Having a cow over Gmail just misses the point

A big outage at Google Tuesday. Things go dark early while most of the U.S. is sleeping. Still, the Internet is without borders and so the glitch leaves millions of people who use Google Web mail and Google Apps, high and dry.

It was mild melodrama for a few hours but things returned to normal after a few hours. It's still unclear what happened, though Google says it's investigating the problem.

Truth be told, the walls of Jericho did not crumble, though the outage nonetheless triggered the (now thoroughly predictable) hand-wringing and bloviating from the usual cast of characters. Amusing to watch, but after this incident, there's also the wider context to consider.

Any outages are embarrassing. But while Gmail did crash a few times in 2008, this is the first time the service has gone down in quite a while. (As my colleague Stephen Shankland noted, Google extends a guarantee to corporate customers paying for any of its business Apps services, which rely on the cloud. The promise: they will be able to access Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time every month. If not, Google pays them a penalty fee. So far Google says it hasn't fallen below that mark.)

If these sorts of outages occurred with more regularity, I suppose that would seriously retard cloud computing's growth. Google and Salesforce.com and Amazon and any other purveyors of cloud-based services obviously cringe when their connections fail. Not to underplay the anguish customers and vendors find themselves dealing with, but the real news here is how rare these cloud-computing outages have become.

A few years ago it seemed that eBay's Web site was seizing up all of the time. The reality was less severe but merchants and bidders would scream bloody murder. At the same time, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Buy.com were dealing with repeated denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Things got so bad that some even feared for the future of e-commerce.

We now know how the story turned out. Fact is that there are no 100 percent guarantees anymore, not in a world in which applications increasingly get hosted on the Internet. When things go bump in the night, as they inevitably will, there is going to be a commotion, albeit a temporary one. Get over it, already.

source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10171400-60.html

Infosys Technologies has set up Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust to promote research in sciences and honour outstanding contributions and achievements by Indians.

The foundation will be funded by a corpus of Rs 21.5 crore and give out annual awards under different categories. The prize money under each will be Rs 50 lakh, one of the highest in the country for research.

Speaking at a media conference here on Tuesday, N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor of Infosys, said: "India needs bright minds across all areas of academics
, government, business and society to strive for global excellence. We need to encourage research in the country to address our developmental problems. This award will honour outstanding researchers who will make a difference to our future.''

The jury panel for each area will consist of eminent international personalities and will be selected by the trustees of the foundation.

Infosys had earlier instituted a global award for computing excellence with a cash prize of $ 150,000. The annual award, instituted through the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), comes out of a corpus of $4 million given by Infosys.

Awards in five categories:

l Physical sciences (physics and chemistry)

l Mathematical sciences (mathematics and statistics)

l Engineering sciences (all branches of engineering)

l Life sciences (biology and medicine)

l Social sciences and economics (economics, history, sociology, political science and other social sciences)

source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Bangalore/Infy_to_promote_science_research/articleshow/4145994.cms

Satellite tracking of Olive Ridley turtles in Orissa

KENDRAPARA (ORISSA): Orissa Forest department and Wildlife Institute of India has again embarked on a telemetry tracking of endangered marine species by establishing Platform Terminal Transmitters (PTT) linkage on three Olive Ridley turtles along Gahirma tha coast.

The telemetry experiment under the stewardship of a six-member team of WII researchers was successfully conducted on February 1 along Babuballi Island of Gahirmatha coast, according to forest officials.

The experiment which had earlier failed to yield desired results aims at exploring the mysterious path these aquatic species travel. “We intercepted two male turtles and a female along the deep sea water near unmanned Babuballi Island.

They were fitted with PTT telemetry objects weighing about 2 kilograms,'' said a forest official who took part in the exercise. The animals were kept under observation to ensure that foreign objects caused no discomfort to the marine visitors. The WII s cientists monitored their movements before they disappeared and plunged into the swirling sea water.

The entire exercise lasted for a little over an hour, he said. As male turtles never invade the nesting ground where females lay eggs, little is known with regard to their behavioural instinct and movement. – PTI

sources:http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blnus/14051454.htm