Apple's OS X Lion uses Nuance speech technology

It seems that the speech recognition technology will be the next big thing for both Google & Apple. I blogged last week about the speech recognition functionality becoming the part of the Chrome web browser which got announced last week at the Google I/O and today I was reading that traces of speech recognition were found in the preview release of Apple’s OS X - Lion.



As seen from OS X Lion - System Preferences



Nuance one of the leaders in the field of speech recognition will eventually shake hands with Apple as the sample of voice translations found in OS X (Lion) were same that has been developed by Nuance. Though nothing is official yet but there has been significant development between Nuance and Apple and hopefully the functionality will become the part of both OS X and iOS.

Patently Apple use to give updates about the patents filed on the behalf of Apple and it released this very interesting patent information on the 12th of May where it has shown how speech to text and text to speech functionality is being planned to be the part of iOS. To get more details about this technology and its real time application and use go here and check. It seems someone is trying to make the SMS obsolete but again this is what ever changing technology is all bout. Can't wait to install OS X Lion on my macbook pro.

Seven deadly sins .... personified

Seven deadly sins. Some believe them some don’t. I try to personify each sin and thanks to Mr. Kahn of IMF that today I am able to compile and finish my list.

So here it is.

• Lust - Dominique Strauss-Kahn (hot hot news of today. 62 but young at heart. IMF puts net US debt at 72% of GDP, Mr Kahn can you phhlease reconsider that now)

• Gluttony - Raj Rajaratnam (see it to believe it…don’t waste time google his name and see for your self)

• Greed - The masterminds of the present Economic crisis (sorry I could have ran out of space even if I try to explain what this sin means)

• Slot - Bernie Madoff (he needs no introduction but if you are not sure about his gift google him and learn the art of ponzi scheme within no time. Atleast I guess that he will teach for free… ooppss sorry about that extra `r` I mean fee)

• Wrath - Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers (sitting on the pile of cash he made during his time at the bank he is single handedly responsible for the destruction of one of the wall streets oldest financial institutions)

• Envy – OBL (his death puts Pakistan and its army out of business, but I am sure Pakistan will come up with something after all somebody I mean somehow they need to run their country)

• Pride - Jeffrey Skilling of Enron (those were the good old days when people pay the price for their deeds not like today where trillions of dollars have vanished but still things have’nt changed a bit).

Some of these names can be put against more than one sin or all of them but this is the best what I can come up with. If you have any better ideas then please comment on this blog. On lighter note this particular blog is just to make you smile and not to incorporate the fear of these sins.

Enjoy !!

What connects Isilon, Avatar & Apple ?

Before I start on this subject there is this vital information I would like to share and we all will see how this helps in understanding the depth of what I am going to discuss.
1 Terabyte = 1,024 GB (gigabytes)
1 Petabyte = 1,000 Terabytes

I know in our daily computational life these numbers are just beyond imagination and hard to comprehend but believe me this is nothing, absolutely nothing and we will see that in a short while.

Now back to the topic that I am going to discuss - what connects Isilon, Avatar and Apple? Well please don’t consider Isilon to be another moon (just like Pandora) of the fictitious planet Polyphemus created by the genius James Cameron for his mega blockbluster Avatar, nor is Isilon one of the alien species shown in the movie Avatar. Isilon is the name of the storage company which deals in creating the super cool clustered storage systems and got acquired by EMC (one of the pioneers of the storage technology) last fall. Seattle based Isilon is the leader in the scalable NAS (network attached storage) and fairly advanced than SAN (storage area network).

Isilon & Avatar:
It came to my notice recently that James Camerson’s Lightstorm Entertainment was one of the early adopters of Isilon and they were one of the primary customers of this storage company. In fact James Cameron and Jon Landau (the producer of Avatar) were so impressed by the functionality offered by Isilon that they look no further when it comes to making the decision to choose the storage to dump the unfathomable data they were going to generate during the making of Avatar. The massive production of Avatar generated terabytes of data on weekly and at times on daily basis and James and Jon were looking for some solution that is scalable, efficient and cutting edge and Isilon answered.

Isilon & Apple:
I guess we all know how busy Apple is preparing to move its iTunes into the cloud and some of us are anxiously waiting for that. Well it seems Apple also picks Isilon to provide the storage for its upcoming cloud services. The news came out on April 6th that Apple is planning to buy some 12 petabytes of storage from Isilon for this project of migrating iTunes into the cloud. More details about this can be found here. 12 petabytes seems to be a large chunk of storage and sure Apple will need that. But after doing some research on the internet and specially on wikipedia I came to know that 12 petabytes is not that big of a storage space. Well I might be out of my mind but here is the information what others have been using and why 12 petabytes is nothing considering the size and reputation of someone who is non other than Apple.

• Teradata Database 12 has a capacity of 50 petabytes of compressed data.
• Google processes about 24 petabytes of data per day.
• The BBC's iplayer is reported to use 7 petabytes of bandwidth each month
• AT&T has about 19 petabytes of data transferred through their networks each day
• The 4 experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year, which will be distributed over the LHC Computing Grid
• The Hippocampus of a human adult brain has been estimated to store a limit of up to 2.5 petabytes of binary data equivalent
• The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) has a storage capacity of 60 petabytes of climate data
• The Internet Archive contains about 3 petabytes of data, and is growing at the rate of about 100 terabytes per month as of March, 2009
• Games: World of Warcraft uses 1.3 petabytes of storage to maintain its game.Valve Steam delivers over 30 petabytes of content monthly
• The 2009 movie Avatar is reported to have taken over 1 petabyte of local storage at Weta Digital for the rendering of the 3D CGI effects

I bet you are pretty amazed by seeing the power and flow and storage of information. Well guess what my friend this is just the beginning. I will shutup and would like to point you to another amazing piece of information as far as storage is concerned. Go to here and find out who is the big daddy of this era of digital storage consumption. Feel free to pinch yourself as I guess you need to.

New iPhone (4S) - The Paraskevidekatriaphobics effect

Paraskevidekatriaphobics is the real tongue twister. It means the fear of the Friday the 13th which was yesterday and all gone good. I came to know about these fresh inputs on the new iPhone iteration which is due out in fall and I am in a kind of a dilemma to update this on my blog or not, as I came to know more about the new iPhone on Friday the 13th. Well does that make me superstitious? Well I don’t think so.

Here are the updates and I hope we all remember what the rule of the thumb is, but let me remind you all again – “If it started coming out as a rumour then some portion or all of it had to be true”. We have seen that before in many cases and this is not different. Anyway here is the list of what to expect in the new iPhone:

• The iPhone is due out sometime in September, this is something not new we all know about this (perfect start for the holiday season)

• The new iPhone will come out as iPhone 4S and not as iPhone5 (not sure why Apple would do that, guess they got confused between S & 5)

• Some minor changes in the design is expected along with better cameras, A5 dual-core processor, and HSPA+ support (sounds cool, what about NFC ?)

• Apple might announce new carriers like Sprint, T-mobile and China carrier (wow this is something which would make Sprint jump on Monday market opening)

• No LTE (long term evolution) support for the new iPhone (now why would Apple do that when Verizon is out their making a so called killing on its so called LTE network)

Well hope this news will make some movement in the share of Apple (I doubt that will happen) which has not shown any significant moves for quite sometime. Every now and then the analyst upgrade the price target for the share of Apple but still the share is playing ping pong between the territory of $340 - $350.

iPhone 4S ha…not bad. Let’s see how Apple will surprise us all with its release.

Zuckerberg Sandberg - they rhyme

My 5 year old has this habit of bringing it to the attention of everybody whenever he hears or speaks the words that rhyme, something like 'more' & 'snore' and he excitedly says "they rhyme", hence the title of this blog.

Anyways back to the blog, well Mark Zuckerberg turned 27 today and he has got all the good reasons to enjoy this day. With around 640 million customers what else do you want? I bet there is one more good reason for Zuckerberg to enjoy and it seems he is extremely lucky to have this one person by his side, the present COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg. There has been an excellent article on Sandberg and her contributions towards Facebook and other projects which have earned her a lot of respect. She is having an impeccable record starting off with her journey at Harvard and then Larry Summers became her mentor and slowly she moved to work with the treasury department and then Google and then finally landing up as a COO of Facebook.

Read this article (on Bloomberg Businessweek) which is very informative and I certainly liked it and recommend reading it. I really feel elated whenever I hear women making it to the top in the corporate world and getting the recognition for the same. This is a good sign not only for the corporate world but also for the society we live in. In the end of the article there has been an speculation that with the present qualities that Sandberg possess, there are chances that she could ran for the president of the US (post Facebook I assume). Well Good Luck to Sandberg with that. Right now what I can say is she is doing one hell of a job at Facebook. Facebook is growing and roaring like an uncontrollable monster and it does not require a geek to run the show what it requires is a methodological manager with the aptitude and proven track record to tame it.

Google I/O 2011 - Day 2 (Google introduces Chromebook)

Following are the highlights of the second day at Google I/O:

• Chrome users increased from 70 million to 160 million.
• Voice recognition support for Chroms web browser. We really need to see how that shapes out in the future. In addition to that language translation facilty added to Chrome so it can translate to the language supported as you speak.

• Now here comes the big one, the introduction of the Chromebook. This one is the complete cloud based solution and the hardware will be developed by both Samsung and Acer. The Chromebook will have instant turn-on and it will be up and running within three minutes. Everything is cloud based so that you can access anything anywhere. $429 in the US for the WiFi Samsung model, $499 for 3G. $399 for the Acer. It will be available here in the US on June 15th through Best Buy and Amazon. Six more countries included for the same release date -- Spain, France, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Italy. More good news, Chromebook will be jailedbreaked from day one so that you can hack and tweak the kernel. Google will be promoting the Chromebook like crazy and it seems Google is having big plans to launch Chromebook in the corporate world. Chromebook will be available for small businesses for $28 (per user) monthly subscription and that will include software and hardware and services – whoa!!. To promote Chromebook in education $20 per user for schools and government organizations and will include same services as mentioned above.

• Another big announcement was on the gaming front. Angry Birds will be coming to the Chrome web browser. This will be a sweet tie up between the creators of Angry Bird i.e Rovio and Google. The game can be cached and can be played offline as well. New game levels called Chrome Dimension added specially for Chrome.

With all these incredible announcements it has been a very wild and amazing ride for the last 2 days and it seems Google is really about to change something in this year’s I/O conference. We all have to wait till 6th June when Apple’s WWDC (world wide developers conference) will start. With no iPhone release set for this years WWDC let’s see what Apple has to offer in its developers conference. I am pretty sure Apple’s latest OS X - Lion will be among the many things Apple will share with all of us. I am already excited and I hope so are all of you.

Rajaratnam guilty on all 14 counts

Raj Rajaratnam has been found guilty on all the 14 charges (9 for insider trading + 5 for fraud). The jury came out with the verdict today in NYC. This is surely a good news and hope this will help send the message to the people who are still involved in this heinous act of making money and taking the undue advantage of their knowledge and power. After the final sentencing which is due for the 29th June, Raj could face up to 15 – 19 years of prison time.

Raj was accused of making around $63 million by practicing insider trading. He not only gained confidence of the people who helped him in this fraud but also made them the part of it. Not sure what will happen to the others who helped him in this job. Raj is originally from Sri Lanka and had earned an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the brightest and most educated on the street but again he felt helpless when it greed overtook him and now like others common criminals he is waiting for the final sentencing. The lawyers of Raj will file for the appeal and we need to wait to see the results for the same, but as of now the odds are not in the favor of Raj and he knows that.