The Kers

Kers means Kinetic Energy Recovery System. Its a device used in some Formula 1 cars to boost acceleration. The technique stores the kinetic energy that is released as a waste when the car's brakes are applied and later uses this energy to convert it into power. This makes the car more environment friendly as the power comes from energy that would have been wasted. During overtaking, the driver uses the Kers button present on his steering wheel.

More Details:
http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/understanding_the_sport/8763.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake

Everything has an End

One can say that Robin Soderling has the ability of providing stunning upsets at least at the French Open and he has now done that for the second time in a row. Rafael Nadal who is regarded as the "King of Clay", was playing for his 5th consecutive French Open title and was unbeaten for the last 31 times there. The dream run had to end when the Swede came from no where to beat him and the Rafa fans ( including me :) ) had a heart break.

This time it was Roger Federer's turn to be beaten by Robin. Roger was playing to win his 17th grand slam and he is so used to reaching the top 4 with ease that he was in the semis for the last 23 grand slams. Federer who has been so consistent in grand slams will now sit back and say "Everything has an End". Will He?

Clean Technology

While going through the profile of one of the highly influential Indian Americans Mr Vinod Kholsa, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, got to know that his company Khosla Ventures has invested on a wide variety of technology sectors and one of them was by name "Clean Technology". Though its not any official name, it mainly involves technologies that create more enery effecient products and hence are more environment friendly.

Sachin Breaks Records, Servers too!

Imagining how could Sachin be the cause of breaking down servers! Employees at cricinfo know it better.
On that record breaking day (24th Feb 2010) and when Sachin was on 190 odd, he breaks a couple of Cricinfo's servers. In spite of Cricinfo having workarounds for handling peak client requests, they never expected that the concurrent users could reach such high levels. The outcome is that they have ordered a couple of Sachin Tendulkar server and are hoping to be ready for the next peak. Sachin's page recorded some 45 million page views that day and is yet another technically proved fact that he is the "God of Cricket".

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a open source software suite of office tools and come as a cost-free substitute for Microsoft Office. It supports over 110 languages and works on almost all operating systems. Sun Microsystems is its primary contributor with support from Google, Novell, IBM, RedHat and other companies.

Here is the screen shot of the various components that constitute OpenOffice suite.

• Writer - a word processor like MS Word. The best part of Writer is the feature to export the document as a Portable Document Format(pdf).
  
• Calc - a spreadsheet like MS Excel
• Impress - a presentation program like MS Powerpoint
• Base - a database management system like MS Access
• Draw - a graphic editor
• Math - a tool for mathematical formula creation
  

"My Location" - Feature for Google Maps for Mobile

"My Location" is a feature which lets applications running on your phone, to figure out the exact/approximate geographic location that you are currently in.
For handsets with built in GPS functionality, the user's current location details(latitude/longitude) are provided by the Global Navigation Satellite System. The accuracy in this case is very high and it could locate the user in the vicinity of 10 meters or less.
But currently, most of the handsets are not GPS enabled which means that there should be an alternative to find the user's current location. Google provides a way to figure out the location details for non-GPS handsets by using the cell tower id of the network service provider that the user uses. Google maintains a database of all the cell tower ids for most of the countries and also the latitude and longitude details that belong to these cell ids. The accuracy of locating the user is in the range of 400 meters to 5 Kms based on the density of the cells in a particular area. This service is much faster and consumes less battery than the GPS service. Click for the official Google video explaining this feature.

A similar feature is provided by Google to on its Google maps for the desktop browser wherein the user's current location is determined based on the IP Address or the WiFi zone that he is connected to. Check this link for the browser and setting options.

Youngest ever World #1 in Chess

Magnus Carlsen of Norway becomes the youngest world number one player in the history of FIDE according to the January 2010 ratings. At the age of 19 and with 2810 FIDE ratings he is only the fifth player after Garry Kasparov, Veselin Topalov, Vladimir Kramnik and Viswanathan Anand to score more than 2800 points. Also at age 13, he became the third youngest Grandmaster in the history of the game.