Smart balls reveal how better bowlers get that perfect strike

London: Always wondered how some people always manage to get a strike in the bowling alley, while you struggle to keep your shots out of the gutter? Well, a smart training ball might hold the key to the secret.

Sports scientist Franz Fuss of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia fitted aluminium tubes in the thumb and finger holes of a regular tenpin bowling ball.

Each tube had a strain gauge at the bottom to measure and log the forces the players' fingers were applying on each shot.

The researchers made ten players of differing abilities to use the ball to attempt various shots.

Fuss found that the strain gauge measurements from the ball enabled him to identify the characteristics of successful shots, reports New Scientist.

For instance, better bowlers consistently pinch the ball with much greater force immediately prior to release, to allow a faster delivery.

Source: here

Most popular online passwords

New study reveals the most used passwords online; the results highlight some shocking practices.

Listed below are the twenty most popular passwords amongst all 32 million members:

Rank	Password	Number of users with password
1	123456	290731
2	12345	79078
3	123456789	76790
4	Password	61958
5	iloveyou	51622
6	princess	35231
7	rockyou	22588
8	1234567	21726
9	12345678	20553
10	abc123	17542
11	Nicole	17168
12	Daniel	16409
13	babygirl	16094
14	monkey	15294
15	Jessica	15162
16	Lovely	14950
17	michael	14898
18	Ashley	14329
19	654321	13984
20	Qwerty	13856

Other key findings include

--About 30% of users chose passwords whose length is equal or below six characters.

--Moreover, almost 60% of users chose their passwords from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters.

--Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password among Rockyou.com account owners is “123456”.

 

Source: Here

Nokia's Symbian 4 plans

Nokia has begun to flesh out its plans for Symbian 4 as it readies to do battle with Android and the iPhone

Nokia has outlined plans for Symbian 4, its forthcoming release of the mobile operating system, and one that is designed to go head-to-head with the iPhone and Google's Android OS.

According to a proposal filed with the Symbian Foundation [http://tiny.symbian.org/S4UI PDF] Symbian's overriding focus will be on simplifying the user experience.

Although Symbian doesn't generally receive as much attention as the likes of Android and Apple's iPhone, Symbian is still the dominant player in the smartphone market, commanding around 50% of the market. Which makes the open source mobile OS an important player and one worthy of watching.

Although the most obvious changes planned for Symbian 4 are the interface ones, there are a number of changes planned under the surface which will improve usability. Among these will be an attempt to minimize the number of user prompts, a common look and feel for applications and autosaving features. Reducing the need for user feedback is a key part of improving usability on mobile platforms and will make Symbian 4 easier to use.

The major, and most obvious, changes in Symbian 4 will be the interface ones. Users of Symbian 4 will be greeted with four main views: contacts, music, photos and applications. This will make major features of the phone quickly accessible to users. In addition to the four main views, users will be able to create shortcuts to specific items which can be placed on the home screen.

Going head-to-head with the likes of Android and the iPhone, the Nokia proposal specifically remarks on certain features of those and how Symbian 4 will differ from them. For example, while Android has a multi-paned home screen, which can be dragged from left to right, Symbian 4 will have individual and distinct pages for each grouping of features. The iPhone, on the other hand, has a "manually organised grid" for displaying available applications. Symbian 4 will instead have the capability of viewing the application library with "multiple filtered views".

But, before the release of Symbian 4 users can look forward to Symbian 2 and 3. Symbian 2 is the first open source release of the OS and will appear on phones early this year. Symbian 3 will appear later this year and will include multi-touch support.

Symbian 4 is expected to start appearing on smartphones early 2011.

Source: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Cellular/11180.html