source::::reblog from sans serif

“Will Barack Obama be page one news tomorrow?'”
by churumuri in sans serif

Natarajan

Will Barack Obama’s reelection be front-page news in your newspaper tomorrow?

Not if your paper has a “jacket advertisement” in this Diwali season, in which case technically it will be page 3. Not if your paper two jacket ads, in which case it will be page 5.

In many ways, Indian newspapers have overturned the traditional importance of the front page (the disease now afflicting even The Guardian, London) although there are many media watchers who believe a newspaper is well within its rights to monetise its most important space.

The veteran editor Surendra Nihal Singh addresses the issue in the latest issue of Society magazine:

In this age, the advertisement department has more sway than the editorial. What do you have to say about it?

Nihal Singh: The front pages of mainstream newspapers are plastered with adverts. This is happening very often. These newspapers are killing the essence of the front page.

The Statesman had strict restrictions on front-page advertisements. During my editorship of the paper in Calcutta, the advertisement manager Chandran Tharoor (father of politician Shashi Tharoor) would beg me for an xtra half-centimetre of space for a front-page advert, but I used to turn down his request.

The contrasts could not be starker with today’s media. In many newspapers, it is the advertisement department that sets the terms. The newspaper owner has given himself the title of editor.

Then again, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was not front-page news in “India’s national newspaper”. Reason: The Hindu only carried ads on page one in the innocent days of 1948.

Supercomputer Does 20,000 Trillion Calculations In A Blink

Washington: New supercomputer Titan can process more than 20,000 trillion calculations, or 20 petaflops, in a mere blink by employing a series of graphic processing units first created for computer gaming.

Launched by the Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), Titan will be 10 times as powerful as ORNL’s last world-leading system, Jaguar, overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers.

Using a grid of 14-km cells, the new system will be able to simulate from one to five years per day of computing time, up from the three months or so that Jaguar was able to churn through in a day, according to an ORNL statement.

Titan, which is supported by the US Department of Energy, will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials and other disciplines and pave the way for a wide range of achievements in science and technology.

Titan also has more than 700 terabytes of memory. The combination of central processing units, the traditional foundation of high-performance computers, and more recent graphics processing unit (GPUs) will allow Titan to occupy the same space as its Jaguar predecessor while using only marginally more electricity.

“One challenge in supercomputers today is power consumption,” said Jeff Nichols, associate lab director for computing and computational sciences.

“Combining GPUs and CPUs in a single system requires less power than CPUs alone and is a responsible move toward lowering our carbon footprint. Titan will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, materials and other disciplines to enable scientific leadership,” he added.

By relying on its 299,008 CPU cores to guide simulations and allowing its new NVIDIA GPUs to do the heavy lifting, Titan will enable researchers to run scientific calculations with greater speed and accuracy.

“Titan will allow scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater detail,” said James Hack, director of ORNL’s National Centre for Computational Sciences.

source::::::Reuters….article by
Poornima Gupta and Noel Randewich

(Reuters) – Apple Inc will begin to sell an 8-inch version of the iPad on Friday to compete with Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle and other smaller tablets, but it set a higher-than-expected price tag of $329 that Wall Street fears could curb demand.

The 7.9 inch “iPad mini” marks the iPhone-maker’s first foray into the smaller-tablet segment. Apple hopes to beat back incursions onto its home turf of consumer electronics hardware, while safeguarding its lead in a larger tablet space – one that even deep-pocketed rivals like Samsung Electronics have found tough to penetrate.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and marketing chief Phil Schiller took the wraps off the new tablet, which essentially has most of the functions and features of the full-size iPad but in a smaller package.

Priced at $329 for a wi-fi only model, the iPad mini is a little costlier than some predicted, but some analysts see that as a bid to retain premium pricing levels. Others fear the gadget will lure buyers away from Apple’s $499 flagship 10-inch iPad, while proving ineffective in combating the threat of Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7, both of which are sold at or near cost.

“Apple has always been a premium hardware manufacturer. It’s basically a hardware company and they don’t have Google advertising or Amazon’s online store to fall back on,” said Destination Wealth Management CEO Michael Yoshikami.

“But people are happy to pay a premium because it’s quality hardware, and the ecosystem (of content and apps) cannot be underestimated.”

JMP Securities analyst Alex Gauna said, however, “It’s coming in the range that most were grumbling about and that, quite frankly, we’re a little bit concerned about.”

“It’s a little confusing at this juncture to try and figure out how it fits into the line-up. Is it going to cannibalize the more expensive iPad?” he said.

“It is worth noting that there are zero-margin products out there competing with them now … and that is presenting some challenges to Apple.”

Frank Gillett, an analyst with Forrester who attended the event, said he was impressed with the lightness of the iPad mini, which he got a chance to play with following the event.

“Apple went for the high end of what people have been thinking of,” Gillett said, adding that Amazon and Google may have to adjust their product lineups to compete with the iPad mini.

The focus on growing competition was evident as Schiller – at the iPad mini’s launch event, held in San Jose’s California Theatre – compared the iPad mini with Google’s popular 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet, citing feature by feature why the new Apple device was superior. It is unusual for Apple to single out a specific competitor in its product launches.

“Theirs is made of plastic,” Schiller said, referring to the Android tablet. “The entire Android product is thicker and heavier.”

Schiller later defended Apple’s pricing of the iPad mini, telling reporters he expects consumers to recognize quality and be willing to pay for it.

FASTER AND SLIMMER

In a surprise move, Apple also announced a fourth-generation full-sized iPad just six months after unveiling a third generation device to much fanfare. The latest tablet, which again sells for $499, is faster and slimmer and comes just days before Microsoft is due to show off its own “Surface” tablet.

Apple also unveiled thinner MacBook Pro laptops, including a 13-inch Retina display.

SIGHTS ON AMAZON

The iPad was launched in 2010 by late Apple visionary Steve Jobs and since then it has taken a big chunk out of PC sales, upending the industry and reinventing mobile computing with its apps-based model, often called an ecosystem.

A smaller tablet is the first device to be added to Apple’s compact portfolio under Cook, who took over from Jobs just before his death a year ago.

“It’s very cool,” Cook said of the iPad mini. “We told you earlier this year you would see some incredible innovation from Apple across the year. We think we kept our promise.”

In a rarity for a company that tightly controls events, Apple live-streamed its invitation-only presentation to Apple devices such as the iPad and Macintosh computers.

The Kindle and Nexus 7 have grabbed a chunk of the lower end of the tablet market and proved demand for a pocket-sized slate exists. Those companies’ tablets – the most successful other than Apple’s – have forced Apple into a space it has avoided and at times derided, analysts say.

Amazon’s 7-inch Kindle Fire released last year for $199 was one of the hottest-selling holiday gadgets. It pressured Amazon’s margins but potentially garnered millions of new high-spending customers for the online retailer.

Amazon sold more than a million Kindles a week during December, paving the way for Google to try out a similarly sized small tablet.

Amazon has now launched its second-generation Kindle Fire HD, which it says is the “best-selling product across all of Amazon worldwide,” based on undisclosed U.S. sales figures and international preorders.

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, built by Asian manufacturer Asustek, won top marks from reviewers and quickly ran out of stock after its July launch.

All three companies will be vying to get their devices on shopping lists during the U.S. holiday season, which traditionally starts next month.

Surveys conducted ahead of Tuesday’s news suggested some consumers had hoped for a more affordable Apple mini tablet.

The “starting sweet spot” for the tablet would be in the $249-$299 range, according to a survey of more than a thousand consumers by Baird Equity Research.

PRICE IS KEY

Jobs famously derided the 7-inch screen, saying such a device should come with sandpaper so users can file down their fingers. But an internal email revealed during a patent trial showed he turned more favorable to the idea by early 2011.

Apple has sold 100 million iPads so far, with the device accounting for 26 percent of Apple’s fiscal third-quarter revenue.

But analysts are concerned now about erosion of Apple’s industry leading margins as it takes on the Kindle Fire. It earned gross margins of 23 percent to 32 percent on U.S. iPad sales between October 2010 and the end of March 2012, according to a July court filing by Apple.

Amazon’s first Kindle Fire just about breaks even after manufacturing costs, according to IHS iSuppli estimates, and Google has said its Nexus 7 is being sold at cost.

“The pricing may limit sales. From a profitability perspective though, I think at $330 Apple is still getting adequate gross margins on the sales,” said Morningstar analyst Brian Colello. “But at that price point it may limit adoption and unit volumes.”

Apple’s shares ended regular trading down 3.2 percent at $613.36, after gaining 4 percent on Monday in the run-up to the event.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Barr and Alexei Oreskovic, Editing by Edwin Chan, Richard Pullin, Andrew Hay and Steve Orlofsky)