My 50th Post: Java founder James Gosling joins Google

James Gosling, the notable programmer who founded Java at Sun Microsystems, has joined Google, a company locked in a lawsuit over how the technology is used in Android.

Gosling announced his new Google employment today on his blog. "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon," he said.

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, Gosling decided not to join.

Oracle's ways evidently didn't agree with Gosling. He called Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison "Larry, Prince of Darkness." And, he said, "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle."

Oracle sued Google for patent and copyright infringement concerning how Android uses software called Dalvik that's very similar to Java. A prime benefit to using Java is that it shields programs from the differences of underlying hardware, such as different processors, letting a single program run on a variety of computing devices.

Google has some of the bubbling, research-intensive ethos that characterized Sun, but it's vastly more commercially successful. And unlike Sun, it's managed to become a household name.

Gosling was on his own for about a year. "One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities," he said on his blog.

Was The Apollo Moon Landing Fake?

According to DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, the most important film of its kind since Oliver Stone's JFK - or since Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, at any rate - images of Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon on July 20, 1969 were shown to the world through the lens of master film-maker Stanley Kubrick and were staged on the same Borehamwood, U.K., soundstage where Kubrick made his landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.


Thursday, July 13, 2006: The original high-quality video tapes of Apollo 11, which were apparently sent by NASA to the National Archives and then were returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center, have gone missing (see the pdf by John M. Sarkissian).  The quality of the video broadcast to the world on television was of much, much lower quality than the video originally received – or manufactured! - by NASA.  Obviously, if you were going to fake the moon landing, you might have a motive to ‘lose’ the high-quality tapes, where artifacts of faking could be seen.  This was by far the biggest moment in the American space program.  You’d think they would care about hanging on to the evidence.

Motives

Several motives have been suggested for the U.S. government to fake the moon landings - some of the recurrent elements are:

1. Distraction - The U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam war. Lunar activities did abruptly stop, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the US ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.
2. Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it was possible, would have been risky and expensive. It would have been much easier to fake the landing, thereby ensuring success.
3. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars pretending to go to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. In variations of this theory, the space industry is characterized as a political economy, much like the military industrial complex, creating fertile ground for its own survival.
4. Risk - The available technology at the time was such that there was a good chance that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted.

The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and an intense economic and political and military rivalry with the USA, could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a Moon landing. Theorist Ralph Rene responds that shortly after the alleged Moon landings, the USA silently started shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of grain as humanitarian aid to the allegedly starving USSR. He views this as evidence of a cover-up, the grain being the price of silence. (The Soviet Union in fact had its own Moon program).Proponents of the Apollo hoax suggest that the Soviet Union, and latterly Russia, and the United States were allied in the exploration of space, during the Cold war and after. The United States and the former Soviet Union today routinely engage in cooperative space ventures, as do many other nations that are popularly believed to be enemies. However, this suggestion is challenged by the impression of intense international competition that was under way during the Cold War and is not supported by the accounts of participants on either side of the Iron Curtain. Many argue that the fact that the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries, eager to discredit the United States, have not produced any contrary evidence to be the single most significant argument against such a hoax. Soviet involvement might also implausibly multiply the scale of the conspiracy, to include hundreds of thousands of conspirators of uncertain loyalty. http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Apollo_moon_landing_hoax_accusations


For Complete Info visit: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm

Why I don’t want to be in Sachin's shoes - By HARSHA BHOGLE

Remember when you failed an examination. How many people recall that, your class, friends, relatives? You failed to make it to the IITs or IIMs. Who remembers. How many times have you had the feeling of being the best in your class, school , university, state….., you failed to get a visa stamped this quarter…, you missed a promotion this year…, how did it feel when you dad told you in your early twenties that you are good for nothing…..and now your boss tell you the same...     You keep introspecting and go into a shell when people most of whom don’t matter a dime in your life criticize you, back bite you, make fun of you. You are left sad and shattered and you cry when your own kin scoffs at you. You say I am feeling low today. It takes a lot from us to come out of these everyday situations and move on. A lot??? really?      Now here’s a man standing on the third man boundary in the last over of a world cup match. The bowler just has to bowl sensibly to win this game. What the man at the boundary sees is 4 rank bad bowls bowled without any sense of focus, planning or regret. India loses, yet again in those circumstances when he has done just about everything right.     He does not cry. Does not show any emotion. Just keeps his head down and leaves the field. He has seen these failures for 22 years now. And not just his class, relatives, friends but the whole world has seen these failures. We are too immature to even imagine what goes on in that mind and heart of his. That’s why I would never want to be Sachin.      True, he has single handedly lifted to moods of this entire nation umpteen number of times. He has been an inspiration to rise above our mediocrity. Nobody who has ever lifted the willow even comes close to this man’s genius. His dedication and metal strength is unparallel. This is specially for those people who would have made fun of him again last night when India lost. They are people who are mediocre in their own lives. Who just scoff at others to create cheap fun. Who have lived in a small hole throughout their lives and thought they have seen the oceans.     Think about the man himself. He is 37 years of age. He has been playing almost non stop for 22 years. The way he was running and diving around the field last night would have put 22 year olds to shame. The way he played the best opening quickies in the world was breathtaking. He just keeps getting better which is by the way humanly impossible. Its not for nothing that people call him GOD.     But still I don’t want to be in those shoes. We struggle in keeping our monotonous lives straight, lives which affect a limited number of people. Imagine what would be the magnitude of the inner struggle for him, pain both mental and physical, tears that have frozen with time, knees and ankles and every other joint in the body that is either bandaged or needs to be attended to every night, eyes that don’t sleep before a big game, bats that have scored 99 international tons and still see expectations from a billion people.      And he just converts those expectations into reality. We watch in awe, feel privileged.     Well I think its time that his team realizes that enough is enough. They have an obligation, not towards their country alone but towards sachin. They need to win this one for him. Stay assured that he himself will still deliver and leave no stone unturned to make sure India wins this cup.     This is not just a game, and he is not just a sportsman. Its much more than this. Words fail here..... 


--- HARSHA BHOGLE

Inside IE9: How Microsoft rewrote its browser from scratch

Jason Weber, lead program manager for IE performance.

Jason Weber’s office boasts a fantastic view, a gigantic monitor — and some of the least-impressive machines you’ll find on the Microsoft campus. His 4-year-old PC runs an early Intel Core 2 Duo processor. On his Tablet PC, the processor is mere 1 GHz.

And that’s precisely the way he likes it. Weber is Internet Explorer’s lead program manager for performance, and his team’s work has been a key part of overhauling Internet Explorer 9, the new version of the browser set for public release tonight.

“If I can make IE9 fast here, I can make it fast anywhere,” Weber explains, noting with almost a hint of pride that the graphics scores of his various machines are all in the bottom 20 percent of PCs run by everyday computer users. If the browser is running smoothly and quickly on his setup, he says, “a high-end machine is just going to scream.”

Those performance improvements will be critical to Microsoft’s efforts to regain traction in the browser market, in the face of tough competition from Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and others.

Microsoft also still needs to overcome lingering negativity about its browser, resulting in part from years of neglect in which little to no work took place on Internet Explorer — creating a five-year gap between major versions, between 2001 and 2006.