May 18

The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday

By admin insights, it-projects, uncategorized No Comments »

The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday

BY WARREN RIDDLE — MAY 14TH 2010 AT 5:40PM

Albert Einstein first postulated the possibility of amplifying protons to create “masers” in 1917, but the theory wouldnt produce effective technology until the post-World War II period. The science of masers continued to evolve over the following decade, and, in 1958, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs published a seminal report that would spark a scientific revolution. The paper proposed that, by incorporating maser properties with the light spectrum, researchers could emit an intense optical beam.

Theodore Maiman of Hughes Labs would finally bring that research to fruition when he constructed the first functional laser and fired the first blast on May 16th of 1960. For those keeping score, that means the laser is officially turning 50 this very day. According to CNETs Daniel Terdiman, Hughes Labs which would later become Raytheon initially developed lasers that were primarily used by the military for guidance and targeting operations, a system which would prove significant and highly effective during the Vietnam War. The beams have since diverged into a multitude of directions, as the technology has been applied to a seemingly infinite array of endeavors — even if its just a cheap method for kids to annoy their pets, teachers and classmates.

While 50 is still relatively young, this year is currently hosting an incredible laser renaissance as scientists seem to be realizing the full potential of the technology. What better way to celebrate a monumental milestone than with the completion of the worlds largest laser, spaceships engaging in distant orbital exchanges, and — finally — a mosquito-zapping Photon Fence? Huzzah! [From: CNET]

via The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday.

Apr 15

BCS Service Management Specialist Group

By admin communication-standards, industry best practise, it-projects, proffesional bodies, uncategorized No Comments »

BCS Logo

BCS Service Management Specialist Group

Subject: Multi-sourcing – How Ready Are You?

Date: Monday 10 May 2010

Time: Registration & refreshments at 18:00 with talks commencing at 18:30. Finishing around 20:00 followed by wine, finger food and informal networking.

Venue: BCS, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

See http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf

for directions.

Speaker: Daniel Jones, Partner at TPI

Synopsis:

Many organisations today are working with multi-sourced IT services; some have arrived at this state through disjointed sourcing activities whilst others have set out with the strategic objective of working with best of breed providers, spreading their risks by avoiding lock-in to a single supplier and at the same time realising IT cost reductions. The rise of Business Process Outsourcing, cloud based services and globalisation are all contributing to pressure for adoption of multi-sourced IT services.

A new approach is required for end to end governance and performance management that enables organisations to realise their objectives in a multi-sourced model. This talk sets out risks and challenges that accompany Multi-sourcing, and proposes the approaches necessary to achieve the intended level of service performance and the planned financial outcome. Examples from both Public and Private Sectors will be explored.

About Daniel: A graduate of the London Business School, Daniel has spent over 20 years in consultancy, application development and IT services in senior roles for a number of major service providers and working with clients in the Media, Pharmaceuticals, Retail, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals and Public Sectors. Prior to joining TPI he was the Managing Director, Civil Government and Healthcare at EDS, responsible for the delivery of BPO and IT services to a portfolio of clients, many of them operating with multiple suppliers. He is currently responsible for TPI’s Public Sector business.

Registration: This event is free to current BCS members and £15.00 (+VAT) for non members.

please use www.bcs.org/events/registration to register for this event.

Apr 01

Mapping an Envelope’s Route

By admin design concepts, it-projects, online tools, uncategorized No Comments »

In the line of one of Google’s previous April Fool Day proposals, this design concept might actually become feasible. “Google Maps Envelopes” maps the course of snail mail on the envelop itself. The project further proposes people would be able to send these envelopes through the GMail interface.

via Mapping an Envelope’s Route – information aesthetics.

Mar 24

Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall

By admin cloud computing, design concepts, insights, it-projects, operating systems & collaborative tools No Comments »

Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall.

Tor-Magne Stien Hagen, Daniel Stødle and Otto J. Anshus, University of Tromsø, Norway In collaboration with Eirik Helland Urke, gigapix.no

Gigapixel images are great. The level of detail, the scope of the images and the sheer amount of data they represent are all fascinating. Viewing them in an enjoyable and efficient manner is another issue entirely. As digital cameras get better and computers become faster, stitching ever larger images becomes possible. In late 2009, a 26 gigapixel image of Dresden in Germany was published online, and currently a gigapixel-image of Paris is the worlds largest gigapixel image.

However, looking at these or pretty much any other gigapixel image online, you are faced with a small viewer confined to your browser window. Can we do better?I work at the Display Wall laboratory at the Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø located in Northern Norway. The Display Wall lab is home to a 22 megapixel display wall, constructed from 28 projectors and driven by a display cluster of about 30 nodes 28 to do the actual graphics, and another few to do other tasks. Each projector creates a 1024x768 resolution image, which when tiled together with the others form a 7168x3072 resolution display.

During the Fall and Winter of 2009, we contacted Eirik Helland Urke, who had recently published a gigapixel image of Tromsø on his website, www.gigapix.no. You can navigate that image for yourself here albeit with the previously stated “in a tiny browser window” caveat. A fellow graduate student of mine, Tor-Magne Stien Hagen, went to work on building a viewer for gigapixel-scale images on the display wall. We combined his WallScope system with my Interaction Spaces system for device- and touch-free interaction with the display wall, and the result was a very smooth and enjoyable experience for navigating very, very high-resolution images.

More technical details will follow as we have time to write them down. We also have a paper coming up -- stay tuned.

via Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall.

Mar 12

Visualizing the Issues behind Food Dependence: How to Feed the World?

By admin communication-standards, design concepts, it-projects, uncategorized No Comments »

If you appreciated the depth and level of detail of the now classic infographically animated The Credit of Crisis – Visualized, you will probably also like the following! “How to Feed the World?” [dvanw.com] explains in more than 8 minutes the intrinsic issues involved with international food dependence and the existing regional differences of food intake, in both quantity as quality.For instance, in Europe, people have access to a varied, large diet, while the available affordable? food in Africa does not cover the normal human needs, causing African people to die about 20 years younger on average.

What are the reasons for this injustice? You can watch the answer in the movie below.The movie even discusses the feasibility of some potential solutions, such as increasing the cultivated land area, increasing the yield of a given agricultural area, increasing the use of organic products, introducing innovative watering techniques, and so on, and finishes with a concrete recommendation of where you have the ability to make a difference.

via Visualizing the Issues behind Food Dependence: How to Feed the World? – information aesthetics.

Feb 08

Olympics and Green tech: ‘No room to fail’ – Vancouver Winter Games

By admin 24x7 Management And Support, communication-standards, design concepts, disaster-recovery, document-management, green-it, industry best practise, insights, it-management, it-projects, media-tools, network-security, operating systems & collaborative tools, proffesional bodies, server architecture, training, uncategorized No Comments »

This is not your grandfather’s winter games. Every Olympic city makes major investments in technology, security and infrastructure in the 21st Century, and the Vancouver Winter Games are no exception.  The Olympic Cauldron will be lit on February 12, 2010. And yet, the hard work began immediately after Canada was selected to host the 2010 Winter Olympics back in 2004.

Want some examples?

1)      Technology companies are certainly talking about their unique role in these Games.  Green technology is a central element. Check out this Canadian website on technology related to the Olympics.

2)      Stopping terrorism is essential. One article back in 2005 estimated that the security budget would be about $177 million with a 50-50 split between the federal and provincial governments, but USA Today called actual security spending to be closer to $1 billion. More than 1000 security cameras are in place for the Winter Olympics.

3)      Infrastructure development has been important. There are plenty of stories online about the people behind the scenes who make the Olympic Games happen. There are also stories about the technology being used. If you look hard enough, you’ll find just about every big IT company is involved in some way. One example is Sun, but AT&T and others are right there as well.

4)      The economic development aspects and wider role of the Olympics can be seen in YouTube videos like this one.

5)      The role of the city mayors and Vancouver Government overall has been a huge part of this story.

Bottom line, this is big business. Just like the involvement of the South African Government in preparing for the 2010 World Cup in June, the Vancouver Olympic Games required an incredible investment in everything that we do in government technology every day. The difference is the scale, and the number of people watching.

So when you watch that beautiful opening or closing ceremony, when the US Hockey Team is skating to victory or those international downhill skiers fly past your TV screen, remember the technology and security infrastructure that made it all possible.

Let the games begin…

Feb 02

Tablet (The Chromium Projects) – Google’s Tablet Project

By admin design concepts, hardware, insights, it-projects No Comments »

A posting on Google’s Chromium blog reveals that the company is considering a touch-sensitive tablet computer like Apple‘s iPad.

It says that the tablet would have
- Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.
- Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.
- Contextual actions triggered via dwell.
- Zooming UI for multiple tabs
- Tabs presented along the side of the screen
- the ability to create multiple browsers on screen using a launcher.

There’s also a concept video which has made its way to YouTube:

In its ghostly way, it reminds one a great deal of the Apple iPad launch, particularly in its use of multi-touch -- though that multi-touch functionality is also reminiscent of Jeff Han’s work.

The concept (which presently just looks like wonderful work with Photoshop -- it doesn’t have any physical reality) is likely to remain just that for some time, since Google surely won’t want to alienate any more potential hardware manufacturers for the Chromium OS having just annoyed those like Motorola which thought that the Android mobile OS would be their saviour, and have now found that Google is competing directly with them through the Nexus.

Yet in the Tech Weekly podcast for this week London literary agent Clare Alexander, of Aitken & Alexander, mentioned that the book trade has been hearing that Google could come up with a tablet. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in this field. The appearance of this post and this video is only going to enhance it.

According to Erictric,

“Rumor actually had it that HTC in partnership with Google would unveil a tablet prototype to an exclusive group of guests in a private session at the Consumer Electronics Show 2010 at the beginning of last month. Later in the month, HTC Australia and New Zealand Sales and Marketing Director Anthony Petts confirmed the rumor, then stated that work on said tablet had been halted completely.”

A little extra from Erictric:

“At the beginning of this year, we posted an editorial piece in
which we stated that this year [2010] would be the year of the tablet.
We noted that there were three major contenders that could dominate the
tablet wars. They were Apple with the iPad, Google with an unveiled
device, and Microsoft with the Courier. With what we’ve seen so far,
Apple can not be expected to compete with iPad, as it is basically a
weak device compared to the concepts of the Microsoft and Google
tablets. In our humble opinion, that’s what revolutionary devices are
supposed to be like.”

Umm -- while there are certainly Windows tablets out there (which launched with all the splash of philosophical trees falling in forests), one must say that it’s always better to bet on revolutions happening from devices that have actually been demonstrated and have a ship date. Google’s tablet sure looks purdy, but it’s a long way from doing any revolving of anything.

Tablet (The Chromium Projects).

Feb 01

Texting Underground Can Save Lives And Caves

By admin communication-standards, insights, it-projects, media-tools, ngo, proffesional bodies, uncategorized No Comments »

Caves are some of the last places on the planet left to explore. Though caving is relatively safe, if something goes wrong deep inside the Earth, a rescue can take days — in part because cell phones and walkie-talkies don't work underground. But a remarkable teenager in New Mexico has invented a device that may significantly speed that process with the ability to text from underground caves. The young man's invention may have other applications, as well.

Underground Transmission

Alexander Kendrick, 16, won the 2009 International Science Fair for inventing this cave-texting device. The award got the teen from Los Alamos, N.M., a new computer, a trip to Switzerland and $12,000.

A cave radio that allows you to beam data to the surface rather than visiting it in person can be extremely valuable. It could save the cave.

- Diana Northup

I wanted to find out why this thing was such a big deal. The next thing I knew, I was hanging from a rope in the bowels of the Earth and groaning under my breath.

I was with a team of cavers in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, heading 1,000 feet underground to test Kendrick's invention.

The device is something like a computer attached to a ham radio. It transmits data using low-frequency radio waves that can penetrate rock more easily than high-frequency transmissions, like those in FM broadcasts.

If this test succeeded, it would be the deepest known underground digital communication ever to take place in the United States.

The Difference Between Life And Death

Why would anyone want to text from nearly 1,000 feet underground?

Here's why: In a 1991 New Mexico cave rescue, it took 170 people four days to save a woman with a broken leg. The rescue team had to lay miles of telephone line in order to stay in touch with the surface.

If they'd had Kendrick's radio, the rescue time may have been cut in half.

Sixteen-year-old inventor Alexander Kendrick stands in the Lake of the Clouds.

Enlarge Brad Horn for NPR

Alexander Kendrick stands in the Lake of the Clouds after testing his invention. He and the team of cavers executed the deepest known digital communication ever to take place in the United States.

Sixteen-year-old inventor Alexander Kendrick stands in the Lake of the Clouds.

Brad Horn for NPR

Alexander Kendrick stands in the Lake of the Clouds after testing his invention. He and the team of cavers executed the deepest known digital communication ever to take place in the United States.

That could make the difference between life and death.

via Texting Underground Can Save Lives And Caves : NPR.

Dec 23

Benefits of project management software | BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT

By jeromewagner it-management, it-projects No Comments »

Benefits of project management software

December 2009

Mouse, keyboard and pen. How can these benefits be realised asks Barry Muir Managing Director of Innate.Project management software has a simple goal; to help those involved in managing projects to achieve their objectives. For individual projects, the objective is to deliver the expected output from the project on time, within cost and to the quality expected. However, for those that manage multiple projects, project management software must do a lot more:

via Benefits of project management software | IT Management | Browse by subject area | Opinion, News, Analysis | BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT.

Dec 15

Hosted Security for Email, Web and Instant Messaging

By jeromewagner 24x7 Management And Support, cloud computing, communication-standards, disaster-recovery, document-management, green-it, hardware, industry best practise, it-management, it-projects, media-tools, ngo, proffesional bodies, uncategorized No Comments »

Hosted Security Services for Small & Medium Businesses

MessageLabs Hosted Services provide an easy and affordable way to secure, control and manage email, web and instant messaging communications. Cheaper, quicker & easier to deploy than in-house solutions, MessageLabs Hosted Services deliver proven technology from a market leader, allowing IT Managers to free up resources & concentrate on running their business.

Benefits of MessageLabs Hosted Services

Strategic Benefits Operational Benefits

Predictable costs for budgeting Lower total cost of ownership compared to in-house solutions

Less on-site hardware/software to install & maintain

Scalable service grows with your business

Only pay for the users you have

Hosted services from a market leader Helps your business to operate without interruption

Service levels you can rely on

Happy, productive end users

Proven performance

Effective resource management Threats blocked at the internet level, freeing up bandwidth

One supplier for your email, web and IM security needs

Intuitive web based portal to administer the services

24/7/365 telephone and email support as standard

A full suite of Hosted Security Services

More than just email anti-spam & anti-virus, MessageLabs Hosted Services offer solutions for email security, email management and web & IM security. Our services are flexible and can be bundled to meet your specific requirements.

via Hosted Security for Email, Web and Instant Messaging.

Previous Entries
preload preload preload