Leaderboard

Just saw the news after the holiday. Curiosity found firm clue that Mars may harbor life somewhere under its shell. Scientists confirmed that the rover found sources of methane coming our from the underground. The scientists are not sure about the source, but 95 percent of methane (CH4) here in Earth is produced by various lifeforms. The discovery was reported at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. “It is one of the few hypotheses that we can propose that we must consider as we go forward,” said John P. Grotzinger, the mission’s project scientist.The scientists also reported that for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them. Full news at NY Times, BBC.

not in the near future, but please take a look : Someday you'll code for the web in any language, and it'll run at near-native speed Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, has announced a new project that could not only speed up web applications but could eventually see the end of JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development. Dubbed WebAssembly, the new effort is a kind of successor to Asm.js, the stripped-down JavaScript dialect that backers describe as an "assembly language for the web." Like Asm.js, it executes via a JavaScript engine. The difference is that WebAssembly is a new, low-level binary format, like a bytecode, which allows it to load and run even faster than Asm.js. The long-term goal, Eich said, is for WebAssembly to become a kind of binary object format for the web, one that can be used as a compiler target for all kinds of languages - including but not limited to JavaScript. "Bottom line: with co-evolution of [JavaScript and WebAssembly], in a few years I believe all the top browsers will sport JS engines that have become truly polyglot virtual machines," Eich said in a Wednesday blog post. WebAssembly has apparently been underway as a skunkworks project for some time and has already gained the support of developers at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, all three of which have previously built Asm.js optimizations into their respective browsers. "I'm happy to report that we at Mozilla have started working with Chromium, Edge and WebKit engineers on creating a new standard, WebAssembly, that defines a portable, size- and load-time-efficient format and execution model specifically designed to serve as a compilation target for the Web," Mozilla developer Luke Wagner blogged. Microsoft's Mike Holman was more subdued in his support for the project, saying Redmond and the other browser vendors have "come to a general agreement on a shared set of goals." One of those goals is "interoperability with JavaScript." In keeping with that, one deliverable for the project is a "polyfill" that implements WebAssembly in JavaScript, so that today's browsers will be able to execute WebAssembly code once the spec is finalized - albeit with slightly degraded performance. What's more, although WebAssembly is itself a binary format, the specification will include a text format that can be rendered when anyone does a View Source, preserving (at least in part) the openness of the web. As far as language support, the initial focus will be on compiling C/C++ to WebAssembly. Once a viable backend for the LLVM compiler has been developed, work on other languages will commence – although you can expect that to be some way down the road. Expect the concept itself to change radically from these early days, too. There isn't even a draft spec yet, although high-level design documents and prototype source code for compilers, the WebAssembly polyfill, and a modified version of Google's V8 JavaScript engine that can execute WebAssembly natively have already been posted to the project's GitHub page. To oversee the project, a new WebAssembly Community Group has been formed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3G), and is open for anyone to join. There's also a FAQ that gives more details on the groups plans – such as they are for now. source : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/18/brendan_eich_announces_webassembly/

sad news, thousand people dead, RIP for them the news taken from CNN : Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN)A 7.8 magnitude earthquake centered less than 50 miles from Kathmandu rocked Nepal with devastating force Saturday, toppling homes, temples and historic buildings and leaving at least 1,457 people dead, authorities said. Afterward, whole streets and squares in the nation's capital and largest city were covered in rubble. The injured wound up being treated outside hospitals in chaotic scenes. Residents, terrorized by a seemingly endless series of aftershocks, huddled outdoors for safety. The death toll was reported by Nepal's Ministry of Home Affairs. But given that the rescue effort is still in its early stages and that people in outlying areas may well have been affected, as well, it seems probable the number will rise. In neighboring Tibet, roads buckled, buildings collapsed and at least 12 people were killed, China's state media reported, citing local authorities. Separately, at least four Chinese citizens in Nepal -- two workers with a Chinese company, a tourist and a mountaineer -- have been killed, state media reported, citing the Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu. source : http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/25/asia/nepal-earthquake-7-5-magnitude/

Nokia could soon be the largest maker of mobile phone network equipment in the world ahead of Ericsson and Huawei. It just acquired French telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6 billion euros ($16.6 billion), or more than double the $7 billion Microsoft paid for its Windows Phone handset arm. The Finnish company also acquired Alcatel-Lucent's famous Bell Laboratories (established by Alexander Graham Bell in 1880) along with its numerous patents. Nokia won't be jumping into the Android business. Alcatel Mobile Phones (which makes the OneTouch and other devices) was originally a joint venture between Alcatel-Lucent and China's TCL -- and it's now 100 percent owned by TCL. Also, Nokia took pains to point out that while the merged business would be headquartered in Finland, France will remain "a vibrant center of the combined company Nokia said it may also sell off its Here mapping division to focus on the network business, but would only do it if the price was right. It was reportedly considering a sale to a German automaker consortium and even Uber, source : http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/15/nokia-just-bought-alcatel-lucent-for-16-6-billion/

This has put the company in a tough spot, but its extensive R&D capacity really makes it a desired target for acquisition. Over the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about such buy-outs, most recently Mediatek was cited as a prospective buyer, but none of the plans has actually stuck. A new rumor now hints that Samsung might have its sight set on the struggling semiconductor company. The benefits of such a deal could potentially be plentiful for both sides. Samsung would acquire a lot of know-how and research potential. Not to mention a formidable portfolio of patents that AMD has acquired throughout the years. The Korean tech giant has been doing really well with its custom Exynos chipsets recently and the latest Exynos 7420 model has shown such huge potential in the new 14nm realm that the company might, quite justifiable, decide to start offering in to third-party companies. The reality, however, is that, while the Exynos chip has managed to crush its competition in terms of performance, it is still based on off-the-shelf ARM technology, namely the Cortex-A53, Cortex-A57 and Mali-T760 MP8 CPU and GPU. In the meantime, competitors, such as Qualcomm and Intel have custom chip designs of their own, which could give them an edge down the road. With the help of AMD, Samsung cane remedy this and perhaps entirely shake itself off from the dependence on Qualcomm or generic ARM technology. And then, there’s AMD. The sad truth is that, if such a buy-out does eventually occur, no matter what the other party is, AMD has one main thing to gain – much needed financial support. Samsung could be the company’s ticket back to the major leagues and a potential investment in mobile graphics research, could even allow AMD to license chips to third party vendors, other than the Korean giant down the road. On the flip side, though, there is the matter of AMD’s current z86 business. Samsung appears to have little use for it, judging by the company’s withdrawal from PC markets in recent years. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that AMD will completely sack its PC CPU and GPU units and most likely the chips will remain in production by third party manufacturers. But the buy-out might lead to a refocus of effort and potentially hinder development of new technologies on this front. source : http://blog.gsmarena.com/amd-might-soon-become-part-samsung-family

PHP 7, a major update to the server-side scripting language due next year, will offer performance improvements and more capabilities, along with deprecation of some existing features. The release will be anchored by performance enhancements derived from the phpng branch of the PHP tree. Officials from PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies discussed the progress of phpng and PHP 7 at the company’s ZendCon conference in Silicon Valley this week. “[The upgrade is] really focused on helping real-world applications perform significantly faster and plus, we’re going to have additional improvements in PHP,” said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans, who has been involved in the ongoing development of PHP. Recent versions of PHP have been part of the 5.x release series, but there will be no PHP 6. “We’re going to skip [version] 6 because years ago, we had plans for a 6 but those plans were very different from what we’re doing now,” Gutmans said. Going right to version 7 avoids confusion. The phpng improvements in version 7 have been focused on areas such as hash tables and memory allocation. A chart on the state of phpng as of this month, presented at the conference, had the technology producing a 35 percent speedup on synthetic tests; 20 to 70 percent performance improvements on real applications, including a 60 percent improvement on WordPress home pages, and better memory consumption for most useful server APIs. The technology supports most PHP extensions bundled into the PHP source distribution and provides speed comparable to the HHVM 3.3.0 open source virtual machine. A PHP developer at the conference expressed optimism about phpng. “Obviously, speed is the most important thing to a Web app or any app in general,” said developer Pete Nystrom, vice president of engineering and co-founder at Classy.org, an online fundraising platform. While recognizing it would be a while before the technology was available in tools, Nystrom understands what's at stake. “Obviously, going into the core and speeding up all these functions that are core to PHP is a massive undertaking and something that’s going to be great for all of us.” Also on tap for PHP is elimination of some existing features. “We’re going to deprecate some old functionality that we think is not that interesting anymore,” Gutmans said. Ext/ereg and ext.mysql are on the deprecation list and have both been replaced by other extensions. Other deprecated features include # style comments in ini files and string category names in setlocale(). source : http://www.infoworld.com/article/2841561/php/php-7-moves-full-speed-ahead.html

Hi all, I have few question,may be not allowed to do so, in this beloved forum.. 1..Can anyone tell me what is the consequences i m gonna face if i use crack software for a research work and wanna publish in a reputed journal? Will i have to face any question like have u used licensed version or not? or any type of query in the near future like this or how much secure is it. In a nutshell what i wanna is: I have crack software that gonna be used in the research work and i not in a state to buy these softs- what upshots gonna happened.... 2..As a newbie, can i publish a research work done by me lonely- i mean only one author, corresponding or first author is me in a high to mid impact-factored journals.Is it the fact is that as neophyte i have to resort to a skilled and high-measured researcher in the author list- is it the fact? Thanks in advance...