Apartments in Dubai - What you get for $10 Million ?
Published May 3rd, 2007 in Dream Homes
Monday, May 07, 2007
Top 5 javascript frameworks
By Justin Silverton
5) Yahoo! User Interface Library
The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.
Features
Two different types of components are available: Utilities and controls. The YUI utilities simplify in-browser devolvement that relies on cross-browser DOM scripting, as do all web applications with DHTML and AJAX characteristics. The YUI Library Controls provide highly interactive visual design elements for your web pages. These elements are created and managed entirely on the client side and never require a page refresh.
utilities available:
- Animation: Create “cinematic effects” on your pages by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements. These effects can be used to reinforce the user’s understanding of changes happening on the page.
- Browser History Manager: Developers of rich internet applications want bookmarks to target not just pages but page states and they want the browser’s back button to operate meaningfully within their application’s screens. Browser History Manager provides bookmarking and back button control in rich internet applications.
- Connection Manager: This utility library helps manage XMLHttpRequest (commonly referred to as AJAX) transactions in a cross-browser fashion, including integrated support for form posts, error handling and callbacks. Connection Manager also supports file uploading.
- DataSource Utility: DataSource provides an interface for retrieving data from arrays, XHR services, and custom functions with integrated caching and Connection Manager support.
- Dom Collection:The DOM Utility is an umbrella object comprising a variety of convenience methods for common DOM-scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management.
- Drag & Drop: Create draggable objects that can be picked up and dropped elsewhere on the page. You write code for the “interesting moments” that are triggered at each stage of the interaction (such as when a dragged object crosses over a target); the utility handles all the housekeeping and keeps things working smoothly in all supported browsers.
Controls available:
- AutoComplete: The AutoComplete Control allows you to streamline user interactions involving text-entry; the control provides suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality based on a variety of data-source formats and supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.
- Button Control: The Button Control provides checkbox, radio button, submit and menu-button UI elements that are more impactful visually and more powerful programmatically than the browser’s built-in form widgets.
- Calendar: The Calendar Control is a graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.
- Container: The Container family of controls supports a variety of DHTML windowing patterns including Tooltip, Panel, Dialog and SimpleDialog. The Module and Overlay controls provide a platform for implementing additional, customized DHTML windowing patterns.
- DataTable Control: DataTable leverages the semantic markup of the HTML table and enhances it with sorting, column-resizing, inline editing of data fields, and more.
- Logger: The YUI Logger provides a quick and easy way to write log messages to an on-screen console, the FireBug extension for Firefox, or the Safari JavaScript console. Debug builds of YUI Library components are integrated with Logger to output messages for debugging implementations.
- Menu: Application-style fly-out menus require just a few lines of code with the Menu Control. Menus can be generated entirely in JavaScript or can be layered on top of semantic unordered lists.
Download and more information: here
4) Prototype
Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.
Features
- Easily deploy ajax applications: Besides simple requests, this module also deals in a smart way with JavaScript code returned from a server and provides helper classes for polling.
- DOM extending: adds many convenience methods to elements returned by the $() function: for instance, you can write $(’comments’).addClassName(’active’).show() to get the element with the ID ‘comments’, add a class name to it and show it (if it was previously hidden).
- Utilizes JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): JSON is a light-weight and fast alternative to XML in Ajax requests
Download and more information here
3) Rico
Designed for building rich Internet applications.
Features
- Animation Effects: provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on
- Styling: Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.
- Drag And Drop: Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest.
- AJAX Support: Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.
Download and more information here
2) Qooxdoo
qooxdoo is one of the most comprehensive and innovative Open Source multipurpose AJAX frameworks, dual-licensed under LGPL/EPL. It includes support for professional JavaScript development, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.
Features
- Client detection: qooxdoo knows what browser is being used and makes this information available to you.
- Browser abstraction: qooxdoo includes a browser abstraction layer which tries to abstract all browser specifics to one common “standard”. This simplifies the real coding of countless objects by allowing you to focus on what you want and not “how to want it”. The browser abstraction layer comes with some basic functions often needed when creating real GUIs. For example, runtime styles or positions (in multiple relations: page, client and screen) of each element in your document.
- Advanced property implementation: qooxdoo supports “real” properties for objects. This means any class can define properties which the created instances should have. The addProperty handler also adds getter and setter functions. The only thing one needs to add - should you need it - is a modifier function.
- Event Management: qooxdoo comes with its own event interface. This includes event registration and deregistration functions.
Furthermore there is the possibility to call the target function in any object context. (The default is the object which defines the event listener.) The event system normalizes differences between the browsers, includes support for mousewheel, doubleclick and other fancy stuff. qooxdoo also comes with an advanced capture feature which allows you to capture all events when a user drags something around for example.
Download and more information here
1) Dojo
Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. You can use the lower-level APIs and compatibility layers from Dojo to write portable JavaScript and simplify complex scripts. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. You can use the Dojo build tools to write command-line unit-tests for your JavaScript code. The Dojo build process helps you optimize your JavaScript for deployment by grouping sets of files together and reuse those groups through “profiles”.
Features
- Multiple Points Of Entry: A fundamental concept in the design of Dojo is “multiple points of entry”. This term means that Dojo should work very hard to make sure that users should be able to start using Dojo at the level they are most comfortable with.
- Interpreter Independence: Dojo tries very hard to ensure that it’s possible to support at least the very core of the system on as many JavaScript enabled platforms as possible. This will allow Dojo to serve as a “standard library” for JavaScript programmers as they move between client-side, server-side, and desktop programming environments.
- Unifies several codebases: builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, and f(m)).
Download and more information here
Whistle-Blower on Student Aid Is Vindicated
WASHINGTON — When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.
The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”
For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.
The story of Mr. Oberg’s effort to stop this hemorrhage of taxpayers’ money opens a window, lawmakers say, onto how the Bush administration repeatedly resisted calls to improve oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry. The department failed to halt the payments to lenders who had exploited loopholes to inflate their eligibility for subsidies on the student loans they issued.
Recent investigations by state attorneys general and Congress have highlighted how the department failed to clamp down on gifts and incentives that lenders offered to universities and their financial aid officers to get more student loans. Under this pressure, the department is now seeking to set new rules.
The subsidy payments that Mr. Oberg uncovered are another corner of the lending system on which the department long failed to act, critics say, letting millions of dollars flow from the public treasury to about a dozen lenders.
The department now says it did not fully understand the extent of the maneuvers the loan companies were making to get the subsidies until last September, when its inspector general investigated and issued a report detailing manipulations carried out by a Nebraska lender, Nelnet. The audit recommended that the department recover $278 million from the lender, but education officials instead reached a settlement allowing Nelnet to keep the money but cutting it off from further subsidies that it claimed it was eligible to receive.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate education committee, has asked Ms. Spellings to turn over documents related to the settlement decision. She is likely to come under questioning about the Nelnet settlement on May 10, at a hearing of the House education committee.
Mr. Oberg, now retired, has a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska and a doctorate in political science from the Free University of Berlin. He is a former Navy officer, university professor, and aide to Senator J. James Exon, a Nebraska Democrat, from 1979 to 1984. He was an Education Department liaison to Congress under the Clinton administration.
The subsidy payment issue that came to preoccupy Mr. Oberg grew out of decisions Congress made in the 1980s to ensure that low-cost student loans were available at a time when the economy was souring. Lawmakers guaranteed nonprofit lenders a rate of return of 9.5 percent on student loans that were financed by tax-exempt bonds to protect the companies from spiraling costs.
Congress eliminated much of the subsidy program in 1993 because interest rates had dropped, but at that time retained the 9.5 percent return for existing loans. By 2002, lenders had devised ways to inflate the volume of loans for which they received the 9.5 percent subsidies. Congress closed one loophole in 2004, but lenders found others. Congress further restricted the subsidies in 2006.
In 1997, the Clinton administration proposed legislation to eliminate all references to the subsidies from the Higher Education Act in an effort to rein them in. Mr. Oberg took the legislation to Sally Stroup, who was then serving as senior aide to the Republican chairman of the House education committee.
“Sally told me there was no way that language was coming out,” Mr. Oberg recalled. “She didn’t give a reason — just forget it.” Ms. Stroup, who went on to become an assistant secretary of education in the Bush administration, and who is now back as an aide on Capitol Hill, did not return several phone calls and messages left for comment.
In 2000, Mr. Oberg transferred to the department’s research operation, and two years into the Bush administration, began to review the government filings of Nelnet and other lenders. He found that not only were payments to lenders rising rapidly, but also that the base amounts of the loans lenders were claiming as eligible for the 9.5 percent subsidies were exploding.
“Several big lending agencies were gaming the system,” Mr. Oberg said in a recent interview at his home in Rockville, Md.
He notified the Education Department’s inspector general’s office. He also told his superiors but felt they were brushing him off. So in November 2003, he wrote a memorandum for general distribution throughout the department warning that lender manipulations could cost the government billions unless stopped, and he recommended that the secretary could end the abuse with a letter to lenders clarifying government rules.
That is when his supervisor, Mr. Whitehurst, director of the department’s Institute for Education Sciences, stepped in. Mr. Whitehurst said that he had forwarded Mr. Oberg’s memorandum to appropriate senior officials, whom he declined to identify, but acknowledged that he “wasn’t real happy” because he considered Mr. Oberg’s research to be outside his job description.
“Plus, I didn’t understand the issues,” Mr. Whitehurst said recently. “In retrospect, it looks like he identified an important issue and came up with a reasonable solution. But it was Greek to me at the time — preferential interest rates on bonds? I didn’t know what he was doing, except that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it.”
He told Mr. Oberg to stop because he wanted him to be monitoring grants, not lending practices. Officials also rewrote Mr. Oberg’s job description, documents show, barring him from further research into the subsidies. Although Mr. Oberg was a civil servant, the Bush administration may have seen him as a holdover from the Clinton administration.
Mr. Oberg said he decided to continue his research in his free time because, “If you tell some people they can’t do something, they want to do it all the more.”
But when he requested from his own department data on payments to lenders, known in the bureaucracy as the 9.5 percent Special Allowance Payments, Donald Conner, an analyst in the department’s postsecondary division, e-mailed Mr. Oberg saying, "I’m not permitted to give any 9.5 percent SAP information."
Mr. Whitehurst, in an interview, suggested that Mr. Oberg was viewed by some senior officials as an annoyance. “I was told he was like a dog on a bone, agitating on this issue,” Mr. Whitehurst said. Ms. Spellings did not reply to a memorandum Mr. Oberg sent her about waste in the loan program just before his 2005 retirement, Mr. Oberg said.
But Mr. Oberg’s warnings prompted a clamor in Congress and a string of reports by government investigators calling for a stop to the giveaways. Senior department officials disputed or declined to follow the recommendations of all of them.
A 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office urged the department to rewrite its regulations to save billions of dollars in future loan subsidy payments. But Ms. Stroup, who had once worked for one of the lending companies that is now under investigation for the subsidies, argued in response that it would be simpler for Congress to clamp down with new legislation. Mr. Paige repeated that argument in a letter to Mr. Kennedy, who was pressing the department to curb the subsidies.
Then, in 2005, the Education Department’s inspector general recommended that $36 million be recovered from a New Mexico lender. Ms. Spellings overruled the finding that the payments were improper and declined to recover the payments. And in January 2007, after the inspector general recommended that $278 million in overpayments be recovered from Nelnet, the department instead reached a settlement under which Nelnet could keep the money — if it dropped plans to bill the department for another $800 million in subsidies.
Nelnet was the nation’s most generous corporate donor to the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2006, and its top three executives were the largest individual donors to the committee as well, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.
Nelnet was also well connected at the department. Don Bouc, Nelnet’s president through 2004 and president emeritus thereafter, sat on the department’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance from 2001 through Feb. 1 of this year, even while the department was auditing the company’s subsidies and negotiating the settlement. Mr. Bouc resigned from the committee 11 days after the department announced that it would not seek to recover the $278 million.
Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said Mr. Bouc’s service for the committee was unrelated to the audit.
Robert Shireman, a researcher in Berkeley, Calif., who co-authored a private nonprofit group’s 2004 report on the subsidies called “Money for Nothing,” said, “There has been an outrageous lack of interest at the Education Department in doing anything to stop the bleeding.”
Then this January, turning to a measure Mr. Oberg had recommended in 2003, the department issued a “subregulatory guidance” letter cutting off subsidy payments to all lenders except those who prove their eligibility with an audit.
Kristin D. Conklin, a senior adviser at the department, said the department had been unaware, until its inspector general issued its Nelnet audit last September, that lenders were collecting subsidy payments on loans that were clearly ineligible.
That audit documented how Nelnet had transferred loans repeatedly into and out of tax-exempt bonds issued before 1993 to expand the volume of loans eligible for the subsidies. The audit identified so-called first-generation loans, financed from the pre-1993 bonds, and second-generation loans, financed from the proceeds of the first-generation loans, as eligible for the government subsidies. It said later-generation loans were ineligible.
“It’s not like we were sitting on this big problem and didn’t address it,” Ms. Conklin said. “We didn’t know the extent to which these third- and fourth-generation loans were being used. The full scope of this problem first became known to us in September, and we moved seriously to address it in the following months.”
Ms. Conklin also said the department had previously lacked the power to cut off overpayments using a simple letter. Only intervening legislation passed by Congress made that possible, she said. Today, with Mr. Oberg’s predictions proven accurate, he has become a bit of a celebrity. Mr. Kennedy arranged his testimony before the Senate in February.
“Taxpayers owe a tip of the hat to former Nebraskan Jon Oberg, who blew the whistle on the scheme that allowed companies to grab hundreds of millions in subsidies,” the Lincoln Journal Star wrote in October.
HOWTO own a 128-bit number!
Would you like to be the exclusive owner of a number, with the right to sue other people for knowing your number or telling other people what it is? Now you can.
Last week, the AACS consortium made history by issuing legal threats against the 1.8 million web-pages (and counting) that mentioned its secret code for preventing HD-DVD discs from being copied.
In effect, AACS-LA (the AACS Licensing Authority) claimed that it owned a randomly chosen 128-bit number, and that anyone who possessed or transmitted that number was breaking the law. Moreover, it claimed to own millions more random numbers -- claimed that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises telling people how to break anti-copying software, gave it exclusive dominion over its many keys.
Why should the AACS get all the fun? Princeton prof Ed Felten has come up with a great way of giving out legally protected 128-bit numbers to anyone who wants them. If he gives out 2^128 of these, then all 128-bit numbers will be owned and no one will ever be able to use a 128-bit key without breaking the law. Good times.
Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the rest.My number is AF BC 9C 5D DA 6B 7A A8 7C 33 A1 2B E7 D3 EA 11. You aren't allowed to know this number. I also reloaded the page and generated a few more numbers. I'm not telling you what they are, but I'll be setting up a Google alert for them and if I catch you using them, I'm gonna take your house away. LinkThe haiku is copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten:
We own integers, Says AACS LA. You can own one too.
See also: AACS vows to fight people who publish the key AACS DRM body censors Cory's class blog Digg users revolt over AACS key Secret AACS numbers, the photoshopped edition Side effect of AACS turmoil: MSM turns on Web 2.0? UPDATED Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken - processing keys extracted EFF explains the law on AACS keys More AACS spoofs: WOW protest, and PSA vid: Think Before You Post HD-DVD/Blu-Ray cracker muslix64 interviewed Web-page aggregates links to "forbidden numbers" used to break HD-DVD
Photobucket Was A Steal v. Google/YouTube
Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for YouTube. By the time the deal closed, the Google stock was worth nearly $1.8 billion. Photobucket is being acquired for just less than 1/5 of that - $250 million plus an earnout of up to $50 million
At the time of the announcement of their acquisition in October 2006 YouTube had very little revenue. Photobucket, however, is on track to blow through their projection of $25 million this year.
Also, the relative sizes of the two companies aren’t that far off. At the time of the acquisition, Comscore suggested that YouTube had approximately 25 million U.S. monthly visitors. Today, Photobucket has around 20 million U.S. monthly visitors, or 80% of what YouTube had when it was acquired.
Photobucket has 40 million registered users and is gaining another 85,000 or so per day. Their users are highly active, and upload a lot of content to the network. YouTube’s registered users were far below Photobucket’s 40 million at the time of their acquisition. YouTube had (and still has) a lot of traffic coming to the site to view videos, but far fewer users actually creating and posting content.
Leaving revenue aside, the traffic numbers indicate a comparable price of $1.3 billion for Photobucket, 4x the price they actually received from MySpace. To look at this another way, YouTube was paid about $67 per unique visitor. Photobucket got just $13.
Did Google overpay for YouTube? Did MySpace get Photobucket for a steal? Perhaps both. But in the end, being no. 1 in a category means you get a premium on acquisition. In the case of YouTube, that premium seems to be about 4x.
Another factor: Photobucket just didn’t generate the bidding hype that YouTube saw. It looks like the final bidders were IAC and MySpace, with a number of other bidders falling off in the last few weeks (perhaps spooked by the MySpace blockage of Photobucket videos).
In a year or so this deal is likely to look as brilliant for NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) as the MySpace acquisition was. Some would argue that they play dirty poker, but shutting Photobucket down at a crucial point in the acquisition negotiations was a brilliant move, and may have shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off of the purchase price.
More perfect
Most people in the US can't cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.
In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you're way better off helping the perfect improve. You'll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.
Kraft Launches Second Life Supermarket
Kraft Foods is opening shop on Second Life today.
The company is using the popular virtual-world Web site to showcase 70 new products as part of its sales pitch to retailers at the annual industry convention, the Food Marketing Institute show, which runs May 6 though 8.
Kraft hosts the grand opening today of a new Second Life store, “Phil’s Supermarket,” named for TV’s “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert, food editor for the “Today” show. The store will be a permanent feature on Second Life, which has 6 million registered users and counting.
Kraft, which has paid an undisclosed amount of money to sponsor the virtual supermarket, is the only food manufacturer whose brands will appear in the store. In fact, it is the only packaged goods company tied to the store: Lempert’s other partners are IBM and the National Grocers Association.
Part of Kraft’s deal includes links from Second Life to its own Web site for nutrition education and to other sites, such as Second Harvest, as well as online forums for Second Life “residents” to chat with Kraft Kitchen experts.
“This non-traditional effort illustrates how we’re changing the way we market our products to build brand equity and remain relevant to our key consumers,” said Kraft spokesperson Lisa Gibbons.
The supermarket opens with simultaneous online and real-world ribbon cuttings with Kraft North America president Rick Searer at the FMI Show in Chicago. During the ceremony, Kraft will donate $450,000 (in real money) to Second Harvest. It’s the first time a corporate donation is being staged in Second Life, according to Kraft.
Product launches are a top priority for Kraft under the growth plan that CEO Irene Rosenfeld outlined in Febuary. Kraft’s strategy now is to compete in broader categories—for example, pitting DiGiorno pizza against local pizzerias, not just other frozen pizzas. Its launches this week cover four main sectors: health and wellness, premium taste, quick meals and snacking.
"We are looking at our products through a new lens—the eyes of the consumer," Searer said in a statement. "By reframing our categories and focusing on four growing segments … our 2007 product innovations fit the dynamic lifestyles of our consumers."
Thirty of its new items are headed to U.S. supermarkets later this year, under brands including DiGiorno, Jell-O, Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia, Planters and South Beach Diet. Kraft also is launching cheeses with probiotics and prebiotics, the digestive-aid ingredients that have become the newest buzzwords in nutrition. A new sub-brand, called LiveActive, piggybacks flagship Kraft brand cheese for Kraft LiveActive cheese sticks and cheese cubes (with probiotics) as well as the Breakstone's and Knudsen brands for LiveActive cottage cheese (with prebiotic fiber). Other new products include:
- Planters NUT-rition Energy Mix (dark chocolate-covered soy nuts with peanuts, almonds, cashews, pecans and walnuts)
- Kraft Bistro Deluxe Pastas (mac and cheese with sundried tomatoes, Portobello mushrooms or Asiago cheese)
- Oscar Mayer Deli Creations Hot Sandwich Melts (microwavable sandwiches)
- South Beach Diet Chicken Salad Kits
- Taco Bell Home Originals Bowlz (single-serve heat-and-eat Mexican food)
- Oreo Cakesters Soft Snack Cakes
- Jell-O Pudding Mix-Ins (pudding with chocolate, mint or caramel chips mixed in)
Spanish solar tower could eventually power an entire city
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Just last month we witnessed a gigantic skyscraper / solar tower hybrid that generates a whopping 390-kilowatts of energy, but even that looks like child's play compared to the 40-story solar power plant that resides in Spain. The expansive system consists of a towering concrete building, a field of 600 (and growing) sun-tracking mirrors that are each 120-square meters in size, and a receiver that converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam that eventually drives the turbines. Currently, only one field of mirrors is up and running, but even that produces enough power to energize 6,000 homes, and the creators are hoping to see the entire population of Seville (600,000 folks) taken care of solely from sunlight. So if you're eager to see what's likely the greenest solar power plant currently operating, be sure to slip on some shades, tag the read link, and peep the video.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6616651.stm#graphic Power station harnesses Sun's rays
| By David Shukman
Science correspondent, BBC News, Seville |
There is a scene in one of the Austin Powers films where Dr Evil unleashes a giant "tractor beam" of energy at Earth in order to extract a massive payment. 
A field of 600 mirrors reflects rays from the Sun 
A tour of the tower Well, the memory of it kept me chuckling as I toured the extraordinary scene of the new solar thermal power plant outside Seville in southern Spain.
From a distance, as we rounded a bend and first caught sight of it, I couldn't believe the strange structure ahead of me was actually real.
A concrete tower - 40 storeys high - stood bathed in intense white light, a totally bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian countryside.
The tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out.
In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air.
The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.
But ultimately, the entire plant should generate as much power as is used by the 600,000 people of Seville.
It works by focusing the reflected rays on one location, turning water into steam and then blasting it into turbines to generate power.
As I climbed out of the car, I could hardly open my eyes - the scene was far too bright. Gradually, though, shielded by sunglasses, I made out the rows of mirrors (each 120 sq m in size) and the focus of their reflected beams - a collection of water pipes at the top of the tower.
It was probably the heat that did it, but I found myself making the long journey up to the very top - to the heart of the solar inferno.
A lift took me most of the way but cameraman Duncan Stone and I had to climb the last four storeys by ladder. We could soon feel the heat, despite thick insulation around the boiler. 
David had to wear sunglasses to shield his eyes from the glare
It was like being in a sauna and for the last stages the metal rungs of the ladders were scalding.
But our reward was the cool breeze at the top of the tower - and the staggering sight of a blaze of light heading our way from down below.
So far, only one field of mirrors is working. But to one side I could see the bulldozers at work clearing a second, larger field - thousands more mirrors will be installed.
Letting off steam
I met one of the gurus of solar thermal power, Michael Geyer, an international director of the energy giant Abengoa, which owns the plant. He is ready with answers to all the tricky questions.
What happens when the Sun goes down? Enough heat can be stored in the form of steam to allow generation after dark - only for an hour now but maybe longer in future.
Anyway, the solar power is most needed in the heat of summer when air conditioners are working flat out.
Is it true that this power is three times more expensive than power from conventional sources? Yes, but prices will fall, as they have with wind power, as the technologies develop.
Also, a more realistic comparison is with the cost of generating power from coal or gas only at times of peak demand - then this solar system seems more attractive.
The vision is of the sun-blessed lands of the Mediterranean - even the Sahara desert - being carpeted with systems like this with the power cabled to the drizzlier lands of northern Europe. A dazzling idea in a dazzling location.
HOW THE SOLAR TOWER WORKS 
1. The solar tower is 115m (377ft) tall and surrounded by 600 steel reflectors (heliostats). They track the sun and direct its rays to a heat exchanger (receiver) at the top of the tower 2. The receiver converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam 3. Steam is stored in tanks and used to drive turbines that will produce enough electricity for up to 6,000 homes
Attack of the Advertising Widgets
Two more are coming this week. Tonight Silicon Valley-based Tumri is announcing a new product called Tumri Publisher, and Seattle’s Mpire will announce an advertising widget later this week.
Tumri Publisher, which is described here, allows users to create highly customizable widgets that promote specific products on their websites, in exchange for an affiliate or other fee. Tumri has twenty or so direct relationships with ecommerce sites like Overstock, Walmart, Shop.com and others to promote their products. Most advertising pay on a purchase, although at least one partner pays a on each click to their website.
Tumri splits revenue from the advertising 50/50 with advertising, and they say they’ll pay up to 70% of proceeds to larger publishers.
The widgets are javascript powered; the company says Flash versions are coming soon.
Tumri was founded in 2004 and has raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of financing from Shasta Ventures and Accel. They are currently closing a second round. They have 31 employees (16 in India, 15 in Silicon Valley).
Friday, May 04, 2007
Copyscape.com – Detect plagiarism on the internet
from KillerStartups.com - published startups by rachsig
Copyscape is a site that aims to get rid of a big problem: the ease with which work can be plagiarized on the internet. You can register your content with the site and put their banner on your article, proclaiming to all that your work is protected by Copyscape. Then you enter the url address of your article on the Copyscape site to see if anyone has written something that is similar enough to have been copied. The site uses a Google API to search for similar word content, so that you can see if anyone has cited your work or even copied you.
The service is free, and Copyscape also offers a Premium service which has more accurate and advanced search options as well as unlimited searches. To use the Premium service, you pay by search. Each Premium search costs $0.05. Search credits are purchased in advance and can be bought as and when they are required.
In their own words:
"Copyscape is dedicated to defending your rights online, helping you fight against online plagiarism and content theft. Copyscape finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you.
* The free Copyscape service makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Web. Simply type in the address of your original web page, and Copyscape does the rest.
* The powerful Premium service provides professional grade coverage, plus an unlimited number of searches. You may also copy and paste to search for copies of your offline content. Copyscape Premium includes integrated case tracking to manage your responses to multiple instances of online plagiarism.
* The advanced Copysentry service provides ongoing protection for your entire website. Copysentry automatically scans the web every day and alerts you to copies of your content. It also includes integrated case tracking.
• The Global Web Rights campaign provides the tools and information you need to defend yourself against content theft and copyright violations on the web."
Why it might be a killer:
The site is a logical companion to anyone who blogs or posts content on Wikipedia and so on. Even if your content isn't actually copyrighted, it is still good to be able to know when others are using it.
Some questions:
Five whopping cents for a search is not going to add much to the site's revenue (which comes from ads), and it may turn off users who don't want to bother with the time or the small cost
Solar power plant looks heavenly
David Pescovitz: This 40 story tall tower just outside Seville, Spain is actually a new solar thermal power plant. Operated by Solúcar EnergÃa, the facility uses 600 mirrors on the ground to tightly focus the sun's rays on water pipes at the top of the tower. The heat converts the water into steam that drive turbines to generate electricity. It's the photo of the reflected solar rays hitting the tower that really impresses me though. As ForteanTimes.com editor Alistair Strachan pointed out to me, the scene "looks strangely religious," like a bad biblical illustration. From the BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6616651.stmThe tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out. In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air. The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.
Improve your photos with classic painting color palettes
Mark Frauenfelder: How to use Photoshop's "Match Color" tool with classic paintings by the old masters to make your digital photos pop.
I keep a directory of about 30 of my favorite paintings and anytime I need to do color correction, I just scan through them to find the one that gives the photo I'm working on the best look. This technique can be used in other ways. For example, use the color from a scanned-in 1970's Kodachrome snapshot to give a recent photo a vintage look. Need to make a picture more menacing? Use the color from a picture of a storm.Link (Via Lifehacker)
Small is The New Big
from GigaOM by
Here are my Three Rules for the new technology enabled company: 
Involve your customer: Spreadshirt and Threadless work because they allow customers to create, design and customize their own T-shirts, instead of buying off-the-shelf stuff.
Your customer is your ultimate salesperson: Moo grew by tapping into and riding on the backs of special interest groups and social networks. Every time a customer hands out a card, Moo gets free marketing.
Serve your customer: If you want to play at cost arbitrage, as CastingWords does, make sure your service is high on convenience as well as low on price. This has been the case for centuries, why should the new millennium be any different.
Richard Moross, a twenty-something Londoner, was bored with the business cards most people were exchanging. He decided to do something about it. He started Moo Prints, a 10-person start-up that takes images from popular websites, like Flickr and Bebo, and prints them on cards that are exactly half the height (28mm x 70mm) of a regular business card.
Size alone makes Moo cards memorable. Moross cleverly dubbed them “mini-cards,” leveraging a marketing trend that’s already been über-successful in selling autos and iPods. Better still, Moo minis are highly personalized. For instance, Moross will take photos from your Flickr account and print it on your cards.
Getting your Moo cards is simple—sign up for the service, fill out your contact details, add your Flickr ID, and 10 days later 100 cards show up. All in, a set of Moo minis sets you back just $5.
Thanks to their size, Moo minis are cheaper to print than typical calling cards. The company prints its cards on an industrial strength laser printer made by Hewlett-Packard. But Moross juices his profits in other ways as well. Because Moo works with existing communities (and social networks) such as Skype, Habbo Hotel, Bebo, Second Life and Flickr, the company has built a sizeable following without spending a dime on marketing.
Which brings me to my point: Moo is among the first wave of young businesses finally putting the so called Web 2.0 technologies to work to make good on the promise that this much-ballyhooed generation of start-ups has been vapidly pledging for far too long: that Web2.0 would reinvent the boring, the old fashioned and the antiquated.
Don’t get me wrong. No stretch of imagination could conjure Moo into a technology business. No, no. Moo is a technology-enabled business. Forget patent-protected code (thank you, Justices of The Supreme Court!) or over-designed hardware. Moo is the epitome of a business that has truly harnessed Web2.0.
Several others companies fit the bill, too. Among them: Germany-based t-shirt maker Spreadshirt; Chicago-based Skinny Corp; and San Francisco-based 8020 Publishing, publishers of the JPG magazine. And CastingWords, which offers a transcription service based entirely on the web. In each case, the basic work product of these companies is no different from that of their traditional predecessors. (A T-shirt is a T-shirt. A business card is still a business card.) These young businesses are not inventing new things that distinguish them. It is the way they are using technology to execute and interface with their customers that makes them special.
I tape an interview with you and upload an MP3 file of our conversation to the CastingWords website. CastingWords puts the job of transcribing our chat to an open auction among its pool of pre-approved transcribers—people who might be dispersed over the world. The low bid wins, and a few days later I receive our transcript in the mail, for a fraction of what it once cost me to have the same chore done by a local service in San Francisco.
Companies like CastingWords are riding the crest of a wave of change that is only going to gather more momentum – and fast. Now any businesses can be reinvented with Web2.0 technologies.
You might be wondering, haven’t we heard this story before? Like ten years ago, when the commercial Internet hit its stride, when many brick-and-mortar businesses set up dot-com shops. But this didn’t trickle down to the little guys, to the small businesses that constitute the bell of the curve of the U.S. economy. This is one of the reasons why most new start-ups from the 1990s, like Amazon, had to spend hundreds of millions to compete with the older, established and large players.
Small and specialized entrepreneurs, such as the printer who specializes in business cards, or the graphic artists who open a T-shirt company, could never have possessed enough scale to make Web-enabling them attractive, or to attract the kind of investment or professional money that might have been necessary to do so. Size mattered.
But no more. Now that Web 2.0 is growing up, scale no longer matters. Even tiny businesses—like transcription services—can go global.
Today the same productivity gains enjoyed by large corporations in the ’90s are available to anyone for a few hundred bucks a year. A couple of hundred for a CRM suite, Google Apps for $50 a year, financial software for less than $10 a month – the cost of running an online business is a few thousand dollars.
The refined service of product customization popularized by Dell Computer no longer has to cost you millions. Today, a few hundred dollars buys you a slick and highly interactive site that is backed up with open source software and cheap hosting. Drive your labor costs with oDesk, which makes it easy to find talented programmers on the cheap.
Web APIs offered by the Google, eBay, or Amazon make once mundane and expensive business processes cheap. Store your customer data on Amazon’s S3 storage service; buy computer [processing] power on demand via Amazon EC2. Don’t want to manage your own inventory (why would you!?), shipping companies like FedEx and UPS or even Amazon, will do it for you.
In other words, today you can work like you are as big as a Fortune 500 company, without incurring 1/500th of the costs. It’s like looking in the rear view mirror: objects may seem bigger than they really are!
But before you decide to chuck your boring day job to start a new Web2.0 business, remember that in this generation—even more than in past business eras—everything about your business, and I mean everything from operations to marketing, must revolve around the customer.
Here are my Three Rules for the new technology enabled company:
Involve your customer: Spreadshirt and Threadless work because they allow customers to create, design and customize their own T-shirts, instead of buying off-the-shelf stuff.
Your customer is your ultimate salesperson: Moo grew by tapping into and riding on the backs of special interest groups and social networks. Every time a customer hands out a card, Moo gets free marketing.
Serve your customer: If you want to play at cost arbitrage, as CastingWords does, make sure your service is high on convenience as well as low on price. This has been the case for centuries, why should the new millennium be any different.
So what are you waiting around for… time to start something new! Or old, for that matter.
Breaking: Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr
The service will be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they acquired in March of 2005. There has long been an issue at Yahoo where newer services have competed with older services, and Yahoo has finally taken some strong action to getting their house in order with a consistent set of product offerings. Garlinghouse has been one of the stronger proponents of this strategy.
Yahoo is not forcing transition to Flickr - instead, users are being given the option of choosing among a number of top photo sharing sites. If you are a current Yahoo! Photos user, you will be given the option to export all your photos into Flickr (a one-click process) or you will be able to export to a few other services such as Photobucket, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly. Most of these services have built special tools to transition users, Butterfield said. Users will also be able to download full sized original photos, or order CDs and prints at a discount to the normal price. “We have no interest in forcing anyone to switch to Flickr” Butterfield said. “We want happy users.”
Yahoo Photos is currently the largest photo sharing site on the Internet, with around 2 billion stored photos. Flickr, by comparison, has around 500 million photos. But Flickr is also growing much faster than Yahoo photos and coincidentally has just exceeded Yahoo! Photos in traffic, according to Comscore.
The first graph below shows only U.S. traffic for Flickr and Yahoo. The table below that shows March Comscore numbers for the worldwide audience.
| Site | Unique Visitors(M) |
| Yahoo! Photos | 31.1 |
| Flickr | 28.5 |
| Photobucket | 28.1 |
| Facebook Photos | 23.5 |
Butterfield also confirmed that Flickr will “soon” allow users to upload videos in addition to photos.
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