What a small world

The world is`s just at a 6,6 people distance away



A study made by the Microsoft researchers based on the IM`s messages sent through Microsoft Messenger seem to confirm the theory of the "six degrees of separation" between any 2 people from the planet. Or, more precisely 6,6 degrees of separation.
The theory of the six degrees of separation says that any 2 persons from Earth can be connected through 6 intermediate bonds based on the idea that "i have a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend...". The theory was conceived by an American Academician, Stanley Milgram, who made an experiment in the `60`s by sending letters to people he knew and the arrived at the conclusion that the medium number of connections between any 2 unknown persons is 6,2.
The later experiments, including the analyzing of the original`s study reasults, didn`t confirm anymore this theory, which remained somewhere at the urban mit level, becoming popular in the theatre play of Six Degrees of Separation, in the movie with the same title from 1993 and in the Six Degrees game of Kevin Bacon.
A group of researchers from Microsoft seem to confirm now this theory, found on larger and more precisely amount of data , meaning all the 30 milliards of messages sent through Microsoft Messenger between all its 180 millions of users during a single month of the year 2006.
The researchers were themselves surprized by the resalut, which showed that in average, the distance between 2 Messenger`s users is 6,6. The study considered that between 2 users existed a connection since they sent al least one message one to another. The reaults show that 78% of the users can be connected through maximum 7 connections, the maximum number of connections is of 29 persons.
From my point of view this is just another proof for me that we live in a small world.
What do you think?

Torrent Administrator condemned to prison

The Administrator of Elite Torrents was sentenced to 18 months of prison and a fine of 20.000$



Daniel Dive, a 26 year`s old American from Virginia, was sentence to 18 months of prison and a fine of 20.000$ for his administrative function of the EliteTorrents web-site.
This is the final sentence of this case which dates from 2005, when the FBI and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) closed the EliteTorrents web-site, a torrent tracker with over 130.000 members.
Dove is one of the tree administrators arrested in this case and the only one who said he`s not guilty. While the other two co-operated with the authorities and received easy penalties, of 5 months in jail and 5 month home prisoner, Dove played his chances in front of a jury in which he failed.
The procurator accused him that he was responsible for the recruiting of the important uploaders, with bandwidth of approximately 50 times bigger than the usual connections to internet access, and that he operated a server of high speed to distribute illegal material.

Internet explorer 8, Beta 2

The new browser from Microsoft is trying to catch the competition from behind, but it`s also coming with new functions.


Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft has now officially arrived at Beta 2 version, stage in which the new browser is considered almost ready from the point of view of its new functions.
As it was known even since the first beta version, lanced in March, one of the main changes from IE is the fact that is much more compatible with the web standards , chapter in which IE had to suffer. This change was so big that Microsoft expects that most of the existent web-sites not to be render properly with IE8 (including a lot of Microsoft`s web-sites).
Because of this, IE8 has a function that permits it to pass to the visualization mode of IE7 for this kind of web-site. For example, if a web-site seen with IE8 appear to be "broken", the person who use it can switch to IE7 mode by pressing a button, "broken page", which appears automatically in the address bar, in this situation. Also, the web-sites that are not prepared yet for IE8 can include a compatibility tag that tells the browser IE8 to visualize the page in IE7`s mode.
Some of the new functions of IE8 are already in the rival browsers for quite a time, but the new browser from Microsoft caught them from behind also trying to take them over with some things. In this way, IE8 will have an intelligent address bar, similar to Firefox`s 3 Awesome Bar, which can be used both to write the address, with auto-complete suggestions, and to search in the history and feeds of RSS.
The new IE allows you to return to the opened tabs before a crash and also gives you the possibility to reopen one of the last tabs closed by mistake. A very interesting function is that you can group the tabs on colors, so the tabs opened from a link of a web-page would have the same color as the one of the tab "mother", for a better identification of the pages connected somehow one to another. The tabs from the same group can be closed by a single action.
IE arrives with a new series of functions regarding the security and the insurance of the private intimacy of the users when they access the internet from another computer than their own. Microsoft introduce the term "InPrivate" which group this functions and which mean a way of "private" browsing through which the private information that involves browsing can not be accessible to other persons that uses the same browser. The first 3 functions of this kind are: InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking and InPrivate Subscriptions.
InPrivate Browsing allows to avoid the stocking of information that regards the browsing, such as visited web-pages, cookies or other data. InPrivate Blocking is a function that reveals the tracking information used by the web-sites to folow its users and permits to block this data collectiong. InPrivate Subscriptions allows the users to subscribe to the permited or blocked web-sites in matter of data tracking. IE8 has a "InPrivate" button, situated in the left side of the address bar, which, once pressed, activates the InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking ways of navogation.
Two other new functions of IE8 are known already from the beta version- Webslices and Accelerators (first named Activities). Webslices is a combination between a web-site and a add-on, permiting the subscription to the content from certain web-sites and which it continously updates, like an RSS, but more complex. This slices require that the web-sites offer this function. Example of possible slices are that Wikipedia, for instance, to offer automatic additional information regarding a name found by the user in the same page, or Amazon to offer, also automatic, information related to a book found in the current web-site. Accelerators offer rapid access from any web-page to web-site and services often uses by the user.
It seems that the users who have Windowns XP SP3 installed on their computers may have certain problems with Beta 2 version of IE8.

This is all for the moment regarding the new browser from Microsoft. For those who are interested, the IE8 Beta 2 version can be downlanded from this web-site- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/, where you can also find more information.

A software that makes your student`s life easier

I will make the presentation of a software that will make your life easier but that also implies some work from your part. The program is called JabRef (http://jabref. sourceforge. net). It`s a reference manager. In this program you can introduce different types of texts (articles, PHD book, etc.) in which you can write various details (author, keywords, abstract, review, etc.). This program is very good to sintethize notes on the text, for example when you review a text. It can help you very much also when you want to look for notes of definitions (for example if you have the definition for quality of life from ten books, if you search you can find it very easy; or , another example is that you can put every article, book, etc. in a diferent category for example imigration, and when you have 500 articles read and you want to see only the part that is related to that subject you go in that cathegory and find those thigs).
The real purpose of this program is in fact to write alone the references. For this you have to use this program in combination with another one that is called Latex (http://www.latex- project.org/). This program is a profesional one whitch is also for free. This program is used for publishing houses. It could be a little complicated but it can help you a lot.
I hope that this information helps you with your studing.

Green is the new Purple

What do you think about that?