Google – Project 10 to the 100th

Google wants to know if you have an idea that can improve the lives of as many people as possible. And it wants to know before Oct 20.

“These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact,” the king of search on the Internet said.

Google has US$10mil (RM33mil) to turn five of the best ideas it receives into reality.

It will first identify 100 best ideas and then ask Google users to vote on which ones should be funded. Their votes will result in a shortlist of 20, which a panel of judges will further distil to five.

The call is part of Google’s 10th birthday celebrations and known as Project 10^ 100 (pronounced Project 10 to the 100th).

“We have learned over the last 10 years at Google that great ideas can come from anywhere,” it said in a statement to the press.

“We want to extend to the world the idea that great ideas come from all angles.”

Google said it knows that there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition. It cited some examples of cool ideas.

There’s a team of two implementing a solution to help the millions of people who laboriously carry on their heads five-gallon buckets of water over long distances, it said.

The team has designed The Hippo Water Roller — a relatively inexpensive 24-gallon container that can be easily wheeled on the ground.

Another cool idea, said Google, is to have communities tacking on WiFi devices to public buses so they can detect and send stored e-mail messages as the buses travel through unconnected areas.

Visit http://www.project10tothe100.com/ for more details.

How to participate?

1. Send your idea by October 20th.

Simply fill out the submission form. <——click here to fill up the form

2. Voting on ideas begins on January 27th.

3. Google will help bring these ideas to life.

Project 10 to the 100th consist of 8 categories:

Category Descriptions

Here are the categories in which we’ll be considering ideas.

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Open Source SOA Benifits

The benefits of the service-oriented architecture are widely touted: reduced integration costs, greater asset reuse, and the ability for IT to respond more quickly to changing business and regulatory requirements. But what about the pitfalls?

SOA pioneers know all too well the challenges that can arise when a company service-enables critical applications. The SOA endeavor spans IT disciplines: It’s part systems design and architecture overhaul, part application development and business makeover. Here, early adopters and other experts give their best advice about avoiding the obstacles when building this New Data Center essential, the SOA.

SOA requires the integration of many varied processes, applications and technologies that are difficult to mesh seamlessly, meaning incompatibility, scalability and flexibility issues often arise. The license-fee structure of traditional software can also limit options and add cost. Turning to open source technology can help alleviate these issues and accelerate deployment, as well as business adoption.

Open source has become a staple of enterprise-class IT as concerns about stability, security and support fall away. Open source is as stable, secure and well supported as proprietary solutions, if not more so. In addition open source SOA solutions provide:

• Simplicity – Open source solutions are easy to find and easy to implement, with many architects and developers being familiar with the core mechanics of the technology. Open source developers are motivated by their communities to deliver easy-to-use frameworks and platforms. It also enables enterprises to rapidly create solutions to deliver tangible, measurable benefits.

• Openness – The flexibility inherent in open source allows for more freedom and personalization of the solution than proprietary offerings, and means that an organization will see more value relevant to its operations from the installation.

• Affordability – The open source subscription model makes SOA products less expensive than proprietary tool sets.

The benefits of open source SOA solutions can be realized in each of the six stages of the SOA evolution:

1) business process understanding;

2) IT assessment;

3) SOA design/determination;

4) SOA service enablement;

5) SOA integration and governance infrastructure;

and

6) process orchestration/composition.

For the first three steps, work efforts are focused on the business processes, current IT design and SOA design, and the open source subscription model offers a more affordable and flexible pricing structure than traditional SOA solutions. That helps the SOA design work proceed more quickly without concern about per-CPU license fees.

The advantages of open source solutions are particularly evident during the final three steps in the process.

quickly without concern about per-CPU license fees.

The advantages of open source solutions are particularly evident during the final three steps in the process.

Intel’s New SATA Solid-State Drive to Ship

Last month, Intel tossed its hat into the ring that is solid-state with the announcement of a series of flash drives. The company unveiled that it would start with 80 and 160 GB MLC drives and 32 and 64 GB SLC drives before following up with larger designs in 2009.

Today Intel released price points and a few other details for its Intel Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive, or X25-M. The 80GB drive uses NAND flash technology and will available this week for $595. According to this CNET News article, that works out to about $7.43 per gigabyte. Most other drives cost around $3.50 per gigabyte.

One reason for the price could be the drive’s performance. PC World reports the X25-M blew away the competition in its lab tests.

Space Station Laptops Catch Virus

Malware has managed to get off the planet and onto the International Space Station, NASA confirmed last week. And it’s not the first time that a worm or virus has stowed away on a trip into orbit.

The attack code, which space news site SpaceRef.com identified Monday as “W32.Gammima.AG,” infected at least one of the laptops used on the station, an international effort headlined by the U.S. and Russia.

NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries declined to identify the malware, saying only that anti-virus software detected a worm on July 25.

The first public report of malware about the ISS was logged earlier this month, on Aug. 11. In NASA’s daily status report on the station that day, the agency said. Sergey Volkov, the International Space Station (ISS) commander, was “working on the Russian RSS-2 laptop” and “ran digital photo flash cards from stowage through a virus check with the Norton AntiVirus application.”

A week later, on Aug. 21 Volkov “checked another Russian laptop, today RSK-1, for software virus by scanning its hard drives and a photo disk.”

The next day, Volkov transmitted antivirus scanning results from the laptop to Earth, and American astronaut Greg Chamitoff scanned another computer for possible infection. NASA also said in Friday’s report that all laptops on board the ISS were being loaded with anti-virus software.

“All A31p laptops onboard are currently being loaded with [the] latest [Norton AntiVirus] software and updated definition files for increased protection,” said NASA.

W32.Gammima.AG, the name Symantec Corp., maker of Norton AntiVirus, gives the malware, is a year-old Windows worm designed to steal information from players of 10 different online games, some of them specific to the Chinese market. Among the games: ZhengTu, HuangYi Online and Rohan.

The worm also plants a rootkit on the infected system, and transmits hijacked data to a remote server.

Today, Humphries said that the worm poses no threat. “It was never a threat to any command-and-control or operations computer,” he said. He refused to detail how the malware snuck aboard, citing “IT security issues,” but other sources, including SpaceRef.com, speculated that it might have stowed away on a laptop or a flash card.

In fact, the Aug. 11 ISS log entry hinted at digital camera storage cards as a suspect.

“There have been other incidents,” confirmed Humphries, who works at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Tex. “I don’t know when the first one was, but the station will have been in orbit for 10 years [come] November.”

“If there is any good news at all, it’s that the malware was designed to steal usernames and passwords from computer game players, not something that orbiting astronauts are likely to be spending a lot of time doing,” said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos Plc., in a post to that company’s blog today. “After all, with a view like that who needs to play the likes of World of Warcraft?”