Google's Cerf: Deep space Web decades out
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The Internet architect said that the search engine will one day organize all the data coming from spacecraft, planets, satellites and other random flying objects.
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Also: Space station spreads its solar wings. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Also: NASA officials to make historic trip to China. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Web surfers may soon be able to explore the canyons of Mars and experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon thanks to a deal announced on Monday between Web search company Google Inc. and the NASA Ames Research Center.
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(InfoWorld) - Google and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have signed a formal collaboration agreement that calls for Google to help make NASA information readily accessible on the Web. Google and NASA announced on Monday the signing of their Space Act Agreement, which calls for them to collaborate on making it easy for people to find weather visualization and forecasting data, see high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars and track, in real time, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. In short, the partnership seeks to make NASA's work "accessible to everyone," Google and NASA said in a statement. Although NASA has collected massive amounts of information about Earth and the universe, this information is scattered and hard to find and is difficult for the average person to understand, they said. The two organizations will also tackle what they consider to be challenging technical problems in areas like large-scale data management, massively distributed computing and user interfaces. In September of last year,Â Google and NASA signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU)Â to collaborate on solving technical problems. That MOU also called for Google to develop up to 1 million square feet within the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field. NASA and Google also are finalizing details for additional collaborations in areas like research, products, facilities and education. The organizations will hold a press conference pn Monday afternoon to offer more information about their partnership.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Data from the far reaches of outer space have been streaming into Dan Reisenfeld&#39;s computer at the University of Montana since late Wednesday.
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For those who want to explore Mars but cant wait for a spacecraft to take them there, NASA scientists have reformulated a website that lets the general public search data and images from previous missions.
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Why do we persist in looking at the web through a browser?
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Vignette's Next-Generation Web solutions are  helping NASA engineers and scientists connect and share information  online, as the federal agency designs its next generation of space  vehicles for the Constellation Program.
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Huge databases that generate Web site content on the fly can be the bane of search engine spiders' existence. They can't find pages; they can't see URLs. So they can't index pages.
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The much hyped Desktop Search Tool (DST) of Google is found to have a critical security flaw. The flaw was discovered by Rice Universityâs computer scientist Dan Wallach and his two graduate students, Seth Fogarty and Seth Nielson.
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Google and US space agency NASA announced an alliance to solve cosmic computing problems and channel information from space around the world via the Internet.
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Google Inc. now provides a searchable index to the millions of Google Earth layers on the Web.
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Introducing The 404s, a contest to find the least informative military websites. Strike a blow for open government; win prizes. In Danger Room.
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The U.S. space program should look to collaboration and open systems to drive the next wave of human exploration and innovation, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said Thursday.&quot;Assume that you don&#39;t have all the answers,&quot; Schmidt said during a speech celebrating the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration&#39;s (NASA) 50th anniversary. &quot;I can assure you that we don&#39;t.&quot;Schmidt used his speech in Washington, D.C., to promote the benefits of open architectures and collaboration. He talked about the importance of collaboration between organizations, such as the images from NASA and private satellite providers Google has used to create Google Earth, but also of the benefit to NASA and other government agencies of seeking ideas from the public.It&#39;s amazing what applications people find for Google Earth, Schmidt said. Archeologists are using the desktop maps to find ancient Celtic settlements, he said.&quot;We don&#39;t anticipate all this,&quot; he said. &quot;We just put the information out there, and people use it.&quot;Schmidt praised programs such as NASA&#39;s Centennial Challenge, which awards cash prizes to inventors that come up with solutions to the agency&#39;s needs. Last year, NASA awarded $200,000 to Peter Horner, an unemployed engineer from Maine, who created a new space glove using a common rubber glove.Google has sponsored the X Prize Foundation, an organization that runs similar competitions, with an award of up to $30 million for a group that can design and launch a lunar lander with a robotic explorer on board. In many cases, the teams competing for the prize in these types of competitions spend more than the total prize money, but the public awards spur competition, Schmidt said.&quot;Why would we do this?&quot; Schmidt said. &quot;Because it&#39;s fun.&quot;Government agencies can&#39;t have a totally open development model, Schmidt said. NASA can&#39;t completely adopt the Google &quot;shift and iterate&quot; model of launching a lot of projects, knowing many of them will fail, because the agency has launch targets it has to meet, he saidBut NASA can learn from open software development and projects&#160;such as&#160;Linux and&#160;MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies such as Google, he said.&quot;The best way to be lucky is to create more luck,&quot; he said. &quot;And the best way to create more luck is to create more at-bats.&quot;One audience member asked Schmidt where the next wave of scientific advances would come. Schmidt said the IT sector has made tremendous strides in the last 30 years. If storage advances continue at their current pace, an iPod-like device will be able to hold 85 years of video by the year 2019, he said.&quot;You couldn&#39;t watch it all,&quot; he said. &quot;You&#39;d be dead.&quot;But the next breakthroughs should come in the areas of biology and biotechnology, Schmidt predicted. The biotech industry still needs more computing power for many breakthroughs to occur, he said.
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As the Internet turned 35 last week, Web speed-demons claimed a new record for how fast data can be transmitted over computer networks, announcing they had sent the equivalent of a big fat