AN INTELLIGENT PLUG

An ‘intelligent’ plug is being developed that will switch off electrical devices such as TVs and desk lamps when they are not being used.
It is part of an electrical system designed to cut household power bills by keeping watch over energy use.
Home owners will be told how much power every device is soaking up, and when equipment is operating needlessly.

The system will also detect and switch off devices that have been carelessly left on in empty rooms.
Researchers hope to see the plugs fitted as standard to all domestic appliances within a few years.
They will transmit information to a central control point in the home.
Dr John Woods, one of the researchers working on the project at the University of Essex in Colchester, said: “Home owners will be able to see how much power every single device uses.
“You will be able to see if a fridge has failed, or if something has been left on that should not have been.”
The plug, which will look no different from a normal 13 amp one, will also contain an ‘integrated motion sensor’, The Engineer magazine reported.

The new smart plug will look the same as a 13 amp one but is designed to cut energy bills

This will detect when there is little activity in a room where a device such as a TV has been left on. The plug will alert the central controller, which can then switch the device off.
“If something is turned off and you don’t want it to be, you simply flick the switch off and flick it back on again and the central controller will recognise that you don’t like that service being compromised,” said Dr Woods.
The plug is being developed with a £90,000 award from the Carbon Connections Development Fund, a green initiative managed by the University of East Anglia.
The aim is to reduce domestic energy consumption, which is responsible for a third of all the electricity used in the UK.
A batch of prototypes should be ready within six months, say the researchers.
They will be tested in Essex University’s ‘iSpace’ department, where hi-tech gadgets can be tried out in home surroundings.
Dr Woods estimates that the plugs would have to cost less than £1 each to be a commercial proposition. However, with mass production he believes this should be possible.
A spokesman for the Energy Saving Trust said: “The average British household wastes £28 each year by leaving appliances on standby. Across the UK this is equivalent to the annual output of more than two 700megawatt power stations.”

MICROSOFT DOESN’T LIKE BLOGS

Here is proof that Microsoft hates blogs. Read the following carefully-

[0014]The classifier 40 analyzes the features and generates an indication or prediction as to whether the web page that provided the features is a blog page or not. The indication or prediction may a “yes” or “no”, for example, indicating that the web page is a blog page or not. Alternately, the prediction may be a number or percentage, such as “95%”, indicating the likelihood or probability that the web page is a blog page, for example.

[0015]Categories of features have been identified that are useful for determining the classification of a web page. In addition to those described herein, it is contemplated that additional features and categories of features may be used in the classification of a web page.

[0016]One category of features is where the page is hosted, e.g., if a page is hosted in a known blog hosting DNS domain, such as MSN Spaces (e.g., spaces.msn.com), Blogspot (e.g., blogspot.com), Yahoo 360, LiveJournal, Typepad, Xanga, MySpace, Multiply, or Wunderblogs, for example. If the web page is hosted on one of these blog hosting sites, for example, it is likely a blog page. The blog hosting sites listed here are examples, and the classifier can base its prediction on these and/or other sites, alone or in combination with other features.

[0017]Another category of features is the non-HTML markup words and phrases contained in the web page. If the web page contains the word “blogroll” or “metaphilter”, for example, it is likely a blog page. Moreover, the number of occurrences of certain terms or words in a web page may indicate that it is a blog page. Terms or words that may be counted include “blog”, “powered by”, “permalink”, “trackback”, “comment”, “comments”, “blogad”, and “posted at”, for example. Desirably, the classifier and its prediction are language independent. Accordingly, the non-English equivalents of these words may also be counted. Desirably, the feature extractor does the counting (e.g., as it parses a web page). The number of occurrences of these words in a web page may be used by the classifier in generating its prediction.

[0018]The targets of outgoing links in the web page may also be considered as a category of features. Links in a web page that likely indicate a blog page include links to http://www.movabletype.com/, http://wordpress.org/, and http://www.blogger.com/, for example.

[0019]Furthermore, the particular strings and/or substrings in a URL for a web page may be considered as a category of features. For example, if the string “blog” occurs in the URL for the web page, that web page may likely be considered to be a blog page.

[0020]Moreover, if the web page contains an ATOM feed or an RSS feed, it is likely a blog page. RSS is a commonly used protocol to share the contents of blogs, and RSS feeds are sources of RSS information about websites. RSS is being supplemented by a newer, more complex protocol called ATOM.

AND FINALLY THIS

[0002]Search engines are increasingly implementing features that restrict the results for queries to be from blog pages. The website www.blogcensus.net gives information on an effort to index blogs, though this was apparently discontinued in late 2003. At that time, the site stated that it had indexed 2.8 million blogs. Currently, Technorati claims to be tracking 43.2 million blog sites. It is currently difficult for search engines to identify blog pages, regardless of the source of the content in a blog page.

[0003]A machine learning classifier is trained with features that are used to classify web pages as either blog or non-blog. Categories of features include (1) where the page is hosted, e.g., a page is hosted in a known blog hosting domain, (2) the non-HTML markup words and phrases contained in the web page; (3) the targets of outgoing links in the web page; (4) the particular strings and/or substrings in a uniform resource locator (URL) for a web page; and (5) if the web page contains an ATOM feed or an RSS feed. Some or all of the features in some or all of the categories may be used by the classifier, either in an initial classification, or in a subsequent classification in order to refine the initial classification.

The above is from US Patent Application 20070294252 filed by Microsoft according to Bill Slawski.

ITS TIME FOR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

CNN Money lists out 11 gadgets to die for. So are you rich enough or tech savvy enough to buy for this Christmas Shopping season or the New Year shopping spree ? and which one ?

http://www.electrobike.com/

 

http://www.audiocubes.com/

 

http://www.zyken.com/

 

http://www.ultimategamechair.com/

 

http://www.peksystems.com/

 

http://www.gibson.com/robotguitar/guitar.html

 

http://www.digitalbeverages.com/myfountain.htm


http://www.kef.com/products/muon


http://www.sonystyle.com/

 

http://www.eye.fi/

 

http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_transporter.html

 

All Images are via CNN Money. Images are sourced from respective websites. For more details & to buy these products click the image or the website link given for each of the item.

 

MARRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR WISHES IN ADVANCE

CHEER UP INDIANS ! SUPER-COMPUTER DEVELOPED BY TATA RANKED 4TH FASTEST IN WORLD & FASTEST IN ASIA

The supercomputer facility at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, has been ranked as the 4th fastest in the world and is the fastest supercomputer in Asia, according to the Top 500 Supercomputer list announced at SC07, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis at Reno, Nevada, USA.

Called EKA (the Sanskrit name for number one), the supercomputer built at the CRL facility at Pune, India, marks a milestone in the Tata Group’s effort to build an indigenous high-performance computing solution. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists.

EKA uses nearly 1,800 computing nodes and has a peak performance of 170 teraflops (tflops or trillion floating point operations per second) and a sustained performance of 120 teraflops based on the LINPACK benchmarks which are used by the world-wide community to rank supercomputers based on performance.

EKA, the CRL supercomputer, follows a near-circular layout of the data centre unlike the traditional hot aisle and cold aisle rows. This near-circular layout enables the building of densely packed supercomputers, and this is the first time this architecture has been tried out on this scale.

Ratan Tata, Chairman of the Tata Group said: “High performance computing solutions have an ever-increasing role in the scientific and new technological space the world over. The Tata Group has supported this development activity and is extremely proud of the team that has developed and built this supercomputer, which is now ranked as the world’s fourth fastest. I am sure this supercomputer and its successor systems will make a major contribution to India’s ongoing scientific and technological initiatives.”

“CRL’s supercomputer, EKA, has put India at the forefront of high performance and supercomputing technology globally. EKA gives us the ability to address applications in multiple disciplines including software development and research,” said S Ramadorai, chairman of CRL and CEO and MD of Tata Consultancy Services. “The successful launch of the supercomputer has been driven by an exemplary team at CRL working collaboratively with scientists across the Tata Group.”

The CRL supercomputer has been built using CLOS architecture with off-the-shelf servers and infiniband interconnect technologies with Linux as the operating system. This is the first ever site in the world which has used the dual data rate infiniband with fibre-optic cable technology for superior performance.

The CRL supercomputer includes nodes and racks built by Hewlett Packard (HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system), which uses high-speed quad-core Clovertown processors from Intel Corp and dual data rate infiniband switches from Mellanox Corp and Voltaire Corp. The CRL team has been actively supported by scientists and engineers at Tata Consultancy Services.

In the near term, CRL is targeting and developing applications such as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics, crash simulation, and digital media animation and rendering. The long-term application areas would include: financial modelling, seismic modelling, geophysical signal processing, weather prediction, medical imaging, nanotechnology, personalised drug discovery, real-time rendering, and virtual worlds among others. CRL also intends to offer high-performance and supercomputer system integration, research, applications and software services to its customers around the globe in the area of high-performance computing.

ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDLY BLOG or WEBSITE

AMAZED..!!

Maxtility says – The Internet is responsible for more than 100 billion pounds of CO2 emissions per year, yet most users are unaware of its environmental impact. Founded by Ph.D. students at Harvard and Yale, The CO2Stats Project has the ambitious goal of making the entire Web carbon neutral!

The CO2Stats Project freely distributes a widget that calculates your web site or blog’s carbon footprint in real-time due to the total electricity usage of your readers’ computers as they spend time on your site. You can then offset your popularity by purchasing carbon credits from a provider listed on their website

Visit CO2Stats Project

NOTE: RECENTLY ONLY AVAILABLE FOR TYPEPAD AND BLOGGER USERS