Maldivian Air Taxi

Maldivian air taxi is of a unique experience. You will be excited to experience the take off and landing into the sea. One might feel it is a flying boat. it starts as a boat go thru the sea for a distance and then takes off. Same way once it is landing, it comes down to the sea run for a distance and finally stops

Maldivian Air Taxi is an airline based in Malé in the Maldives. It operates float-equipped aircraft on tourist charters and government VIP flights throughout the Maldives. Its main base is Malé International Airport

Maldivian Air Taxi operate the largest sea plane fleet in the world using De Haviland DH6 Twin Otters. It is Canadian manufactured and used throughout the world. It is safe and highly reputed.

Maldivian Air Taxi flies regularly to more than 40 resorts in the Maldives. It offer private charter services, scenic flights, island hopping, picnic excursions and special purpose flights such as cargo flights. You will be able to choose

The airline was established in 1993 by Danish investors and started operations in the same year. It is wholly owned by Lars Erik Nielsen (Chairman) and has 275 employees (at March 2007

Whether you just want to relax over a drink or attend to urgent business, It’s the ideal place to enjoy a drink from the bar, check your email or read the in flight magazine. Its well serviced Private lounge gives you that extra care for special occasions.

Maldivian Air Taxi or what it is commonly called MAT which is a sea-plane service company in the Maldives. I am a frequent flyer of this as I need to travel to different resorts in Maldives for my official work. There are two Sea-plane service providers in the Maldives and the second one being the Trans Maldivian Airways or commonly called TMA. Both are excellent service providers and they connect the Male’ International Airport and the remote islands which are very far from the Airport. I had posted an article on the information on Maldivian Air Taxi an year back, but now the quality of the services has changed, the operations and the facilities had improved tremendously with the increasing flow of Tourists in the Maldives

Software that makes software better

Read this informative article from the Economist:
Software that makes software better

Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Computing: Programmers are using a variety of software tools to help them produce better code and keep bugs at bay
Illustration by Petra Stefankova

MODERN civilisation depends on software, so it needs to be as reliable as possible. But software is produced by humans, who are fallible. The programs they create are prone to crashes, bugs and security holes. What can be done? A good way to make more reliable software may, oddly enough, be to use even more software. Programmers are increasingly calling upon bug-squashing tools for help at various stages in the software-development process. Some of these tools help programmers to work together more effectively. Other tools scrutinise the resulting software, or its underlying source code, for problems. And still others help project managers put numbers on code quality, programmer productivity, and the cost-effectiveness of fixing particular bugs, so they can decide which bugs ought to be fixed first.

Things are improving, insists Daniel Sabbah, who started programming over 30 years ago and is now general manager of IBM's Rational Software unit, which makes software-development tools. Such tools “really have gotten much better over the years,” he says, though their impact is difficult for ordinary users to see, in contrast with the far more obvious improvements in hardware performance, network speeds and storage capacity. Unlike whizzy new hardware, which is quickly adopted by manufacturers, new programming tools and techniques can take several years to percolate through the software industry, he says.

Not everyone agrees with Dr Sabbah's rosy view. Even if the tools are better, the number of bugs in newly written code has remained constant at around five per “function point”, or feature, says Capers Jones of Software Productivity Research, a specialist consultancy. Worse, says Mr Jones, only about 85% of these bugs are eliminated before software is put into use. Dr Sabbah responds that such numbers do not show whether software is effective—bug-free code that does not do something useful, or does it two years too late, is not much help to a business, he says. And broader metrics suggest that things are, indeed, improving: the Standish Group, a consultancy that produces a biennial “CHAOS Report” on the state of software development, found that 35% of software projects started in 2006 were completed on time, on budget and did what they were supposed to, up from 16% in 1994; the proportion that failed outright fell from 31% to 19%.
Software as a social science

According to Jim Johnson, the chairman of the Standish Group, most of this improvement is the result of better project management, including the use of new tools and techniques that help programmers work together. Indeed, there are those who argue that computer science is really a social science. Jonathan Pincus, an expert on software reliability who recently left Microsoft Research to become an independent consultant, has observed that “the key issues [in programming] relate to people and the way they communicate and organise themselves.” Grady Booch of IBM Rational once tracked 50 developers for 24 hours, and found that only 30% of their time was spent coding—the rest was spent talking to other members of their team.

Programmers generally work together using a software platform called an “integrated development environment”, which keeps track of different pieces of code and assembles them when required into a complete program, or “build”, for testing. But many firms no longer have all their programmers and testers in the same place, or even in the same country. So it has become necessary to add features to programmer tools to allow coders to communicate with each other, request design changes, report problems and so on.

This field was pioneered by CollabNet, with the launch in 1999 of Subversion, a collaborative platform for programmers which now has more than 2.5m users. Subversion integrates with existing programming tools, including IBM's Eclipse, and offers features such as project-management features, discussion threads and support for quality-assurance engineers.

In 2007 IBM announced a similar effort called Jazz, which (as the name implies) is intended to foster creativity and collaboration among programmers. The idea is to provide a standardised way for existing programming tools to handle change requests, project updates and scheduling details for a particular project, not just code. As well as improving communication between far-flung programmers, centralising this information could also allow managers to track a project's progress more precisely.

High-level improvements in project management, and in the distribution and testing of new versions of a particular piece of software, are a useful, top-down way to improve the quality of software. But just as important are the low-level tools that scrutinise the actual code to look for bugs, conflicts, security holes and other potential problems. Such tools, which are now proliferating, can be divided into two main types: dynamic-analysis tools, which examine software as it runs to work out where breakdowns happen, and static-analysis tools, which look at code without actually running it to look for fundamental flaws.
Illustration by Petra Stefankova
Analyse this

To use a mechanical analogy, dynamic analysis is like watching a machine in operation, whereas static analysis is like poring over its blueprints. “Dynamic-analysis tools say, ‘Well, you've got a problem on something over here,'” says David Grantges, a technical manager of application security at Verizon Business, a unit of the American telecoms giant. “Static-analysis tools say, ‘You've got a problem on line 123.'” The two types are complementary, and Verizon, like most firms, uses both, he says.

Static analysis, being more difficult, is the younger of the two disciplines. In recent years several start-ups, including Klocwork, Fortify and Ounce Labs, have entered the field. Static analysis is best done as close as possible to the programmer, because the earlier a bug can be identified, the cheaper it is to fix. (An industry rule of thumb is that a bug which costs $1 to fix on the programmer's desktop costs $100 to fix once it is incorporated into a build, and thousands of dollars if it is identified only after the software has been deployed in the field.)
“If new tools do not fit with existing ways of doing things, no one will use them.”

In February Klocwork released Insight, a new version of its static-analysis tool that can run on a programmer's desktop every time code is submitted for a build. The advantage of this approach, says Gwyn Fisher, Klocwork's technology chief, is that programmers do not need to wait for a build in order to test their code. And when a whole team uses Insight, it can spot potential conflicts between code written by different programmers. Brian Chess, Fortify's chief scientist, says such tools can also spot mistakes that programmers are known to make routinely, such as allowing “buffer overflows” and “SQL injection”, both of which can open up security holes.

Dynamic analysis involves running a chunk of code with a variety of test inputs to see if it performs as expected, and to make sure it does not do anything undesirable such as crashing, going into an endless loop or demanding more and more memory as it runs. This process can be automated to a certain extent, but guidance from the programmer or tester, in the form of test scripts, is usually required.

Both static and dynamic analysis have been around for a while, but encouraging more programmers to use them is not always easy. It is especially hard to spread these tools beyond large companies, which have the staff to support them. Veracode, a firm based in Burlington, Massachusetts, thinks the answer is to offer code testing as an online service. Chris Wysopal, the firm's co-founder and technology chief, says that his company's tool will broaden the market for software testing by giving smaller companies “a blood test” to check their code. At the moment, he says, “we're where network security was in 1995, when some people didn't even have a firewall.”
A question of priorities

Another approach is to integrate testing tools more closely with existing programming tools. If testing tools do not fit neatly into a company's existing way of doing things, developers will not use them, notes Alberto Savoia at Agitar Software, the maker of a tool called Agitator which automatically produces test scripts for use in dynamic analysis. Seth Hallem, the co-founder of Coverity, which makes a static-analysis tool, expects greater integration between programming and testing tools in future.

But analysis tools that spot potential problems, useful though they are, can in turn cause new problems. John Viega of McAfee, a big security-software firm, used to run a start-up that sold a static-analysis tool called CodeAssure (which is now owned by Fortify). He says he did not realise how daunting such tools were to use until he tried selling them. “People would use our tool and find out that they had many reliability problems and many potential security problems, but the cost of researching and fixing them all was astronomical, so they would give up,” he says.

Not all bugs are worth fixing—but how can programmers decide which ones to concentrate on? Jack Danahy, technology chief of Ounce Labs, says the expertise required is the software equivalent of interpreting an MRI image. But his company is doing its best to automate the process, with a static-analysis tool that spots problems and estimates the risk associated with each one.
Illustration by Petra Stefankova

A similar risk-analysis approach is also being applied to software on a larger scale, through efforts to develop metrics for code quality and programmer productivity. Atlassian, an Australian developer of software tools, last year released Bamboo, which tracks trends in code over time, such as the number of bugs found. Veracode's analysis service has a code-scoring tool that gives grades to code. And Mr Savoia has developed a system to assess the quality of software written in Java, which he has jokingly named “change, risk, analysis and predictions”, or CRAP. His software plug-in, which determines the “crappiness” of a particular piece of code, has been downloaded by hundreds of programmers. Given that programmers are paid a total of half a trillion dollars a year, Mr Savoia estimates, the industry needs better tools to assess the quality of their work.

To this end, America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is doing its best to create the software equivalent of the “generally accepted accounting principles” used in the financial world. Its Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation (SAMATE) project is intended to offer companies a way to quantify how much better their code will be if they adopt particular tools and programming languages.

Paul Black of NIST says its first report, on static-analysis tools, should be available in April. The purpose of the research is “to get away from the feeling that ‘all software has bugs’ and say ‘it will cost this much time and this much money to make software of this kind of quality’,” he says. Rather than trying to stamp out bugs altogether, in short, the future of “software that makes software better” may lie in working out where the pesticide can be most cost-effectively applied.

Fishing In The Maldives

Maldives Fishing - Young fishermen showing off their catch!

Sunrise paints the skies with tints of rose and gold. Darker blues of early daylight silhouette the Dhoni . Nets are flung out Whether with trap, seines, hand or trawl lines as fishing is the mainstay of the traditional island life. Outside the atolls massive tuna catches, sharks, marlin, sailfish, and the famous Maldive skipjack are easily netted. Skipjack, both dried and frozen is famous Maldivian product. Known as "Maldive Fish" and is the main export of the country.

University Education in France

BENEATH the medieval cloisters and bleak 1960s campuses of Europe's universities, the ground is trembling. For years, Europeans have talked of doing something about higher education, so as to prepare better for the “knowledge economy”. But lingering taboos—over tuition fees, private finance, or competition—have inhibited the timid and frustrated the bold. Now, however, there are the first stirrings of genuine change.

The shortcomings of Europe's universities are well-known. Only two European universities (Cambridge and Oxford) are in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's global top 20. Europeans spend an average of $10,191 per student, measured at purchasing-power parity, next to $22,476 in America. They devote only 1.3% of GDP to higher education, compared with 2.9% in America, and—unlike in America—almost all of it is public money. Only 24% of working-age Europeans have a degree, compared with 39% of Americans. And Europe bags an ever-declining share of Nobel prizes.

Yet some changes have begun. One, inelegantly known as “the Bologna process”, involves the harmonisation of European degrees into an Anglo-Saxon “bachelors, masters and doctorate” structure. Despite fierce resistance in some quarters, by 2007 nearly three-quarters of countries had over 60% of higher-education students enrolled on courses compatible with the new structure. As the scheme settles down, it should promote mobility in both the education and labour markets, and give a further boost to the popular Erasmus student-exchange programme.

Another Europe-wide project is the new European Research Council. Designed to boost investment in pioneering scientific research, it will inject some €335m ($520m) this year in starting grants to individual research projects, bypassing national governments. It is awarding these grants, on the basis of peer review, to some 430 of the 9,137 researchers who put in bids for them.

Individual countries have also been busy. Since 2005 Germany has allowed states to charge tuition fees of up to €1,000 a year. It is trying to foster elite universities by encouraging them to compete for money. The Netherlands has given universities sweeping autonomy. Oxford University has just launched a campaign to raise £1.25 billion ($2.45 billion), the biggest fund-raising drive of any European academic institution. Britain has introduced tuition fees for England and Wales, now running at up to £3,300 a year.

Now France is having a go. It has 1.4m students enrolled in 82 state-owned universities. There are no tuition fees, nor is selection of students on entry allowed, apart from the required baccalauréat. Lecture halls are swamped; first-year medical students camp out early for scarce places. Campus libraries close at weekends. As many as 52% of undergraduates fail after their first year; and 90,000 students quit university each year without a degree. France's brightest students compete for places at the elite, fee-paying universities, known as the grandes écoles, instead. And the best researchers snap up well-financed jobs abroad.

Given this depressing picture, an event on June 2nd in a rain-soaked quadrangle in Toulouse was startling. Before a crowd of international economists and French business chiefs, Valérie Pécresse, the universities minister, inaugurated the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), a graduate school of the University of Toulouse 1. Its English name and English-only teaching are not the only novelties. The school announced that it had raised fully €33m, from private sponsors such as AXA, Total and BNP Paribas. Ms Pécresse is to match every euro raised with the equivalent in public money. Visibly moved, Jean Tirole, the new school's director, called it the “realisation of a dream”.

The launch of the TSE reflects two changes. The first is that, since last year, French universities have been granted autonomy. This means that universities, or departments, can set up private foundations, as the TSE has done, with tax breaks for donors. This will allow them to recruit the researchers they want, at the salaries the foundations allow them to pay (though like the TSE, they still cannot charge tuition fees or select students at entry level). The TSE intends to offer 18 new economics professorships over the next three years, to help reverse the brain drain. At one time, universities and companies looked at each other with deep mutual suspicion. Now, Michel Pébereau, chairman of BNP Paribas, calls the TSE a “model of excellence” for Europe.

Second, the once-sacred principle of equal treatment has been blown away. Past reforms have been guided by the idea that everybody should have a fair share. By rewarding the TSE's efforts, Ms Pécresse has explicitly blessed competition. She has also set up a €5 billion campus-renovation fund, to be allocated only to the ten best bids, forcing rival research and teaching bodies to co-operate. Last week she announced the first six winners from among a total of 46 bids, including a joint one from Toulouse 1 and other institutions in the city. They will use the money to build a new student centre, a digital library and a sports complex. As if to rub in her point, Ms Pécresse turned down several bids, including some from Paris.

The TSE is in some ways an exception: a centre of research that has for years been battling with pesky bureaucratic rules on hiring and financing that the government has now lifted. But it is not the only example. Universities in Grenoble, which also won a slice of the campus-renovation money, have been working with local research bodies and companies in technology and innovation. Strasbourg, yet another of Ms Pécresse's winners, is next January merging its three universities—which, like many French campuses, were split after the student riots of May 1968—to create a single, decent-sized institution that can compete internationally.

All of this is still tentative. Companies may be happy to support economics or science, less so philosophy or sociology. With stretched public finances, it is hard to see how university finances can be stable in the long run without tuition fees; yet they are firmly ruled out. And there remains fierce student and teaching-union resistance to any changes, thwarting reform on many campuses and often taking their protests to the streets.

Putting more money in is only half the answer. French universities also need to be freed from meddling bureaucrats, and in return to be made more accountable. A study for Bruegel, a Brussels think-tank, concluded that “having budget autonomy doubles the effect of additional money on university research performance.” Ministers may not be keen to relinquish control; French ones tightened their grip after May 1968. It is fitting that, exactly 40 years on, even they are at last having to let go.

Tourism In The Maldives

Maldives tourism

Tourism in Maldives which was introduced in 1972 has successfully developed in the past years. Maldives tourism has been rapidly growing the number of tourist arrivals and resorts islands over the last ten year period.

On the European market, Maldives today rank among the most attractive travel destinations in the tropics. Maldives offers large natural resources for tourism and encourages eco-tourism to protect the sensitive environment and underwater life.

It is not only divers and snorkelers who enjoy the profuse underwater resources, but also beach tourists are attracted by the nature of the beaches and the climatic conditions as well. This environment really guarantees relaxation and recreation.

The Maldives honeymoon

Celebrate your special honeymoon in Maldives at the most beautiful and romantic islands of Maldives.

You could enjoy the privacy and intimacy of a secluded, natural setting and a warm inviting atmosphere, where the sunsets are spectacular!

The Maldives resorts offer you not only the crystal clear waters and azure blue lagoons, food is tasty and services are excellent.

As a welcome token, almost all Maldives resorts offers honeymooners fruit plates and flower decorated rooms on the arrival night - a romantic promise of what lays ahead. On request, resorts also arrange romantic candle-lit dinners on the beach and also champagne breakfast served in the privacy of your own room, to make your honeymoon holiday memories that will last a lifetime!

Specks of emerald green enveloped by dazzling turquoise waters like scattered beads in the ocean; white powdery beaches, tall palms lean on towards the sea, crystalline white sands giving way to crystal clear waters, shades of turquoise blend flawlessly with deeper hues of blue; pristine coral reefs and some of the most incredible underwater life on our planet.

Rising from the deep blue of the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean are more than a thousand islands and thousands more reefs that form the Maldives.

What better place to relax and enjoy yourself than the romantic dunes that adorn these islands. Imagine a place that is nothing but surf and sun; where paradise meets reality. You can choose any of the ninety resorts islands across the Maldives for your honeymoon or holiday stay; allowing yourself the freedom to explore everything is amazing tropical wonderland has to offer. Everything has been designed with the luxury and comfort of travellers in mind, which is why per capita it is the busiest tourist area in the world. Half a million people every year rediscover this paradise.

The Maldives Islands

Sunny, unique and unspoiled, the Maldives is an archipelago comprising 1,190 low-lying coral islands scattered across the equator, in groups of 26 naturally occurring atolls which are divided into 20 for administrative purposes.

Maldives Islands are characterized by a unique coral nature and thus they posses unique tourism resources though in a one-sided way, namely in the submarine and littoral environment of the islands, lagoons and reefs, associated with the year-round tropical climate.