Patna’s Super 30 script another ‘max’ story

It’s 30/30 again — for the second consecutive year. Super 30, an initiative under which poor students are coached free of cost in Patna to crack IIT-JEE, has scripted another success story with all its 30 students, coming out with flying colours.

Last year too all the 30 students of Super 30, being run by a local maths wizard Anand Kumar since 2002, cracked the JEE. Like previous years, most of the 30 successful candidates are wards of marginal farmers, school teachers, a police constable and a grade IV government employee.

The 30 students were selected from among 3,000-odd aspirants who had appeared at the Super 30 entrance test last year. “We would now be picking up 90 students every year for free coaching as well as food and lodging facilities.”

Last year, Patna saw two other coaching institutes, Rahmani Foundation and Triveni Super 30, offering free coaching and free food to deserving poor students. Abhayanand, an ADG-rank officer, offered his services at these two institutes.

Is IPL2 hurting India's World Cup chance?

The IPL2 gets over on May 24, just 12 days before Twenty20 World Cup2 begins on June 5. Does that leave the Indian squad with enough time to recharge their batteries and motivate themselves for the greater cause?

Playing anywhere between 14-16 high intensity Twenty20 games can take a physical as well as mental toll on any player. The climax of IPL2 will be cathartic. Can the players get themselves fired up -- hungry and raring to go - for another tournament that follows so soon?

Even physical injuries are ailing the Men in Blue: Virender Sehwag (finger) and Zaheer Khan (shoulder). Thankfully, at least Sehwag is back. But one also needs to worry about captain MS Dhoni's dodgy back, especially because India doesn't even have a back up. Just watch the way every fielder hurls himself at the ball. Can you rule out injury to any of the key players in the forthcoming games?

Of all victories achieved by the Indian cricket team in the past 25 years, winning the Twenty20 World Cup was perhaps the greatest. But the big question now is: Are we really serious about retaining the Twenty20 World Cup?

Microsoft PowerPoint under attack

Microsoft Corp said that hackers are seeking to attack users of its PowerPoint presentation software for Windows PCs and released patches to protect them against the threat.

The world's No. 1 software maker said that a version of PowerPoint for Apple Inc's Mac computers is also vulnerable, though it has yet to find any evidence that hackers are actively seeking to exploit it.

Microsoft defined the threat as "critical" -- the most severe on the scale by which it ranks vulnerabilities to its software.

Hackers are seeking to exploit the vulnerability in PowerPoint by persuading the intended victim to open a tainted PowerPoint file -- that they either download from a Website or receive in an email, according to Symantec Corp, the world's top maker of security software.

"At that point, the attacker would then have complete control over everything the user's account has permission to do on the system," said Alfred Huger, a senior researcher with Symantec.

Huger said that Symantec has so far only observed a limited number of hacker attempts to exploit the vulnerability in PowerPoint.

Microsoft did not release a patch for Mac computers, though company spokesman Christopher Budd said that one is in development.

Cyber Jam(But the internet needn’t collapse just yet)

Video killed the radio star. But could it also kill the internet? New research from American analyst firm Nemertes Research Group says that by 2010, increasing internet traffic, particularly video applications like YouTube and Hulu, will fatally clog the tubes. This isn’t the first such prediction that has been made in the recent past: Brett Swanson of the Discovery Institute, a think tank, warned in 2007 of a coming surge of data that “today’s networks are not remotely prepared to handle”. So are the increasingly dire predictions of the demise of the internet on the mark, or have rumours of the Net’s death been grossly exaggerated?

It is true that with the advent of Web 2.0, internet usage has shifted to bandwidth-heavy applications like You-Tube and Skype. The amount of traffic generated by You-Tube in 2006 was more than that of the entire internet in 2000.At 50-60 percent a year,the current growth of internet traffic is enormous. However, several experts believe that the internet is in no danger of collapsing under the weight of its own success. Andrew Odlyzko, a computer scientist at the University of Minnesota who specialises in analysing historical trends in networking, believes that global internet traffic is and will remain manageable with modest capacity updates.

There is some evidence to support that conclusion. For one, telecom companies in both Britain and America are already investing significant amounts in order to upgrade internet infrastructure, including the last mile cable, to increase capacity. Secondly, the internet was originally developed to withstand all kinds of catastrophes and has proven to be remarkably robust. It has coped with massive growth over the past 15 years. There’s no reason to suppose this can’t continue. Anyway, engineers are preparing for the worst by working to replace the internet with a superfast ‘grid’. So, even if capacity updates fail to keep pace with demand, an alternative will be in place.

No one is suggesting that the internet wouldn’t face operational difficulties if it was left just as it is. The debate is over whether the rate of investment in capacity upgradation is fast enough to cope with rising demand. Studies like this can provide an impetus for telecom majors to invest in infrastructure. As of now, though, it’s safe to assume that the Net will be with us for a while more.