Snorkel rice

Japanese scientists have developed a new kind of rice plant which grows snorkel like structure very rapidly when submerged. These snorkels help the plant survive. In a flood-prone country like Bangladesh, this plant can be a very good news to the people. I hope the agricultural arm of Bangladesh government take a look at it and introduce it to the local farmers soon if it is suitable for us. The following video shows the plant in action:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8210482.stm

Stack Overflow

It is a name of a website. I just found this excellent site for programmers few days ago. The purpose is same as many other sites having forums to discuss programming questions. But this one is not based on forums, rather on question/answer style discussions. To differentiate between the languages/tools/areas tags are used. Answers as well as questions can be voted up or down. But not anyone has the right to vote. The right comes with reputation which can be earned by being active. Badges can be earned based on many criteria. Overall, I liked the innovations the site brings. And which matters most is people are active and make the site useful. The site is run by Fog Creek Software.

A fantastic article on Google's vision with Chrome OS

G. Pascal Zachary wrote a great article on why Google wants to have an operating system of its own now. It has an interesting analysis of how Microsoft dominates the OS world too. The risks of building a new operating system is too high. Many efforts were made in the past to unseat Microsoft but each of them failed. Like me everyone is looking at Google to find out what it does. It also is not immune to failure when it comes to operating system. Undoubtedly Microsoft is too much successful in this arena and not only Google has to produce something technologically superb but also cloud computing has to become as successful as people are predicting it to be.

Apple censors a dictionary!

For last couple of days I have been reading a lot about Apple's whimsical censorship policy for approving new apps for iPhone. But this one seems to be most hilarious: Apple censored a dictionary application for having vulgar words. What is more interesting is that it has previously allowed dictionary applications which have those words. I think someone in Apple really needs to look into what is going on with this approval process.

The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world

Here is an interesting article by Jeremy Reimer where he shares his thought about how Microsoft Word has reached its end of life. I loved the article particularly because of the history of electronic document editing. It shows a clear picture of how our habit and usage of document composition changed over time. It also points out modern wiki based documents as the tool to use instead of Microsoft Word. Overall, it is an interesting read.

TurnItIn: making profit by acting as "Plagiarism Police"

Have we ever thought that this innocent looking tool is making huge profit by pretending to be the benevolent Plagiarism Police? They themselves are violating the very law which they ostensibly try to protect: the Copyright Law! Apparantly few have thought about it and decided to take stern action. It will be interesting to see where this goes eventually. At the least it revealed the true intent of the company: making money, a boat-load of them!