Selecting a Time Source For a Network Time Server

UTC - Coordinated Universal Time (from the French: Universel Temps Coordonné) is a global timescale based on Greenwich Meantime (GMT - from the Greenwich Meridian line where the sun is above at 12 noon). But accounts for the natural slowing of the Earth's rotation. It is used globally in commerce, computer networks via a NTP server, air-traffic control and the World's stock exchanges to name but a few of its applications.

UTC is really the only solution for time synchronisation needs. While it is just as possible to synchronise a computer network with an NTP server to a time other than UTC it is pointless. As UTC is utilised by computer networks all across the globe by using a UTC time source that means your network can synchronise with every other network in the world that is synchronised to UTC.

UTC is most commonly received from across the Internet, however, this can only be recommended for small network users where either accuracy or security is an issue. An Internet based UTC source is external to the firewall so will leave a potential hole for malicious users to exploit.

Two secure methods of receiving UTC are commonly available. These are either the GPS network (Global Positioning System) or specialist radio transmission broadcast on long wave from several of the world's national physics laboratories. The two methods have both advantages and disadvantages which need to be ascertained before a method is selected.

A radio transmission such as the UK's MSF, the German DCF-77 or the USA's WWVB signal are vulnerable to local topography although many of these signals can be picked up indoors. Whilst not every country transmits a UTC radio signal around the neighbouring countries that do it is possible to still receive it.

GPS on the other hand is available literally anywhere on the globe. The signal comes directly from above and as long as the antenna has a good clear view of the sky it can be received anywhere. However, as the antenna has to be on a roof looking up this can have logistical problems (particularly for very tall buildings).

Specialist dedicated network time servers are available that can actually receive both methods of UTC but whether using GPS or a radio transmissions synchronisation of a network to within a few milliseconds is possible.

CES ’09 - Gadgets That Will Get You Laid

My favorite geek event of the year, CES (Consumer Electronic show), was in Las Vegas again this past weekend unveiling 2009’s slew of gadget goodies. For a tech-whore like myself, CES is my belated Christmas. Walking into CES actually does make me feel like a kid on Christmas morning. I look around all glossy-eyed with electronic "toys" as far as the eye can see, not knowing where to start! There are literally thousands of new products and I want to play with them all! Seriously, few things excite me more than tech gadgets. It’s an obsession, a sickness of mine. I just can’t get enough. Sadly though, I could not make it to this year’s CES. I had to go to that stupid place called work instead of getting to tinker with cool digital devices - boo. I didn’t pout though and I didn’t sulk. If I couldn’t be at the show, then I was bringing the show to me. I was going to follow all 4 glorious days of CES coverage via the web. Now even though this post is titled "CES - Gadgets That Will Get You Laid", there are few gadgets in this world that can do just that. Because let’s be honest, 99% of women don’t care about tech gadgets. Some sleek little wireless router that does everything except walk my dog may seem orgasmic to me, but to most women, they couldn’t care less. "What’s a router?", they’ll ask. I’ll roll my eyes and walk away because they just don’t understand how sexy it is. However, there are some exceptions in this world, that remaining 1%. That rare breed of woman that actually does understand the pulling power of a data encrypted self-destructing thumb drive. And in that small remaining 1% of women, few are as hot or as tech obsessed as my girl Meghan, who can be seen below hugging (or depending on how you look at it – humping) the CES world logo from last year’s event.

For those of us tech obsessed, the free swag bag given out at CES is like a mini bag of porn! (Which is rather ironic because the Adult Entertainment Expo takes place right next door to CES every year. Warning! NSFW - Link contains adult content.) Pop it open and the drooling begins! To me, it might as well be Santa’s bag of goodies. An iTunes card, free software, Blu-ray movies, a Bluetooth headset, an underwater digital camera, the list goes on and on. Of course the majority of women would just shrug their shoulders. No biggie to them. They would not revel in the same delight that I do. Instead they would toss that to the side and opt for a swag bag consisting of Manolo Blahnik shoes, a Burberry scarf and a small turquoise blue box from Tiffany & Co. That’s their idea of "gadgets". That’s fine though. To each their own.

Guys I know you are wondering and anxiously awaiting. Just tell me what gadgets will get me laid! That’s what you want to know, right? Well, as I said earlier, probably none. So why did I title my post "CES - Gadgets That Will Get You Laid"? Well, would you have wanted to read it if it was titled "CES - Gadgets Won’t Get You Laid"? Where’s the teaser in that? That won’t lure you in. I know. I’m sorry. That was a sick and evil trick on my part. Now if you want to get laid, your best bet is to forget trying to woo her with your 60inch HDTV. She’s just not interested. However, you may get a lil play if you go the route of an unexpected well thought out gift, some properly placed compliments, perhaps flowers, maybe a heartfelt letter, taking her on a totally original date. I could keep going on, but you get the idea. Of course I don’t guarantee you’ll get laid, but it certainly can’t hurt your chances. One thing I can guarantee you is that you’ll kill your chances of every getting laid in your lifetime with this...

If you’re a guy who loves tech gadgets, then lean in close because you’ll want to hear every word I'm about to say! I can tell you what the #1 gadget from CES '09 that you should stay away from. Far, far away from...unless of course your goal is becoming a 40-year-old virgin. It is certain to NOT make panties drop. In fact, I’m positive it will be such a mood killer to a woman that she will actually get up and run away from you! Yes, it’s that serious. I’m talking about the LG GD910 Wrist Watch Phone. If you thought those digital LCD/calculator watches from the 80s were bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet! I love almost all tech gadgets, but this watch would actually make me lose an erection. So I can only imagine how much it would turn a girl off!

I know LG was going for the cool James Bond wannabe spy image, but there is nothing cool about this product. As a kid, I wanted to grow up to be 007, but there is no way in hell I would ever let this watch touch my skin! I can hear Sean Connery mocking it in disgust. The LG GD910 Wrist Watch Phone is more than just a watch and phone combo. Besides being touch-screen and water resistant, it has about a bazillion other features jammed in it. It’s also an mp3 player, has a camera, built-in Bluetooth, speech recognition, video calling capability, 3G Internet access, stop me when you heard enough. Oh, and I think it tells time? Not sure though. So what isn’t it? Well it’s not an aphrodisiac, that’s for sure.

Dare to wear this watch and 3 words will go thru your date’s head. And they aren’t: "I want you." They are: "You fucking nerd." Her next sentence will contain just 4 words - "Get away from me." Not exactly the smooth sailing path to getting you laid now is it?

Tree Climbing Robot

Tree-climbing robot

A remarkable, if slightly creepy, tree-climbing robot is being developed by robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and several other US Universities. And here's a video of it scrabbling up several different surfaces.

The aim of RiSE (Robots in Scansorial Environments) is to develop a robot capable of walking on land and also crawling up vertical surfaces. And it is funded by DARPA's Biodynotics Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robotics (BIODYNOTICS) Program.

Obviously such a robots could have plenty of useful applications, in search-and-rescue and space exploration, for example. But presumably it could also help you reach those really hard-to-prune branches

What happen after no oil anymore?

I discovered something amazing recently and I tried to tell a bunch of friends about it. A guy in Illinois has, it seems, invented a device that can turn almost anything into oil, plus a few byproducts (all useful).

I, for example, could be transformed into 40 pounds of light sweet crude, 7 pounds of flammable gas, 8 pounds of high-quality mineral fertilizer, and 125 pounds of slightly cloudy water, give or take. Individual results may vary.

Inventor Paul Buskis is not planning to process people, of course. He's going after trash. His thermo-depolymerization process works on any carbon-based substance--chicken entrails, tires, plastic milk jugs, you name it. Garbage in, oil out--that's the promise.

My friends scoffed. "Sounds too good to be true," was their consensus. "It'll never work."

Ah, but it's already working. A company called Changing World Technologies has built a plant in Carthage, Missouri, based on Buskis's process. It's producing 400 barrels of oil a day right now, extruded from the wastes of nearby turkey processing plants. The company is building another plant in Philadelphia to process sewage into black gold.

My friends would have none of this. They assured me the invention will emit toxic pollution. (It doesn't.) It will use more energy than it produces. (Quite the opposite.) It's voodoo science: "How can oil be created?"

Well, it's been done before. The earth created oil by heating, cooling, and squeezing the rotted remains of plants and animals. Buskis replicates that process mechanically. What took millions of years in nature, his process achieves in a day.

Inconceivable? Not really. Even in nature, Buskis says, the transformation occurred rapidly. What took millions of years was for the right conditions to line up by chance.

A monkey banging on a typewriter might take millions of years to come up with a great sonnet. That doesn't make us doubt that Shakespeare could do it in a day. But if this thing is real, my friends countered, why aren't people stampeding to buy the stock?

Because there is no stock. This technology is closely held by a small group of private investors including James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and Howard Buffet, son of the legendary investing genius Warren Buffet.

Ah. Now the skepticism faded away.

"I knew it," one of my friends uttered bitterly.

"And it's still oil," another scolded. "Burning it still creates pollution...."
Everyone leaned back, relieved. They had no trouble believing my news as long as it wasn't that thing with feathers. You know. Hope.

History of aluminium

Aluminum is an abundant metallic chemical element which is widely used throughout the world for a wide range of products. Many consumers interact with some form of aluminum on a daily basis, especially if they are active in the kitchen. The element has an atomic number of 13, and it is identified with the symbol Al on the periodic table of elements. It is classified in the poor metals, sharing the property of extreme malleability with metals like tin and lead.

Although aluminium is the most abundant metallic element in the Earth's crust (believed to be 7.5 to 8.1 percent), it is rare in its free form, occurring in oxygen-deficient environments such as volcanic mud,, and it was once considered a precious metal more valuable than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, is reputed to have given a banquet where the most honoured guests were given aluminium utensils, while the other guests had to make do with gold.The Washington Monument was completed, with the 100 ounce (2.8 kg) aluminium capstone being put in place on December 6, 1884, in an elaborate dedication ceremony. It was the largest single piece of aluminium cast at the time. At that time, aluminium was more expensive than silver, gold, or platinum. Aluminium has been produced in commercial quantities for just over 100 years.

Aluminium is remarkable for its ability to resist corrosion (due to the phenomenon of passivisation) and its low density. Structural components made from aluminium and its alloys are vital to the aerospace industry and very important in other areas of transportation and building. Its reactive nature makes it useful as a catalyst or additive in chemical mixtures, including being used in ammonium nitrate explosives to enhance blast power.

The metal derives its name from alumen, the Latin name for alum. In 1761 L. B. G de Morveau proposed the name alumine for the base in alum, and in 1787 Lavoisier definitely identified it as the oxide of a still undiscovered metal. In 1807 Sir Humprey Davy proposed the name aluminumaluminum. Shortly thereafter, the name aluminium was adopted to conform to the "ium" ending of most elements, and this spelling is now in general use throughout the world. Aluminum was also the accepted spelling in the United States until 1925 when the American Chemical Society officially reverted to aluminum. for this metal and later agreed to change it to

Hans Christian Oersted
Hans Christian Oersted is now generally credited with having been the first to prepare metallic aluminum. He accomplished this in 1825 by heating anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and distilling off the mercury. Frederick Wöhler improved the process between 1827 and 1845 by substituting potassium for the amalgam and by developing a better method for dehydrating aluminum. In 1854 Henri Sainte-Claire Deville substituted sodium for the relatively expensive potassium and, by using sodium aluminum chloride instead of aluminum chloride, produced the first commercial quantities of aluminum in a pilot plant near Paris. Several plants using essentially this process were subsequently built in Great Britain, but none survived for long the advent in 1886 of the electrolytic process, which has dominated the industry ever since.

In 1866, Charles Martin Hall of Oberlin (Ohio) and Paul L.T.Héroult of France, both of them 22 years old at the time, discovered and patented almost simultaneously the process in which alumina is dissolved in molten crysolite and decomposed electrolytically. This reduction process, generally known as the Hall-Héroult process, has successfully withstood many attempts to supplant it. It remains the only method to produce aluminum in commercial quantities.

The 10 best invention ever

What does "best" mean? Probably the best definition would be the "most defining of who we are today", Here are the best inventions ever :

10 - The World Wide Web -

Berners-Lee brought the Internet to life in 1991 and made the globe a village. It is providing science with instant information and its use is being refined every single day.

9 - The Steam Engine -

Thomas Savery was an English military engineer and inventor who in 1698, patented the first crude steam engine. Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric steam engine in 1712. James Watt improved Newcomen's design and invented what is considered the first modern steam engine in 1765.

8 - The Sewing Machine -

The first functional sewing machine was invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830. In 1834, Walter Hunt built America's first (somewhat) successful sewing machine. Elias Howe patented the first lock stitch sewing machine in 1846. Isaac Singer invented the up-and-down motion mechanism. In 1857, James Gibbs patented the first chain-stitch single-thread sewing machine. Helen Augusta Blanchard patented the first zigzag stitch machine in 1873.

7 - The Mechanical Clock -

Time was actually a measure of events before the timepiece was invented, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. No universal time actually existed, only a local one. That meant that once you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to clearly state where that was, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. And of course, what clocks made possible, they soon made necessary. In a clock-driven world, most of us are now either "on time," "ahead of schedule," or "running late."

6 - The Light Bulb -

Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Alva Edison didn't "invent" the light bulb, but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea. In 1809, Humphry Davy, an English chemist, invented the first electric light. In 1878, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, an English physicist, was the first person to invent a practical and longer-lasting electric light bulb (13.5 hours) with a carbon fiber filament. In 1879, Thomas Alva Edison invented a carbon filament that burned for forty hours.

5 - Antibiotics -

Most people actually died of infectious diseases, a few centuries ago. The plague that broke out in 1347, killed almost half of Europe's population in nearly two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the western hemisphere was tuberculosis. Almost no one ever died of old age back in the day, probably the main reason why elders were revered.

4 - The Automobile -

"You can have any color as long as it is black," boasted Ford at the turn of the Century. Automobiles have come a long way. They permitted rapid transportation of people and goods. The next challenge lies in developing environment-friendly automobiles. We're still waiting for the flying cars that Back to the Future promised.

3 - Television -

In 1884, Paul Nipkow sent images over wires using a rotating metal disk technology with 18 lines of resolution. Television then evolved along two paths, mechanical based on Nipkow's rotating disks, and electronic based on the cathode ray tube. American Charles Jenkins and Scotsman John Baird followed the mechanical model while Philo Farnsworth, working independently in San Francisco, and Russian émigré Vladimir Zworkin, working for Westinghouse and later RCA, advanced the electronic model.

2 - The Computer -

There are many major milestones in the history of computers, starting with 1936, when Konrad Zuse built the first freely programmable computer.

1 - The Telephone -

Many people imagined a form of telephony, even long before it was actually invented. This wonder of modern technology allows anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment, even without physically seeing the person, or even knowing ho he/she is.

Which milk is the best milk for me?

Help! Our fresh milk is gone from the supermarket. How i know, which milk is the best for me to buy? Milk is one of the healthiest food in the world.

Milk is well known as an excellent source of calcium. Regardless of its fat content, milk provides about 300 milligrams of calcium per serving (8 fluid ounces).A diet that includes three servings of milk (or other comparable dairy foods) each day provides enough calcium and other nutrients that may help reduce the risk of osteoporosis, high blood pressure and colon cancer.It is difficult to obtain enough calcium without consuming milk (or other dairy foods). To help meet calcium requirements, the following number of servings of milk (or its equivalent) is recommended each day:

Children 4 to 8 : 3 servings
Children 9 to 18 : 4 servings

Adults 19 to 50 : 3 servings

Adults 50-plus : 4 servings

Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized or homogenized. It come directly from cow. Raw milk contain 3,5 until 4 % milk fat and a little bit more vitamin B and C than the fresh milk. It should be consumed in the first 24 hours after the milking process. Raw milk should be cooked before consumed, drinking raw milk can be dangerous, especially for young children.

Fresh milk is milk that has been pasteurized. Raw milk will be cooked for 15 - 30 secs in 72 - 75 Celsius. It make the milk can be consumable for 10 days. There's low fat (0,5%), reduced fat (1,5%), and full fat (3,5%) fresh milk. Fresh milk is safer to be consumed than raw milk.

Long Life Milk is milk that simply lasts longer. It is milk that has been heat at a high temperature so that you can store it for a longer period if time, before chilling and serving.

Lactose-free milk is real farm fresh milk in which the lactose (sugar) has been broken down. Lactose intolerant people can usually consume lactose-free milk and other lactose-free products if they have trouble digesting regular milk and dairy products.

Concentrated milk is also known as condensed whole milk. It contains a minimum of 7.5% milk fat and 25.5% total milk solids. Concentrated whole milk is used primarily in the confectionery industry.