Rolls-royce to power Dubai water taxis

A fleet of new water taxis powered by Rolls-Royce waterjets is being introduced here by the Road Transport Authority to help improve transport infrastructure in this gulf city. This is the first order for waterjets for water taxis in the UAE where Rolls-Royce is already a supplier of marine, aerospace and energy power systems in the region. The first of ten catamaran-based vessels, a modern version of the traditional water taxi, is scheduled to carry out sea trials in August 2009. The Deliveries are due to be completed by early 2010. "Waterjets are ideal for these taxis because they are most efficient at speeds of about 30 knots and upwards," Esa Uotinen, the regional manager Marine, at Rolls-Royce said. "They are lightweight, simple to maintain and enables vessels excellent manoeuvre ability coupled with high speed," he said. Each water taxi is capable of more than 30 knots and will be able to carry 11 passengers. They will work around the Dubai Creek as well as the Dubai coast to provide a more modern, flexible and integrated public transport service.  The heart of a waterjet unit is a pump, usually driven by a shaft from a diesel engine or gas turbine, which draws in water through a sloping intake duct from under the boat's hull, and discharges it through an aft-facing nozzle.  The result is a thrust that drives the vessel forward. Fast patrol boats built by Abu Dhabi Ship Building (ADSB) here are already powered by Rolls-Royce waterjets. Earlier, ADSB and Rolls-Royce signed a service agreement covering waterjets in the region and a new Marine Service Facility is expected to come up soon in Dubai.

Google to offer search of old magazines

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San Francisco: Google is teaming up with dozens of publishers to index old magazines and make them available online, according to a blog posting by the company. The move is another facet of Google's ambition to organize the world's information and comes two years after the tech search giant embarked on a scheme to scan and index millions of books. In September, the company launched a project to digitize newspaper archives, making millions of old newspaper articles searchable online. The new offering allows users to browse magazine covers and to delve into individual issues, which will be presented in exactly the same way as they first appeared in print, including all the ads. The magazine pages will be shown alongside contemporary Google ads and links to publishers' web sites. Dozens of publishers have already signed on for the project. Among the magazines already available are New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and Ebony. "Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google book search results," wrote Dave Foulser, the software engineer in charge of the project.  "Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for," he said.

Google Image Search Just Got Even Better

Few days ago, Google announced the launch of a new feature in their Image search option, using which one can search exclusively for faces and later on they released photo search feature. But now, they realized to do something even better and the output is what I am going to write about.

Now Google have included features to search for Line Drawings and Clip arts as well. So, if you are looking for some specific formats or types of images, then you can now easily locate the images you are looking for using these new options in Google Image Search.

To check out these new options, I personally tried searching images using the different options for the keyword ‘Christmas’ and here are those images.

If you remember, few days ago I mentioned a feature in Live Image Search using which we were able to find images using similar images. This new updates by Google, seems to be a reply to those guys at Microsoft.