Strangest Clock!

A £1m clock called the "time eater" has been unveiled at Cambridge University by Professor Stephen Hawking. The author of A Brief History of Time was guest of honor when the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College.

Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, it features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time. Its creator John Taylor said he "wanted to make timekeeping interesting". The Corpus Clock will stand outside the college's library and will be on view to the public.

Dr Taylor is an inventor and horologist - one who studies the measurement of time - and was a student at Corpus Christi in the 1950s. He has given the clock as a gift to his former college. The grasshopper or "chronophage", meaning "time eater", advances around the 4ft-wide face, each step marking a second. Its movement triggers blue flashing lights which travel across the face eventually stopping at the correct hour and minute. But the clock is only accurate once every five minutes - the rest of the time the lights are simply for decoration." Read More

Technology For You: Japan tops world broadband study

Only Japan has the broadband quality to cope with next-generation internet applications, a new study has revealed. Sweden and the Netherlands have Europe's best broadband, according to the 42-nation study sponsored by internet equipment maker Cisco Systems.

The UK, Spain and Italy fell just below the quality threshold for today's web. The study aims to highlight each nation's ability to cope with next-generation web applications such as high-quality video streaming. It was carried out by a team of MBA students from the Said Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics.

They developed a "Broadband Quality Score" for each nation based on internet speed both downloading and uploading, the loss of packets of data and latency - a measure of the delays in information routing. The study focused on countries in Europe, North America, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Brazil, Russia, India and China (Brics).

Their research found that more than half of those countries had broadband connections good enough to deliver consistent quality for most common web applications today. Researchers put the success of Sweden and the Netherlands in Europe down to those countries' "increasing investments in fibre and cable network upgrades, coupled with competition diversity, and supported by strong government vision and policy". They said Japan's early commitment to investing in broadband made it the only country prepared to deliver the necessary quality for next-generation web applications over the next three to five years.
The study used nearly eight million records from broadband speed tests conducted by users around the world during May, 2008, through www.speedtest.net. Read More

The Google Chrome

Google is going to unveil its own open source browser with lot of new capabilites. Let's see what difference it can make :)
For those who are interested here's the link Msnbc
Check this link for google's comical book which explains the working of its browser Chrome

IE Update

One feature new to the release is the "smart address bar". Microsoft senior product manager James Pratt pointed out at that 80% of the time, internet users were visiting sites they had been to before. To address that, the new release archives visited sites based on their titles as well as their addresses. That means a search in the address bar for words and phrases will find previously visited sites, as well as bookmarks.

Another new set of features makes web searching easier; search terms entered in the search bar at the top of the browser now instantly display potential results in real time as the search term is typed. Results are shown from user-defined search engines and websites, with rich visual content. For websites with changing content, such as items on eBay or status pages on Facebook, IE8's Web Slices allows users to keep up with the content without going to the webpage directly, accessible through the Favourites bar. Read More