ICC to accept govt intervention only over security issues

LAHORE: Emphasising the requirement to keep member boards independent of government interference, chief executive of the International Cricket Council (ICC) Haroon Lorgat has made it clear that the game’s governing body will accept government’s intervention only in one situation — security issue endangering a contest between two countries.

“Only in one case the ICC will allow government to interfere with the affairs of the member board: when the security issues are involved between the two countries, and if any national squad do not tour any other country on security grounds the ICC will accept government’s writ,” ICC Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat told Dawn from Hong Kong after attending a series of ICC meetings from June 26 to 30, during which several important decisions, aimed at improving the game, were taken.

Lorgat asserted nothing forced the ICC to make the amendment in its constitution to rid its all affiliated member boards of government interference.

He insisted that the game’s governing body did it just to follow the principle of modern sporting governance that national federations should be made autonomous to work independently, without any government interference in administrative matters.

“Every member country supported the amendment and it was required to power the member countries to have a free elections system, to hold a democratic process in the administration, which can strengthen the leadership of the board; and thanks every member supported it,” he said.

Asked whether the PCB also backed it, Lorgat said: “Everyone”.

The PCB was against the amendment and it had also served a legal notice to the ICC in this connection. However, later, the PCB and the ICC reached an understanding under which a one-year period has been given till June 2012 to implement it.

During this period the member boards are allowed to discuss with the ICC, any problem, if they will be facing in implementation. The PCB was against the amendment because in case of acceptance, president of Pakistan will not remain its patron, who has the power to appoint  chairman of the cricket board.

During recent years, Lt Gen (r) Tauqir Zia, Shaharyar Khan and Dr Nasim Ashraf were appointed as PCB chairmen, without having any direct link with the cricketing fraternity, but just having close association with then president of the country.

Though the incumbent chairman Ijaz Butt was also appointed by Asif Ali Zardari, on political grounds, he is a cricketing personality (former Test cricketer and he has also remained head of the Lahore City Cricket Association).

Meanwhile, while replying to a question about any further role of the ICC task force on Pakistan after it had submitted its recommendations, Lorgat said it had no more responsibility.

“Now it comes to its logical ending and we have provided full report of the task force to the PCB, which has a series of recommendations,” he stated.

“It has many parts; one also relates to the attack on Sri Lanka cricket team in Lahore in 2009 while another concerns spot-fixing issues surfaced in Lord’s Test [between Pakistan and England] in August 2010,” Lorgat added.

Asked if international cricket would return to Pakistan after the implementation of those recommendations, Lorgat responded: “Then the ICC will encourage the visiting country to go to Pakistan, but again we will accept government’s directives over safety and security issues.”

The task force was formed to bring back international cricket to Pakistan.

Lorgat said though the ICC had abolished the task force, if the PCB required it further the ICC would have no objection.

About the second proposed amendment, asking to elect the ICC president, instead of having him through existing policy of rotation, Lorgat said for some reasons it had been deferred till October.

Lorgat, however, did not agree with the questioner that the proposed amendment was not suitable for the ICC, which had a very small number of member countries unlike other major global sports governing bodies such as FIFA. “It is just a speculation and a best decision is on hold,” he contended.

Asked as some member countries of the ICC were much stronger, how a best suitable person for the said post from any smaller country could contest the elections against a candidate belonging to a big country, his reply was the same, “It’s just a speculation.”

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Gayle blames West Indies board for feud

BRIDGETOWN: Chris Gayle has finally broken his silence on his long feud with the West Indian Cricket Board, dismissing suggestions he did not want to play international cricket and laying the blame with the board. 

The former Test captain released a long and emotional statement saying he had wanted to resume his international career but his attempts to reconcile with the board had been fruitless so he had been forced to go elsewhere. 

"I have now reached the stage where I have to say that enough is enough," he wrote in the statement. 

"I have come to the bitter realisation that I am not wanted by the board and all that has gone before in terms of reconciliation is a sham and a mockery. 

"I see it as a scam to fool the people of the West Indies and the world into believing that they were serious about my returning to West Indies cricket." 

Gayle, an explosive opening batsmen, has played 91 Tests, scoring two triple-centuries, and 223 one-day international for West Indies. 

He was not selected for the current series against India and on Thursday, the 31-year-old announced he had signed for Sydney Thunder in Australia's revamped domestic Twenty20 tournament. 

"My eyes are open, my heart is clean, my conscience is clear and the voice of reason is loud in my ears telling me that I should close this chapter in my life," he said in the statement. 

"I am not going to be the WICB's whipping boy. They have said they will root me out and they have succeeded in doing so by using underhanded tactics while attempting to ascribe blame to other people for what is clear is a well planned set of action. 

"Despite all that has happened I am still hopeful that good sense will prevail and I would once again represent my country and my region in near the future. 

"I wish to make it abundantly clear that I have not yet retired from any form of the game and remain available for selection for both Jamaica and West Indies. However, this is entirely out of my hands." 

DIFFERENT PATH 

West Indies coach Ottis Gibson, speaking at a news conference after the fourth day of the second Test against India on Friday, said he recently spoke to Gayle and explained to him what he needed to do to rejoin the team. 

"What Chris wants to say is up to him. It's a board matter now. The board is dealing with and Chris knows that," Gibson said. 

"We are trying to build a team, a team that is competitive and starts to win. Everyone has a part to play in it, including Chris Gayle, if he chooses. He knows the score, but he's choosing his own path."

Gibson, who had been a strong supporter of Gayle, said his absence was not a factor in the team's preparations and the players were keen not to let it distract them. 

"I can assure you we don't sit down at our team meetings and discuss Chris Gayle," Gibson said. 

"We discuss playing India and how we're going to get (Rahul) Dravid out, and how we're going to get (Vangipurappu) Laxman out and how we're going to stop (Ishant) Sharma from getting six wickets in the second innings and how we're going to go about winning the Test match. We don't talk about Chris Gayle."

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IBM scientists create a new memory technology that’s 100x faster than flash

IBM developed a new type of computer chip memory that can store multiple data bits per cell, a discovery that could lead to better performance for enterprise data storage and cheaper memory chips for consumer electronics like mobile phones.

Traditionally, data is stored as an electrical charge. But this new memory chip technology called phase-change memory stores data by changing the state of a material from amorphous to crystalline. PCM stores data when there’s a resistance change in the material. It uses less power than flash memory and can write data 100 times faster than any flash memory that is available today.

Currently only single-level cells PCM are on the market and are found in products like Samsung’s GT-E2550 GSM mobile phone. The multi-level cell technology could lead to better storage density, keep data forever and reduce manufacturing costs.

“As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies are needed,” Haris Pozidis, manager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research said in a statement.

The chip is 90 nanometers in width. It can store data when there’s no power supply and won’t corrupt the data. IBM researchers have been working on PCM for a while. In 2005, IBM partnered with Infineon and Macronix to develop PCM because the researchers saw a potential for PCM to succeed flash memory chips, which are in consumer electronics such as digital cameras.

NAND is inherently limiting. For example, consumer products like Apple’s MacBook Air use NAND flash memory. Flash memory requires data to be erased before it can be reprogrammed with new data, reports ComputerWorld. The problem with NAND flash is the life cycle problem: consumer and enterprise products have 10,000 to 100,000 write cycles, respectively. IBM says PCM can hold up 10 million write cycles, so it won’t wear out like flash memory.

However, IBM won’t produce the new memory chips, but plans to license the technology out to others.

CNET reports that others are working on PCM as well, citing Hynix, Samsung and Micron.

While still in research stage, the new PCM technology could be used for enterprise and cloud applications, and be integrated into existing computer systems. CNET’s Stephen Shankland writes:

Phase-change memory (PCM), could snuggle up alongside conventional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) to improve computer performance in ways that flash memory so far can’t. It’s not as fast as DRAM, but IBM says it’s 100 times faster at reading and writing data than flash memory, its chief competitor today.

IBM has a history of breakthroughs, namely the invention of DRAM, which enabled the production of the first low-cost microprocessors. DRAM is now in household gadgets from computers to game consoles and in data centers. It will be interesting to see what happens when PCM hits the market in the next five years.

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Google+ contributor and Mac pioneer talks with CNET (Q&A)

by Scott Ard

Thirty years ago, Andy Hertzfeld was a young computer engineer working at Apple Computer on the first Macintosh under the leadership of Steve Jobs. As Jobs had repeatedly promised the small team, their creation would change the world, and he was right.

Today, Hertzfeld's passion for technology and his experiences at Apple have been baked into a new product that Google unveiled to the public this week. Called Google+, it's a suite of features for helping people communicate across the Web with friends, family, and co-workers. If that sounds like Facebook, it should. Google+ is openly described as Google's latest attempt to break in to the social space in a big way, potentially chipping away at--if not dismantling--Facebook's dominance.

Hertzfeld's role on Google+ was primarily building Circles. Simply put, Circles grabs all the contacts in your Google profile and allows you to drag and drop them into circles labeled friends, family, sports, and so on, similar to taking a batch of songs in iTunes and dragging them into playlists. You can then send updates and photos to one or more circles of contacts.

CNET interviewed Hertzfeld by phone to ask more about the ambitions of Google+, the thinking that went into Cirlces, his next projects at Google, and some broader industry trends.

Q: For those not familiar with your role in the early days of the personal computer, can you summarize your work on the Mac?
Hertzfeld: I was one of the first people on the original Macintosh team that started working on the Mac in February 1981. I first started doing low-level stuff like the BIOS system and all the device drivers, and later developed the user interface toolbox, which was the code for the windows menus, scrollbars, and all that, and left Apple a couple months after the Mac [was released in 1984], so I developed the original thing. After that, I continued to do stuff for the Mac, like Switcher and everything, but that was a very positive formative experience for me.

And you've collected those stories into a book and a Web site. You want to give a plug for those?
Hertzfeld: I'll plug my book, which is called "Revolution in the Valley." Actually, I don't need to plug it anymore because it just recently went out of print, but there's a Web site, folklore.org, where you can read all the stories in the book and even more for free.

After Apple, you went to a few companies: Radius, General Magic, Eazel. 
Hertzfeld: I actually helped start three different companies: Radius, which addressed the limitations of the Macintosh in 1986, and then General Magic, where I worked from 1990 to 1996, where you could say we developed the iPhone of the '90s, kind of. We were developing what we called Personal Intelligent Communicators...We correctly identified mobile as the next big thing after PCs; we were just about 10 or 15 years too soon. And then I got very enthusiastic about open source in early 1998, which led me to found a company called Eazel in 1999, to try to help make open-source software easier to use, and so I worked there for a couple years. Unfortunately...Eazel was a creature of the bubble. We just didn't know it. And when the bubble burst in 2001, we couldn't raise our second round of funding, so we had to scuttle the company.

You went to Google in '05. What were some of the projects you worked on at Google prior to Google+?
Hertzfeld: I worked on a smattering of different things, including the Photo Picker...it was in Gmail for many years, but I think it finally got switched out by something newer. But probably the single thing that (was) sort of my project was Google News Timeline, which launched around April 2009, and it's still available. (It) is sort of a zoomable timeline that you can project all kinds of information on.

Which brings us to Google. What exactly is your role? 
Hertzfeld: My role's been evolving, but really, the Circle Editor was my baby. I wrote a prototype for it singlehandedly and then sort of led its development through to the present time. I was not just the interface designer but the main implementer as well, writing code.

Circle Editor is the page where you drag the little tiles that represent people into circles. And, of course, I had a lot of help, both with the interface design and the implementation.

More recently, I started three or four months ago helping out with other areas of Emerald Sea (the internal Google code name for Google+), and more recently, in the last month or so, I've taken a broader role, trying to make all of it be as great as I can make it.

One thing I just want to make clear is, I feel a little bad that I've actually gotten too much credit as the designer of Google+...I feel more comfortable saying I'm the designer of the Circle Editor, which...even though I had help from other people, I really was the driving force behind that. I was not, really, for the entire Google+, and I'd just like to make sure that the superb UI team that we have here does get credit for their work.

So you focused on Circles, but now you're going to branch out into what, Sparks and Hangout?
Hertzfeld: Yes. All of it, really. Just helping to refine the UI, improve it, adding important features that people want, etc.

I'll come back to Circles in a second, but can you just give me kind of a high-level view of what G+ is? What was the intent for Google+, and what are you hoping to do with it? 
Hertzfeld: Sure. Everything on the Web can be improved by knowledge of your social connections, so Google+ is an effort to...add a social layer to Google, to YouTube, to Google Search, to every Google property. And so the core of Google+ are some APIs and applications that let you organize [and] maintain your identity through a profile and organize the people you know. Really, one of the main contributions we're making compared to the status quo is giving you much finer grain control over your sharing. You know, instead of just having an undifferentiated mass of people, we make it really easy and at the forefront of the UI to send some things to some people, other things to others.

 Related links
• Video: Google's Facebook killer, Google+
• A hands-on look at Google+, using Google+
• Developer API for Google+: It's coming
• How to invite your pals to Google+

Let's talk about Circles. It works really well, and I think the early returns have been very positive. I think somebody called them "delicious," which is pretty rare for a Google product, especially when talking about an interface rather than some algorithm behind it. Tell me about how Circles came about and how your past experiences at Apple, at Eazel, at General Magic may have played into it. 
Hertzfeld: Well, really, at Apple, I learned that the best thing I can do is put a smile on the user's face, and actually, I want to make their jaw drop when they use what I do. I want to astonish and delight people, and I've tried to do that throughout my career with everything I work on--just make the user happy. And even more than happy, get them excited and pleased with what they're doing. And so with Circles, one of the things I was trying to do is take advantage of the new capabilities of the Web browser. I had a feeling of a lot of fertile territory, because the Web browsers pretty recently, in the last year or so, got a whole range of new dynamic capabilities that people weren't exploiting yet. So, as you probably know, the Circle Editor is heavy on animation, with rotations and scales and fades that really were very difficult to do in Web browsers up until 2010 or so, so part of it was just my technical hunger to try out new things. But really, that's driven by the main desire just to put a smile on the user's face and make a vivid, exciting experience for them.

I started [Circle Editor] work in February of 2010, and then by May, they'd conceived of this broader Emerald Sea project that my prototype became one of the central pillars of, and so since May, I wrote the prototype, which was quite different than the Circle Editor that actually shipped. For one thing, at the very beginning, we weren't even calling them circles, which of course influenced the graphic design.

Once we decided to call these groups of people "circles," I tried to make things very circular, but anyway, starting in May or June, I got a bunch of people to help me, and by September, we had something resembling pretty much the Circle Editor you see today. But I spent another six months refining it, adding more animation, trying to make it as delightful as my imagination would allow me to make it.

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PC Monitoring Software to keep a tab at employee desktop activities

New York - Switch to PC Monitoring Software and know what your employees do when you expect them to work using the official resources. If you are experiencing a sudden drop in the productivity then it is important to know how much time they are spending in doing office work, surfing net, visiting social networking websites, chatting or accessing illicit sources etc. 

All these activities of the user can be immediately brought under scanner and therefore you will feel the need to take proper actions to improve the overall productivity of employees and therefore the profits of your organization. Using this software, you can easily monitor any number of computers simultaneously. Also, you can schedule recording when you are not available on your desk. 

Employee Desktop LIVE Viewer is a tool that can be availed to monitor ‘n’ number of computers at a time so that you can keep a close tab at all the computers for which you wish to monitor pc activities. The software allows the administrator to record and save the desktop activities of computers being monitored in AVI file format using Online recording option. 

Even if the administrator is not available on his desk, the target desktop activities of computers can be monitored by scheduling offline recording. This file can be used later to show the time they wasted for the organization. To know more about the features and functionalities of this PC Monitoring software, visit www.pcmonitoring-software.com

Salient Features

1. Real time desktop monitoring over LAN. 
2. Monitor PC activity LIVE – what’s happening on employee computer 
3. Perfect tool for invisible and stealth monitoring of remote desktop activities
4. Save employee desktop activities through Online recording and Offline recording
5. Provides administrative controls for monitored computers like closing it, locking it, restarting it, starting the screen saver and removing the wallpaper
6. Send instant messages to the computer(s) being monitored
7. Send monitoring notifications to the computer(s) being monitored
8. Increase employee efficiency and profit margins
9. Compatible with every Windows OS: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and all the previous versions

Employee Desktop LIVE Viewer is available for free evaluation so that you can easily monitor pc activity before the software is purchased. The free evaluation version of this PC Monitoring software is available for monitoring a single computer for a period of seven days. Also, it allows the user to schedule recording for a period of 5 minutes. To use the software for monitoring multiple computers, you can purchase the license that meets your requirements. 

About the company:

Kernel Data Recovery is a well-known firm dealing varied range of data recovery solutions for both enterprise and home users. The company started its services in the year 2004; Kernel Data Recovery has since released many best-selling data recovery tools along with a growth rate of 200 percent annually for the same period. To get a detailed view about the software functionality, feel free to visit www.pcmonitoring-software.com.

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Apple tries to block four Samsung devices in U.S

by Josh Lowensohn
In the legal battle between Apple and Samsung, things just went from bad to bold.

Apple today filed a preliminary injunction against Samsung with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking to keep four of the company's latest mobile devices out of the U.S.

The filing, discovered by blog FOSS Patents this afternoon, asks the court for a preliminary injunction to keep Samsung from making, selling, and importing the Galaxy S 4G, Infuse 4G, Droid Charge smartphones, along with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. Apple claims these products infringe on three of its design patents, and one utility patent.

"A preliminary injunction is necessary not only to protect Apple's rights, but also to protect the public interest," Apple said in its filing. "Because Apple has demonstrated a likelihood of success on its claims, the public interest would be served by prohibiting Samsung from infringing Apple's patents."

Apple says it's "limiting" this preliminary injunction to only include the four devices, while keeping the yet-to-be-released Galaxy S 2 phone and Galaxy Tab 8.9 tablet off the table. Even so, the company said it "reserves the right to seek a preliminary injunction against those two products as their release becomes imminent."

Representatives from Apple and Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.

Apple's legal battle with Samsung began in April, with the iPhone maker launching a lawsuit against the company in the U.S. for "copying" its cell phones and iPad tablet. Samsung fired back with its own lawsuit in the U.S. and abroad.

Along the way, the two companies have traded blows in the legal filings, including both parties asking to see unreleased and unannounced versions of products from one another. For Samsung, that was asking to see the "iPhone 4S," "iPhone 5," "iPad 3," and "third-generation iPad," along with retail packaging to make sure its own products would not infringe on Apple's intellectual property. Apple asked for similar assurances in wanting to see various Samsung products, including the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9, Galaxy S II, Droid Charge, and Infuse 4G.

As mentioned in previous coverage, Apple and Samsung are longtime business partners, with Apple once investing millions into the company's display business.

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