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Friday 20 July 2012

Space Shuttle Enterprise goes on display in New York

The Space Shuttle Enterprise exhibit at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum opens to the public in New York City.

The Space Shuttle Enterprise, the first of the six space shuttles, is now on display in New York.

Several months after its high-profile fly-by of the New York City skyline, the Space Shuttle Enterprise has landed on display at a New York exhibit presented by the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. The show finally opened to the public today.
The Enterprise has found its final home on the USS Intrepid. For now, it's housed in a temporary pavilion; the museum is planning a more permanent structure in the future.
The space shuttle was unveiled as part of Samsung's SpaceFest week at the museum, which also included the "launch" of the company's newest product, the 75-inch ES9000 television.
Susan Marenoff-Zausner, president of the Intrepid Museum said the space shuttle would serve as an invaluable learning tool for the schoolchildren who visit.
"We are just so proud to be able to have the Enterprise now, as this brings...a whole new dimension to our ability to excite the kids," she said.
The Enterprise is the original prototype for NASA's space shuttle program and, though it never saw space, it was instrumental in determining the cause of the Columbia disaster, as well as supplying spare parts to the other five shuttles.
Click through to the photo gallery below for more information on the space shuttle and a behind-the-scenes look at the exhibit.

Friday 13 July 2012

Ferrari F750 Concept Car For Year 2025

Ferrari has been one of the most popular car manufacturers around due to their elegant, luxurious and expensive yet the fastest of its class sport cars. And to bring us the company’s future car, designers, namely Marc Devauze, Vianney Brecheisen and Alexandre Labruyere, have created a concept of how Ferrari will look like in 2025, combined with all the future and green technology in it, beside the mind blowing aesthetics make way for the Ferrari F750. See full gallery after the break.

Gallery

The ’750′ on its moniker represents the weights that might only amount to 750Kg. There will be also two engines running the rear with petrol and the front with electric –seemed to be a normal hybrid setup. Where the petrol engine would act as a range extender and there could be shifting of engines depending on driving situations

Adobe Conducts Road Shows For Creative Suite 6

for india

Adobe has upped its ante for recently launched Creative Suite 6 product line for design, Web and video professionals in India. The company has started series of road shows to generate awareness among the partners as well as the customers.

Adobe has conducted road shows in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. “Creative Suite 6 has received enthralling response from the professionals and the partners. We will cover Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad within next three weeks. Later on, we will focus on other tier-1 cities in the next phase,” said Shrihari Palangala, Country Marketing Manager, Adobe Systems.

The series of road shows is in line with the objective to expand its base to more than 120 active partners in 2012. “We have already over-achieved that target and have about 160 active partners on-board under our recently introduced Adobe Partner Connection program,” he said.

Besides hands-on experience on latest tools in CS 6, technical sessions highlighted features for design and print digital imaging professionals, cross-media designers, Web developers, VFX artists and videographers. “All the sessions have been recorded and will be uploaded on the Website for partners and customers who missed the event,” added Palangala

Microsoft Details Four Windows Server 2012 Editions, Pricing

Microsoft will offer the upcoming Windows Server 2012 in four editions that will provide dramatically simplified licensing

The software major also disclosed that it is retiring the Small Business Server Edition, a product that had been popular among small and midsize businesses and the solution providers that sell to them.

The release candidate version of Windows Server 2012 has been available since May 31, but Microsoft has not revealed a target date for the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version that immediately precedes general availability. Like Windows 8, the next release of the desktop and tablet operating system, Windows Server 2012 is widely expected sometime this fall.

Windows Server 2012 will be offered in Datacenter, Standard, Essentials and Foundation editions. Which editions customers choose will hinge on the size of their organizations and their requirements for virtualization and cloud computing, according to Microsoft.

The Datacenter Edition is targeted at highly virtualized, private and hybrid cloud environments with unlimited virtual instances. It carries a $4,809 price tag under Microsoft's Open No Level licensing, excluding Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs).

The Standard Edition is designed for lightly virtualized or non virtualized environments, offering the same Windows Server functionality as the Data center Edition but permitting only two virtual instances. That edition costs $882, not including CALs.

Of most interest to the partners will be Windows Server 2012 Essentials Edition, which has a 25-user limit and no virtualization rights. Microsoft describes Essentials as an ideal cloud-connected first server with its simple interface and preconfigured connectivity to cloud-based services such as Office 365. The Essentials Edition, which has no virtualization rights, has a $425 price tag.

Microsoft, in a FAQ accompanying the Windows Server 2012 editions and pricing lineup, said it is discontinuing Windows Small Business Server because more small businesses are turning to cloud computing for email, backup and other services, rather than running those applications on premise. The new lineup also eliminates the Enterprise, Home Windows Server, HPC and Web Server editions that round out the current Windows Server 2008 R2 product lineup.

The new Foundation Edition, with a 15-user limit, is only available to OEMs.

Facebook highlights weddings with new feature

As the social network debuts its redesigned Events page, it tops it off with another feature that displays friends' weddings and engagements alongside birthday announcements.

What Facebook's new "Weddings and Celebrations" feature looks like.

(Credit: Facebook)

Sometimes it can be easy to miss a friend's engagement or wedding announcement on Facebook's News Feed. So the social network has decided to do something about this.
Facebook announced today a new feature called "Weddings and Celebrations." Similar to the birthday feature, the weddings and celebrations feature shows friends' status on the top right-hand side of the page once they change it to "married" or "engaged."
Here's what a Facebook spokesperson told CNET in an e-mail:

Facebook has become a unique way people share and congratulate friends around exciting life events such as engagements and weddings or the arrival of a child. To make it easier to keep up with these momentous occasions and to ensure you can share in your friends' joy, we are rolling out a "Weddings and Celebrations" feature. Beginning today, special events starting with engagements and weddings will be displayed along with friends' birthdays when you log into Facebook.

Microsoft exec's defection adds to Amazon phone mystery

A new clue for the latest parlor game on Amazon's possible entry into the smartphone race.

This may rate as one of the tech industry's worst-kept secrets, but another clue has surfaced to suggest that, yes, Amazon is indeed hard at work developing its own phone.
If you're keeping score, the latest data point concerns the job-hopping status of one Robert Williams, who used to be the top business development exec at Microsoft's Windows Phone division. Williams has now joined Amazon -- we know this thanks to Williams, who blabbed the news on his Twitter feed, complete with a tweak to his bio with this tease: "working on a top secret project called....oops, gotta go." (Good thing it's Amazon; at Apple, that's a crime punishable by death.)
We've contacted Amazon for comment and will update the post when we hear back. But the personnel move follows in the aftermath of a recent Bloomberg report that Amazon is working with Foxconn to build a device that would challenge the iPhone and Android-based phones. Separately, here's one more to toss in for today's tea leaf-reading ritual: The Wall Street Journal's sources confirm that Amazon is testing a device said to feature a screen in the neighborhood of four to five inches.

More Yahoo news

By way of context, don't forget this prediction from late last year when Citigroup also claimed the existence of an Amazon-Foxconn collaboration on a smartphone with the projected debut date sometime in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Rich Edmonds of WP Central reminds everyone that Brandon Watson, who used to be Microsoft's director of developer experience for Windows Phone, joined Amazon five months ago to work on the Kindle.

Thursday 12 July 2012

Obama signs order outlining emergency Internet control

A new executive order addresses how the country deals with the Internet during natural disasters and security emergencies, but it also puts a lot of power in the government's hands.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order last week that could give the U.S. government control over the Internet.
With the wordy title "Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions," this order was designed to empower certain governmental agencies with control over telecommunications and the Web during natural disasters and security emergencies.
Here's the rationale behind the order:

The Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions. Survivable, resilient, enduring, and effective communications, both domestic and international, are essential to enable the executive branch to communicate within itself and with: the legislative and judicial branches; State, local, territorial, and tribal governments; private sector entities; and the public, allies, and other nations. Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies, and improve national resilience.

According to The Verge, critics of the order are concerned with Section 5.2, which is a lengthy part outlining how telecommunications and the Internet are controlled. It states that the Secretary of Homeland Security will "oversee the development, testing, implementation, and sustainment" of national security and emergency preparedness measures on all systems, including private "non-military communications networks." According to The Verge, critics say this gives Obama the on/off switch to the Web. Presidential powers over the Internet and telecommunications were laid out in a U.S. Senate bill in 2009, which proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. But that legislation was not included in the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 earlier this year.
After being published by the Federal Register, executive orders take 30 days to become law. However, the president can amend, withdraw, or issue an overriding order at any time.