Email and Forum Profiles in IT: Larry Page and Sergey Brin 50th Anniversary of Sputnik Launch What really slows down Windows? Homemade Wi-Fi range extended antenna Microsoft Drop Windows Genuine Validation on Internet Explorer 7 RIAA Wins Big ? But is the Verdict Fair? Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery --- Another Hoax Hacked iPhone may become iBrick after Patch Check Your Thumb Drive Before the Presentation Halo3 News Linux Attacks on the Rise http://hubblesite.org/ http://jmemorize.org/
Dear Tech Talk: I am having trouble connecting my computer in the basement to the wire access point. What can be done? John in Bethesda
Tech Talk Answers: Reposition the access point. Get a repeater. Get a higher gain antenna..
Profiles in IT: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Larry and Sergey are co-founders of Google
Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.
They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page.
Their search engine was originally nicknamed, "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site’s importance.
Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine.
Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu.
The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.
The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost $1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.
The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10100 (the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros).
A patent describing part of Google’s ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.
Google’s initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as ?2 ? 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders.
The sale raised $1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
Google’s post-IPO stock performance has been very good as well, with shares surging to $500 by 2007.
Sergey Brin was born August 21, 1973 in Moscow, Russia, to a Jewish family, the son of a mathematician and economist. In 1979, when Sergey was six, his family emigrated to the United States.
Sergey received a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from University of Maryland, College Park in May 1993 and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford in August 1995.
Larry Page was born March 26, 1973. He is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, one of the University of Michigan’s first computer science Ph.D Graduate.
Page holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a MS from Stanford.
Larry and Sergey have suspended their Ph.D. studies. Net worth: $18.5 billion each
50th Anniversary of Sputnik Launch
Sputnik was launched October 4, 1957
Here is the behind the scenes story.
The Soviet Union was developing a rocket capable of striking the United States with a hydrogen bomb.
The R-7 ballistic missile was built with thrust to spare because of uncertainty in atomic payload requirement.
The R-7’s thrust and payload capacity made it the perfect vehicle to launch an object into orbit.
When the warhead project hit a snag, Sergei Korolyov, chief scientist and father of the Soviet space program, seized the opportunity.
Korolyov pressed the Kremlin to let him launch a satellite. The military did not like the idea. They treated the satellite as a toy, a fantasy.
The U.S. was already planning such a move in 1958, he pointed out, as part of the International Geophysical Year. The U.S. had its own satellite program, called Project ‘Vanguard.
Sergei he ordered his team to quickly sketch a primitive orbiter. It was called PS-1, for "Prosteishiy Sputnik" – the Simplest Satellite.
The satellite, weighing just 184 pounds, was built in less than three months. Soviet designers built a pressurized sphere of polished aluminum alloy with two radio transmitters and four antennas.
Korolyov selected the sphere because the Earth is a sphere.
The launch was first scheduled for Oct. 6. But Korolyov suspected that the U.S. might be planning a launch a day earlier. He canceled some last-minute tests and moved up the launch by two days, to Oct. 4, 1957.
Soon after blastoff from Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, the satellite sent out what would be the world’s most famous beep.
The tiny satellite was too small to be seen with the naked eye. What was watched by millions was the second stage of its booster rocket.
Excited by the global furor, Khrushchev ordered Korolyov to launch a new satellite, this time, to mark the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Working round-the-clock, Korolyov and his team built another spacecraft in less than a month. On Nov. 3, they launched Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,118 pounds. It carried the world’s first living payload, a mongrel dog named Laika, in its tiny pressurized cabin.
The dog died of the heat after a week, drawing protests from animal-lovers. But the flight proved that a living being could survive in space, paving the way for human flight.
The first Sputnik beeped for three weeks and spent about three months in orbit before burning up in the atmosphere. It circled Earth more than 1,400 times, at just under 100 minutes an orbit.
Khrushchev rejected the Nobel committee’s offer to nominate Korolyov for a prize, insisting that it was the achievement of "the entire Soviet people."
This is a parabolic antenna made with heavy paper stock (business card stock), aluminum foil, and a template to get the proper curvature.
It gives you 12 db gain.
Since each 3 db is a factor of 2, is increases signal by a factor of 16. You must be in the beam to this improvement.
Microsoft Drop Windows Genuine Validation on Internet Explorer 7
The official reason is given on the Microsoft blog as a ?commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem, we’re updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users?
In other words: Microsoft was worried that ?pirates? might not be protected by all the security goodness the company has added to IE, so it decided to remove piracy checks from the IE 7 download process.
Not surprisingly, there are other theories as to why Microsoft removed WGA from the browser. Perhaps Microsoft decided that WGA was enough of a deterrent to result in IE 7 failing to gain marketshare as fast as the company would like. From Ars Technica:
According to data from the market researchers at Net Applications, IE 6.X currently has 42.75 percent of the worldwide browser market. IE 7 has 34.6 percent. Firefox 2.0 has 13.7 percent. Both IE 7 and Firefox 2 share is growing, Net Applications says (though given Firefox’s smaller user base, Firefox is growing more quickly).
RIAA Wins Big ? But is the Verdict Fair?
The Recording Industry Association of America probably should have won its lawsuit against a Minnesota woman accused of sharing 24 songs (2 CDs) through the Kazaa file-sharing network.
There was enough evidence linking Jammie Thomas’ computer to an IP address that was offering a slew of copyrighted songs to other Kazaa users.
A jury in Minnesota, hardly the record labels’ home turf, unanimously thought so too.
The problem isn’t the verdict. It’s the penalty.
After decades of special-interest lobbying by large holders of intellectual property rights, U.S. copyright law has spiraled out of control.
Copyright no longer abides by the fundamental principle of law, which is that the damages awarded should be related to any harm committed.
Jammie Thomas got slapped with a $222,000 bill, plus attorney’s fees.
They did not even have to establish that anyone downloaded the songs.
Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery — Another Hoax
The Claim
Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source.
As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
If all goes well plans are for these cells to reach store shelves in about 2 to 3 years.
The Truth
It is a hoax. Too good to be true.
They would be 72 times heavier, generate lots of heat, have stability problems according to some scientists. Not ready for prime yet.
Probably part of a pump and dump scheme to drive up stock prices.
Google ?betavoltaic? to get the whole story.
Hacked iPhone may become iBrick after Patch
The latest software patch 1.1.1 disables many iPhone hacks and makes the phone unusable.
Update carries this warning: ?IF YOU HAVE MODIFIED YOUR IPHONE’S SOFTWARE, APPLYING THIS SOFTWARE UPDATE MAY RESULT IN YOUR IPHONE BECOMING PERMANENTLY INOPERABLE.?
Users may be able to unhack the phone to restore functionality.
Apple says that the software upgrade is necessary because the original OS was patched together for the debut and was not ready for primetime.
New hacks for the patched phones are now showing up.
Check Your Thumb Drive Before the Presentation
Lawmaker shows a nude pic to high school seniors.
Ohio state legislator Matthew Barrett was supposed to give a group of high school seniors a civics presentation using PowerPoint slides he had prepared on how a bill becomes a law.
When Barrett inserted a memory stick into a school computer, the topless nude photo appeared.
The democratic lawmaker quickly removed the data stick and apologized.
House democratic staffers later said the image had been downloaded by one of the legislator’s four children. S
School officials in the future plan to screen class materials before guest speakers give presentations
Halo3 News
Proceeds for first week of sales reached $300 million on "Halo 3."
Halo3 is a first-person shooter for Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360.
More than 2.7 million people have logged on to Microsoft’s online service, Xbox Live, to collectively play 40 million hours of "Halo 3" with other gamers, Microsoft said.
"Halo 3," the much-anticipated last installment of a trilogy, was developed by Microsoft-owned Bungie Studios.
Microsoft said on Friday that Bungie will become an independent company.
Microsoft said it will retain a stake in the new company and will continue to publish future Halo games and other titles.
Microsoft bought Bungie in 2000 as it beefed up its game development efforts in preparation to launch its Xbox gaming console the following year.
Linux Attacks on the Rise
eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation.
It uncovered a huge number of hacked, botnet computers.
eBay believes that online attackers are indeed becoming more sophisticated, with malware developers now being funded to develop new and improved attacks.
Criminals are being paid to develop better types of attacks, and the attacks are getting harder to detect.
The phishing emails I see are extremely sophisticated.
The vast majority of the threats we saw were rootkitted Linux boxes, which was rather startling. They expected Microsoft boxes.
Rootkit software covers the tracks of the attackers and can be extremely difficult to detect.
None of the Linux operators whose machines had been compromised were even aware they’d been infected.
Although Linux has long been considered more secure than Windows, many of the programs that run on top of Linux have known security vulnerabilities.
If an attacker were to exploit an unpatched bug on a misconfigured system, he could seize control of the machine
Because Linux is highly reliable and a great platform for running server software, Linux machines are desired by phishers, who set up fake websites, hoping to lure victims into disclosing their passwords.
jMemorize is a free open-source Java application that manages your learning processes by using flashcards and the famous Leitner system.
In the early 70’s a German psychologist named Sebastian Leitner devised a learning system that makes selective learning possible with less effort than the traditional method of studying a set of flashcards sequentially.
Runs with Windows, Linux, Mac and any other operating system that supports Java.
Maintain hundreds of flash cards and arrange them by categories.
Import and export different file formats like XML, CSV, RTF and PDF for easy printing.
A great way for parents to help kids learn facts using the computer.