Jumat, 30 Mei 2008
dpreview.com is hiring: web development engineer
Intranet Implementation The Advantages Of A Web-Based Solution
Over the past few years, another option has grown in popularity – the implementation of a web-based solution.
As you consider the choice between installed software and a web-based intranet, here are some considerations:
1. The most important requirement of any intranet is that everyone uses it.
To assure broad-based participation, the intranet must be easy to implement, simple to use, cost-effective to maintain, and offer each individual user the power to post, access and use content in a way that serves their specific needs. In short, the intranet must have value to everyone.
Web-based intranets are designed around this concept. The interface and navigation are consistent with their use of the web – an environment in which they feel in control, using familiar tools.
In contrast, the business world is littered with countless elegant and feature-rich soft-ware based intranets that have failed. Why? Because they represented an alien environment into which the user was expected to venture. Few employees had the time or the interest (or courage) to enter, rendering the intranet impotent, with the powerful tools unused.
This is the plight of traditional, out-of-the-box software solutions. Unlike web-based intranets, they force users into a constrained environment requiring in-depth training, built around rules designed for the group, rather than the individual.
2. Software intranets have unpredictable costs: in time, attention and money.
Software based solutions require extensive internal support. The ongoing expense in both staff time and money takes the focus of your IT group away from mission-critical tasks.
System integration, Implementation, maintenance, technology upgrades, training and user support are all on-going tasks that represent a significant, recurring investment. The cost can be substantial, far exceeding your initial license cost and monthly fee.
3. Web-based intranets offer a predictable cost and cutting-edge technology.
Most web-based solutions offer a fixed monthly fee that covers all maintenance, technology upgrades, training and user support. The costs are predictable, the technology evolutionary, and it's all done with minimal involvement of your IT staff.
It's for these reasons that companies needing broad-based participation in a changing environment are choosing web-based intranets over traditional software solutions.
About the Author:
Malcolm Brown is vice president of Trichys, providers of advertising agency software and extranet solutions to customers around the world.
Space Exploration Seen as Never Before.
CLICK HERE to watch the cinema promotional trailer for When We Left Earth.
Kamis, 29 Mei 2008
The Wonderful Future Of Cell Phones
The development of the cell phones and technology in the past decade along with social and cultural processes as well as sharp decrease in prices contributed to their phenomenon success.
Cell phones have long become a symbol of status as well as a fashion statement. Some manufacturers have started to produce special designed phones for women. Other models are designed with interchangeable facades to cater for the youngsters. A lot of young people are transferring their instant-messaging habits to their cell phones.
The integration of so many different functionalities and technologies into the cell phones is more impressive and beneficial than the all-in-one office devices that integrated a scanner, a copier, a fax and a printer into a single compact space saving multifunctional machine.
The current generation of G-2.5 technology as well as the very near future G-3 units that are starting to emerge right now will carry in it so many functions which are mind blowing. These new Cell phones are going to be a multimedia center, a mobile office, a navigation device GPS (Global Positioning system), a computer with fast Internet access, a text messenger, a high resolution camera and video, a watch, a calculator, a PDA, an MP3 music player, TV and a Wallet! Yes, we will be able to pay with it for things we today pay with coins like vending soda or coffee machines as well as for parking space, trains and buses tickets etc’. It has become our “Swiss Army Knife”...
In Israel they used the cell phone to send SMS message and approval for one dollar donation payment for needy children. I guess that in the future it will be a legitimate tool for voting in contests and may be even in Elections.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, an executive for a wireless company noted that “in Slovakia, people are using mobile phones to remotely switch on the heat before they return home,” and in Norway, “1.5 million people can confirm their tax returns” using cell phone short text messaging services. Paramedics use camera phones to send ahead to hospitals pictures of the incoming injuries; “in Britain, it is now commonplace for wireless technology to allow companies to remotely access meters or gather diagnostic information.” Construction workers on-site can use cell phones to send pictures to contractors off-site. Combined with the individual use of cell phones—to make appointments, locate a friend, check voicemail messages, or simply to check in at work—cell phones offer peoplean unknown level of convenience. (Source: The New Atlantis – Article by Christine Rosen).
Other interesting applications are providing a locating service of your friends, or in other words if one of your friends is very close to where you are right now an SMS massage can alert you of this fact.
Cell phones and Dating Services
Several companies now offer a way to flirt and meet people anonymously. These services offer cell-to-cell texting and PC-to-cell texting. (Text-messaging phones also can receive messages sent over the Internet from a PC.) Companies including UPOC (Universal Point of Contact) and SMS.ac allow users to fill out a profile as they would at any dating service (some dating sites are dabbling with texting) and then search for an ideal match. Profiles can include photos and can be accessed either with a picture-enabled cell phone or through a PC. Say you want to meet a 20- to 30-year-old man in Kentucky who is interested in hiking. Do a search and three names pop up. You can send one a text message without ever exposing your phone number
Cell phones as safety device
One of the main reasons the cell phones have become so wide spread nowadays is that besides convenience it is perceived as a security and safety aid, Parents provide their children with mobile phones in order to track their whereabouts, to make sure they arrived safely to their destinations, to give them a mobile phone to report in real time when in any sort of trouble. Many women feel much safer in the street knowing they can call for help when in need.
About the Author:
Amit Laufer is a Writer & Internet Marketer. MBA - International Trade & Finance. Bsc. Computers and Information Systems. Hobby: Photography. Married with two Children. Owner Editor of: www.cell-phones-infoweb.com
The Guessing Game Has Begun on the Next iPhone
SAN FRANCISCO — Can Steven P. Jobs top the iPhone ... with another iPhone?
Garrett Child tested an iPhone at the Apple store in Salt Lake City.
Apple’s chief, Steven P. Jobs, talked about the new iPhone features at a March news conference in Cupertino, Calif.
Last June, Mr. Jobs began selling what has become one of the most talked-about consumer products in history. Now he faces a new challenge as Apple prepares to introduce an updated version of the phone next month.
After almost a year of strong sales that have made it one of the dominant smartphones in the United States, the iPhone has settled down to a less-than-spectacular pace: roughly 600,000 units a month, according to the company.
Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., had shipped about 5.5 million phones by the end of March, the most recent figures it has released. It sold just 1.7 million phones in the first three months of this year, meaning it must sell more than 8 million phones to reach Mr. Jobs’s publicly stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.
“They’re going to have a difficult time” hitting that number, said Edward Snyder, an analyst at Charter Equity Research. He said that Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, sells more phones every week than Apple has sold since the iPhone’s introduction.
So what could Apple’s impresario have up his sleeve to pick up the pace — and to keep the second-generation iPhone from being a letdown?
Although the company will not publicly confirm the arrival of a second iPhone, Apple watchers have concluded that a new version will be introduced June 9, the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.
Apparently in preparation for the event, stocks of the existing iPhone have been dwindling in the last month.
Although AT&T stores still have phones in stock, according to a company spokesman, the supply has largely dried up in Apple’s retail outlets, and the phones are no longer available through the company’s online store.
Apple may be trying to avoid the anger it faced last September when it cut the iPhone’s price by $200 just two months after it went on sale, making early buyers feel cheated. Mr. Jobs offered those customers a $100 store credit.
Cutting down on supply means fewer angry buyers when their new phone is suddenly obsolete.
“You can say what you want about Steve Jobs, but he’s learning from his mistakes,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG Nielsen, a market research firm. “They are cleaning out the supply channel.”
Even as supplies shrink, Apple has been signing a series of deals with cellphone network providers around the world. On Tuesday the cellular operator TeliaSonera said it would offer the iPhone in seven countries, including Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The only major countries without an iPhone distribution agreement are Japan, Russia and China.
Meanwhile the Apple rumor mill has wound up to a fever pitch in recent weeks with speculation about the new phone’s features.
One Web site that tracks imports even decided that shipping manifests indicated that the company had already brought millions of iPhones into the country in dozens of seaborne shipping containers. Industry executives, however, said this would be an odd move for Apple, which in the past has introduced products by air — shipping the first batch at the last moment.
Both Mr. Jobs and Randall L. Stephenson, the chief executive of Apple’s partner AT&T, have promised a new iPhone model this year that would run on a high-speed wireless data network. AT&T is building such a network, which uses technology known as 3G and is intended to support a range of new applications, including mobile digital video. The company said last week that the network would be largely finished by the end of June.
But analysts say faster downloads may not be enough to touch off a new wave of consumer interest in the iPhone.
“Subscribers don’t care what the radio interface of their cellular phone is,” Mr. Snyder said.
If he is to rekindle the excitement that greeted the iPhone’s introduction, Mr. Jobs is likely to need something else. So far, he has been successful in hiding any surprise features from the dozens of Web sites and bloggers that track the company’s new products.
There has been speculation about a higher-resolution camera, possible support for digital video recording, a slightly bulkier and more curved case, and the addition of a global positioning system receiver that would allow new Web services tied to a person’s location.
Mr. Jobs is certain to make much of the availability of many new iPhone programs that Apple will begin selling through its iTunes store in the coming months. He could also accelerate sales by cutting the phone’s price or letting operators offer subsidies, as they do with many other phones. In the United States the phone now costs $399 or $499 depending on the amount of memory.
Bells and whistles aside, the new phone may have a few new shortcomings as well. Company executives have acknowledged that the new 3G networks will be a challenge for its engineers, because using them burns up more battery power compared with the slower Edge networks used by current iPhones.
IPhone users have turned out to be prodigious consumers of wireless data. For example, the iPhone customers of T-Mobile, the German cellular operator, consume 30 times more data than its other wireless customers, according to Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless industry analyst.
Mr. Sharma estimates that iPhone users in the United States consume two and a half to three times more data than users of other cellphones. Faster networks could widen that gap and further extend the iPhone’s influence in the telecommunications world.
“IPhone is not only having an impact on data revenues,” he said, “but also on device design, mobile advertising road maps, and applications and services that are being contemplated for the future.”
Intel Delays Next-Generation Centrino Chipset
Intel has delayed the next generation "Montevina" chipset until mind-July, with a formal launch in mid-August. "Montevina" is the next-generation Centrino chipset, whose capabilities include WiMAX and 802.11n.
A Wall Street analyst also claims that the company has suffered problems getting the chipset certified by the FCC , contributing to the delay.
Intel will launch some of its chipsets and Core 2 Extreme processors in July, but release them in volume in August. Montevina was originally expected to be launched by the end of this month.
"There were two minor issues we found during final testing – one with our integrated graphic chipsets, which we have found a workaround for but need to re-screen our parts, and second around our wireless wi-fi chip, which was a paperwork and certification mistake we made," said Bill Kircos, a spokesman for Intel, in an email.
"Both of these led us to establishing a launch date for our mobile processors and discrete chipsets of the week of July 14th, and taking a couple of weeks to get the right readiness and volume for the rest of our components," Kircos added. "We're looking at early August for that."
The delay isn't catastrophic for Intel, as Montevina's two key technologies—802.11n and WiMAX—are both mired in launch problems. The 802.11n protocol has still not been standardized, although the technology has progressed far enough along that the first pre-802.11n "draft" products were released a year ago with the blessing of the Wi-Fi Alliance.
WiMAX, however, has proven to be considerably more challenging. Chip makers have moved on to delivering true mobile WiMAX technology that can be built into cell phones and other devices; Wavesat, for example, announced an Odyssey chipset which can support WiMAX, Wi-Fi, and new 3G standards such as LTE, all in the same chip architecture.
With the bailout of Clearwire, considered to be the flagship WiMAX service provider within the U.S., regulatory delays are likely to postpone the service's launch until at least 2009, leaving the technology in a sort of limbo from a domestic perspective.
However, regulatory delays also affected the Montevina chipset, according to Doug Freedman of American Technology Research, who published a report last Friday claiming that the chipset had suffered "hiccups," as a "mis-step" in the FCC certification process would prevent the chipset from being sold within the U.S. Freedman also claimed that Montevina also suffered from errors within the integrated graphics portion of the chipset, which had discovered and also been notified of the errors.
"We believe the options will be screening for failures in completed systems or retesting of semiconductors devices at Intel," Freedman wrote. "We believe it is too early to measure the impact to the launch until the severity of the issue is understood in terms of percentage of output affected. We believe the potential impact is to lower end systems as higher-end notebooks are designed with discrete graphics cards. In fact, the impact on INTC is a possible improvement in mix within the chipset business; however, it is offset by the yield loss related to the functional issues."
Freedman also wrote that it was possible that notebooks would ship with older 802.11a/b/g radios, instead of the newer 802.11n technology.
Signal From Mars Is Restored
A satellite radio that carries signals and commands to the Mars Phoenix lander restarted last night, ending a one-day delay in the robotic explorer’s deployment on the Martian surface.
The UHF radio on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite shut down on Tuesday, blocking communications between mission controllers and the newly arrived spacecraft. In a statement posted to the Web site of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration late on Tuesday, the balky orbiter “successfully received information from the Phoenix lander and relayed the information to Earth. The relayed transmission included images and other data collected by Phoenix during the mission’s second day after landing on Mars.”
The cause of the glitch is undetermined, according to the NASA statement. During the radio silence, the lander carried out instructions that had been sent on Monday.
In a press conference on Tuesday, mission officials displayed startlingly clear photos taken by the orbiter of the lander on the Martian surface, its solar panels shining a brilliant bluish against the red soil. Other images showed the heat shield and parachute, along with the mark they made after crashing into the soil. A photograph from the lander showed the parachute and shield in the distance.
The lander’s Canadian-made weather monitoring station is also up and running, and in the Tuesday press conference included a slide of a mock weather report that showed the skies “sunny and clear,” with dust storm activity to the west and temperatures that ranged from minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 112 degrees.
Another image from the craft displayed a DVD that bears the names of 250,000 supporters of the project, along with a collection of books on the theme of Mars and a message, “Astronauts, please take this DVD with you,” said Peter Smith, principal investigator for the lander, from the University of Arizona. It won’t happen soon, he admitted: “Maybe in the next century, we hope, maybe 5,000 years from now, maybe 100,000 years from now. But some day, somebody will come and take that DVD and be able to read the books in our little library.”
Mission officials said that they expected to begin unlimbering the robotic arm today, and to begin digging in the soil within days. The shoveling craft will search for ice under the surface and cook soil in a special oven designed to determine the chemical composition of the sampled materials. Scientists hope to find the kinds of organic compounds that would suggest that life has existed, or could exist, on Mars.
Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts
Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.
In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand, a robot on a treadmill or a small vehicle.
The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.
Experts not involved with the study said the findings were likely to accelerate interest in human testing, especially given the need to treat head and spinal injuries in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This study really pulls together all the pieces from earlier work and provides a clear demonstration of what’s possible,” said Dr. William Heetderks , director of the extramural science program at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
Dr. John P. Donoghue, director of the Institute of Brain Science at Brown University, said the new report was “important because it’s the most comprehensive study showing how an animal interacts with complex objects, using only brain activity.”
The researchers, from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, used monkeys partly because of their anatomical similarities to humans and partly because they are quick learners.
In the experiment, two macaques first used a joystick to gain a feel for the arm, which had shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers.
Then, just beneath the monkeys’ skulls, the scientists implanted a grid about the size of a large freckle. It sat on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand movements. The grid held 100 tiny electrodes, each connecting to a single neuron, its wires running out of the brain and to a computer.
The computer was programmed to analyze the collective firing of these 100 motor neurons, translate that sum into an electronic command and send it instantaneously to the arm, which was mounted flush with the left shoulder.
The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback.
After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.
The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding.
On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.
The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.
“In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that.
“But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”
The co-authors were Meel Velliste, Sagi Perel, M. Chance Spalding and Andrew Whitford.
Scientists have to clear several hurdles before this technology becomes practical, experts said. Implantable electrode grids do not generally last more than a period of months, for reasons that remain unclear.
The equipment to read and transmit the signal can be cumbersome and in need of continual monitoring and recalibrating. And no one has yet demonstrated a workable wireless system that would eliminate the need for connections through the scalp.
Yet Dr. Schwartz’s team, Dr. Donoghue’s group and others are working on all of the problems, and the two macaques’ rapid learning curve in taking ownership of a foreign limb gives scientists confidence that the main obstacles are technical and, thus, negotiable.
In an editorial accompanying the Nature study, Dr. John F. Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, argued that after such bugs had been worked out, scientists might even discover areas of the cortex that allow more intimate, subtle control of prosthetic devices.
Such systems, Dr. Kalaska wrote, “would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.”
Selasa, 27 Mei 2008
Sennheiser headphones good for home listening
- Story Highlights
- Sennheiser's high-end open-air headphones deliver deep bass
- Offered at a more economical price than their flagship model, HD-650
- Headphones are expensive; not the best solution for portable listening
- A good choice for home listening if you're willing to pay for high-quality sound
(CNET) -- When Steve Guttenberg reviewed the Sennheiser HD 650 headphones, he rightfully called them "fit for a king" -- while noting that they retail for a correspondingly princely sum of $500.
Thankfully, the HD 650s aren't the only model in Sennheiser's high-end audiophile line. The Sennheiser HD 600s can be bought at a 40 percent discount to their big brother.
Yes, you'll be substituting a grey and black plastic finish for the 650s' fancy titanium metallic housing, but you'll still be getting a high-end pair of open-air headphones while saving enough money to buy a really nice bottle of vintage wine to sip as you listen to your music of choice. (For me, that would be the losslessly encoded FLAC version of Phish's live June 6, 1998, rendition of "Piper.")
If you're not familiar with the open-air design, they leave the outside of the ear cups open so that sound waves moving away from your ear can continue away unimpeded and cannot interfere in any way with the sound moving toward your ear.
In the case of the Sennheiser HD 600s, there are pieces of black metal mesh on the outside of the ear cups to cover the drivers and protect them from accidental damage.
Speaking of those drivers, Sennheiser is happy to point out that the HD 600s use computer-optimized neodymium magnet systems, which is supposed to minimize distortion, to drive lightweight aluminum voice coils.
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A 9-foot Y-cable (one wire to each earcup) delivers your tunes to the drivers and is terminated in a gold-plated 1/8-inch (3.5mm) stereo minijack connection. (Sennheiser also includes a phono adapter for the larger headphone jacks that snap securely over the smaller headphone plug.)
Both the earpads and cable are user-replaceable--though Sennheiser is, of course, your only choice when doing so. Replacement earpads will cost you about $41, while cables cost about $25.
Since the HD 600s aren't nearly as efficient as most earbuds, you won't get ear-splitting levels of volume out of them with a portable music player, such as an iPod. However, listening to music at such levels can damage your hearing. I typically got a comfortable volume out of my iPod with the HD 600s.
However, with some recordings I did crave a little more volume from time to time. Also, given their open-air design, which lets in outside sounds, you might have trouble cranking your music to try to compete with sounds in a loud environment.
I wouldn't want to use them on the New York subway or to try to drown out my dorm-mate while he practices his guitar.
If you really do plan on listening to Phish play that 20-minute-long version of "Piper," you'll definitely appreciate the soft cloth padding on the ear cups. During my listening tests, I was able to wear the HD 600s for hours at a time, in some cases nearly an entire workday, without the annoying sweat that you sometimes get from headphones with leather-padded ear cups.
Another bonus to the cloth padding is that you won't have to worry about the leather flaking off as you would with some headphones, such as the Sony MDR-V6.
Given their open design, the HD 600s really shine on live recordings giving the impression that you're really in a big space rather than a small room with cans on your ears. They deliver a wide range of the audio spectrum and deliver it well, digging deep into the bass registers, and reaching way up into the higher frequencies. However, despite the fact that they faithfully recreate very low bass, it lacks the oomph some closed-ear-cup designs can deliver.
Specifically, I was able to compare the HD 600 directly with the similarly priced Denon AH-D2000s and enjoyed the more powerful presentation they gave to bass when compared with these Sennheisers. Also, the HD 600s felt a little shy in the uppermost treble regions, where there was just a very slight bit less definition and clarity to the sound.
For instance, while listening to "Rise Up" on the excellent album Tonic by Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Mr. Martin's precise ride cymbal work popped more on the Denons than on the Sennheisers. The Denons delivered a crisper snap when the stick hit the cymbal, while the Sennheisers were ever so barely less snappy, though admittedly some people will probably have a hard time hearing the difference and most likely won't notice much deficiency if they can't do a direct comparison.
The relative lack of warmth to the Chris Wood's upright bass and slight lack of punch to John Medeski's ascending bass line on the piano on the Sennheisers compared with the Denons is more apparent, but again is mainly a side effect of the open design.
So, if you're already a fan of open-air headphones, this will likely not be a big issue and indeed, you may prefer it to the Denons' closed design.
Even though I have outed myself as a fan of closed headphones, that hasn't stopped me from thoroughly enjoying the Sennheiser HD 600s for the last few weeks. They are exceptional headphones and, in my opinion definitely worth the money, especially if you use headphones often.
If you're a particularly persnickety listener though, you may want to step up and shell out the extra cash for Sennheiser's HD 650s. Just remember that these are really intended for home listening -- ideally when connected to a home stereo with a solid amplifierScientists: Female DNA Path Found
(AMSTERDAM, Netherlands) — Dutch scientists claim they have completed the first sequencing of an individual woman's DNA.
The researchers at Leiden University Medical Center say they have sequenced the entire genome of one their female researchers, though no other scientists have yet verified their data.
The first sequencing of a composite human genome was announced in 2001. Four individual male genomes have so far been sequenced. Scientists have also mapped the DNA of about a dozen mammals, including chimpanzees, dogs, cats, cows and a platypus.
The full complement of an organism's DNA is called its genome. In animals and people, it is made up of nearly 3 billion building blocks. The sequence of those blocks spells out the hereditary information, just as strings of letters spell out sentences. Decoding a genome, which is called sequencing, means identifying the order of the building blocks.
While scientists have made great advances recently in identifying genes for certain diseases such as cancer, those have not yet translated into cures or treatments.
Attempts by The Associated Press to contact outside experts for comment on the Dutch scientists' claim were not immediately successful.
Farmers go high-tech to cut costs
- Story Highlights
- American grain farmers are enjoying the highest crop prices of their lives
- Farmers are investing the cash in technology to increase efficiency and cut costs
- GPS guidance for tractors prevents overlapping areas, cutting fuel costs
- The benefit of technology depends on how effectively a farmer uses it
CHAMPAIGN, Illinois (AP) -- When Martin Barbre got his first look three years ago at a system that would drive his tractor for him, he didn't buy the device -- or the premise that it would cut costs on his farm.
A farmer in Illinois sprays herbicide using GPS technology to keep costs down.
"When they first came out with them and we first looked at it, it seemed like a fancy gadget," said Barbre, a 53-year-old who grows corn and soybeans in southern Illinois.
But with the cost of fuel, seeds, fertilizer and just about everything else it takes to grow his crops rising fast, Barbre quickly came around after he started using the global positioning system to drive his tractor a year and a half ago. "As soon as we used it, we realized the benefits," he said.
American grain farmers are enjoying the highest crop prices of their lives, but they don't expect that to last forever. As a hedge against the inevitable downturn, owners of mid-size farms like Barbre's -- and even some smaller-scale farmers -- are investing that cash in technology that's increasingly integrated.
"These new economics have changed the whole landscape," said Dan Davidson, an agronomist with agricultural-data company DTN in Omaha, Neb. "They've got the money to spend; they're going to update. They know the (profit) margins we have today are not going to be around forever."
Large-scale farmers have used GPS-based automated steering for tractors, sensors that probe soil for nutrients and moisture and other gadgets since the late 1990s to cut their expenses and increase their production. It wasn't until the past five years or so, however, that the savings owners of smaller and mid-size farms could realize from using high-end technology would significantly offset their rising costs, said Davidson.
Sure, there were environmental benefits: spraying less fertilizer and fewer herbicides; not overwatering; cutting fuel costs and reducing soil compaction. And farmers could take the data that high-tech gear gathered in the field, download it to their computers and use it in planning.
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But now fertilizer used by corn and soybean farms costs almost double what it did two years ago, while seeds and fuel cost almost 50 percent more, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, the cost of auto-steering systems -- among the most popular high-tech products -- has remained relatively flat the past few years, and in some cases it has fallen. Systems that now typically cost from a few thousand dollars to $25,000 used to run as high as $40,000.
Look no further than Barbre's farm, he said, for examples of technology's payoff in the current farming economy -- and of how important it may be if costs continue rising.
With auto-steering, a farmer manually drives the perimeter of a field to map its boundaries so the GPS gadget can then direct the tractor to carve near-perfectly straight rows. A few systems will even turn the tractor around at the end of each row. By cutting down on overlap, the system saves fuel, and it means the same ground won't be planted twice or sprayed unnecessarily with fertilizer or pesticides.
Barbre estimates that using auto-steering on his 4,000 acres -- split about evenly between soybeans and corn -- has cut his fuel costs up to 5 percent.
"That's maybe 30, 50 cents an acre," he said. "Over 4,000 acres, that adds up."
Yield mapping -- tracking how much corn or soybeans parts of his fields produce, which he's used for more than 10 years -- brings him an extra $30 or $35 on every acre of corn. He figures he's spent about $14,000 on it over the years, buying and upgrading his hardware and software, for a net benefit of $60,000 to $70,000 or more per year on 2,000 acres of corn.
But technology has limits for Barbre. Some of his fields are cut into hilly terrain, while others are near-perfect squares and rectangles of flat prairie.
"This field I'm planting in right now goes all the way from flat, black ground to ridges with terraces in them," he said while taking a break from corn planting.
The auto-steering helps a lot more in fields like that and less on flat, relatively square tracts. Similarly, yield-monitoring can work wonders if you farm across different types of soil, but not so much if all your crops sprout from similar ground.
A lot also depends on how effectively a farmer uses the technology.
Iowa State University agriculture professor Matt Darr said buying and using high-tech gear is a lot like buying exercise equipment.
"Just because you have a treadmill in your basement doesn't mean you're in great shape," he said.
That's why equipment dealers are offering new services.
"They've had to hire consultants. They have to go out to the farm," said Barry Nelson, a spokesman for the agricultural equipment division at Moline, Ill.-based Deere & Co. "There are some extra expenses."
A 2007 survey of farm equipment dealers conducted by Purdue University and CropLife magazine found that 85 percent offered customers custom applications and someone to come out and put in-field technology to work. Only 45 percent reported making money on the services.
Companies like Deere now try to entice farmers to stick with their brand by making their various high-tech devices compatible so a farmer can get more use from data and high-tech parts, like GPS receivers.
"You can take the receiver off the tractor and plug it into the combine and, boom, you're off and running," said Nelson.
Just over the horizon, even more technology is coming to the farm.
Researchers at the University of Illinois are working on a small robot that can identify individual weeds in a field and spray them with herbicide so farmers don't have to spray an entire field as they commonly do now. The robot will move perhaps 2 mph picking out weeds by color, location and other characteristics, engineer Lei Tina said.
"Actually we have a prototype," he said. "We can identify the individual plant pretty well."
The technology is years from commercial viability, however.
Then again, Davidson said, what's expensive and far-fetched today may quickly become cost-effective if fuel and fertilizer costs don't drop back.
"All of these things are so tied to energy," he said. "I don't expect them to come back down."Tracking your Emails with Mailtracking.com
It is to be found at Mail Tracking and once you sign up for it and start using it you will understand its benefits real well.
If you use it and send me an email (for example) you will get a report back that tells you when I opened your email, how long it took me to read it and if I open it, read it and close it then open it again later it wil also tell you that.
If I were to forward your email to anyone else it would tell you I did that, when that person opened it and how long they took to read it.
There are other bells and whistles too. You can do a pretty fair job of customization once you get into the configuration menus.
The one thing you want to watch out for is that you don't demand that I send you an email receipt for opening your emails. Some of you do that now and I never hit the send button. The reason I don't acknowledge receipt is that my firewall won't let me do it for some strange reason. With mailtracking you don't need that because you are going to get a receipt anyway.
Now then, let me explain the whys and wherefores bit more. Let us assume that you send me an email and I don't answer it. Why would I ignore your emails? Well, I usually wouldn't but sometimes when deleting some to the junk emails I get a key bounce effect and more than one email gets deleted. The one that got unintentionly deleted might very well have been your email. I probably would not have any way of responding to you since I don't keep email address books because of the virus problems.
Then maybe I don't get back to you because I'm extremely busy from time to time and your email gets shoved down the stack of constantly incoming emails and goes by unnoticed, and you don't get the service we both want you to have.
Now then, with mail tracking you know exactly when I opened your email or if I didn't even open it. You know that I want to give you the very best service possible and you know that I want to get your email answered within 24 hours if at all possible. That means that if I don't answer you within 24 hours something has gone wrong. What might have gone wrong? As we all know, anything can go wrong with email. You make a typo and I don't get it but for whatever reason you don't get a mailer daemon return from it, So there you sit, getting madder by the hour. And I am oblivious to what has happened.
If you use mailtracking.com service lots of that frustration can be eliminated. You can send me another email if I don't answer within 24 hours so you can be sure to get my attention and some action going for you.
If I open the email you will know when I opened it and if I don't get back to you within 24 hours you will know it is time to start calling me or asking me what for and why.
Use it for sending email to other businesses for the same reasons. And use it with friends, relatives and whoever for the same reasons. It isn't about trying to track them down or stalk anyone although you could come pretty close with the pro version I use. I could not use it to find your house and actually drive right up to your front door except by accident. In order to actually do that I would have to know your actual address but lacking that I could drive right up to your door, sit there in front of your house and look around me and wonder which house was really yours and not know I was sitting right in front of it. And why on earth would I want to do that anyway?
I use it because I want to know that you got what I sent you and so why wouldn't you use it for the same reason?
I think it can be used when sending payments by paypal too. I'd like you to start trying to use it when sending in a payment. That would make sure you sent it to bbauer1@netzero.net and not to bbauer@netzero.com or some other bad address and if you did that you would have a way to track the mistake and get your money back faster so you can send it to the right address.
You don't even have to sign up for their service to start using it. All you have to do is send an email to someone such as ceo@creditwrench.mailtracking.com and mailtracker will immediately pick up on that and send you back a confirmation telling you that they opened a free temporary account for you. Then you can follow the links in that and go sign up and customize your settings and start using it. Their pro version is only about $40 a year and I think that is well worth it when you send out as many emails as I do.
Security and service are important to all of us and this tool heightens both of those a whole lot. Get it and try it. I think you will like it.
About the Author:
Mr. Bauer is the CEO of Credit Wrench. The true purpose of the CREDITWRENCH program is to teach you how to recognize abuse of your rights by unscrupulous debt collectors and combat such abuse when it happens to you. It is not designed to be a credit repair program nor a debt repair program although it's easily possible to use it for those purposes. Submitted with Article Distributor.
The Email Hosting Debate
There is an old adage that says the only way to assure a job is done properly is to do it yourself. Managing email may be the exception to that rule. Do-it-yourself email requires expertise and cash to stay ahead of the technology curve—cash that might better be spent on core competencies.
Besides the DIY route, small to midsized enterprises have several options on how to manage their growing requirement for email: have someone else host it offsite or have someone else manage a system on their premises.
Benefits Of External Hosting “With email hosting, customers benefit from a team of dedicated IT specialists focused exclusively on email,” says Kirk Averett, senior products manager for Mailtrust (www.mailtrust.com). He lists many positives, including uptime, security, scalability, and cost savings. “There is no large capital outlay,” he adds.
By using an outside host, businesses do not have to deal with maintaining their own email servers, notes Quoc Hoang, program manager at The Radicati Group. “This allows businesses to focus on their core business. Hosting an email server can be costly for small companies.”
While internal email servers do allow for more flexibility and control in feature choices, they can be costly and time-consuming to put in place and maintain. Radicati research shows that by using an outside host, enterprises avoid the hassles of setting up, running, and maintaining an email server. For smaller businesses, hosting provides a cost advantage. “Service providers allow smaller businesses to act big, giving them access to an email solution that smaller companies would not be able to afford to run internally,” Hoang says.
Especially at the lower end, external hosting offers great money-management advantages. “External hosting has no capital outlay for equipment purchases and greater flexibility over time to add/modify the system,” Averett says. For instance, an external hosting service can add BlackBerry licenses for nothing more than an incremental per-user cost. “To deploy the features of BlackBerry Enterprise Server internally usually requires significant hardware and software purchases, even if relatively few users have BlackBerrys,” he notes.
Using an outside email hosting company does mean relinquishing some control. “But the advantage is that internal IT professionals are free to focus on what they do best—projects core to their business. With hosted email, all updates, repairs, patches, and fixes are run on an ongoing, scheduled basis. Internal resources no longer need to be dedicated to secure and maintain the mail servers,” Averett says.
With external hosting, companies do not have to worry about maintaining and managing an email server. And because an email hosting company’s business focuses on staying up-to-date and current on patches, fixes, new software rollouts, etc., management of technology updates is simply another part of its routine.
“An IT manager running an in-house email server might want new software (perhaps Exchange 2007) that might offer compelling new features but require significant planning, hardware, and/or personnel,” Averett says. “When working with an outside hosting vendor, a company can usually rely on the vendor to have the hardware and a transition plan and can reduce IT time spent on the transition. With external hosting, adding mailboxes or removing them, adding broadband access or removing it is all seamless,” he says.
A hosting company manages firewalls, data backup, virus and spam protection, and blacklisting daily. “They innovate to save customers time, expense, and worry,” Averett says.
Internal Management Advantages However, external email hosting is not right for everyone. “Companies that need super-specialized control, highly specialized access to the interface, or the ability to move massive files (more than 50MB) via email might be better served with an internal operation,” Averett says.
The bigger the operation, the more reason there is to keep email in-house. “For large enterprise[s], it would be more cost-efficient to run an internal email server,” according to Radicati research. That is because the investment can be spread over many more users, and there likely is an in-house support team.
“Running an internal email server also gives enterprises more control over their email servers. In addition, there is a serious security issue when hosting email because the company’s emails are no longer located in-house but on another company’s server,” Averett notes.
Flexibility is a key selling point for in-house hosting. Internal hosting offers large enterprises more flexibility. Larger SMEs can choose which archiving, compliance, filtering, and encryption services they want to use.
Another advantage is the ability to choose mailbox sizes for different sets of users, such as administrators. External hosts usually have a fixed price per mailbox, which isn’t cost-efficient for larger companies.
Managed Email There is yet a third option: managed email. Managed email offers enterprises an email server on their premises but run by a managed email service provider. “Managed email is usually customized and allows enterprises to run an email server without having to maintain and manage an email server,” Radicati reports.
No matter what the email hosting strategy implemented, technology updates are another concern. “By using hosted email, enterprises do not have to worry about constantly updating some of their services, such as antispam and antiviruses, themselves,” according to Radicati.
There are other concerns. You should ascertain the level of transparency with any vendor. Will it be around when you need it most? Can you reach it 24/7 on phone or through live chat?
“An email hosting partner who is transparent, available, and completely focused on providing a great email experience can provide a significant advantage,” Averett says. “The ‘little things’ about email can often be the most important.”
by Curt Harler
Phone Giant in Germany Stirs a Furor
FRANKFURT — Germany was engulfed in a national furor over threats to privacy on Monday, after an admission by Deutsche Telekom that it had surreptitiously tracked thousands of phone calls to identify the source of leaks to the news media about its internal affairs.
René Obermann, chief of Deutsche Telekom, which tracked telephone calls by its board members to determine news leaks.
In a case that echoes the corporate spying scandal at Hewlett-Packard, Deutsche Telekom said there had been “severe and far-reaching” misuse of private data involving contacts between board members and reporters.
The disclosure, which was prompted by a report on Saturday on the Web site of the news magazine Der Spiegel set off a storm of protest from privacy advocates, journalists, and labor representatives at the company.
The German government, which effectively controls Deutsche Telekom through a 32 percent stake, demanded a thorough investigation, describing the spying operation as a “serious breach of trust.”
Prosecutors are looking into the case at the request of Deutsche Telekom. In its own investigation, the company said it discovered that its security department apparently hired an outside firm to track phone contacts between members of its supervisory board and several reporters in 2005 and 2006 — a tense period when the company was shaken by waves of layoffs.
“By handing over information to the prosecutor, we’re using the sharpest knife we have to solve the problem,” said a company spokesman, Mark Nierwetberg. “We’re not in any way trying to hide anything.”
With its use of outside contractors and its focus on the communication between boardroom and newsroom, Deutsche Telekom’s case is eerily similar to that of Hewlett-Packard, the computer equipment company based in Palo Alto, Calif., which hired investigators to obtain the private phone records of journalists who covered the company.
It is also the latest in a spate of privacy scandals in Europe, ranging from the Internet posting of the tax records belonging to 38 million Italians to the confidential financial information on about 25 million people in Britain, which was lost by tax authorities on two computer disks.
Privacy issues carry a particular resonance in Germany, where people have been zealous in guarding personal information ever since the state-sanctioned snooping of the Nazi and Communist regimes.
The German government has fought a lengthy battle for the legal right to conduct surreptitious online searches of computers belonging to people they deem suspicious during terrorism investigations. Experts said the Deutsche Telekom case may raise new hurdles to expanded state powers.
“No one likes to hear that people are using their mobile phone records,” said Lutz Hachmeister, director of the Institute for Media Policy in Berlin. “It gives one the sense that Big Brother can watch you and hear you.”
This is not the first time that journalists have been spied on in Germany. In 2006, a Parliamentary report accused the federal intelligence agency, the BND, of conducting systematic surveillance on some reporters. The government of Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the agency to stop.
The BND came under scrutiny again recently when the government confirmed that it had paid an informant more than 4 million euros ($6.3 million) for a disk containing stolen bank data on hundreds of Germans who evaded taxes by steering cash to the Alpine principality of Liechtenstein.
In an odd link between these scandals, the most prominent person arrested so far on allegations of tax evasion is Klaus Zumwinkel, the former chairman of Deutsche Telekom’s supervisory board.
Germany companies have suffered through a season of scandal: Siemens, the engineering and industrial electronics company based in Munich, caught up in allegations of bribery, and Volkswagen, tarnished by payoffs to union representatives.
Deutsche Telekom’s spying strikes a chord among ordinary Germans because it remains the dominant provider of fixed-line phone service here despite the inroads made by rivals in recent years.
“This company has special access to the records of its customers,” said Michael Konken, chairman of the German Journalists’ Association. “That means it has a special obligation to be trustworthy.”
Mr. Konken said he was satisfied by the response of Deutsche Telekom’s chief executive, René Obermann, who referred the company’s findings to the state prosecutor in Bonn on May 14. He also hired a law firm in Cologne to do an independent investigation.
Deutsche Telekom said it acted after receiving a letter in April from an outsider who had been hired to track the phone records of the 20 members of the supervisory board. By law, the company’s board is evenly split between representatives of shareholders and employees.
Federal Desktop Core Configuration 101
As of March 31, 2008, any federal agency that falls under the Office of Management and Budget, the largest cabinet-level office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, will have to meet the FDCC (Federal Desktop Core Configuration) policy for all Microsoft Windows XP and Vista systems through the use of the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol, pronounced “S-cap”), a method for using specific standards to enable automated vulnerability management, measurement, and policy compliance evaluation.
Each federal agency’s CIO is required to submit his FDCC reports to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). The goals of this initiative are to increase the overall system security and reduce the cost of system and application maintenance for all federal agencies.
The FDCC baseline was created through a collaboration between NIST, DHS (Department of Homeland Security), DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency), NSA (National Security Agency), USAF (U.S. Air Force), and Microsoft. NIST has developed resources to aid agencies in testing, implementing, and deploying WinXP and Vista to meet the FDCC baseline, including a scanning tool and technical FAQs.
What Does It All Mean? According to Ron Gula, chief executive officer and chief technical officer for Tenable Security (www.tenablesecurity.com), there isn’t as much confusion around the government mandate in comparison to regulatory compliance, such as PCI (Payment Card Industry), which has very broad and generic requirements. “SCAP has very specific settings that are applied to specific operating systems. It’s taking the ambiguity out of system configurations,” he explains.
Each agency will be responsible for reporting computer counts, SCAP reports, and FDCC deviations for each environment/system role within its jurisdiction. Validation and reporting are not limited to just the operating system but to assorted components, such as firewalls, antivirus, Web browsers, etc. NIST provides extensive SCAP checklists for individual components, as well as SCAP-validated vendor products.
Over the years, Gula has worked extensively with government agencies, including the NSA where he conducted advanced vulnerability research and penetration tests of government networks, as well as helping to secure networks and systems in the private sector.
Robert Hollis, director of product development at ThreatGuard (www.threatguard.com), offers a simplified description: “At a very high level, FDCC is a policy that is mandated saying that all desktops in the federal space should be configured in a certain manner. SCAP, the technology piece to FDCC, is a set of protocols that define how to check for or enforce the policy.”
Interoperability SCAP is a suite of open standards that function together to deliver automated vulnerability management, measurement, and policy compliance evaluation. The XCCDF (eXtensible Configuration Checklist Description Format) and OVAL (Open Vulnerability Assessment Language) are assessment protocols. The reference protocols include the CCE (Common Configuration Enumeration), CPE (Common Platform Enumeration), CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System), and CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). (See the “SCAP Abbreviations & Definitions” sidebar for more information.)
SCAP will allow security technologies to exchange systems and vulnerability information through a common format, thus allowing individual agencies the flexibility to use configuration management and security solutions that best meet their needs and budgets.
“Interoperability and standardized methods for communication between security and compliance tools are essential in order for agencies to optimize their security dollar and increase their return on investment. The SCAP validation program for security products is a huge next step in accomplishing that goal,” says Andrew Buttner, lead INFOSEC engineer at The MITRE Corp. (www.mitre.org).
Not Just For Feds Although SCAP is only required by government agencies, organizations in the private sector have begun to adopt the standards, such as they have with the NSA Best Practices and the DISA Security Technical Information Guides. “You’ll see organizations like credit unions and healthcare agencies—those who work with the government—implementing FDCC,” says Gula, who believes the government might be encouraging organizations to adopt the policy and standards as a requisite for doing business with them.
“The government agency, being a customer, is basically asking their vendors to comply with the same standards to which they themselves are held accountable,” Gula notes. “The only motivation there is to get the business of the government, which is obviously a significant amount of potential revenue.”
Hollis agrees. “We believe that FDCC is such a good idea that other industries will take hold of this. You’ll definitely see this adopted in private industries, such as health care,” he says.
Security experts, including Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, believe that Washington is moving in the right direction by implementing FDCC and mandating that all vendors supplying software to federal agencies pass an SCAP validation. “People saw what could work, so they made these national mandates around software sales and systems patching, and every company in the nation could do the same type of things to help themselves,” Paller says. “By working with the vendors instead of blaming software companies for these problems, this type of effort can be helpful for everyone else.”
As a consequence of SCAP, federal agencies, as well as nongovernment organizations, are able to implement automated configuration assessment applications to help them meet the FDCC requirements and have a proactive security posture through routine monitoring of systems for any policy violations as a result of patching, new software installation, or human intervention.
by Sandra Kay Miller
Are You Safe from Hackers ?
Since we have up to date anti-virus and firewall software on our computer, we assumed we were safe. Not so! It seems this is not enough to keep away the hackers as the software does not prevent "Spyware" from being installed on your computer.
"Spyware" is software that gets onto your computer and literally "spies" on your activities. The spying can range from relatively harmless use of cookies tracking you across multiple websites... to extremely dangerous "keystroke loggers" which record passwords, credit cards, and other personal data. That data then gets relayed to the person who put the software on your computer.
Spyware gets on your computer in one of several different ways.
First, it rides along with software you download from the 'Net and install on your system.
Second, they come as email attachments (much like viruses) and automatically install themselves on your computer when you open the email message.
Third, hackers find an open port on your computer and use the "back door" to install basically anything they want.
And fourth, the more malicious types, like keystroke loggers, can even get installed by someone with direct physical access to your computer such as an employer, suspicious spouse, business competitor, or someone who wants to know exactly what you're doing.
So how do you protect yourself against these malicious hackers? You need a program that specifically scans your system for the tens-of-thousands of existing spyware programs along with the new ones appearing daily.
Below are two programs which specifically check for and remove spyware from your system:
"Spybot Search & Destroy" - www.safer-networking.org
"Ad Aware" - www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
You may have spyware lurking on your computer right now so protect yourself today by downloading one of the above programs!
As a point of reference, we contacted E-gold and informed them that we had been hacked. We provided them with the account number of the person who received the funds and asked for a contact e-mail address on the person. E-gold informed us that they could not provide that information without a "court order" and that basically there was no way of getting the money back!
Take action today to protect yourself from this growing threat! The bottom line is: - Keep your anti-virus program current
- Install a firewall
- Carefully screen software before installing it
- Scan specifically for spyware weekly
- Stay current on this growing threat.
About the Author:
Charles & Susan Truett are experienced internet marketers
who have built a successful online business and are now
teaching others how to achieve the same success. For more information on how to make money at home visit:
www.partnersinsuccess.net
Senin, 26 Mei 2008
NASA Spacecraft Appears to Have Landed on Mars
Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander celebrate after the spacecraft landed successfully on Mars.
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft appeared Sunday to have made a safe, flawless landing on Mars.
Live Video of the LandingIn the mission support room during the final, tense minutes before the landing, long stretches of quiet were punctuated by cheers and clapping as confirmation of crucial events like the deployment of the parachute were confirmed.
Then, at 7:53 p.m. Eastern time, Richard Kornfeld, the lead communications officer for entry, descent and landing, announced: “Touchdown signal detected.” The mission controllers erupted in cheers and began hugging one another in congratulations.
Because the signal was relayed via the Mars Odyssey orbiter, the controllers would have to wait a couple of hours, until Odyssey’s next pass over the landing site, for additional word of the Phoenix’s condition, including whether it had successfully unfolded its solar panels, and possibly for the first photographs of its landing site in the frigid plains above the arctic circle of Mars.
If all is operating properly, the next few days will be spent checking out the lander’s instruments. Then it will begin the first up-close investigation of Mars’s northern polar regions. That area became a prime area of interest for planetary scientists after Odyssey discovered in 2002 vast quantities of water ice lying a few inches beneath the surface in Mars’s polar regions.
All of Mars’s surface is currently far too cold for life to exist, but in the past, the planet’s axis may have periodically tipped over so that its north pole pointed at the sun during summer. That could have warmed the ice into liquid water.
With liquid water comes the possibility of life.
On the spacecraft, a robotic arm with a scoop will dig into the permafrost terrain and into the ice. Instruments include a small oven that will heat the scooped-up dirt and ice to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Analyzing the vapors will provide information on the minerals, and that will provide clues about whether the ice ever melted and whether this region was habitable.
“We see Phoenix as a stepping stone to future investigations of Mars,” said Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, the principal investigator of the mission.
But the spacecraft had to get to the surface first. Mission managers sent their last instructions to it around noon Eastern time on Sunday. From there, the spacecraft operated on autopilot all the way to the surface.
Barry Goldstein, the mission’s project manager, said the management team decided against a small tweak of the trajectory to move away from “a small, rather diffuse rock pile” within the intended landing area. But there was only a 1 percent chance of landing on the rock pile.
During the day Sunday, the pull of Mars’s gravity accelerated the spacecraft from 6,300 miles per hour to 12,700 m.p.h. when it entered the Martian atmosphere. The friction of the atmosphere slowed the craft down by 90 percent, then a parachute provided further drag. For the last kilometer down to the surface, 12 rocket engines slowed the spacecraft to a velocity of 5 m.p.h. as it bumped into the ground.
The landing held an extra measure of anxiety, because the spacecraft has the same basic design as NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which crashed while landing near the south pole in 1999. The spacecraft was originally going to Mars’s equatorial region as Mars Surveyor 2001, but when investigations of the Polar Lander failure turned up major flaws in the design, that mission was canceled, and the almost complete Surveyor spacecraft was put into storage.
Dr. Smith then proposed using the body of Surveyor and resurrecting it as Phoenix for a different mission. Extensive testing identified more than a dozen flaws in the lander design, and mission managers believed they had fixed all of the known problems.
NASA is spending $420 million on the Phoenix mission, for testing and retrofitting the spacecraft, outfitting it with new instruments, launching and mission operations. The Canadian Space Agency contributed $37 million for one of the instruments, a weather station. In addition, the development and construction of the original Surveyor 2001 spacecraft cost $100 million.
e=mc2 Is Wrong Einstein's Special Relativity Fundamentally Flawed
USA (Wire) December 12, 2005 --
Is Albert Einstein's Special Relativity incompatible with the very equations upon which science's greatest theory is built? New observations made by many scientists and engineers appear to contradict the great German scientist's ideas. Apparently there are implicit contradictions present within Relativity's foundational ideas, documents and equations. One individual has even pointed that quotations from the 1905 document and Einstein's contemporaries as well as interpretations of the Relativity equations clearly and concisely describe a confused and obviously erroneous theory. It is time therefore, for science to update its thinking on this theory with a comprehensive analysis of the history leading up to, during and after that revolutionary year of Special Relativity.
As this is the 100 year anniversary of the original release of Special Relativity, a review of the original assumptions, documents and ideas which led to the acceptance of this theory is timely and warranted. Every year millions of students are taught this theory without a critical analysis of Relativity. Relativity Theory consists of its two variants Special Relativity and General Relativity and is considered the cornerstone of modern physics.
Albert Einstein borrowed from the ideas of Fitzgerald, Lorentz and Voigt to create a new concept of the universe. His first work in this regard later came to be known as Special Relativity and contained many controversial ideas which today are considered axiomatic. Amongst these are Length Contraction, Time Dilation, the Twin Paradox and the equivalence of mass and energy summarized in the equation E=mc2.
This equation became the shining capstone of the new theory along with its first & second postulates, namely, that the laws of nature are the same from all perspectives and that the speed of light 'c' is constant in a vacuum regardless of perspective. Further, the theory also predicted an increase in mass with velocity. Numerous examples have been given of the 'proof' of the validity of Special Relativity.
Most notably, experiments using particle accelerators have sped particles to incredible velocities which apparently provide confirmation of Einstein's theory. However, doubts remain in the scientific community who have never totally given up the comfort of a Newtonian world view. This is readily apparent in that they refer to the Newton's 'Law' of Gravitation whilst Special Relativity (SR) and General Relativity (GR) are given the polite attribution 'The Theory of' or simply SR 'theory' and GR 'theory.' Einstein would continue working on the ideas of Special Relativity until producing the aforementioned even more controversial treatise.
In his later more comprehensive work called the Theory of General Relativity (1916), Einstein proposed a major re-thinking of cosmology. He conceived of a space time continuum that is curved by mass; in other words, planets, stars, galaxies and other stellar objects cause a curvature of space time. The movement of these objects are determined by the aforementioned curvature.
As a result of these ideas, our understanding of geometry, math, physics, science and the universe would never be the same. However, some scientists are reporting that speed of light is not constant from different experimental observations. One has even reported errors in the fundamental equations. If so, this would require a major rethinking of the known cosmological models and assumptions of modern physics.
About the Author:
Michael Strauss is an engineer who had an interest in Relativity since his earliest math and science courses. To contact the author visit: www.relativitycollapse.com or www.relativitycollapse.net.