Soyuz blast-off preparation in full swing
Engineers are going through the final checks on the latest Soyuz spacecraft, due to blast off in three days, taking three members to create the first six-person crew on the International Space Station.
Hubble analyzer fixed, but not without headaches
On a marathon spacewalk Sunday, two astronauts overcame repeated obstacles to make the second of two historic repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope.
One bolt that had to be extracted proved so stubborn that astronaut Michael Massimino resorted to brute force to rip it out of the telescope.
Google puts flu tracker to work on swine flu
April 29, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Top Stories
Using a new tracking tool, search engine giant Google said on Wednesday it saw a spike in searches for information about flu among people in Mexico last week even before news of the outbreak became widely known.
Google said it has put together a flu trends tracking system for Mexico based on the U.S. Google Flu tool launched last fall that is used by U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out where influenza is heating up.
It is based on Google’s observation that people who are sick with flu tend to search for the same types of information on the Internet, and these searches can be used to predict where an outbreak may be occurring.
Yahoo to lay off 675 after profit slides 78%
April 22, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Search Engines, Top Stories
Yahoo Inc. confirmed Tuesday that it will cut 675 jobs, 5 percent of its workforce, as its online advertising business continued to erode in the first quarter amid economic gloom.
The Sunnyvale Web portal said it would carry out the layoffs, the third round in just over a year, in the next two weeks in hopes of saving money and freeing resources to hire elsewhere in the company. Executives said the cuts will be focused on Yahoo’s product managers and engineers.
Skype for iPhone — it’s official
March 31, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Partnership
Months after teasing us at CES with an announcement of Skype’s native VoIP client for the iPhone, the free Skype for iPhone will finally be available to download from the iTunes App Store sometime on Tuesday.
We got a chance to sit down with the application’s principal engineer before the announcement was made at CTIA 2009, to see Skype for iPhone do its thing.
While most of the features aren’t too surprising–Skype does want to maintain some consistency across its mobile applications, after all–there are a few capabilities that are notably missing, and a few iPhone-only perks that are refreshing to see.
Computer Worm to attack on April Fool’s Day
March 27, 2009 by NetCrunch
Filed under Internet Security, Top Stories
Rumors has it, the dreaded fast-moving computer that infected at least 3 million computers, is set to attack again on April 1, 2009.
The army of Conficker-infected machines, known as a “botnet,” could be one of the greatest cybercrime tools ever assembled. Conficker’s authors just need to figure out a way to reliably communicate with it.
Infected Machines need commands to come alive. So far, Conficker-infected PC’s have been trying to connect each day to 250 Internet domains. The hackers needs to get just one of those sites under their control to send their commands to the botnet. (The name Conficker comes from rearranging letters in the name of one of the original sites the worm was connecting to.)
Jerry Sanders – American Businessman
Walter Jeremiah Sanders III (born September 12, 1936) was a co-founder and a long-time CEO of the American semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
Jerry Sanders III grew up in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, raised by his paternal grandparents. He was once attacked and beaten by a street gang that left him so covered with blood that a priest was called in to administer the last rites, but Jerry recovered. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on an academic scholarship from the Pullman railroad car company. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1958.
Biswamohan Pani – Indian Engineer
Biswamohan Pani is an Indian-born engineer who has been charged with stealing trade secrets from chipmaker Intel. Pani began working for Intel’s competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), during the last few weeks of his employment with Intel. During this time, the affadavitt alleges, Biswamohan downloaded top secret documents detailing future Intel projects onto his computer.
Biswamohan Pani – Sci-techs.com
