customers, We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches  for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are ...

Hi there, Yesterday TechED EMEA 2008 started with the keynote by Brad Anderson (general manager of the Management and Solutions Division at Microsoft Corp.) Unfortunatly this is the last TechED in Barcelona, but next year we will be in Berlin, so bye Tapas and Hello Bratwurst  The keynote was all about Dynamic IT, this was also the topic @ MMS 2008, so it is something Microsoft is realy into these days. Microsoft started with some trends/priorities they see in the current market: Virtualization Green IT Anywhere Access Business Intelligence Compliance Cloud Computing For your convienience I’ve put the slidedeck on our fotolog, so you can have a look. Keynote slidedeck During the keynote the following announcements were made: Windows Server 2008R2 M3 is ready and will support Live Migration in Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V is RTW and can be downloaded for free (this was allready announced last month) SC Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is RTM APP-V 4.5 (formaly known as Softgrid) is RTM and ava...

Many sessions were dedicated to Cloud Computing topics last week at Tech Ed EMEA. Some highlights I wanted to post here. First the Azure platform. Like Windows SharePoint Services (SharePoint Portal is build on top of it) Azure delivers a platform for applications that will become geographic independent. By this I mean that we will see many more applications that do not require a specific location to run. Geo independency is a major advantage with cloud computing. You can now create multiple instances of your application anywhere in the world! Or if you are more of a green fellow, wherever the coolest datacenter is. Next federation. Microsoft is aiming to become a federation trusted party. It is like the TTP in certificate world. The federation platform v2 has codename Geneva. When this product evolve we will see websites where you automatically will become recognized. Just because your system admin and the web application developer were able to combine efforts. The result is stunning....

Every day the battle in the virtualization market is getting more exciting.  Thursday (11 December 2008) VMware released update 3 for it’s free hypervisor: ESXi. No big deal right?But  apparently  they changed something in this update that could really change the way VMware virtual infrastructures will look like in a few months / years.  In the last 12 months we have seen a change of focus within the virtualization battle. The hypervisor has really become a commodity and is free (ESXi & Hyper-V). It’s all about managing the virtual infrastructure now. Microsoft released their System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) for this. What makes VMM great is that it can manage different virtual infrastructures at only a fraction of the cost of other managing tools. VMM can also manage a VMware VI. The downside of this is the fact that although you can manage a VMware environment you will also need VirtualCenter. VMM needs VirtualCenter to pass the command to the ESX servers. So you would...

Ask google to  define fiber : besides  ‘a slender and greatly elongated substance capable of being spun into yarn’  which sounds quite nice; it also defines fiber as: ‘ Optical fiber is made of flexible glass and can support very high data transfer rates. An individual glass fiber, roughly the thickness of a human hair, is capable of carrying a distinct signal transmitted in the form of pulses of light’ Which sounds even nicer…. Guess what……..No, I haven’t taken up spinning… I finally ordered my FTTH or Fiber To Tinus’ Home as I define it… and got it delivered…Whats in the package; a 50 Mbit symmetrical internet connection using the XMSnet network… (100 Mbit speeds also available..) The  CO  (which is quite near) was already hooked up to the backbone; and after my order a fiber was blown to my appartment and welded together….. resulting in a plug neatly fixed in the  box , a PacketFront DRG500: The plug with the fiber inside With all that plugged, fixed & stuffed; its time for some...