Unseen World!

Today HBO announced it will be making its movies and TV Shows available on the Web to subscribers through HBO Go,which up until now has been in private beta. HBO Go is part of the cable industry’s TV Everywhere strategy to make TV content available online to paying subscribers. It contains 600 hours of movies and TV shows which can be streamed live and even in HD. HBO Go is available first to Verizon FIOS subscribers. Since I am a Verizon FIOS customer, I logged into HBO Go this morning and checked it out. (Despite reports elsewhere that it won’t be available until Thursday, it is in fact now live). Below are my initial impressions and screenshots.

The videos play decently and you can watch in HD, but if I wasn’t already paying for HBO I certainly wouldn’t pay for access to this site. The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the final season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD.

The site itself is well-designed, image heavy with lots of entry points. You are greeted with a slideshow view of ten shows and movies on heavy rotation, including the movie Taken, HBO Series Big Love and The Wire, and a Dennis Miller special. If you have HBO, you can’t really avoid any of these shows, so nothing special there except that you can stream it anywhere on your laptop. Tabs across the top allow you to explore deeper into movies, series, comedy, sports, documentaries, and “late night” (aka, HBO’s hard-hitting sex documentary series like Real Sex). Everything is done in Flash, which makes it a beautiful experience, but it won’t be accessible on an iPad or iPhone without converting the site into an app

For each series, you can choose any episode for at least one season, but some shows are missing. You can also create a watchlist to watch shows later. When I was clicking through the site, the streaming quality was great, but when I tried to switch to another show or movie the audio to Canadian Bacon kept playing in the background (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—I love that movie).

My main issue with HBO Go is not the fact that it is behind a paywall (after all, that is HBO’s business even on TV) or the site’s look and feel. The site’s navigation is clean, everything is easy to find, and the playback looks great. And moving part of its video library online is a smart move for HBO. My issue is with the selection. It’s not just that 600 hours of rotating shows and movies is just a fraction of what HBO shows on TV in any given month. Managing 600 hours of on-demand video is resource intensive, so HBO has to set some limit. HBO is not Web video company. But Hulu or even Verizon could manage a bigger catalog, and even keep the paywall.

TV is moving online, as this first step by HBO illustrates. But ultimately, I want all the channels I get through Verizon to be available for searching, managing, and video streaming on the Web. Verizon FIOS already lets me program my home DVR from the Web, but I can only watch those shows on my TV. There is still a disconnect between my computer and my TV, and that is frustrating. And yes, I want it all because I am already paying for it.

Global search giant Google, earlier this week, unveiled Buzz, a new social networking platform that lets users manage and engage in social activities, via Gmail, the company’s email program.

The platform has been described as a catch-all product by people who have used it.

With Buzz, users can share multimedia and update their status for friends to see. They can even share their location information to help connect with others in their area.

According to analysts, Google’s Buzz poses a direct challenge to both Twitter and Facebook.

I don’t think it will be able to catch up with Twitter anytime sooner. Till then I would suggest keep buuuzzzing..oops keep buzzing..

Written by Gerry Matlack

In the wake of World War 2 the United States government enacted legislation which prohibited any other nations from receiving the scientific bounty derived from the Manhattan Project. This meant that despite the participation of British scientists in the project, Britain recieved none of the benefits of the research. The year after the United States’ first successful nuclear bomb test in July of 1945, the British government decided that they too must develop a nuclear program in order to maintain their position as a world power. This pilot project eventually developed into the Windscale Nuclear plant.

In October 1957, after several years of successful operation, the workers at Windscale noticed some curious readings from their temperature monitoring equipment as they carried out standard maintenance. The reactor temperature was slowly rising during a time that they expected it to be falling. The remote detection equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, so two plant workers donned protective equipment and hiked to the reactor to inspect it in person. When they arrived, they were alarmed to discover that the interior of the uranium-filled reactor was ablaze.
Windscale’s two nuclear piles had been constructed in concrete buildings just outside of the small village of Seascale, Cumbria to produce Britain’s bounty of weapons-grade plutonium. The fission reactors had a straightforward air-cooled configuration which allowed each one to exhaust its excess heat through a tall chimney. Breeder reactors such as those at Windscale create plutonium by bombarding the most common isotope of uranium (uranium-238) with neutrons. Any uranium atoms which happen to absorb a neutron briefly become uranium-239, an unstable element which rapidly decays into neptunium-239. Having a half-life of only 2.355 days, this element also soon decays, resulting in the desired plutonium-239.

Each of the heavily shielded Windscale reactors was comprised of a stack of massive graphite bricks. A series of vertical boreholes through these blocks acted as channels for the reactor’s control rods which were used to absorb loose neutrons and thereby govern the fission rate. Hundreds of horizontal channels were carved into the blocks in a octagonal pattern for inserting canisters filled with whatever substances the scientists wished to bombard with neutrons. Many contained uranium to convert into plutonium, but others were special isotope cartridges for producing radioisotopes.

The canisters were pushed into place through the front of the reactor– known as the charge face– and once the neutrons had worked their magic and turned a good portion of the metallic uranium into plutonium, they were pushed out through the back into a water duct for cooling. The reactor itself was cooled by way of a fan-driven air duct which forced air over the reactor core and out the 400-foot-tall discharge stacks. As a last-minute modification, and at a great effort and expense, a filtering system was added to the top of each chimney at the insistence of a physicist named Sir John Cockcroft. These filters came to be known as “Cockcroft’s Folly” due to their engineering difficulty and questionable value.

It was not understood during the plant’s construction that graphite which is subjected to neutron bombardment has a tendency to store that energy within dislocations in its crystalline structure. This stored energy is called Wigner energy, named after physicist Eugene Wigner who discovered the effect during his own experiments. Left unchecked, graphite has a tendency to spontaneously release its accumulated Wigner energy in a powerful burst of heat. This was made apparent after two years of operation, at which time unexpected temperature increases were observed in the cores. On one occasion this occurred while the reactor was shut down.

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Written by Matt Castle

The passenger manifest for British South American Airlines (BSAA) flight CS-59 might have made a perfect character list for a murder-mystery. Aboard were two businessman friends touring South America on the lookout for trade opportunities: a fun-loving Swiss and a self-made English executive. Also travelling were a Palestinian man who was rumoured to have a diamond stitched into his jacket, and a South American agent of the Dunlop tyre company who had once been the tutor to Prince Michael of Romania. The oldest passenger was in her seventies, a widow of German extraction returning to her Chilean home after an inconvenient World War had unexpectedly extended her stay abroad. And to add a whiff of espionage, a member of a select corps of British civil servants known as King’s Messengers joined the flight, carrying a diplomatic bag bound for the UK embassy across the border.

The date was August 2nd, 1947, and the flight was scheduled to depart from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. The intrepid voyagers were to fly in the Star Dust, a shiny Lancastrian aircraft derived from the legendary Avro Lancaster World War II bomber. Its aircrew were ex-Royal Air Force to a chap, and the machine was captained by an experienced and decorated wartime flyer named Reginald Cook. Traversing the Andes Mountains in atrocious winter weather was an undertaking that would demand all his knowledge and skills, yet the journey should have been well within the capabilities of both man and machine.
The dependable airliner could fly at speeds of 310 miles per hour and at altitudes of well over 20,000 feet— higher than most aircraft of the time and sufficient to clear the tallest peaks in the area. Reginald Cook had been recruited to the airline from the elite RAF Bomber Command Pathfinder Force, and like all BSAA pilots had received additional navigational training.

The crew maintained Morse-code radio contact with the ground for the duration of the flight, and just before it was scheduled to arrive they signalled their approach. But then a mysterious signal was received at Santiago airfield—comprising the letters “S-T-E-N-D-E-C”. Aware of no such Morse abbreviation, the radioman at Santiago requested a repeat of the signal, and the same cryptic message was received twice more. This inexplicable message was the last one received from flight CS-59; it answered subsequent signals with silence, and it never arrived at its destination. Mount TupungatoAn extensive aerial search was mounted, while the Chilean and Argentine armies combed the area on foot. No trace of Star Dust was found. For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident.

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When 21-year-old Ashley Towns released the very first iPhone virus from his home in Wollongong a week ago he was not anticipating death threats, media interviews or job offers.

But he says he got all three in one day after an audacious viral security “experiment” got out of hand, pushing Rick Astley’s face onto hundreds of iPhone screens and making headlines around the world.

It all began when Towns was downloading programs for writing iPhone applications.

“I was reading a blog that said in bold letters to change your passwords and I wondered how many had.”

It turned out that most of the people on his network had not.

“So I started writing it from there. I stayed up all night and when I was half asleep I decided to test it.

"I didn’t really think about legal consequences at the time. I honestly never expected it to go this far.

"I thought it would spread to no more than 10 or 15 people.”

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Facebook password reset confirmation is a virus. Many people have received emails titled Facebook password reset confirmation. The email that seem to be coming from Facebook contains a deadly virus that can destroy your computer.

The Facebook has made some substantial changes in social networking site recently. And many people who are usually caution seem to have been bitten by the mail thinking that it was a genuinely Facebook email.
Besides recent changes in Facebook feed and news feed, the social networking site a few weeks ago had also launched Facebook lite.
Many people have said that it is something akin to Twitter and that Facebook is preparing to take their fight with Twitter to higher level.

Some said that it is going to be a premium service that will come at a price and would not be free as Facebook is right now.
But that is apparently not true. After months of complaining that this social networking site is super slow, the company has realized that in order to get more eyeballs or footfalls from around the world it needs to have a faster version.
And Facebook lite is going to be certainly facebook lightening fast.

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website’s name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

The Ares I-X and the space shuttle on the launchpads at KSC. Credit: NASA.

Possible rain and high clouds are the only "ifs" so far for the test flight of the Ares I-X rocket on Tuesday morning, the first test flight of a new rocket for NASA in over 30 years. Central to the concern about weather is a possible static discharge called "tribo electrification" created by the outer coating of the rocket if flies through cloud vapor or precipitation that is colder than -10 degrees C (14 deg. F). This static electricity could disrupt the transmission of flight test data from the rocket, one of the main reasons for the test. At a briefing Monday morning, managers for the Ares program said the only other issue they are working with also deals with weather – the timing when to remove a probe cover.

"There are no issues we are currently working," said Bob Ess, Ares I-X mission manager. "We’ve worked through all the technical issues and it is relatively unprecedented to have a vehicle this clean for this long. Right now we’re just making sure test team is ready. The probe cover is not a new problem; we want to be smart and protect ourselves for when we take it off, because once you take it off you can’t put it on."

The probe is covered by a "sock" that is Velcroed over the cover. The cover has to be removed manually by pulling a lanyard attached to the cover. If the cover is taken off and it starts to rain, water could get inside, freeze and cause problems with the probe. This doesn’t cause any issues of the vehicle being able to fly, but could cause issues with taking and receiving data.

The probe is part of over 700 sensors for the flight.

The launch window opens at 8 am EDT (1200 GMT), but managers said they can use the entire four-hour window if necessary. $445 million test flight will last six minutes from liftoff to splashdown, with the Ares I-X reaching a maximum altitude of 46,000 km (153,000 feet) and a top velocity more than 4.7 times the speed of sound.

NASA weather officer Kathy Winters said there is a chance of isolated showers, not widespread, but clouds could be a problem. Currently Winters reports a 40% chance of favorable weather for Tuesday. If a 24 hour delay is called, the weather improves to 60% chance of good weather on Wednesday and 70% on Thursday.
"This is a test flight, and not human flight, so there’s not the level of redundancy and the amount analysis if it was," said Ess. "There are no guarantees, but we have high confidence in the vehicle. We know we’ll learn a lot from this."

Ess said the main data they will be looking for is that the stage separation occurs at the altitude and speeds that are expected from computer models. "We’ll be receiving data during the flight," Ess said, "and we’ll get a data recorder back when we recover the booster. We’ll get a huge amount of data from the recorders and compare it with ground station tracking. We’ll merge two different data sets, to get the ‘best of source,’ as its called — get the cleanest , data we can get. That takes a couple of weeks. We have scheduled to give 30-, 60- and 90-day reports, and will be looking through sensor data for any surprises. We have computer models what we expect to see."

Top of their list of things to look for are information about thrust oscillation issues which have been reported to be a potential show stopper for the Ares program, as well as monitoring acoustics and other pressure sensors. "It will be a long process to go through the large amount of data we’ll be getting" Ess said.
Over 200 sensors will measure how vehicle will bend and stretch throught the various parts of the flight. They are also interested in seeing how robust the parachute deployment sequence is. A large amount of that data will be gathered through imagery by a chase plane.

When asked about the possibility of this being the only flight for Ares – since the Augustine Commission Report seems to hint at a possible future without the Ares 1 vehicle, Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley said, "What is most critical is that we learn something, and what does it mean for generations coming up. Key for future of human spaceflight is to have tools that allow us to go places we’ve never gone before, and we need substantial tools in our tool kit… What you see in Ares I-X is a stepping stone along the way. With any other architecture we’d be following a similar approach. Whatever the nation asks us to do, the Ares I-X demonstrates a lot of learning."

Source: NASA press briefing

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