Satellites TELKOM-2 Indonesia

TELKOM-2 is a C-band geosynchronous communications satellite built by Orbital for Indonesia's state-owned telecommunications company, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (PT Telkom). TELKOM-2 was successfully launched November 16, 2005, and positioned in geosynchronous orbit, 22,300 miles above the Earth, at 118 degrees East longitude.

Based on Orbital's highly successful and flight-proven STAR-2™ spacecraft platform, TELKOM-2 features state-of-the-art communications satellite technology, and 24 C-band transponders. The new spacecraft will replace PT Telkom's on-orbit Palapa-B4 satellite, improve communications coverage across Indonesia, and allow PT Telkom to expand its coverage area into southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

In addition to providing the spacecraft bus and payload, Orbital is supplementing Telkom's existing ground segment through the addition of a state-of-the-art ground station including all hardware and software. Orbital is also providing extensive mission operations support.
Performance:
Repeater: two groups of 15-for-12 linearized traveling wave tube assemblies (TWTAs)
Transponder Power: 39 watts RF
Stabilization: 3-axis, zero momentum
Launch mass: 1,930 kg (4,255 lbs)
Mission life: 15 years (>15 years of fuel)
Status:
TELKOM-2 was successfully launched on November 16, 2005.

'Brave' Afghan voters hailed amid Taliban threats

Nato and the UN have praised voters who turned out for parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, despite violence that killed at least 14 people.

Nato forces chief Gen David Petraeus said the voice of Afghanistan's future belonged to the people, not extremists.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Afghan voters had shown "courage and determination".

Turnout has been put at 40%. However, there were many reports of fraud that may question the results.

More than 2,500 candidates are vying for 249 seats in the lower house of parliament, or Wolesi Jirga.
Governor targeted

Most polling stations had opened on schedule on Saturday.

However, the Taliban staged a series of rocket and other attacks around the country to deter voters.

The interior ministry said three security officials and 11 civilians had been killed.

The Kandahar provincial governor was also targeted in a bomb attack but survived.

Faizal Ahmad Manawi, head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), said initial figures pointed to a turnout figure of 40%. Turnout for the last parliamentary election, in 2005, was about 50%.

"As a whole I would rate this election successful," he said.

Gen Petraeus said the "people of Afghanistan sent a powerful message".

"The voice of Afghanistan's future does not belong to the violent extremists and terror networks. It belongs to the people," he said.

Gen Petraeus also praised the Afghan forces for "safeguarding a weapon with greater potential than any other - the people's right to vote".

Nato senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill, said the poll had shown "the future of Afghanistan remains one where violence cannot overthrow the democratic will of the people".

However the UN envoy to the country, Staffan de Mistura, told the BBC that it was premature to say the vote had been a success.

He said there had clearly been security problems, particularly in the south, but that in many other parts of the country the vote had been "enthusiastic".
'Stick to jihad'

After casting his vote in central Kabul, President Karzai said that by taking part in the election, Afghans would "take the country many steps forward into a better future".

An Isaf spokesman said the level of violence had been similar to last year's presidential election, with 445 violent incidents on Saturday compared with 479 on 20 August last year.

But fraud remains a key concern to the credibility of the election.

The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, a monitoring group, said it had found "extensive irregularities" and urged the Independent Election Commission "to ensure the integrity of the rest of the electoral process".

The foundation's Nader Nadery told the BBC it was to be welcomed that more people had voted than expected and that casualties from attacks were lower than anticipated.

But he said there were many problems with the indelible ink used to stop multiple voting, with proxy votes, interference by local power brokers and with a large amount of intimidation.

The BBC's Lyse Doucet in Kabul said among the incidents of fraud were the arrest of 26 people with fake identity cards in Helmand province and officials stuffing ballot boxes at one closed polling station in eastern Wardak province.

The Taliban had earlier warned voters to boycott the poll and "stick to jihad".

Preliminary results are to be announced on 22 September, with the final results due on 31 October.

The outcome is not expected to change the make-up of the government although President Karzai's credibility may be damaged if his preferred candidates are defeated, or if vote-rigging is suspected.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

YouTube Instant creator, 19, finds instant fame

(CNET) -- For Stanford University student Feross Aboukhadijeh, what started off as a bet fueled by youthful ambition and technical bravado, ended up an Internet hit and quite possibly a job.

Last week, Aboukhadijeh, 19, was just an ordinary, albeit talented, college student as he tested out Google
Instant, the Web giant's new predictive search results feature. He was immediately impressed on its debut Wednesday but also inspired. To his roommate, he said, "I bet you I can build YouTube Instant in an hour." And his roommate took him up on the bet.

Aboukhadijeh didn't quite make the hour deadline, but three hours later, YouTube Instant was born. The site lets people search the enormous YouTube video database in real time.

He spent a couple more hours Thursday sprucing up the user interface. And before going to sleep that night, he posted his work to his Facebook page.

"When I woke up Friday morning there was craziness," he said.

By "craziness," Aboukhadijeh means countless e-mails congratulating him, a bevy of interview requests, a server flooded with Web traffic, the creation of a Wikipedia entry in his name, and -- perhaps most notably -- a job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley via Twitter.

Unsure just how seriously to take the tweeted job offer, Aboukhadijeh replied along the lines of "Is this a for-real offer?" Hurley then e-mailed him to set up a meeting, which is scheduled for Monday at YouTube's San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, Aboukhadijeh said.

YouTube officials didn't respond to an e-mail request sent Friday from CNET seeking confirmation of the job offer or meeting.

Aboukhadijeh is just finishing up a summer internship with Facebook, but he doesn't see how that would prohibit his taking a job at YouTube, which is owned by Google.

"I'd like to finish college," he added, which he agreed could pose the bigger problem.

Much like Google Instant, YouTube Instant lets people type in what they're looking for, and the engine guesses what that video is. By design, it plays the video immediately. However, based on feedback, Aboukhadijeh said he's working on play and pause features, among other improvements.

"It's not as useful as Google Instant if you know exactly what you're looking for, since you're shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination," Aboukhadijeh told All Thing Digital's Peter Kafka. "But I think this is perfect for many Internet users."

He built the site using the YouTube API but scraped YouTube search suggestions after Google blocked his server for making too many repeated requests to the search suggestion endpoint. Aboukhadijeh ended up re-writing the site to instead query YouTube directly for search suggestions, "eliminating the round-trip to my server," he said.

Aboukhadijeh, who is from Sacramento, California, said he's been blown away by how quickly his tool went viral and is grateful for all the supportive feedback.

"I'm amazed and humbled by all the attention it's received. So thank you," he said.

But imitation is the highest form of flattery, and it appears he's got that, too. TechCrunch on Saturday pointed to Alabama-based developer Michael Hart, who, inspired by Aboukhadijeh, used jQuery and the Google Maps API to build Google Maps Instant. And the same blogger later pointed to an all-encompassing Instantise page that gives a home to the evidently quickly growing number of sites with instant, predictive search results.

Instantise was reportedly designed by Scottish engineer Tam Denholm, TechCrunch said.

Aboukhadijeh is a majoring in computer science, but his technical expertise has been developing over many years.

Around age 5, when his parents bought a new microwave oven, he took the manual and learned how to turn on the child lock, something his parents never learned to do. That knowledge came in handy when he was old enough to get grounded -- he would lock it up and use it as a bargaining chip.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com

My Generation iPad app syncs with TV

(CNN) -- Don't have a friend who will watch TV with you?

Now you can turn to your iPad for company.

A new app for Apple's tablet computer will listen to the ABC television series "My Generation" with you, and serve up content to augment the experience.

Using the iPad's built-in microphone, the free "My Generation Sync" app literally syncs up with the TV show so it can give you information about what's happening at that very moment on the television.

The app would let viewers "take polls and quizzes" and "get behind the scenes" info as the show progresses, according to a description in the iTunes App Store. The app also lets viewers connect with social networks.

It launched Thursday, according to the site.

The show-syncing program comes as TV viewers -- like everyone else -- tend to multitask while watching their favorite shows. Online social networks such as GetGlue and Miso let viewers "check in" to certain programs, alerting their friends to the things they're watching and reading at any given time. Others have sought to bring social network chatter into TV programming, or TV programming into social networks such as Facebook.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he thinks media-viewing will only get more social.

"Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You'll turn on your TV, and you'll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching 'Entourage,' and that your parents taped '60 Minutes' for you," Jose Antonio Vargas writes in that magazine.

An executive at ABC also told The Hollywood Reporter that the new "My Generation Sync" app plays on the trend of people fiddling with other electronic devices while sitting in front of the TV.

"The big thing that's changed to make a go at this again is more and more people are multitasking in the living room environment," Albert Cheng told that publication.

"This was another opportunity to take a crack at this again."

Source: http://edition.cnn.com

Like Moths to a Flame, Alien Planets Can Flock to Nearest Star

A newfound alien solar system with planets the size of Saturn circling close to their star is helping astronomers learn how some giant worlds snuggle up to their stellar parents like moths to a flame.

NASA's Kepler space observatory recently confirmed the presence of the two Saturn-sized planets that orbit a star about 2,300 light-years away from Earth. A third, much smaller planet may also orbit the star, circling so close that one year on the alien world would last just 1.6 Earth days.

While the discovery of the Kepler-9 planetary system is a major find, it is also a starting point for astronomers to learn how the planet arrangement formed in the first place. [Gallery - Strangest Alien Planets]

Scientists think these planets originated much farther from their parent star and gradually migrated inward over time. All three objects could fit inside the orbit of Mercury today.

"It's safe to say that they did migrate because they ended up in this very special set of orbits," said Alycia Weinberger, an astronomer in the department of terrestrial magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C., when the planets were announced in late August."

"The likely candidate for how that migration happened is interaction between these planets and the original disk of material – the gas out of which they formed. It will now take some work to try to figure out exactly how that was likely to happen in this system," Weinberger said.

Timing planet paths

Understanding the process of planetary migration will help astronomers understand the initial conditions that led to the final configuration of the Kepler-9 system, and other planetary systems discovered in the future.

As a planetary system is being formed, "planets can change locations or migrate due to interactions with the raw materials with which they are built," Weinberger said.

A study led by Matthew Holman, associate director of the theoretical astrophysics division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., determined that the two Saturn-sized planets, named Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c, have somewhat atypical orbits.

It takes Kepler-9b about 19.2 days to complete one orbit. The other Saturn-sized world, Kepler-9c, makes one orbit every 38.9 days, taking almost twice as long to complete the circuit.

"There is a near 2-to-1 orbital resonance, which means the planets have orbital periods in a 2-to-1 ratio," Holman told SPACE.com. "At this configuration, we can see that they strongly interact and we can see large variations in the orbits of the planets."

What planetary migration tells us

Studying how planetary migration occurs, and how much a planet has moved, can tell researchers a lot about the history of how such worlds and their local solar system formed.

Kepler-9b and 9c were found to have a lot of gravitational interaction, and they are located so close to their parent star that their orbits would fit inside the orbit of Mercury in our own solar system, said Holman.

The two planets most likely migrated to their observed locations, said Weinberger, because being so close to the star would have made it extremely difficult to develop and survive in the first place.

Observations combined with theoretical work will then be able to pinpoint how far apart the planets originated, how long it took them to form and how long their migration lasted.

"Kepler was designed and built to answer fundamental questions," Weinberger said. "We want to know what types of planetary systems there are; what is common amongst the various systems; whether there are any special conditions that result in Earth-like planets; whether the whole system of planet formation is robust and common."

Source: www.space.com

iOS 4.2 for Apple iPad released to developers

Apple has released a beta version of the iOS 4.2 software update to developers. A final version of the operating system is expected to be made available to all iPad users in November.

Steve Jobs unveiled details of the iOS 4.2 update at Apple’s music event earlier this month. He said that the update would bring some of the features previously only available on the iPhone and iPod touch to the popular iPad.

Developers have posted early reviews of some of the update’s new features, including a change to the functionality of the screen orientation lock which sees it become a mute switch. If the iPad user wishes to lock the orientation of the screen, they must now pull up the multitasking dock, swipe left, and select the lock button from the menu, just as users now do on the iPhone and iPod touch.

The iOS 4.2 update also brings folders to the iPad, allowing users to organise up to 20 similarly-themed apps in to single, named folders. iPhone and iPod touch users can only have 12 apps in a folder.

iPad users can also change the default font of the iPad’s Notes program, choosing between the default script, which makes notes look as they have been written using a marker pen, to the Helvetica and Chalkboard fonts.

However, one of the most significant changes is the introducing of AirPrint, which will initially allow iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users to wirelessly print to a compatible HP printer at the touch of a button.

"AirPrint is Apple's powerful new printing architecture that matches the simplicity of iOS,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing. “There’s no set up, no configuration, no printer drivers and no software to download.”

Other new features of the iOS 4.2 software update include:

:: AirPlay: This new and improved version of Apple’s AirTunes wireless music-streaming feature enables iPad, iPhone or iPod touch users to stream content (such as photos, movies or music) directly from their device to an AirPlay-compatible receiver. Initially, this will be AirPort Express base stations for music streaming, and the new Apple TV for audio and video streaming. It is likely that Apple will license the AirPlay software to third-party manufacturers to build their own compatible solutions.

:: Safari: Tweaks to the iPad’s browser now make it easier to see how many pages a user has open. It also enables users to search for text on a page, and highlights all mentions within the web document.

:: Game Centre: Apple’s online gaming portal, Game Centre, is optimised for the iPad interface. A new Game Centre icon appears on the iPad’s desktop, while the Game Centre portal itself has been tweaked to look better on the iPad’s larger screen.

Apple has sold more than three million iPads since the touch-screen, tablet style computer first went on sale earlier this year.

source: www.telegraph.co.uk