Tech Dose of the day Streaming Media, AbsoluteDeNoiser, Google's Hoaxes, Terracotta, Witricity, Google bomb.
Contributed by M&E (Media & Entertainment Delivery) Group (MphasiS Software Services) Streaming Media What is Streaming Media? Streaming media is multimedia that is continuously received by, and normally displayed to, the end-user while it is being delivered by the provider. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather than to the medium itself. The distinction is usually applied to media that are distributed over telecommunications networks, as most other delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). The verb 'to stream' is also derived from this term, meaning to deliver media in this manner. The advances in computer networking combined with powerful home computers and modern operating systems made streaming media practical and affordable for ordinary consumers. Stand-alone Internet radio devices are offering listeners a "nocomputer" option for listening to audio streams. In general, multimedia content is large, so media storage and transmission costs are still significant; to offset this somewhat, media are generally compressed for both storage and streaming. A media stream can be on-demand or live. On-demand streams are stored on a server for a long period of time, and are available to be transmitted at a user's request. Live streams are only available at one particular time, as in a video stream of a live sporting event. What are the social and legal issues? Some streaming broadcasters use streaming systems that interfere with the ability to record streams for later playback, either inadvertently, through poor choice of streaming protocol, or deliberately, because they believe it is to their advantage to do so. Broadcasters may be concerned that copies will result in lost sales or that consumers may skip commercials. Whether users have the ability and the right to record streams has become a significant issue in the application of law to cyberspace. In principle, there is no way to prevent a user from recording a media stream that has been delivered to their computer. Thus, the efforts of broadcasters to prevent this consist of making it inconvenient, or illegal, or both. Plus, using DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies recording the bits that came through can give some control of the reproductions or plays, so if you have a file created to a streaming capture, you will need a license or key to unblock / decrypt the content. Broadcasters can make it inconvenient to record a stream, for example, by using unpublished data formats or by encrypting the stream. Of course, data formats can be reverse engineered, and encrypted streams must be decrypted with a key that residessomewhereon the consumer's computer, so these measures are security through obscurity, at best. Efforts to make it illegal to record a stream may rely on copyrights, patents, license agreements, orin the United Statesthe DMCA. Further References Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media What is streaming video? : http://searchvoip.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid66_gci213055,00.html How to create streaming video : http://www.mediacollege.com/video/streaming/overview.html AbsoluteDeNoiser What is AbsoluteDeNoiser? AbsoluteDeNoiser is an easy to use software that produces very competitive noise reduction filtering for digital images. It is a Java software that should run on almost every machine : Windows 98/2000/XP, Mac Os X, Unix, Linux, etc. Principle: Digital cameras or scanners often produce images that contains noise, especially when using high ISO. This noise is made of random pixel variations that damage the picture in different manner, adding unwanted granular effects. To obtain a good result, this noise should be removed paying a great attention to : Image details that often can be removed with noise, and edges definition that are often blured by basic noise reduction technics. Keeping some granularity to avoid the common "plastic" effect of too much noise removal. Working: AbsoluteDeNoiser works in 3 steps : Edges detection : this analyse makes a separation between large surfaces with poor details, and places where some edges and/or details require a special attention. The value to tune enables to decide the sensitivity of the edges detection, thus the amount of the picture that is to be considered as details/edges or not. Surfaces and edges will then be processed in different ways in next steps. Surfacing : performs a calculation of local color cohesion to decide, for each pixel, what is the mean color value in the noise variations arround it, without merging two different surfaces together. This step also processes surfaces and edges in two different ways. The more important is the value that tunes the surface managment : it is the one that decides of the effective noise reduction. There is also a secondary value that tunes the edges managment, but it should often be kept at a low value to avoid bluring edges : in some cases it offers the possibility to reduce some edges pixelisation effects. Texturing : the step 2 may provide with "too" clean surfaces where some small details or textures could have been lost, and possibly a "plastic" effect. This final filter decides the amount of original pixels that should be added back to the clean surface to restore details and textures without re-introducing the noise that should be removed. A first value tunes how much part of pixels that was removed in step 2 shows a local regularity, thus how much noise vs details is to be considered on them. There is also a secondary value that tunes how much pure granularity, without special regularity, should be added back without re-introducing bad strong spots and scratches. Further References http://absolutedenoiser.free.fr/ Google's Hoaxes What are Google's Hoaxes? Google has a tradition of perpetrating April Fool's Day hoaxes, which generally have an intellectual sense of humor. Some of the hoaxes: Google Mentalplex In 2000, Google announced a new "MentalPlex" search technology that supposedly read the user's mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the step of actually typing in the search query. PigeonRank In 2002, Google reveals the technology behind its PageRank System PigeonRank. Google touts the benefits of this cost-effective and efficient means of ranking pages and reassures readers that there is no animal cruelty involved in the process. The article makes many humorous references and puns based on computer terminology and how Google PageRank really works. Google Copernicus Center In 2004, fictitious job opportunities for a research center on the moon. Luna/X (a pun to Linux as well as a reference to the Windows XP visual style and Mac OS X) is the name of a new operating system they claimed to have created for working at the research center. Google Gulp Google Gulp, a fictitious drink, was announced by Google in 2005. According to the company, this beverage would optimize one's use of the Google search engine by increasing the drinker's intelligence. It was claimed this boost was achieved through real-time analysis of the user's DNA and carefully tailored adjustments to neurotransmitters in the brain (a patented technology termed Auto-Drink). The drink was said to come in "4 great flavors": Glutamate Grape (glutamic acid), Sugar-Free Radical (free radicals), Beta Carroty (beta carotene), and Sero-Tonic Water (serotonin). This hoax was likely intended as a parody of Google's invite-only email service called Gmail. Although ostensibly free, the company claimed the beverage could only be obtained by returning the cap of a Google Gulp bottle to a local grocery store: a causal loop. In the Google Gulp FAQ, Google replies to the observation "I mean, isn't this whole invite-only thing kind of bogus?" by saying "Dude, it's like you've never even heard of viral marketing." Google Romance On April Fool's Day 2006, Google Romance was announced on the main Google search page with the introduction, "Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance." It pretends to offer a "Soulmate Search" to send users on a "Contextual Date". A parody of online dating, it amusingly had a link for "those who generally favor the 'throw enough stuff at the wall' approach to online dating" to Post multiple profiles with a bulk upload file, you sleaze in addition to Post your Google Romance profile. Clicking on either of these gave an error page, which explained that it was an April Fool's joke and included links to previous April Fool's Jokes for nostalgia. Gmail Paper At about 10:00 PM Pacific time (where Google has its headquarters) the day before April 1, 2007, Google changed the login page for Gmail to announce a new service called Gmail Paper. The service offered to allow users of Google's free webmail service to add e-mails to a "Paper Archive," which Google would print (on "96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum") and mail via traditional post. The service would be free, supported by bold, red advertisements printed on the back of the printed messages. Image attachments would also be printed on high-quality glossy paper, though MP3 and WAV files would not be printed. Google TiSP Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider) was a fictitious free broadband service supposedly released by Google. This service would make use of a standard toilet and sewage lines to provide free Internet connectivity at a speed of 8 Mbit/s (2 Mbit/s upload) (or up to 32 Mbit/s with a paid plan). A user would drop a weighted end of a long, Google-supplied fiber-optic cable in their toilet and flush it. Around 60 minutes later, the end would be recovered and connected to the Internet by a "Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)." The user would then connect their end to a Google-supplied wireless router and run the Google-supplied installation media on a Windows XP or Vista computer ("Mac and Linux support coming soon"). Alternatively, a user could request a professional installation, in which Google would deploy nanobots through the plumbing to complete the process. The free service would be supported by "discreet DNA sequencing" of "personal bodily output" to display online ads that relate to culinary preferences and personal health. Google also referenced the cola-and-Mentos reaction in their FAQ: "If you're still experiencing problems, drop eight mints into the bowl and add a two-liter bottle of diet soda." The non-hoaxes Google has chosen April Fool's Day to announce some of their actual products. This marketing strategy is used to make people think that the product is a hoax and spread the word around, and then to surprise them when they realize that it is real. Shortly before midnight on March 31, 2004, Google announced the launch of Gmail. Some believed it was a hoax, because free web-based e-mail with one gigabyte of storage was unheard of at the time. In 2005, Google increased Gmail storage to two gigabytes and released Google Ride Finder. On July 20, 2005, the 36th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon, Google debuted a version of Google Maps that included a small segment of the surface of the moon. It is based entirely on NASA images and includes only a very limited region. Panning causes the map to tile. Zooming in too much shows a picture of Swiss cheese. The map also gives the locations of all moon landings, and the Google Moon FAQ also humorously mentions a connection to the Google Copernicus hoax, which Google claimed to be developing. Supposedly, by 2069, Google Local will support all lunar businesses and addresses. Further References http://teck.in/2005/08/googles-april-fools-day-hoaxes.html http://esteban8a.blogspot.com/2007/04/google-hoaxes.html http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2004/04/01/google-gmail-april-fools-hoax Terracotta What is Terracotta? Terracotta is Network Attached Memory (NAM). NAM is best suited for storing what we like to call scratch data. NAM must look just like RAM to the application. Terracotta coined the term "Network Attached Memory" to explain what the technology does for Java applications. Terracotta offers IT organizations a lightweight approach to scalability that lowers costs and simplifies deployment by reducing development effort and easing the load on application servers and databases. Terracotta uses high-performance mapping of server memory changes, to share temporary work-in-progress data among servers. That makes an application highly available without placing such temporary data in an expensive relational database. It also provides dramatic cost savings and much higher performance and scalability than either databases or application-tier caches. "Terracotta takes a smart approach to scalability that works well with Liferay Portal, said Bryan Cheung, Liferays chief executive officer. Our enterprise users will be pleased with how easily Terracotta enhances their most performance-critical Liferay deployments." What is its usefulness? 1. Simple - use what you need at development time, add high availability at run time. 2. Fast - share application data within the application itself. 3. Reliable - Add high availability to frameworks that don't have by default. 4. Saves Time and Money. 5. Reduce Development Effort and Dependencies on Application Servers and Frameworks. Terracotta helps simplify enterprise application development by providing a purpose-built infrastructure service. It can be used in the following cases: Distributed Caches Distributed caches shared through Terracotta improve throughput without changing the code. This is because sharing cache data across application nodes improves cache hit rate by allowing one server to populate the cache on behalf of many. Hibernate Terracotta helps to reduce pressure on the database caused by O/R-mapped applications deployed in a clustered environment. Use it to cluster your Hibernate second level cache. HTTP Session Clustering When clustered by Terracotta, web application session becomes highly available without actually being replicated to every app server in the cluster. This leads to scalable applications especially when used in conjunction with an HTTP load balancer. Virtual Heap for Large Datasets With Terracotta, Java applications can address heap in excess of one machine's physical RAM. Your JVM can spill data to the Terracotta Server Cluster. The Terracotta Servers can, in turn, spill data to disk. This two-tier system ensures high performance by keeping data as close to the processing context as possible. It also makes it possible for 32 bit systems to access terabytes of data. Cluster OSS Frameworks Terracotta enables developers to build highly available, highly scalable applications with a variety of Open Source development frameworks, including some that do not have built-in high availability features. Master Worker Master - Worker is a design pattern that Terracotta users leverage to divide and route large workloads around a grid of JVMs. POJO Clustering Terracotta works with or without a container. Terracotta works with Open Source and proprietary frameworks. This is because Network Attached Memory works with the POJO's in those frameworks and it works the same for your own POJOs. No Spring beans, getters and setters, serialization, or other interfaces are required in order to use the technology. Further References http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/orgsite/What+Is+Terracotta http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/orgsite/How+Terracotta+Works Witricity What is Witricity? The highlight of the year was a technology that has the potential to have a far greater transformative impact called Witricity. When electric current is passed through a coil of wire a powerful electronic field is created around it. Electronic devices would pick up the power when brought into the room. The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak. In July 2007, US researchers showed-off a relatively simple system that could deliver energy to devices, such as laptop computers, without the need for wires. The setup, called Witricity, was able to make a 60W light bulb glow from a distance of 2m (7ft). The bulb was even made to glow when obstructions such as wood and metal were placed between the transmitter and receiver. What can we see in the future? If this technology passes all tests and comes to our homes one day then we can say that the need for power cables will end and our cell phones, laptops and PMPs will never need a battery charge as they will automatically get charged when you are in a room transmitting wireless electricity. Further References MIT News : http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiTricity Witricity Revolution Information : http://www.witricitynet.com/ Mobile & Wireless : http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/WiTricity-Transmitting-Electricity-Wirelessly/ http://www.instablogs.com/live/scientists-develop-witricity-a-wireless-answer-to-all-your-electricity-problems/ Google bomb What is a Google bomb? A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. The first Google bomb known about by a significant number of people was the one that caused the search term "more evil than Satan himself" to bring up the Microsoft homepage as the top result. Numerous people have made claims to having been responsible for the Microsoft Google bomb, though none have been verified. Types of Google Bombs: Humor Bombs : Mathes' original Google Bomb remains the classic of this genre. It's pretty funny to see your friend come up in Google as the No. 1 talentless hack in the whole world. Successful humor bombs, like most Google Bombs, require search key words that don't get a lot of traffic. Ego Bombs : Many bloggers want to be the top search result for their first name or full name. Free-lance writer David Gallagher posted this plea on his site: I've decided that I want to be the most famous David Gallagher on the Internet, and if you have a Web site, you can help. How? Link to this site like so: David Gallagher. Money Bombs : So far, no one's paying bloggers to set off Google Bombs, but the practice is probably inevitable. Last month, Weblogger Brig Eaton floated the idea, saying that her father would be willing to pay to get his site Google Bombed into the No. 1 search result for Santa Cruz real estate. A week and a few (free) links later, www.santacruzrealty.net had moved from the No 189 Google result to No. 39.... Justice Bombs : Angry Webloggers can mete out vigilante justice by Google Bombing sites that violate the bloggers' standards for Internet ethics. Further References Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb http://www.wordspy.com/words/Googlebombing.asp Google bomb on BBC : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1868395.stm Google bomb Watch : http://blogoscoped.com/googlebomb/ Forgot the famous last words? Access your message archive online at http://in.messenger.yahoo.com/webmessengerpromo.php To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
