A technology blog with lots of geek stuffs. Many web site reviews, tips and tricks, free download and free tech support option. You will find topic ranging from hacks, security, interesting facts about WWW, free downloads and many more.

You can visit it here:

http://blog.techiezone.in

President Bush scolded lawmakers yesterday saying "they had no business trying to manage the war," reports the New York Times. Bush said he wouldn't be rushed into an early withdrawal of troops even as he delivered a decidedly mixed report on the progress of the Surge and acknowledged, "There's war fatigue [and] it's affecting our psychology." All of this fell on deaf ears in the House of Representatives where Democrats pushed through a new bill that would require most U.S. troops to leave Iraq by April 1, 2008. "President Bush continues to urge patience, but what is needed - and what the American people are demanding - is a new direction," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the House had split on party lines to vote 223-201 for a pull-out.

At least the President is consistent. His administration has continually tried to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks and in yesterday's speech Bush came full circle, warning that "the same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.” Hold on, says the New York Times (noting that Bush invoked Al-Qaeda some 30 times in his speech on Iraq), the Iraq version of Al-Qaeda is very much a homespun insurgency only formed as a reaction to the US invasion. "Mr. Bush’s critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place," writes the NYT.

Away from the politics and back to the very real bloodshed in Iraq, 19 people were killed yesterday, including two employees of the Reuters news agency, when US troops raided a Shiite area of Baghdad in an operation to capture two militants believed to have links to Iran. Another five Iraqi government guards were killed earlier today in an attack outside the Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Linspire and Microsoft in agreement over something? Although it sounds unlikely at first glance, that is exactly what is happening as the developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems announces it will join Microsoft in its efforts to improve the ability of OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format.

To this end, Linspire has confirmed that all future versions of Linspire will include Open XML bi-directional translators between ODF and Open XML.

It should not come as too much of a surprise, I guess, especially as both Novell and Xandros have already signed the bi-directional open source translation blood treaty with Microsoft.

What it means is that all future releases of Linspire and Freespire will include the bi-directional translators between ODF and Open XML, and users of both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org will be able to share files with a lot less hassle while retaining format, formulas and style templates.

The Open XML format was standardized by Ecma International on December 7, 2006 and is currently under consideration for ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1. Open XML is the default format for the recently released Microsoft Office 2007. The OpenDocument (ODF) file format, which is an ISO-standardized, XML-based file format specification for office applications, is maintained by the open source community. The OpenDocument format ensures information saved in spreadsheets, documents and presentations is freely accessible to any OpenDocument-supporting application. OpenOffice.org currently support this standard.

Kevin Carmony, Linspire CEO, told DaniWeb “for Linux to gain acceptance beyond the server, it must interoperate within the broader desktop computing ecosystem. Interoperability with Microsoft Office documents is critical, and Linspire is pleased to join this ongoing effort with Novell and Microsoft to bring document interoperability to our mutual customer base."

Microsoft’s General Manager for Interoperability and XML Architecture, Jean Paoli, added “this is good news for customers. Linspire and Microsoft share the view that it should be easy for users of competing office productivity applications to exchange files with one another and XML is pivotal in that regard. We believe in delivering interoperability by design for the benefit of our customers. Our ongoing collaborative relationships with commercial open source companies like Linspire help us achieve that goal."

IBM has just announced the arrival of ' href="http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/bluegene.html" target="_blank">Blue Gene/P, the newest and fastest supercomputer around. How fast? Well Blue Gene/P just about triples the performance of Blue Gene/L, which currently holds the official title of the world’s fastest computer.

The IBM System Blue Gene/P Solution is designed to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one “petaflop” or one-quadrillion operations per second if you prefer. That is 100,000 times more powerful than an average home PC, and means that drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a fraction of the machine’s power. IBM claims it can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high.

Not least because Blue Gene/P can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops.

With Blue Gene, the IBM design team has sidestepped two key constraints on state-of-the-art supercomputing, namely power usage and space requirements. It has been purpose-built to fit in smaller spaces and use less electricity compared to other commercially available supercomputer designs. The end result is a machine that is, according to IBM, “at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.” The breakthrough Blue Gene design uses many small, low-power chips each connected through five specialized networks inside the system.

Four IBM (850 MHz) PowerPC® 450 processors are integrated on a single Blue Gene/P chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A two-foot-by-two-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks. Each rack runs at 13.9 trillion operations per second. The one-petaflop Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. Blue Gene/P can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve three-petaflop performance. A standard Blue Gene/P configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.

There are some key differences between Blue Gene/L and Blue Gene/P. In hardware, Blue Gene/P moves to more (four vs. two) and speedier (850 MHz vs. 700 MHz) processors per chip; more memory and an SMP mode to support multi-threaded applications. This new SMP mode moves Blue Gene/P to a programming environment similar to that found in commercial clusters. Blue Gene/P dramatically scales up collective network performance to minimize common bottlenecks inherent in large parallel-computing systems. Software marks the third key upgrade for Blue Gene/P -- system management, programming environment and applications support have all been refined in Blue Gene/P.

Blue Gene’s operating system is based on open-source Linux. Applications are written in common languages such as Fortran, C and C++ using standards-based MPI communications protocols.

Were you one of the many, and the chances are that being a reader of Inside Edge dumps you squarely into the informed geek category (and there really is no offense meant in that remark, says a fellow informed geek), who mourned the passing of promised core parts of Longhorn such as WinFS when Vista finally emerged?

If you shed a tear then, perhaps you might want to get the big box of tissues out again. This is not going to be a good news day for you.

It has come to my attention that attempts to revive a version of Vista, complete with WinFS, have been shot through the head by the Microsoft legal machine.

It should come as no real surprise that the Longhorn Reloaded project is officially dead.“To put the projects aims simply, we aim to finish off what Microsoft started before the operating system was canceled. It is a modification of Windows 6.0.4074, which was originally released during the 2004 Windows Hardware Engineers Conference” says the project blurb. It was doomed to failure from the get go.

Did anyone seriously think that Microsoft would allow an early Vista Beta to be promoted, distributed and lauded?

Of course not.

Doesn’t stop me from applauding the effort to take this build and build upon though, not least because it would have been nothing short of a miracle if the Longhorn Reloaded project could succeed given that it had no access to the Microsoft source code.

It didn’t stop 25000 knowledgeable nerds from downloading the Milestone 1 release either.

So why am I writing about this, why do I even care? Because, friends, I do actually care about the future of the Windows OS as surprising as that might sound to those of you who have read myriad slagging posts of mine over the years. Removing WinFS from Vista was, in my not at all humble opinion, one of the biggest mistakes Microsoft has made with regard to OS development. Forget the fact that it looks likely to be available at some point in some form as an add-on for SQL Server, it’s the fact that it is not going to be integrated into the Windows OS development tree that sucks elephants through a straw.

25000 people are like a spit in the sea to Microsoft, but I have this admittedly forlorn hope that perhaps it could spike a revolt amongst the Redmond Campus Nerds Association who might just slip WinFS back in unnoticed as part of a forthcoming Windows Update…