Tendulkar, cricketing fraternity pay tributes to Bal Thackeray

NEW DELHI: The cricketing fraternity today condoled the sad demise of Bal Thackeray with fellow Maharashtrian Sachin Tendulkar leading the pack, saying the Shiv Sena patriarch will “always be remembered and missed”.

Tendulkar said Thackeray’s demise is a “terrible loss” for Maharashtra and he would have personally liked to pay his last respects to the Shiv Sena supremo had he not been playing in the first cricket Test against England in Ahmedabad.

“Really sad to hear about Balasaheb’s demise. His contribution to Maharashtra was immense. It’s a terrible loss and he will always be remembered and missed,” Tendulkar said in a message on his facebook page.

“Unfortunately I am in Ahmedabad as I would have liked to pay my last respects personally. My condolences to his family. May God rest his soul in peace,” he added.

The 86-year-old cartoonist-turned politician, Thackeray, known for his strong views and speaking his mind, breathed his last at 3.30pm at his residence ‘Matoshree’ in suburban Bandra after after having been critically ill for the past few days.

Tendulkar was joined by team-mate Harbhajan Singh in paying tributes to Thackeray.

“Rip to great bala saheb thackeray ji.you wil be missed.very sad to hear the news. condolence to the family. respect,” the off-spinner wrote on his twitter page.

Mumbai batsman Rohit Sharma also paid his respects to Thackeray on his twitter page.

“Roaring tiger of Mumbai-Maharashtra is no more..rip balasaheb thackeray,” he wrote.

IPL chairman and Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, Rajeev Shukla also offered his condolences on twitter.

“I would like to offer my deepest condolences to the Thakre Family on the passing away of Shri Bal Thakre. May his soul rest in eternal peace,” said Shukla, who is also the vice-president of BCCI.

Bal Thackeray dies, life comes to a halt in Maharashtra

MUMBAI: Life virtually came to a halt in several parts of Maharashtra following the death of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray today.

Samsung Chromebook review: The one we’ve been waiting for (at least in price)

he good: The Samsung Chromebook is a lightweight, thin, and inexpensive laptop for those times when all you need is a powerful browser.
The bad: The Chromebook’s low price comes out in its build quality and performance.
The bottom line: The $249 Samsung Chromebook is a good extra computer for cloud-loving Google-centric Web users.
With Google Chromebooks, price really does make all the difference.

It’s Off to the Tablet Races for Amazon’s Big Kindle Fire

Amazon began shipping its 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD on Thursday, ahead of its original planned schedule. The specs and price point of the device are interesting enough that it will certainly make some inroads in the tablet market: Among other features, it sports a front-facing HD camera, 16-GB or 32-GB storage options, and 10 hours of battery life.

The 16-GB model is priced at US$299 and the 32 GB at $369. Later this month, an LTE option will ship for $500.
Content Is King

Amazon is lucky among tablet makers, of course, in that its primary goal is not necessarily to make much — or even any — profit from hardware sales. Its interest lies in the anticipated revenue stream from content users buy or rent to consume on the device.

This approach to the market allows Amazon to try just about anything it thinks will meet market demand. Whether it will or not — try anything, that is — is a matter of debate.

The Full-Sized Tablet Market

The 8.9-inch form factor was a bet Amazon had to make if it wanted to go head-to-head with Apple’s full-sized iPad, and it exhibited some confidence going into this venture.

“What few know is that while the larger and more expensive Kindle didn’t sell as well as the original size, the users were far more active and loyal,” Rob Enderle, principal of the Enderle Group, told the E-Commerce Times. “Keeping your most loyal users happy is a good strategy for any vendor.”

The 8.9-inch model completes Amazon’s line of Fire tablets and Paperwhite e-readers, and Amazon will expand into other areas only if this model moves well, he predicted.

“They aren’t interested in becoming a generic device maker — at least not at the moment,” Enderle said.

Competing With the Surface

However, Amazon is interested in taking down its competition, which now includes Microsoft’s Surface tablet.

As it continues to compete with the iPad — and now the Surface as well — Amazon could find itself focusing more on expensive, high-end hardware.

The head of Amazon’s Kindle division, Mike Nash, spent 20 years at Microsoft, noted Laura DiDio, principal of ITIC. “He is a very savvy marketer who has worked on many different projects at Microsoft. I don’t think Amazon has fully leveraged his expertise — not yet, at least. There is more to come from him.”

Amazon’s next move will be to take on the Surface with a more full-featured product, she predicted.

“Amazon seems to be watching and trying to improve on both Apple and Microsoft,” observed DiDio. “They are saying to consumers, ‘we can innovate too, and we can do it at a lower price.'”

That’s All, Folks

Then again, Amazon might be hesitant to stray far from its content-oriented business model.

“While the Kindle is clearly a media consumption device, Microsoft is positioning the Surface more as a general- purpose computing platform that supports well-known productivity apps,” Charles King, principal of Pund-IT, told the E-Commerce Times.

“Frankly, I don’t think Amazon is capable of playing that angle unless it has something up its sleeve in apps,” he said.

“Google is a much clearer opponent of the Surface in this sense, given the strength of its Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and other services — let along the size of the Android app market,” King pointed out.

Amazon also must consider that other vendors are attempting to make content plays, Azita Arvani of the Arvani Group told the E-Commerce Times.

“The competition has changed on the content side of the tablet market,” she said. “Apple, Amazon and Google are all trying to not just sell devices, but use the devices as a conduit to sell other digital goods.”

India second in requesting user info: Google

The Indian government made the second largest demand for Web user information — next only to the United States government — to Google in the six-month period from January to June this year, according to the ‘Transparency Report’ published by the Web services major on Tuesday.

During the six-month period, the Indian government — both by way of court orders and by way of requests from police— requested Google to disclose user information 2,319 times over 3,467 users/accounts. Google fully or partially complied with the request to the tune of 64 per cent. Only the U.S. government requested more data during the period — 7,969 requests over 16,281 accounts, compliance rate: 90 per cent.

It is the sixth time Google has brought out the bi-annual report detailing its interactions with the world government agencies. It details two categories of interactions : requests to divulge user data; and requests to pull down content. India ranked seventh in the list of requests to pull down data; experts say that the possible reason could be the government not having such powers under the Constitution.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director with Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, said that the Google report was a damning indictment of the country’s government exceeding its constitutional bounds by demanding removal of material for defamation, government criticism, etc., without a valid court order. “There are no laws in our country that allows the executive or the police to remove such material without a court order.”

Substantial spike

In all, 33 countries figure in the report. There was a substantial spike when compared to previous reports with respect to the number of requests from various governments to pull down content.

“In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 36,614 accounts,” wrote Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst, on the Official Google Blog while presenting the report. “The number of government requests to remove content from our services was largely flat from 2009 to 2011. But it’s spiked in this reporting period. In the first half of 2012, there were 1,791 requests from government officials around the world to remove 17,746 pieces of content.”

Google is leading the cause for voluntary disclosure of the interactions it has with the governments. Other web services that put out similar transparency reports include micro-blogging site Twitter; cloud storage service Dropbox; and social networking site Linkedin.

Mr. Prakash said it was not enough if just the web services put out such reports. “The telecom service providers must voluntarily come out with such information,” he added.

“There is a dearth of public information about the amount of legal interception and surveillance. This does not bode well in a democratic polity.”

Bacteria that line up to make a ‘live wire’

Necessity is the mother of natural selection. When conditions become threatening, maverick or mutant members of a group which can cope with the threat survive and multiply. The latest example is the discovery of a special type of bacteria in the ocean, which join together to form a long conducting nanowire cable to transport electrons and capture the oxygen at the surface for metabolic use. This wire is not made of metal, alloy or other usual material, but of living biological cells. The report by Dr. Christian Pfeiffer and others in the 8 November 2012 issue of Nature is a live example of the Panchatantra tale which teaches the value of cooperation between individuals to win over a problem.

All organisms gain energy for living through metabolism. The vital step in the process is the burning or oxidation of the food molecules. Chemists define oxidation as the loss of electrons and reduction as the gain of electrons. We burn our food by the breathing of oxygen in the air. When we oxidize our food and gain energy, the oxygen molecule is reduced by accepting or gaining electrons to make water, while the food molecule is oxidized by losing electrons; this is not much different from burning petrol for energy.

What if no oxygen?

What about organisms that live in places where there is no oxygen? They too metabolize their food through oxidation. But, rather than oxygen, they utilize whatever electron-acceptor molecules are available in the environment. One such group lives in marine sediments, below the surface, and it use the sulphates in the sediment as the electron-acceptors for ‘burning’ and gaining energy, an example of making do with available resources. In the process, however, the sulphate gains electrons and is reduced all the way to hydrogen sulphide (HS), a poisonous material. How then is this sulphide removed?

The problem

Look at the problem. If HS can be oxidized to sulphur, the situation turns safer. But in the process electrons are liberated and should be accepted by a partner. If only oxygen at the surface can be reached and the electrons transferred to it, we will have HS becoming S and the O reduced to H O. How does one transfer the electrons centimetres away? It is no longer a process within the cell where reactions happen within nanometres, and the oxidant and reductant molecules are in contact. What is needed is an efficient method — an electrical cable or wire for transporting the electrons from the sulphide to the oxygen above.

It is here that biology springs an unexpected surprise. In the sedimental layer beneath the marine surface lives a class of anaerobic bacteria called Desulfobulbaceae, which Pfeffer and colleagues find to densely populate the sediments. And these live not as individuals but in groups strung together as long, multicellular filaments or rods, some as long as 1.5 centimetres. And these filaments reach out from the sulphide-rich sedimental layer to the aerobic top layer a few centimetres above, which has dissolved oxygen (from the air). These filaments thus connect the anoxic layers to the oxic layer. And what do they do? They capture the electrons generated when the HS is oxidized to S at the bottom, and transport them all the way to the oxygen at the top, which accepts them and generates water or HO. In other words, the Desulfobulbaceae bacteria line up to make a live wire.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments to show how the filaments form and work. They layered the sedimental layer below in the lab and covered is with the overlying oxic sea water and studied the process. As the sulphide oxidation happened in the deeper anoxic layers, distinct change in the pH was noticed, confirming the process. And when they gently disturbed the layer, they found the 12-15 run long fibrous filaments entangled. Genetic analysis of the filaments showed their identity as Desulfobulbaceae. It appears that at least 40 million cells come together to assemble filaments of lengths as much as 1.5 cm, showing that the bacteria could span the length of the entire anoxic layer.

Liquid-filled layer

Electron microscopy showed that the cells were connected lengthwise, and each cell had a liquid-filled layer in the periplasmic space between the outer and inner cytoplasmic membranes. These liquid compartments formed ridges connecting the each cell to its neighbour, suggesting electron transport occurring through this fluid tubular structure covered with a continuous outer membrane along the filament acting as the insulator — the ancient precursor, if you will, of the electric cable of today. Hair-like appendages, called pili, of some bacteria are known to be electron transporters, but the whole cell acting so, and joining with others to make a conducting wire is novel, and reported for the first time.

Plenty of room

The physicist Richard Feynman famously remarked that there is plenty of room at the bottom. Bacterial filaments acting as electric nanowires is but one example. Some cyanobacteria called Anabena, which are able to ‘fix’ nitrogen, also form such continuous periplasmic filaments. And when a fluorescent protein was engineered into some its cells, the fluorescence was found to move along the filament from one cell to the other. Here is an example of material transfer, while with Desulfobulbaceae, it is electrons that are transported. Surely there is far more room at the bottom, and nanotechnologists can learn a lesson or two from such bacteria.

Nexus 4 Now Sold Out: Poor Sales Launch by Google Read more at http://androidheadlines.com/2012/11/nexus-4-now-sold-out-poor-sales-launch-by-google.html#1dJ22eQCh8DQ7uJ8.99

So, it seems that Google has yet again struggled to launch hardware into the world. We thought that the web giant would have been over this by now what with the poor launch of the Nexus 7 but it seems like the launch of the Nexus 4 and the Nexus 10 were too much for their serves. All over Google+ we’ve been hearing word that the Play Store was an absolute mess when trying to order a device and some of our own writers have experienced this. It looks like the Nexus 4 is now completely sold out, both the 8GB and the 16GB models sold out in under 30 minutes. Which raises a whole lot of questions…

Did Google Not Think the Nexus 4 Was In Demand?
I don’t want to go off on a tangent here but did Google really not have any idea of how popular a phone of this caliber at this price point was going to be? From the way the Play Store was geared up to handle orders today it was as if the Search Giant thought they had a loser on their hands. The Play Store has been nothing but a mess of server errors, inane Google Wallet egg-timers and general confusion. Of course things are going to be a little wonky when it comes to a new product launch but, really Google? This was the best you could do on the day your flagship device went live? Historically the Nexus program has never done that well when it comes to sales – there’s a reason we never see number of Nexus phones – but how can they not see that at that price, for that phone people were going to go crazy over it?

Had Google Done Anything to Prepare the Play Store for This?
It looks like Google didn’t do much at all to help bolster the Play Store’s defences when it comes to the sheer amount of traffic they received. I’m still on the fence when it comes to ordering one of the devices but even when I was refreshing the page I got errors and whatnot when the site went live in the UK. It looks to me as if Google should really do something about the Play Store as when the devices page went live for orders in the US there was nothing but error messages and uncertainty. You can say what you will about other retailers but I doubt that a launch has been as bad as this in a very long time. How is that that the World’s biggest presence on the web can’t launch and sell their own phones and devices properly? The Play Store looked like a boxer on his last leg’s this morning and if Google are smart, they’ll do something about it, and fast.

Why Have Google Not Said Anything?
Then there’s the whole issue of waiting and wondering when the devices were going to actually go live for orders. With people not knowing exactly when they could get their hands on the devices, people were lying in wait all day long, ready and waiting to pounce on their Web Browsers like hungry Lions. This isn’t good for any server – no matter how large – as it doesn’t take a lot to flood one with traffic. If Google came clean and were vocal about the launch then I don’t think it would have been anywhere near as bad as this, there’s no word on Google when the devices will be in stock and some of you out there are still waiting on confirmation thanks to massive errors with Google Wallet. For a company that owns and runs their own social network, they don’t seem to know how to use it very well.

Did You Get One?
This is perhaps the most pressing question of all, did you get your hands on one of these Nexus devices? If you did, let us know what it was and how your experience was!

‘Skyfall’ Wins Box Office, Sets Franchise Record

Taking in an estimated $87.8 million this weekend in the U.S., Skyfall made box office history as the biggest debut for a Bond film ever.
Video: Exclusive Secret Visit to New Bond Flick ‘Skyfall’
The 23rd movie in the franchise, and star Daniel Craig’s third’s turn as the famed super-spy, took in $20 million more its opening weekend than 2008’s Quantum of Solace ($67.5 million), the franchise’s former best.
Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph placed second with $33.1 million. The family friendly flick maintained a steady lead above Denzel Washington’s Flight, which took in $15.1 million.
Related: The Real Story Behind Bond, James Bond
Argo held forth this week at $6.7 million, followed closely behind by Liam Neeson’s Taken 2 at $4.0 million.

Kim Kardashian befriends Stacy Keibler

Kim Kardashian has found a new BFF in Stacy Keibler, after Beyonce showed little interest in palling around with reality star.

The retired professional wrestler has been linked to George Clooney since July 2011 and the 31-year-old reality star was spotted with her a number of times last week.

According to a source, Kardashian and Keibler first bumped into each other at Yankee Stadium last weekend at the Madonna concert, which Kardashian attended with her BFF Jonathan Cheban, who’s also friendly with Keibler.

“They’ve known each other for years and have always been friendly, just not best friends,” the New York Daily News quoted a source as saying.

During the week, the duo also hung out at the Marchesa fashion show in Grand Central Station, which Kardashian attended with West.

On Thursday, the pals were spotted again at The Palladium Jewelry By Jacob and Co. Launch Celebration hosted by W Magazine at Jacob and Co. Flagship’s store in midtown.

Emma Watson supports Africa schools charity

” Harry Potter” actress Emma Watson has shown her support for a charity supplying vital equipment to schools in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Back to School Shop work to raise funds for education supplies including stationery and uniforms, as well as six-month or one-year bursaries for impoverished students in the region, reports express.

Watson, who showed her support for good causes in 2009 by launching her own ethical clothing range in aid of fair trade fashion charity People Tree, has thrown her weight behind the campaign.

“Please help CAMFED with their campaign to give that one thing their students need to go to school,” the 22-year-old tweeted Thursday.