VD, I’d love to know more about what led you to write this. I would think Sun is definitely on the bandwagon of grid computing and powering many companies and startups that together make the “Computer is the network” thing true. Sometimes by providing hardware but also by being behind the curtains of software that is used by them: MySQL, Java, Netbeans, VirtualBox, etc… and OpenOffice for which you seem to contribute.

Via this site:

“The new web is moving beyond connecting pages to interconnecting data objects, concepts, and things. Ultimately Web 3.0 is really about creating technology that more accurately mirrors how we see and think about the world around us.”

• Attention. “Applications that are smartest at competing for our attention—or at helping us understand what we should be paying attention to—will have a distinct advantage in the web 3.0 world”.
• Agents. “As just one small example, you tell it that you want to be kept abreast of upcoming social media events, and it checks Upcoming.org, Facebook, Evite, Meetup, etc. and shares with you the events it finds, allowing you to sign up for them through its own interface.”
• RSS. “Content syndication will be at the heart of web 3.0. It empowers almost everything I’ve been talking about in this post to some extent. Don’t sell it short. Look for ways to use it and build applications around it.”
• Semantic Web. “What if there was a way, for instance, that my blogging software could understand that what I was writing about—in plain English—was an event I was trying to promote, and could translate that information so that it could automatically be shared with Upcoming, Evite, Eventbrite, Facebook, etc.?”

Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize given out by the EFF.

The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was then verified by a different computer system.

What is the importance of finding a new prime number?

Finding new Mersenne primes is not likely to be of any immediate practical value. This search is primarily a recreational pursuit. However, the search for Mersenne primes has proved useful in development of new algorithms, testing computer hardware, and interesting young students in math.

Does this affect RSA cryptography?

The security of the RSA algorithm is founded on the mathematical difficulty of finding two prime factors of a very large number. Essentially, a RSA public key is the product of two randomly selected large prime numbers, and the secret key is the two primes themselves. This algorithm is secure because of the great mathematical difficulty of finding the two prime factors of a large number, and of finding the private key from the public key. This is difficult because the only known method of finding the two prime factors of a large number is to check all the possibilities one by one, which isn’t practical because there are so many prime numbers. This means the discovery of a new prime number doesn’t affect the security of RSA. The promised development of quantum computers over the next several decades that can effectively perform many calculations simultaneously may be able to break the RSA algorithm relatively quickly.

Why does the EFF pay $100,000 for this finding?

The foundation supports individual rights on the Internet and set up the prime number prize to promote cooperative computing using the Web.

Now you can finally spy on what your neighbour is working..

http://www.mikrokopter.com/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter

Every now and then, and sometimes more often than not, you are asked to do something at work that you don’t particularly like. Or maybe you don’t feel you should be doing it, or maybe you don’t know how to do it, etc.

What kind of person are you? How do you react to this kind of situation and how is the best way to deal with it? Are you able to workaround your thoughts and emotions and get the work done or do you talk with your boss about it?

Whatever you do, you’re not alone. Thousands of people face the same thing every day.

What would you do if it was your own company and a worker approached you saying he doesn’t really feel motivated enough to carry out a task he was assigned?

Well, at least for one day, smile at the task and do the work as if it was the best thing that could have happened to you. You will see there is nothing this technique will subtract from you. It will only add. And if this doesn’t work forget about me and my technique ;)

Of course I’m saying this for myself only. Take only what you feel like taking. But one thing is for sure, stupid work is periodical.