Inventor of copy and paste

Larry Tesler

Larry (formally Lawrence Gordon) Tesler (born April 24, 1945) is a computer scientist working in the field of human-computer interaction. Tesler has worked at Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!

Tesler grew up in New York City and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1961. He went on to Stanford University, where he studiedcomputer science in the 1960s, and worked for a time at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. With Horace Enea, he designed Compel, an early single assignment language. This functional programming language was intended to make concurrent processing more natural and was used to introduce programming concepts to beginners.

From 1973 to 1980, he was at Xerox PARC, where, among other things, he worked on the Gypsy word processor and Smalltalk. Copy and paste was first implemented in 1973-1976 by Tesler and Tim Mott while working on the programming of Gypsy at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

In 1980, Tesler moved to Apple Computer, where he held various positions, including Vice President of AppleNet, Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group, and Chief Scientist. He worked on the Lisa team, and was enthusiastic about the development of the Macintosh as the successor to the Lisa.

In 1985, Tesler worked with Niklaus Wirth to add object-oriented language extensions to the Pascal programming language, calling the new language Object Pascal. He also was instrumental in developing MacApp, one of the first class libraries for application development. Eventually, these two technologies became shipping Apple products.

Starting in 1990, Tesler led the efforts to develop the Apple Newton, initially as Vice President of the Advanced Development Group, and then as Vice President of the Personal Interactive Electronics division.

In 1991, he contributed the article "Networked Computing in the 1990s" to Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks, September, 1991.

Tesler left Apple in 1997 to co-found Stagecast Software, which allowed him to apply his enthusiasm for kids' programming and use of computers, an enthusiasm he acquired mainly at Xerox PARC, where he worked in Alan Kay's Learning Research Group.

Tesler joined Amazon.com in 2001; in 2004, he became the company's Vice President of Shopping Experience. In 2005, he joined Yahoo! as Vice President of Yahoo!'s User Experience and Design group.

In November, 2008, he left Yahoo to join personal genetics information company, 23andMe as Product Fellow. Since December, 2009, he has been an independent consultant.

Tesler is on the board of the Gorilla Foundation.

Tesler has a strong preference for modeless software, in which a user action has a consistent effect, rather than changing its meaning dependent on previous actions, as in the vi text editor. His Gypsy editor, for example, provided a 'click and type' interface in which the user could, at any time, enter text at the current insertion point, or click where the insertion point should be repositioned. Previously, most editors used the keyboard to enter text or to issue commands, depending on the current mode. To promote his preference, as of 2010, Tesler has equipped his Subaru automobile with a personalized California license plate with the license number "NO MODES". He has used this license number since about 1980. Along with others, he has also been using the phrase "Don't Mode Me In" for years as a rally cry to eliminate or reduce modes.

This is How Google Glass Works: Features & Specifications -

Today we have to know the features of Google Glass, the augmented reality glasses Google , which will be available in late 2013. This ambitious project is becoming reality gradually, following the release of last year known as Project Glass.

This is How Google Glass Works [VIDEO]

To leave us with honey on the lips, Google has made public today Google features Glass, which is undoubtedly a good appetizer until we can prove in reality these augmented reality glasses.

Glass features a 640 x 360 display that Google says is the “equivalent of a 25-inch high definition screen from eight feet away,” a 5-megapixel camera capable of 720p video audio that comes via a bone conduction transducer. There will be 16GB of flash storage on-board, with 12GB actually usable, and it will sync with “Google cloud storage” — presumably Google Drive. Glass will feature adjustable nose pads in a frame that Google says will “fit any face,” and you’ll get extra pads in two sizes.

The new Google Goggles include 16GB flash memory (to which additions are added 12GB using cloud services, especially Google Drive ). Other important features of Google Glass is the use and battery life of the product, which can be used for a whole day. Google explains that the biggest drain on the battery of the glasses come while we use these in the Google Hangouts or during video recording. The new augmented reality glasses Google also include a micro USB port. As for the connectivity of the new device , Google has looked pretty this technical aspect. Thus, the glasses support 802.11b / g Wi-Fi, and promise to be compatible with any device having Bluetooth. Among the list of features of Google Glass also found some technical specifications related to the new application MyGlass . This app is compatible with mobile devices that present Android operating system 4.0.3 or higher, and allow important functions like GPS or SMS messaging support. 

See the Google Glass in Action Video-

smart pen

Now, smart pen that vibrates when you make spelling error 

German inventors have developed a new hi-tech pen that gently vibrates every time it senses a spelling mistake or sloppy handwriting.

Lernstift is a regular pen with real ink, but inside is a special motion sensor and a small battery-powered Linux computer with a WiFi chip.

Together those parts allow the pen to recognise specific movements, letter shapes and know a wide assortment of words. If it senses bad letter formation or messy handwriting, it will vibrate, 'ABC News' reported.

Users can choose between two functions:

 Calligraphy Mode - pointing out flaws of form and legibility or 

Orthography Mode - recognising words and comparing the word to a language database. If the word isn't recognised it will vibrate, according to Daniel Kaesmacher, the 33-year-old co-founder of Lernstift from Munich.

The other co-founder Falk Wolsky, 36, had the idea for the pen last year while his 10-year-old son was doing his homework.

"His son had been struggling with his work and staying focused and Falk thought there should be a pen that gives him some sort of signal so he stays focused," Kaesmacher said.

After a year and a half in development, the founders have now brought Lernstift to Kickstarter to begin raising money and gauging interest.

Technology Used by Facebook – Research Report by Jay Thadeshwar

Social networking is the art of connecting with others who share common interests. This “Red Road” is a community that helps us hold together and offers many other benefits. Networking through social networking has revolutionized the way that Internet usage is at the forefront of what we now know as Web 2.0.
Facebook is the social network. People have been “facebooking” one another for about 7 years, so most used Facebook social network with over 800 million users worldwide. But how does Facebook work?

In this article I’ll discuss the inner workings of Facebook, which includes infrastructure architecture and frontend / backend, nuts and bolts holding together Facebook.

How does Facebook work –  The Front End

Facebook uses a variety of services, tools and programming languages ??to make up its basic infrastructure. In the front, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack with Memcache. Not a computer science expert? Let’s take a look at what this means.

Linux & Apache

This part is pretty self-explanatory. Linux is a Unix-like operating system kernel. It is open source, highly customizable, and good for security. Facebook runs the Linux operating system Apache HTTP server. Apache is also free and is the most popular open source web server in use. 

MySQL

For the database, Facebook uses MySQL for its speed and reliability. MySQL is used primarily as a key store of value when the data are randomly distributed among a large number of cases logical. These logical instances extend across physical nodes and load balancing is done at physical node.

As far as customization is concerned, Facebook has developed a custom partitioning scheme which is assigned a global ID for all data. They also have a custom schema file that is based on the amount of common data and the latest is on a per user basis. Most of the data are randomly distributed.

PHP

Facebook uses PHP, since it is a good web programming language with extensive support and active developer community and is good for rapid iteration. PHP is a dynamically typed language / interpreter.

Memcache

what is memcache??- Memcache is a caching system that is used to accelerate dynamic web sites with databases (like Facebook) by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce reading time. Memcache is the main form of caching Facebook and helps relieve the burden of database.

Having a caching system allows Facebook to be as fast as it is to remember your information. If you do not have to go to the database you just collect data from the cache based on user name.

Disadvantages of using LAMP

Facebook has realized that there are disadvantages to using the LAMP stack. Note that PHP is not necessarily optimized for web sites large and therefore difficult to scale. Furthermore, it is the fastest executing language and framework of the extension is difficult to use.

Facebook President, Vice President of Engineering, has conducted an interview with EmTech @ MIT on this. “Extension of any website is a challenge,” Schroepfer said, “but the expansion of a social network has unique challenges.”

He continued by saying that unlike other websites, you can simply add more servers to solve the problem because Facebook “huge interconnected dataset.” The new connections are created all the time due to user activity.

Facebook has grown so rapidly that often face questions relating to database queries, caching and data storage. Their database is huge and complex in many ways. To account for this, Facebook has started a lot of open source projects and back-end services.

How does Facebook Work – The Back End

Facebook backend services are written in a variety of different programming languages ??like C + +, Java, Python, and Erlang. His philosophy of building services is as follows:
1. Create a service if necessary

2. Create a framework / toolkit to facilitate the creation of services

3. Use the programming language suitable for the task

A list of all open source developers Facebook can be found here. I will discuss some of the essential tools that Facebook has been developed

Thrift (protocol)

Thrift is a lightweight remote procedure call framework for scalable cross-language services development. Thrift supports C + +, PHP, Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, Erlang, and others. It’s fast, saves development time and provides a working division of labor in high-performance servers and applications.

Escribano (server logs)

Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time on many other servers. It is a scalable framework useful for recording a wide range of data. It is built on top of savings.

Cassandra (database)

management system is a database designed to handle large amounts of data spread out across many servers. The function of the power of Facebook

 Inbox search and provides a structure of key-value store with eventual consistency.

HipHop for PHP

HipHop for PHP is a transformer of source code for PHP script code and was created to save server resources. HipHop transforms PHP source code in C + + optimized. After doing this, use g + + to compile it to machine code.

Why Facebook’s performance is so good?

800 million users, divide America, Europe, Asia. It means that more than one million people view photos, chat with friends or update status at a time. How can they do?

The main language is PHP and MySQL Facebook, who have a reputation to scale well. To my knowledge, people tend to use a compiled language (like Java,. NET) for the implementation of big business. The languages ??enforce good practice and habit of refactoring, good architecture, while PHP does not. In addition, the scripting language can not run faster than a compiled one.

Critical Architecture Maps of Facebook Technology

There is no single reason but a lot of reasons:

Extensive use of caching (memcached APC), which drastically reduces processing time. Slide 12 compares the load time with APC (~ 130 ms) versus without it – 4050 ms. That’s 30 times faster!

The use of HipHop, which converts PHP code C + + (which is compiled into machine code much more efficient than current PHP).

Facebook uses PHP and MySQL, but that is not the only thing. For example, use Erlang by chat, groups of Hadoop for some storage. If you visit their employment page, you’ll see they’re hiring developers with experience in C + +, Java, Python and others.

Facebook has data distributed across many servers, many years. In June 2010, there were 60,000 FB servers. (I think it is not too much. Google had half a million … 5 years ago)

Facebook sends traffic as little as possible using static CDN to deliver static content. Gzip to compress the data. Cookies, Javascript, HTML – all that is cut back to reduce the number of bytes sent over the network. Use a technology they call “BigPipe” which sends the partial content rather than the entire page.

One of the key values ??of Facebook is to move fast. Over the past six years Facebook has been able to achieve much faster thanks to a development path that offers PHP. As a programming language PHP is simple. Easy to learn, easy to spell, easy to read, and easier to debug. Facebook is able to obtain new Facebook engineers intensified in faster with PHP than with other languages, allowing us to innovate faster.

HipHop for PHP is not technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source transformer. HipHop program transforms the PHP source code highly optimized C + + and uses g + + to compile it. HipHop executes the source code so semantically equivalent and sacrifices some rarely used features – such as eval () – in exchange for enhanced performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP run time system, and a rewrite of many common PHP extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Scale PHP as a scripting language

Roots of PHP is a scripting language like Perl, Python and Ruby, all of which have important benefits in terms of programmer productivity and the capacity to implement products quickly. This compares with more traditional compiled languages ??like C + + and scripting languages ??such as Java. On the other hand, scripting languages ??are known to be generally less efficient when it comes to CPU and memory usage. Because this has been a challenge to scale Facebook to over 400 million page views each month based on PHP.

A common way to address these inefficiencies is to rewrite the most complex parts of your PHP application directly in C + + and PHP extensions. This is largely becomes a glue between the PHP front-end HTML and application logic in C + +. From a technical standpoint this works well, but it dramatically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work throughout the application. Learning C + + is just the first step in writing PHP extensions, the second is the understanding of the Zend API. Given that Facebook’s engineering team is relatively small – there are over one million users all engineers – Facebook can not afford to be part of Facebook’s code base less accessible than others.

Scale Facebook is particularly difficult because almost all page views are a registered user in a personalized experience. Seeing your home page Facebook have to find all your friends, see their most relevant updates (from a personalized service that it created called multi-feed), filter the results based on your privacy settings, then fill the stories with comments, photos, likes, and all data rich people love Facebook. All this in less than a second. HipHop allows us to write the logic that makes the final cut of the PHP page and go quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C + +, Erlang, Java or Python with external news service, research, Chat, and other core parts of the site.

Since 2007 Facebook has thought of some different ways to solve these problems and have even tried to implement some of them. The common suggestion is to rewrite only to Facebook in another language, but given the complexity and speed of development of the site that it will take some time to perform. We’ve rewritten aspects Zend Engine – PHP internal – and has contributed to the patches in the PHP project, but ultimately Facebook has not seen the kind of performance gains that are needed. HipHop benefits are nearly transparent to Facebook speed of development.

Share your thoughts by Commenting here. Let us know what you think.

History of the Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, about 20 years after the first connection was established over what is today known as the Internet. At the time, Tim was a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Many scientists participated in experiments at CERN for extended periods of time, then returned to their laboratories around the world. These scientists were eager to exchange data and results, but had difficulties doing so. Tim understood this need, and understood the unrealized potential of millions of computers connected together through the Internet.

CERN (circa 1991)

Tim documented what was to become the World Wide Web with the submission of a proposal to his management at CERN, in late 1989 (see the proposal.), This proposal specified a set of technologies that would make the Internet truly accessible and useful to people. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. However, Tim persevered. By October of 1990, he had specified the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s Web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your Web browser):

·         HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The publishing format for the Web, including the ability to format documents and link to other documents and resources.

·         URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique to each resource on the Web.

·         HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the Web.

Tim also wrote the first Web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb”) and the first Web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first Web page was served. By 1991, people outside of CERN joined the new Web community. Very important to the growth of the Web, CERN announced in April 1993 that the World Wide Web technology would be available for anyone to use on a royalty-free basis.

Since that time, the Web has changed the world. It has arguably become the most powerful communication medium the world has ever known. Whereas only 25% of the people on the planet are currently using the Web (and the Web Foundation aims to accelerate this growth substantially), the Web has changed the way we teach and learn, buy and sell, inform and are informed, agree and disagree, share and collaborate, meet and love, and tackle problems ranging from putting food on our tables to curing cancer.

Tim Berners-Lee and others realized that for the Web to reach its full potential, the underlying technologies must become global standards, implemented in the same way around the world. Therefore, in 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a place for stakeholders to reach consensus around the specification and guidelines to ensure that the Web works for everyone and that it evolves in a responsible manner. W3C standards have enabled a single World Wide Web of information and people, and an increasingly-rich set of capabilities: Web 2.0 (personal and dynamic), Web 3.0 (a semantic Web of linked data), Web services, voice access, mobile access, accessibility for people with disabilities and for people speaking many languages, richer graphics and video, etc. The Web Foundation supports the work of W3C to ensure that the Web and the technologies that underpin it remain free and open to all.

With over 1 trillion public pages (in 2008) and 1.7 billion people on the Web (in 2009), we do not really understand how these pieces work together and how to best improve the Web into the future. In 2005, Tim and colleagues started the Web Science Trust (WST). WST is building an international, multidisciplinary research community to examine the World Wide Web as “humanity connected by technology”. WST brings together computer scientists, sociologists, mathematicians, policy experts, entrepreneurs, decision makers and many others from around the world to better understand today’s Web and to develop solutions to guide the use and design of tomorrow’s Web. The Web Foundation believes the discipline of Web Science is critically important to advancing the Web, and supports WST‘s efforts to build and coordinate this new field of study.

Most of the history of the Web is ahead of us. The Web is far from reaching its full potential as an agent of empowerment for everyone in the world. Web access through the world’s 4+ billion mobile phones isan incredible opportunity. New Web technologies will enable billions of people currently excluded from the Web community to join it. We must understand the Web and improve its capabilities. We must ensure that Web technologies are free and open for all to leverage. The work of the Web Foundation aims to have a substantial, positive impact on all of these factors, and on the future history of the Web.