The Red Bull driver built an early lead from pole but was caught by the Finn, who started 11th, after half distance.

Vettel then pulled away after the final pit stops, despite Raikkonen's attempts to close him down.

Lotus's Romain Grosjean was third, with McLaren's Lewis Hamilton finishing eighth and Jenson Button retiring.

Force India's Paul di Resta, doing a two-stop strategy in contrast to the three employed by the rest of the main contenders, drove an excellent, studied race to take sixth place.

The Scot was running fifth going into the final 10 laps but was helpless to defend from Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg, who was on fresher tyres in the closing laps.
Di Resta seemed poised to lose a further place to Button, b
ut the Briton's McLaren suffered a puncture with three laps to go and dropped out of the points, before retiring on the penultimate lap with a broken exhaust.

The Scot also just managed to hold off a challenge from Ferrari's Fernando Alonso in the closing laps.

Rosberg was investigated for possible dangerous driving in defending from both Hamilton and Alonso earlier in the race, but was cleared of any wrongdoing by the stewards.

Ferrari's Felipe Massa produced his strongest race of the season to take ninth, ahead of Mercedes driver Michael Schumacher, who battled up from 22nd on the grid.

The result means Vettel takes the championship lead, after starting the race in fifth place, while Hamilton has slipped down to second, ahead of Vettel's team-mate Mark Webber - who finished fourth in Bahrain - Button and Alonso.
Bahrain's Sakhir circuit is notorious for producing uninteresting races, but this was an exception, with a tense battle for the lead and several wheel-to-wheel scraps down the field.

Vettel stormed into the lead from pole, building a five-second lead after eight laps in the sort of performance that won him 11 races on his way to the title last year.

"It was an incredible race," said the German. "We had a very good start, which was crucial. I was able to pull away from the pack which turned out to be a good advantage because we always had to go on used tyres.

"Kimi was quick, and so was Romain. It was a difficult race. Once he was close, I thought he would have more than one shot, but in the end I was able to pull out of a gap."

Raikkonen was judging his rise from 11th place on the grid to perfection, his low qualifying position a tactical ploy to ensure he had more sets of new tyres to use in a race that all teams expected to be dominated by tyre management in the high temperatures. 

After 10 laps, Raikkonen was up to third place behind Vettel and Grosjean and he continued to close on the leading pair after they had all made their first pit stops.

He passed Grosjean on lap 24, and then began to close on Vettel, who he caught by lap 33.
But the Finn could not pass the Red Bull and after they stopped together for the final time on lap 39, Vettel eased away and Raikkonen could not hold him.

"It's always easy to say if afterwards, but in the end we were not fast enough," he said. "I had one chance to pass Sebastian but I chose the wrong side. I didn't get another chance. We gave ourselves a chance, but we didn't do it."

The race provided a fascinating spectacle throughout, but it did little to distract from the main focus of the weekend - the wisdom or otherwise of deciding to hold the race in Bahrain in the midst of ongoing civil unrest.

Google launches storage service for personal files

Google is hoping to build the world’s largest digital filing cabinet in the latest attempt to deepen people’s dependence on its services.

The Internet search leader’s latest product stores personal documents, photos, videos and a wide range of other digital content on Google’s computers. By keeping their files in massive data centres, users will be able to call up the information on their smartphones, tablet computers, laptops and just about any other Internet-connected device.

Google announced the long-rumoured service on Tuesday. Available immediately, Google Drive is offering the first five gigabytes of storage per account for free. Additional storage will be sold for prices starting at $2.49 per month 25 gigabytes.

Google Inc. will be competing against similar storage services offered by Microsoft, Apple and rapidly growing start-ups such as Dropbox.

Oracle vs. Google: idea of owning an idea

Mobile phone users worry over the future of the Android platform as Google and Oracle fight a high-profile turf war to establish monopoly. 

Android, the most popular platform of mobile phone users across the world, is on fire. The ongoing battle for control over the platform between two companies — Google and Oracle — whose core business was not even remotely connected to the world of mobile telephony till recently, are now battling in courts in the U.S. to establish control over a platform that has always been “open” to the wider community.

This case — and the other ongoing dispute in courts across the world involving Apple, Samsung and HTC — are seen by many as instances of giant companies using IP (and more specifically, copyrights) to establish monopoly over what logically should be competitive markets. Both sets of disputes are instances of companies attempting to appropriate control over “fundamental” ideas that actually belong to the wider community.

What it's about

The Oracle-versus-Google fight is over the use of the Java programming language in the Android platform, which was initially promoted by Google.

The gathering pace of acquisitions by large IT corporations, aiming to build arsenals of IP rights to establish monopoly over large swathes of technological space, is fraught with serious consequences.

Ironically, Oracle, which is seeking outright control over Java, was not even in the picture when Java, which is used in a range of platforms, was being developed by Sun Microsystems.

Soon after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, it stopped supporting the Openoffice.org project, which was an alternative to the proprietary office suite.

Although Java was a Sun Microsystems project, it has been Free and Open Source with most of the technologies licensed under the GNU General Public License. This helped the Java developer community to contribute towards making it one of the most versatile programming languages used in a range of platforms for varied applications.

Java applications are compiled to work on Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which enables application developers to develop applications just once, which could then run on any platform. This inherent trait of “write once, run anywhere” has been the most important aspect of Java's success, with more than 10 million users.

Oracle is suing Google for infringement of its copyrights on the Java programming language, specifically, for the use of various Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

APIs are code-based specification, more in the nature of design elements used to prescribe the interaction between various software components. In essence, APIs are software-to-software interfaces, enabling applications to communicate with one another for sharing services without user intervention.

Oracle is also suing Google for infringement of seven patents. It has also alleged that the virtual machine ware used in Android, Dalvik VM, uses Oracles's copyrighted content.

Google's defence

Google defends itself, claiming it has only used Open Source technology to develop the Android platform. It maintains that it has not infringed any of the copyrights or patents on Java.

It is not mere coincidence that Oracle, after falling flat in its own attempt at entering the smartphone market (it tried buying Palm and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion), is now suing Google for infringing IP. Unfortunately for Google, Sun Microsystems, which had openly sanctioned the use of Java for Android, now has another master who does not have a track record of a close association with the Open Source community as its old owner, Sun.

K. Gopinath, professor, Computer Science and Automation Department, Indian Institute of Science, says: “Expression of ideas can be copyrighted but not the ideas themselves. What Oracle is now trying to do by claiming copyright over Java APIs is in effect trying to copyright ideas.”

Android's future

With the tech titans fighting over IP, the thriving Android platform is in danger of being suffocated to death. If Google were to lose this lawsuit, then the terms of distributing Android will have to be changed to accommodate inherent support to Oracle's Java, which currently is not wholly possible with the Android releases. This will mean that applications built for Android cannot directly be run on Java platforms, although Android itself is based on Java. 

Oracle perhaps fears that Google's modified Java may render the native Java obsolete.

To bring about full compatibility to native Java, the Android platform and the applications running on it will need to incorporate extensive changes, which might retard the development and hamper the Open Source ecosystem built around the Android platform.

Software development

Beyond the impact on Google's Android, the bigger threat this trial poses is to the software development ecosystem. Until now, there have been very few attempts to copyright entire computer programming languages. Hitherto, copyrighting only specifics such as libraries or standardisation of software interfaces have been possible.

The mind boggles at the consequences of an Oracle win. If it becomes acceptable to ring-fence ideas in software, the notion that concepts in mathematics can be copyrighted would only be a small step away. This case, therefore, is not merely about the interests of corporations or consumers but about the much bigger question of how humankind acquires and builds a body of knowledge. It would be a pity if this were to be sacrificed at the alter of profit.

The Hunger Games movie review

There’s a short anxious scene in the new film The Hunger Games when its 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), races through a deep, dark forest; falls down a hill; and rolls and rolls, only to rise up and thrust herself again into the unknown. Katniss, the lethally tough linchpin from Suzanne Collins’s trilogy and now a rather less imposing film heroine, is a teenage survivalist in a postapocalyptic take on a familiar American myth. When she runs through that forest, and even when she falls, there’s something of the American frontiersman in her, as if she were Natty Bumppo reborn and resexed.

For as long as this brief scene lasts, it seems possible that Gary Ross, the unlikely and at times frustratingly ill-matched director for this brutal, unnerving story, has caught the heart-skipping pulse of Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans if not that film’s ravishing technique and propulsive energy. Alas, Mr. Ross, the director of the genial entertainments Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, and whose script credits include Big, has a way of smoothing even modestly irregular edges. Katniss, who for years has bagged game to keep her family from starving, was created for rough stuff — for beating the odds and the state, for hunting squirrel and people both — far rougher than Mr. Ross often seems comfortable with, perhaps because of disposition, inclination or some behind-the-scenes executive mandate.

It may be that Mr. Ross is too nice a guy for a hard case like Katniss. A brilliant, possibly historic creation — stripped of sentimentality and psychosexual ornamentation, armed with Diana’s bow and a ferocious will — Katniss is a new female warrior, and she keeps you watching even while you’re hoping for something better the next time around. (Mr. Ross is onboard to direct the follow-up, Catching Fire.) For some fans of the three novels, the screen version will inevitably be disappointing, especially for those keeping inventory of the details, characters, grim thoughts and cynicism that have gone missing. For others the image of a girl like Katniss taking up so much screen space with so few smiles may be enough to keep faith.

The screenplay by Mr. Ross, Ms. Collins and Billy Ray hews dutifully close to its source material, at least in wide strokes. Katniss lives in District 12 of Panem — as in panem et circenses, Latin for bread and circuses — a totalitarian state that has risen from the postwar ashes of North America. Every year a boy and a girl ages 12 to 18 are chosen from each Panem district to compete in the gladiatorial games of the title, a fight that owes something to that ancient Roman blood sport and something else to the Greek myth of the Minotaur, the part man, part bull that devoured Athenian youths given in tribute. The Minotaur is eventually slain, but that’s getting ahead of Katniss.

The film takes off at the selection ceremony, or reaping, a nationally televised event complete with armed soldiers and a bubbly bubblehead M.C. (Elizabeth Banks), during which Katniss’s younger sister, Primrose (Willow Shields), is chosen. Katniss quickly volunteers to take Prim’s place, becoming, with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), District 12’s tributes. The two are whisked off to the Capitol, where they’re plucked and primped by a team of gaudily hued stylists (overseen by a gilt-lidded Lenny Kravitz as Cinna), a potentially razor-sharp sequence that should underscore the Capitol’s decadence but here comes across as a variant on Dorothy’s cheery wash- and brush-up when she enters the Emerald City. Katniss may not be in Kansas, but neither does she seem in palpable danger.

That changes once she and Peeta are transported to the outdoor arena where, with wits and weapons, they battle the other tributes and assorted perils generated by the game makers (including a dandified Wes Bentley), who dole out death via computer touch screen. There, in a rapidly cut massacre that pits boy against girl and finds youngsters killing and falling and dying in a frantic, fragmented blur, Mr. Ross and his editors, Stephen Mirrione and Juliette Welfling, set the stage and stark mood. For her part Katniss, though frozen in fear, follows the advice of her and Peeta’s mentor, Haymitch (an overly cute Woody Harrelson), and runs in the opposite direction. It’s a strong, visceral scene that quickens the pace and pulse, and distills the story’s horror — suffer the little children to enter the arena — in blunt visual terms.

Nothing else in the arena comes close to that initial fight in its sheer primal impact. Working with Tom Stern, Clint Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Mr. Ross tries to find mystery in the forest, in its canopy of trees and thick undergrowth, but never locates a deeper dread, despite the computer-generated fireballs and hounds, and especially the other tributes. Part of what makes the Hunger Games books so effective is that they literalize the familiar drama of adolescence, translating the emotional assaults, peer pressure, cliques and the tortured rest into warfare. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did the same on television, except there the villains were supernatural demons. In The Hunger Games the real enemies are adults, including, of course, the parents catching the show on TV.

Fans of the Japanese cult film Battle Royale may see some overlap with its allegory about students sent to an island to fight to the death, and others may be reminded of Orson Scott Card’s science-fiction novel Ender’s Game, about children trained to battle an alien species. If you’ve seen the pint-size assassins in the recent action flicks Kick-Ass and Hanna, which feature prepubescent girls who lock, load and shoot without batting a lash, you may think you’ve also seen it before. You haven’t, not really. Although the girls in those movies are vaguely sexualised, their age exempts them from the narrative burdens of heterosexual romance. They don’t have to bat those lashes at the boys, and they don’t need to be saved by them either, as in the Twilight series.

What invests Katniss with such exciting promise and keeps you rapt even when the film proves less than equally thrilling is that she also doesn’t need saving, even if she’s at an age when, most movies still insist, women go weak at the knees and whimper and weep while waiting to be saved. Again and again Katniss rescues herself with resourcefulness, guts and true aim, a combination that makes her insistently watchable, despite Mr. Ross’s soft touch and Ms. Lawrence’s bland performance. One look at District 12, which Mr. Ross conceives as a picturesque old-timey town — filled with withered Dorothea Lange types in what was once Appalachia — and it’s clear that someone here was enthralled with the actress’s breakout turn in Winter’s Bone as a willful, resilient child of the Ozarks.

A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission. The graver problem is a disengaged performance that rarely suggests the terrors Katniss faces, including the fatalism that originally hangs on her like a shroud. What finally saves the character and film both is the image of her on the run, moving relentlessly forward. Unlike those American Adams who have long embodied the national character with their reserves of hope, innocence and optimism, Katniss springs from someplace else, a place in which an American Eve, battered, bruised and deeply knowing, scrambles through a garden not of her making on her way to a new world. 

 by

Manohla Dargis/New York Times

Read more at: http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_Review.aspx?id=693&cp

Read more at: http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_Review.aspx?id=693&cp