Researchers convert plastic bottles into porous Researchers convert plastic bottles into porous cement

Researchers have converted discarded plastic bottles in combination with soil to form a porous cement like substance that could be the construction material of the future.

It could also considerably ease ecological hazard caused by billions of plastic bottles discarded every year.

Naji Khoury, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Temple University in US, says the trademarked product is called ‘Plastisoil.’

Khoury said that it takes 30,000 of the better quality recyclable bottles to make one tonne of porous Plastisoil. He hopes to be able to use different types of recyclable plastic bottles in the future, according to a Temple statement.

Besides, Khoury said that an energy analysis shows that it uses less energy to produce one tonne of Plastisoil than one tonne of cement or asphalt.

Khoury said that Plastisoil could ease environmental problems created by stormwater run-off because stormwater can filter through it into the ground below.

The material could be used to form sidewalks, bike/jogging paths, driveways and parking lots. “We are currently testing the porous Plastisoil to see if we could also remove or reduce pollutants like motor oil from the water as it filters through,” he said.

He added that preliminary results also show porous Plastisoil to be cheaper to manufacture than existing technologies/products.

Khoury first developed Plastisoil with a co-inventors while at the University of Oklahoma, but he created the material after moving to Temple in 2008.

MicrosofT is Going To Lanch WindoWs 8

The Windows 8 release date has been shrouded in a cloud of rumors. Most experts expect a late 2011 early 2012 release of the operating system. A recently leaked Windows 8 product cycle chart provides the answers needed to determine the release date of the next Windows OS by Microsoft.

chart lists the planning, development and readiness product cycle of Windows 8 and related Microsoft products such as Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live Wave 4, Windows Live Wave 5 and Windows 7. It also lists major events.

Roadmap Spreadsheet can be downloaded click here

Some events and products have already been held / released and it is possible to pinpoint the release date of Windows 8 by making the remaining calculations.

Here is what we know. Forum I and Forum II have been major events, the former held in December 2009, the latter in April 2010. The listing lists four additional event, Forum III to Forum VI. The next two events fall into the development phase of Windows 8, the remaining two into the readiness phase.

Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Live Wave 4 have either been announced with final dates (at least for the beta) or released already.

Forum II was held 4-5 months after Forum I. If we take this approach we can calculate the approximate month of the other four forums. This would mean between 16 to 20 months from April 2010 on which coincides perfectly with the projected late 2011 release date.

The Windows 8 beta should be released around June 2011 and the final release might even hit the stores at the same time that Windows 7 was released, which was October.

The Internet Explorer 9 product cycle confirms the findings. Microsoft has announced a beta release of Internet Explorer 9 for August 2010. This would be the same time that Forum III will be held, which is exactly four months after Forum II.

The chart may be a bit off since Windows Live Wave 4 was released in June. It could be that Microsoft has projected the Forum III conference for June / July instead.

Could also be that the chart is not 100% accurate and it can happen that development cycles need to be shifted, especially if major issues are encountered during development.

Still, we are pretty sure that Microsoft will release the beta of Windows 8 in or around June 2011 and the final release of the operating system in or around October 2011.

What’s your take on the chart? We are very interested in users who can provide us with additional information including Forum III to Forum VI dates.

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Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 Beta

Top 10 benefits of PowerPoint 2010

1 Bring more energy and visual impact to your presentations. Save time and money by applying sophisticated photo effects without using additional photo-editing software programs. Transform your images into compelling, vibrant visuals by using new and improved picture editing features such as color saturation and temperature, brightness and contrast, and an advanced cropping tool, along with artistic filters such as blur, paintbrush, and watercolor.

2 Work with others without having to wait your turn. PowerPoint 2010 redefines the way people can work together on presentations. With co-authoring, you can simultaneously edit the same presentation with individuals in different locations. You can also use Office Communicator or your instant messaging application to view the availability of others who are authoring a presentation with you and easily initiate a conversation without leaving PowerPoint. 2

3 Add a personalized video experience. Embed and edit video files directly in PowerPoint 2010. Easily trim your video to show only relevant sections. Bookmark key points in a video for quick access or trigger animation to begin automatically when those bookmarks are reached. You can also set the video to fade in and out at specified intervals and apply a variety of video styles and effects—such as reflections, bevels, and 3-D rotation—to help you quickly capture your audience’s attention.

4 Imagine just-in-time show and tell. Instantly broadcast your PowerPoint 2010 presentations by sending out a URL so people can view your presentation on the Web. Your audience sees your slides in high fidelity, even if they don’t have PowerPoint installed. You can also turn your presentation into a high-quality video with narration to share with virtually anyone through e-mail, via the Web, or on DVD.

5 Access your presentations from more locations and on more devices. Post your presentations online and then access, view, and edit them from the Web3 or your Windows Mobile-based smartphone.4 With PowerPoint 2010, you can get things done according to your schedule across multiple locations and devices. Microsoft PowerPoint Web App. Extend your PowerPoint experience to the Web and enjoy full-screen, high-quality viewing of our presentations. Store your presentations online and edit your work through the PowerPoint Web App when you're away from your office, home, or school.3 Microsoft PowerPoint Mobile 2010. Stay current and take immediate action when necessary using an enhanced mobile version of PowerPoint specifically suited to your smartphone.4

6 Create high-quality presentations with stunning graphics. You don’t have to be a design expert to create professional-looking graphics. Use dozens of additional SmartArt® layouts to create many types of graphics such as organization charts, lists, and picture diagrams. Transform words into impressive visuals that better illustrate your ideas. Create diagrams as easily as typing a bulleted list or convert text and images to a diagram in just a few clicks.

7 Captivate your audience with new transitions and improved animations. PowerPoint 2010 offers new, dynamic slide transitions and animation effects that look similar to graphics you’d see on TV. Easily access, preview, apply, customize, and replace animations. You can also use the new Animation Painter to easily copy animations from one object to another.

8 Organize and print your slides more effectively. Easily organize and navigate through slides using slide sections. Divide a presentation into logical slide groups, rename sections to help you manage content—such as to assign slides to a particular author—or easily print just one section of slides.

9 Get things done faster. PowerPoint 2010 simplifies how you access features. The new Microsoft Office Backstage™ view replaces the traditional file menu to let you save, share, print, and publish your presentations with just a few clicks. And, with the improved Ribbon, you can access your favorite commands even more quickly by customizing tabs or creating your own to personalize the experience to your work style.

10 Work on multiple presentations and multiple monitors. PowerPoint 2010 gives you a completely separate window for each presentation that you open. So, you can view and edit multiple presentations independently, side-by-side, or even on separate monitors.

Mobile office 2010

Top 10 benefits of Office Mobile 2010

1 Experience an intuitive, touch-friendly user interface. Office Mobile 2010 integrates with your Windows® phone to offer an intuitive experience. Use natural gestures to touch through menus and easily flick your way through a file for quick navigation with simple clicks, drags, and taps.

2 Stay connected from anywhere with SharePoint Workspace Mobile. Take your Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 files offline on your phone with Microsoft SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010, a new application in Office Mobile 2010. Browse document libraries and lists right from your smartphone. Open documents directly for viewing or editing in Microsoft Word Mobile 2010, Microsoft Excel® Mobile 2010, and Microsoft PowerPoint® Mobile 2010, and sync them back to SharePoint Server 2010 once reconnected. Best of all, you can sync documents on your smartphone with a single touch so you never miss a beat.

3 Use PowerPoint Mobile as a presentation aid. When delivering a presentation, your notes are just as important as your presentation itself. Many times you don’t have the luxury of using multiple monitors—one for showing your presentation and another for viewing your notes. With PowerPoint Mobile 2010 and the Presentation Companion, a second monitor is always readily available. You can connect your Windows phone to your PC via Bluetooth and use PowerPoint Mobile 2010 as your second monitor to easily view your presentation notes. Your phone can even be used to advance your slides!

4 View and edit your documents with confidence. You can open Office documents created on a desktop application and view them on your smartphone with high fidelity, with Text Reflow technology in Office Mobile 2010. When you edit and save your file, rich formatting, such as tables, charts and SmartArt® graphics, will be preserved.2 With Office Mobile 2010, you’ll get a high-quality viewing experience adapted to your device, and you can be confident your content will not be compromised.

5 Distribute your files right from your Windows phone. There’s no need to take documents from your Windows phone back to your computer in order to e-mail them to others. With Office Mobile, you can send documents via e-mail or save them directly back to SharePoint Server 2010 using SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010.

6 You won’t need a learning curve. Enjoy a familiar formatting experience when creating or editing on your smartphone. The Office Mobile applications have many of the same formatting tools you already know and use in Microsoft Office. With Office Mobile 2010, you have the richest editing experience found on any mobile device. Essential authoring capabilities. Use bullets, numbering, and font styles in Word Mobile 2010 and OneNote Mobile 2010. And, find cell formatting options in Excel Mobile 2010, such as borders, shading and font styles — you can even use custom number formats. Built-in support for images. View rich graphics across your Office Mobile documents. And, in PowerPoint Mobile 2010, SmartArt graphics are better supported.

7 Update your Excel data on the fly. Whether you’re working on your budget or updating your travel expenses, you can quickly update and instantly recalculate your Excel workbooks. Add or edit formulas and take advantage of more than 100 functions.

8 Stay organized and in sync with OneNote. Review or take notes on your phone with ease, insert voice clips or pictures, or make a quick list —it’s up to you! You can even synchronize your notes with Microsoft OneNote 2010 on your PC using the Windows Mobile Device Center, available on Windows 7.2

9 Outlook Mobile makes managing your e-mail a snap. Outlook Mobile 2010 brings powerful and familiar concepts from Outlook 2010 to your Windows phone when connected to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Conversation View allows you to save time by combining related messages that can be moved, categorized, or deleted in just a few clicks. Find people in your organization by searching your global address list directly from your smartphone.3 With Outlook Mobile, get online access to your e-mail, calendar, contacts and tasks from virtually anywhere, anytime.

10 Seamlessly copy and paste across applications. Content for an Office document or an e-mail is pulled from a variety of sources. It may come from a Web site, other Office documents, or e-mails, along with information from your notes. With the improved clipboard on your Windows phone, copying and pasting to and from any other application on your smartphone is simple and intuitive.

Google-Apple Cloud Computer

In his new book "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," computer industry writer and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review Nicholas G. Carr discusses the changes he sees in the future of computing. One of the more dramatic changes is a shift to cloud computing -- where applications and files are stored on a large, centralized supercomputer or network. The end user accesses his or her files using computers that are more streamlined but less sophisticated than today's typical machines.

Nicholas Carr, seen here at a Sun Network Conference in 2003, believes that tech giants Apple and Google may be on the verge of creating a cloud computer.

The idea of cloud computing certainly isn't new. Oracle's Larry Ellison launched the New Internet Computer (NIC) company in 2000 to lead the industry forward to that goal. The concept is very simple:

"On your desk, you would have a very low-cost computer with just a processor, a keyboard and a monitor. There would be no hard drive or CD/DVD drive. It would be hooked up to the Internet and would link to a central supercomputer, which would host all of your programs and files."

A Googol of Power

A googol is the name for a one followed by 100 zeros. Google's name comes from its founders' desire to keep track of the vast amounts of information on the Internet. As the company grew, it began offering more services than just Web searches. Through in-house innovations and acquisitions of other companies, Google created what is now Google Docs, a Web-based suite of applications that includes word processing, a spreadsheet and a presentation program. With Gmail, that puts Google in direct competition with Microsoft for the corporate desktop. And unlike Office, Google Docs is completely free.

manufacturer to partner with. Google's machine, really a These hosted services are the kinds of applications that would be at the core of a cloud computer, just one reason it would be feasible for Google to be the perfect back-end for a hardwarenetwork of machines, offers amazing computing power. It also offers redundancy. Google already stores multiple backups of its information on its equipment, and if one part of one machine breaks, it can be swapped out without any loss of information.


Advantages

• Using a cloud computer stored on Google's massive infrastructure would free you from having to take your files with you -- no thumb drives, laptop hard drives, CDs, DVDs or other removable media.

• You could work on your projects from home, from work and on your mobile computer while on the go.

• With a cloud computer, you probably wouldn't have to pay for software. Using applications hosted on the server, your local machine would have all the software it needs to work without having to store it locally.

• You wouldn't have to update your software to the next version -- and everyone would use the same software on the cloud. There should be no compatibility issues.

In 2006, Google built two giant computing centers in The Dalles, Ore. Each is the size of a football field and needs massive amounts of cooling for the computers inside.

Disadvantages

But what happens to those frequent flyers who need to work as they travel? A cloud computer would require an Internet connection, and today's airliners don't offer that ability, though some carriers have plans to offer in-flight access. You'd be stuck reading or watching the in-flight movie. You'd also have to be comfortable with letting Google, or whomever else, keep your documents online. Many corporations don't allow their documents past their firewalls. Would these companies change their minds if the majority of business was done on a cloud-computing model?

One of the biggest problems involved with creating a cloud computer is the amount of electricity
required to make it work. Google built its data center in The Dalles, Ore., because of the high-speed Internet access powered by fiber optic lines and the nearby The Dalles One of the biggest problems involved with creating a cloud computer is the amount of electricityDam .

Google needs large amounts of electricity to power the cooling equipment necessary to keep thousands of servers running. In fact, the two football-field-sized buildings each have two cooling plants four stories tall.

If Google can't handle the processing power needed to offer the world a computing cloud, it certainly is well on its way to building it.


Other Players:

• Microsoft, Amazon and IBM are some of those known to be considering cloud offerings.Yahoo brings a robust Web mail network and photo site Flickr to the table.With its Office suite already entrenched in the desktops of offices across the country, a Microsoft cloud could enter the race as a contender.

• Another potential competitor could be Amazon.com. Already one of the world's largest online retailers, the company has interests in other areas as well. Amazon Web Services is a suite of cloud resources aimed at small developers who need a place to work online

• In November 2007, IBM announced its Blue Cloud initiative, offering a package of hardware and software to allow its customers to create their own internal clouds

• Many companies are offering hardware designed to operate on cloud networks, including Hewlett Packard, Dell and Clear Cube.

In its Blue Cloud initiative, IBM wants to network its massive computers, like this one at a research center in Jülich, Germany, to create a powerful cloud.

"At the MacWorld San Francisco trade show, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the closest thing it has to a cloud computing device: the MacBook Air. It's less than an inch thick at its largest; Jobs pulled the demonstration model from a manila mailing envelope during the product announcement. It weighs only three pounds. To get it so thin, Apple engineers sacrificed an optical drive and some of its connections, including Ethernet. The battery had to be incorporated in a way that prevents users from replacing it themselves. Unlike a true thin client, the MacBook Air has a hard drive, which can be either a traditional drive or a solid-state drive. "

Further info:

Understanding Cloud Computing

Consumer cloud computing - Box.net, Amazon, EMC, Google

IBM Introduces Ready-to-Use Cloud Computing

Zimdesk: Complete Cloud Computing System

OpenNEbula Virtual Infrastructure Engine - (Open Source, Apache2 license)

Virtual Workspace Service - cloud and grid virtualization software (Open Source, Apache2 license)

The 5 Wierdest cars over the net!!

Extracte

Well.. Cars have always been "the hot topic" , Its a hobby,its a fantasy,its the life its everything ,, Cars have always been the 'Boy's Toys'.The following is a list of 5 most weirdest cars ever built. I had stumbled upon the following list the other day and thought of sharing ..

The “Home” Car – I mean, come on! There are RVs and trailers — why build a house on a poor chassis? I’m pretty sure it’ll have loads of amenities inside to make it feel more like home, right? How would this go about then? Sleep on a bed inside, then wake up to drive elsewhere? Truly a mobile home, a similar car has appeared in the series Arrested Development, when George Sr. tried to get away with the “cabin car.”




The Stilletto – I see some batmobile in there, plus something from Star Wars … in all the wrong colors. Built from a 1960s Corvair, it really jumps far from the source material. If you look at it closely … and imagine it in black … it kinda reminds you of the motorcycle in the new Batman movie.

Judge Dredd Land Rover – Think about it, Land Rovers are pretty much monsters nowadays so what of the fictional future where Judge Dredd resides in? It combines the looks of a tank, an armored car and, well, the tires of a land rover. Made specifically for the movie, one is in display in the Rover Heritage museum in England.

The 2001 Chevrolet Camaro Police Car – It’s notweird or anything, but this sports car is the fastest pursuit car in terms of law enforcement. Plus, it’s only sold to police units. The silly thig is, the car looks above average when compared to normal street cars, but consider what police cars go through — they get shot at.

The Couch Car! – I mean, come on! We have race car beds — but do they actually go anywhere? Think about having your own couch car, with a steering wheel mounted on the desk, stacked with your favorite snacks and beverages — then you literally park in front of the television. That’d be amazing. This car has caught the attention of the local media and has been featured in the Daily News … driving ‘round Times Square.

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