It really is touching the future.. Industry Pundits worldwide are already calling the iPad a big failure. People have gone on to say that the iPhone was one of the last great things we would ever see from the iconic Steve Jobs. The iPad in many ways is something that is radically new than just trying to innovate an existing market that the iPod and iPhone lines have done.

The iPad is Apple’s Computer for the rest of us. By the rest of us, I mean the people who aren’t in the Technology profession. Tech Enthusiasts world over have been crying foul that the iPad is not open and they cannot install apps of their choice. I’d have loved it if Apple allowed open App Development on the iPad without being dependent on the App Store, but the fact remains in doing so they would be jeopardizing the Experience that Apple has built around its platform.

I’m a student of Computer Science and I appreciate the power that my MacBook Pro or my Dell PC offers me, but everytime my Mom wants to send an email to somebody there are just too many steps involved with both of these platforms. But she understands how the iPhone works, it really is that simple. When I showed her the iPad video the only thing she said was I’d love to have this thing.

And it is then that realization struck me that Apple isn’t making the iPad for us Tech Enthusiasts who live by the night trying to code or to fix a bug but for the proverbial Mom who is looking for simple solutions to her problems.

Does she need Photoshop on her iPad? Does she need something like uTorrent running on her iPad? Heck No. I could easily say that atleast 80% of the Internet Connected Population uses the Internet for just EMail, Chat, Social Networking and Blogs. And the iPad solves the problem of the majority and not that of us minority who live by Technology.

Before I proceed further I want you all to watch the iPad Introduction Video. Watch it till the end, and try to gel everything that I’ve said thus far with what you see.

So why is that Tech Bloggers, the Media is calling the iPad a big failure?

First of all the print industry is scared to deaths that iPad will take over the Publishing industry. I can very well see the day when we will be reading magazines in full color and gloss on an iPad flipping through the pages just like what we do in a real magazine or a book.

And Second us the Tech Bloggers, Coders, Programmers, Computer Mechanics or whatever. We are obviously scared that we will loose our God like status in the society. Have you ever seen the pleasure that a Techie derives when he helps the average guy next door send an email or fix whatever the issue with his PC not booting up.

With the iPad, Apple is giving all these average next door neighbors a device so sexy and so easy that they won’t need us Techies anymore. Everything is so obvious and straightforward on the iPad. There are no crashes, no viruses, no weird phenomena that we have to come to associate with computing in general over the past decade.

And this is why the iPad is quite literally touching the future. No more confusing User Interfaces. Apple has taken a big step forward with the iPad. Having read elsewhere that iPad is what Apple set out to build, and the iPhone is actually is its child I can very well predict an exciting future for Apple’s MultiTouch Computing Platform.

But that does not mean iPad is not without issues. Here are some things I’d like Apple to fix before the iPad enters the market or atleast in the next product revision.

• MultiTasking
  Yes MultiTasking is a must on the iPad. It makes more sense on an iPhone to not have Multi Tasking with its limited screen estate, but the iPad a big no no. Multi Tasking is a must on the iPad.

  However there are already rumors that iPhone/iPad OS 4.0 will bring Multi Tasking to the platform. Here’s to hoping that these rumors are true.

• USB Interface
  A USB Interface is again a big request. I’d love to see an easy way to transfer my Photos from my Camera and upload it to Facebook or Flickr just like iPhoto already does on the Mac.

  I’d love to be able to complete my Spreadsheet on Numbers and plug in a USB Printer when I arrive at the office and take a quick printout to show it to my boss. The Applications are endless, so please Apple throw in a USB Connector.

• Video Camera
  This is more of a novelty though but it would be nice to do Video Chats with my friends while on the move. Ofcourse a Camera on the back is pretty much pointless because I don’t see people taking pictures with the iPad, but a front facing Camera will be welcome.

So does Apple have a Winner with the iPad? I’d say, Yes! The fundamental we compute is about to change. And Will I buy an iPad? Probably not the first revision, but definitely later. The iPad will make for an amazing second computer.

Say you type in the Wikipedia.org in your browser window. The DNS then converts the URL you typed into machine readable IP address and returns it to you. Only after the actual IP of the website is determined does the webpage begin loading for you.

OpenDNS has long since been considered the pioneer in the making the web faster by giving users a free, fast public DNS server with servers spread around the globe to reduce latency.

I’ve been using OpenDNS for the past two years for my needs, and needless to say the experience has been quite good. Not to forget the increase in speed while browsing the web. But today with the release of Google’s own DNS solution I was curious to see if it could beat the already fast service that OpenDNS provides.

So I ran my own tests sitting here in India, using this script by Manu over at TechSutra.

#!/bin/sh 
for i in "lifehacker.com" "facebook.com" "dailyapps.net"  "reddit.com" "google.com" "bbc.co.uk" "microsoft.com" "yahoo.com" "ebay.com"
do
  for j in "4.2.2.2" "8.8.4.4" "208.67.222.222"
  do
    echo $j $i `dig @$j $i | grep Query | awk -F ":" '{print $2}'`
  done
done

And here are my results :

As you can see Google DNS consistently was atleast two times faster than OpenDNS and even more faster than Level 3. Those of you in the U.S I believe shouldn’t see much performance difference between Google and Level 3.

For me personally, Google was always in the range 90-110ms while OpenDNS was in the 200-210ms range. A Significant performance boost I must say.

Is Performance a tradeoff for Privacy?

Hmm it depends on how you look at it. Surely Google has a lot of information about you, and a DNS server will only allow them to gather more data about you. They could in theory gather information about all the websites you visit. Sounds like Big Brother ain’t it, except that Google makes it explicitly clear that “Collected data includes IP address (up to 48 hours, to detect malicious behavior against the service), ISP information and geographic information (2 weeks each). The data is not correlated with your Google account in any way”

For more on what they log while using their DNS service, read the Google Public DNS Privacy Policy.

So as things stand at the moment you don’t have to worry about Privacy Issues. But OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch seems to have other concerns :

“Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet.
……
To think that Google’s DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive. They know there is value in controlling more of your Internet experience and I would expect them to explore that fully. And of course, we always have protected user privacy and have never sold our DNS data.”

At the end of the day, its pure competition. Google has been entering a lot of verticals lately, in their quest to make the web a better place for everyone. They’ve a long way to go, before they can achieve their goals.

What does this mean for OpenDNS? Well guys, you’ve had the free run for the past three years, now you got to make OpenDNS even more faster. Competition is always a wake up call.

So are you willing to give Google DNS a shot? Google has a handy guide for you to get started.

Google Public DNS (via Google Code Blog) | Photo Credit : jpctalbot

The future of computing is here. First we saw the iPhone that took Touch sensitive Mobile Phones to the masses and revolutionized the world of Mobile communication. The area of Multi touch devices is fast developing and the Microsoft Surface PC that was launched sometime back in retail AT&T Stores is just another example, how fascinating multi touch really is.

I’ve been looking for photos of Microsoft Surface in action and thanks Long Zheng I found this Flickr Set uploaded by a Microsoft Employee Jean-Luc David containing photos of applications running on Surface.

So here are a few of my favorites. For more have a look at this Flickr Set.

Rockpool Water-Ripple Demo, Pretty Cool eh!

The photo application now with support for categories and labels.

Virtual Earth on the Surface.

A puzzle game called ScatterPuzzle. Nice way to Kill time.   

Ghosts, an adoption of a puzzle game where the objective is to move objects so lines do not cross each other.

The music player. Neat Implementation IMHO!

A Cool Looking Visualization.

Surely Microsoft seems to be doing an amazing job with Microsoft Surface. Who knew you could have so much fun over a coffee table?

If you’re fed up with your current Mobile Phone’s battery, don’t fret, the future of Battery technology, just got brighter, with Nanotechnology promising upto 10 times more battery life. Which means if your battery previously lasted for 6days, it will now last for 60days. Charging your mobile phone only six times a year – imagine that!

Over at Stanford University researchers have found a revolutionary concept, that could forever change this world. They have found a way to use Silicon nanowires in rechargeable Li-ion batteries that power the current generation of batteries in Laptops, Mobile Phones, Camera’s, iPods etc, thus enhancing the storage capacity to upto 10times the existing levels.

“It’s not a small improvement. It’s a revolutionary development”, said Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who leads the research for the new battery technology.

Well that means. you now need to recharge your Mobile Phone battery once in a couple of months. The same goes for laptops, iPods and other devices. They’ll be able to provide much more battery life between recharges.

A standard Li-ion battery has an electrical storage capacity limited by the amount of lithium that can be retained in the battery’s anode, usually made of carbon. When made of silicon, the anode can retain much more lithium, but silicon’s disadvantage is that it pulverizes during charging cycles, lowering the battery’s performance and life-cycle.

The Stanford research team found a way to avoid this problem, by leveraging on nanotechnology. To store lithium, they use silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a paper sheet. When soaking up lithium, the nanowires grow four times their size and then come back to normality, but due to their extremely small wired shape, they don’t fracture in time. Hence silicon is better than carbon after all, it only has to be used as nanowires.

When the batteries are manufactured commercially in the future, things are going to change forever in mobile electronics arena. Imagine charging up your Mobile Phones six times a year!!

Via Softpedia

First, there were the Seven Wonders of the World. Then there was a New Seven Wonders list, voted on Internet-style. That got us thinking: What are the seven wonders of the IT world? Here’s a look at seven of the biggest, most extreme and most unusual computers and projects. By the way, do you have a vote for an eighth wonder?

Well this is the introduction to the amazing post made by CIO that

• Computer Closest to the North Pole : Webcam #1

Who’s in charge: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory takes care of this floating eye at the top of the world.

• Computer farthest from Earth: NASA’s Voyager 1 satellite

Distance from Earth: Voyager is three times farther away than Pluto. That’s to say at least 4 billion kilometers, times three.

• World’s most intriguing data center: Google

Location: The Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River, 80 miles east of Portland.

• World’s largest scientific grid computing project: The E-sciencE II (EGEE-II) project

Helps power: Large-scale scientific research projects in fields from geology to chemistry—for example, will analyze data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator being built to help investigate details around the Big Bang and related physics questions.

• World’s fastest supercomputer: IBM BlueGene/L (BGL)

Powered by: 65,536 dual-processor computer nodes.

• Smallest PC to run Windows Vista: OQO, Model 02

The package: OQO’s Handheld PC checks in at 5.6 (wide) by 3.3 (high) by 1 (deep) inches.

• Biggest Paradigm Change in Enterprise Software: Linux kernel

Created by: Linus Torvalds, in 1991, helping open-source developers collectively craft a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems. The Linux kernel contains 8.2 million lines of code, with approximately 86 lines added every hour

Number of developers: Total since 1991 is unknown; 3,200 developers for the kernel as of release 2.6.22.

Via CIO