10 Daily Things

How did the Internet Start and Why?
Many believe it all started with the time-sharing of IBM computers in the early 60’s at universities such as Dartmouth, Berkeley and others in the States. People would share the same computer for their computing tasks. The Internet also received help from Sputnik! After this Russian Satellite was launched in 1957, President Eisenhower formed ARPA to advance computer networking and communication.

What was ARPANET?
ARPANET stands for ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency Network’ Came about in the arena of Sputnik and the cold war. The military needed a method of communicating and sharing all the information on computers for research and development. It would also be a handy communication system if all traditional ways were wiped out in a nuclear attack.

Who coined the phrase “World Wide Web”?
Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. He’s also considered by most people as the person who started the whole thing rolling.

How fast is the Internet growing?
Very fast. It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, and only 5 years for the Internet.

Number of Internet Users and Breakdown.
The Internet is roughly 35% English, 65% non-English with the Chinese at 14%. Yet only 13% of world’s population, 812 million are Internet users as of Dec. ‘04. North America has the highest continental concentration with 70% of the people using the Internet.

How big is the Internet’s surfing world?
Google’s index now stands at 8 billion pages. Roughly 812 million surfers and growing. Using email (67%) and doing reseach (45%) are the main activities, followed by getting info about products/services (41%), and checking news, weather, etc. (40%) Source: Harrisinteractive.com

What are your average surfing habits according
Each month you usually visit 59 domains, view 1,050 pages allocating 45 seconds for each page and spend about 25 hours doing all this net activity. Each surfing session lasts 51 minutes. Source: Nielsen Netratings

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mRemote is a full-featured, open source, multi-tab remote connections manager, written in VB.NET and C# 2.0. Allows you to manage all your remote connections in a single place. Currently it supports the RDP, VNC, SSH2 and Telnet protocols. The main intention is to have a central place to store all your connections and access them in the same window.

Download mRemote >>>

This is an interesting computing gadget. A USB rack for the your 2.5″ or 3.5″ hard disks. Viewing the photos, seems you’re able to plug-in and out your hard disk on the fly. No screws. Just swap hard disks. The price of $46.79 is reasonable.

More info and online shop @ geekstuff4u >>>

The Ubuntu team release today the new version 7.10 of their top popular Linux distribution, which brings a host of excellent new features.

GNOME 2.20
The Gutsy Gibbon release candidate brings you the latest and greatest GNOME 2.20 with lots of new features and improvements.

Desktop 3D effects
Compiz Fusion is enabled by default and will bring 3D desktop visual effects that improve the usability and visual appeal of the system. Ubuntu 7.10 automatically detects whether the hardware is capable of running compiz; if not, it falls back to normal desktop. Additional effects can be enabled in “System/Preferences/Appearance” under the “Visual Effects” tab. There you can also disable the effects entirely.

Dynamic screen configuration
Several drivers, including ones for ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics chips now support the X Resize and Rotate Extension (xrandr). This enables dynamic monitor detection, and resizing and rotating of video output, for no-fuss support for projectors and external monitors.
If you have this hardware and used MergedFB / Xinerama previously, you may need to update your X configuration to use this new feature.

Graphical configuration tool for X
You can now configure what driver you want to use for your graphic card, change the default resolution for all users or change your monitor’s refresh rate without having to turn to the terminal. A new GUI has been added making it easy to adjust your video and monitor settings. This tool can also set up dual screen capabilities for cards that use the Xinerama mode.

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Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

“The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons,” explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. “One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn’t control what you do.”

He also says that the console’s Cell processor, co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, can deliver massive amounts of power, comparable even to that of a supercomputer — if you know how to optimize code and have a few extra consoles lying around that you can string together.

“The PS3/Linux combination offers a very attractive cost-performance solution whether the PS3s are distributed (like Sony and Stanford’s Folding@home initiative) or clustered together (like Khanna’s), says Sony’s senior development manager of research and development, Noam Rimon.

According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he’s not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. “It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time,” Rimon says.

Read the full article @ Wired >>>