12-01-2012

 AJAY PAUL


XFCE
Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters) is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD – though recent compatibility issues have arisen with regard to BSD Unix platforms.It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use.
The current version, 4.8, is meant to be modular and reusable. It consists of separately packaged components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment, but which can be selected in subsets to create the user's preferred personal working environment. Xfce is mainly used for its ability to run a modern desktop environment on relatively modest hardware.
It is based on the GTK+ 2 toolkit (the same as GNOME). It uses the Xfwm window manager, described below. Its configuration is entirely mouse-driven, with the configuration files hidden from the casual user.
It is possible to run Xfce with 40 MB of memory using Alpine Linux. On Ubuntu, tests show that Xfce 4.6 has lower memory usage than GNOME 2.29 and KDE Plasma Desktop 4.4, but higher than LXDE 0.5.

 

^REESHMA

Keeping Electronics Cool:ScienceDaily

A University of California, Riverside engineering professor and a team of researchers have made a breakthrough discovery with graphene, a material that could play a major role in keeping laptops and other electronic devices from overheating.

The results bring graphene -- a single-atom thick carbon crystal with unique properties, including superior electrical and heat conductivity, mechanical strength and unique optical absorption -- one step closer to being used as a thermal conductor for managing heat dissipation in everything from electronics to photovoltaic solar cells to radars.

The importance of the present research is explained by practical needs for materials with high thermal conductivity. Heat removal has become a crucial issue for continuing progress in the electronics industry, owing to increased levels of dissipated power as the devices become smaller and smaller. The search for materials that conduct heat well has become essential for the design of the next generation of integrated circuits and three-dimensional electronics.

In a few years, it could be used with silicon in computer chips, for example as interconnect wiring or heat spreaders. It also has the potential to benefit other electronic applications, including analog high-frequency transistors, which are used in wireless communications, radar, security systems and imaging.

10-02-2012

AJAY PAUL

Intel Medfield chip on Motorola and Lenovo smartphones

Intel demoed its own prototype smartphone built using a Medfield

 

Intel's new processor designed for mobile devices will be used by Motorola Mobility and Lenovo in upcoming Android-based smartphones.

The Medfield chip is designed to help Intel make headway in a sector dominated by processors based on designs by the UK firm Arm Holdings.
The announcement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
The Motorola partnership is significant as Android's maker, Google, is in the process of taking over the phone maker.
This launch marks Intel's second attempt to get Atom-based chips used in smartphones.
LG unveiled a previous tie-up at CES in 2010, but the handset never went into production.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16492156

11/02/2012

AJAY  PAUL

Ultrabook

An Ultrabook is an ultraportable laptop computer in a category defined by Intel. They feature reduced size and weight while retaining standard performance by utilizing low-power Intel CULV processors with integrated graphics, solid-state drives, and unibody chassis.
Intel claims a trademark in the name Ultrabook. By this marketing initiative and an associated $300 million fund, Intel hopes to reinvigorate the PC market against rising competition from tablet computers, which are typically powered by rivaling ARM-based processors.Announced at Computex 2011, Intel's aim is that by the end of 2012, 40% of the consumer laptop market segment will be Ultrabooks.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook

09-01-2012

AJAY PAUL

NASA launches open source web site

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US, has launched code.nasa.gov, a web site that will serve as the central source of information about the agency's open source projects. The site, which is still in early alpha, is intended to help unify and expand NASA's open source activities.

Along with an overview of NASA's open source projects, such as the interactive 3D world viewer World Wind Java. To help NASA employees release more software as open source, the site also has a Guide page that provides instructions and how-tos for developing and publishing open source software. Planned for the second phase of development, and not yet implemented, is a forum for site users to discuss open source projects and find out how they can contribute to a NASA project.

The third phase will focus on tools and mechanisms, including version control, issue tracking and documentation. During that phase NASA will "create and host a tool, service, and process chain to further lower the burden to going open".

VIVEK KANISSERY

 A new discovery by the scientists of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS), Rajasthan have found out ways to stop the formation of a protein which helps in the creation of a gut barrier in the malaria carrier mosquito, Anopheles. By stopping the formation of gut barrier, the immune system of the mosquito starts recognizing the malaria parasite and the immune system kills the parasite resulting in the stoppage of the life cycle of the parasite. Findings of a study by Dr Sanjiv Kumar and Dr Lalita Gupta of BITS Pilani which has been published in the latest issue of the journal, Science, indicate that the growth of malaria can be effectively blocked by stopping the formation of a specific type of protein called Immunomodulatory Peroxidase (IMPer) in the mosquito gut. The proteins actually help in the creation of a gut barrier which prevents the direct interaction between the mosquito immune system and the foreign antigens found in the blood. The study by Dr Kumar and Dr Gupta found that the formation of IMPer can be stopped by advanced methodology called Gene Silencing. The scientists state that stopping of the formation of the barrier will result in the recognition of the parasite by the mosquito's immune system,their killing and thereby stopping of the parasite's life cycle...

06-01-2012

ATHIRA

THE MAKING OF ARDUINO

Photo: Randi Silberman Klett

The Arduino core team [from left]—David Cuartielles, Gianluca Martino, Tom Igoe, David Mellis, and Massimo Banzi—get together at Maker Faire in New York City.

 

Photo: Randi Silberman Klett

The team recently unveiled the Arduino Due, a board with a 32-bit Cortex-M3 ARM processor that offers more computing power for makers with complex projects. Click to enlarge.

The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that’s where an unlikely new king was born.

The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place. Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.

Released in 2005 as a modest tool for Banzi’s students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), Arduino has spawned an international do-it-yourself revolution in electronics. You can buy an Arduino board for just about US $30 or build your own from scratch: All hardware schematics and source code are available for free under public licenses. As a result, Arduino has become the most influential open-source hardware movement of its time.

The little board is now the go-to gear for artists, hobbyists, students, and anyone with a gadgetry dream. More than 250 000 Arduino boards have been sold around the world—and that doesn’t include the reams of clones. "It made it possible for people do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise," says David A. Mellis, who was a student at IDII before pursuing graduate work at the MIT Media Lab and is the lead software developer of Arduino.

There are Arduino-based breathalyzers, LED cubes, home-automation systems, Twitter displays, and even DNA analysis kits. There are Arduino parties and Arduino clubs. Google has recently released an Arduino-based development kit for its Android smartphone. As Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher of Make magazine, the bible of DIY builders, puts it, Arduino has become "the brains of maker projects."

But Arduino isn’t just an open-source project that aims to make technology more accessible. It’s also a start-up company run by Banzi and a group of friends, and it’s facing a challenge that even their magic board can’t solve: how to survive success and grow. "We need to make the next jump," Banzi tells me, "and become an established company."

Arduino rose out of another formidable challenge: how to teach students to create electronics, fast. It was 2002, and Banzi, a bearded and avuncular software architect, had been brought on by IDII as an associate professor to promote new ways of doing interactive design—a nascent field sometimes known as physical computing. But with a shrinking budget and limited class time, his options for tools were few.

Like many of his colleagues, Banzi relied on the BASIC Stamp, a microcontroller created by California company Parallax that engineers had been using for about a decade. Coded with the BASIC programming language, the Stamp was like a tidy little circuit board, packing the essentials of a power supply, a microcontroller, memory, and input/output ports for attaching hardware. But the BASIC Stamp had two problems, Banzi discovered: It didn’t have enough computing power for some of the projects his students had in mind, and it was also a bit too expensive—a board plus basic parts could cost about US $100. He also needed something that could run on Macintosh computers, which were ubiquitous among the IDII designers. What if they could make a board that suited their needs themselves?

Banzi had a colleague from MIT who had developed a designer-friendly programming language called Processing. Processing was rapidly gaining popularity because it allowed even inexperienced programmers to create complex—and beautiful—data visualizations. One of the reasons for its success was an extremely easy-to-use integrated development environment, or IDE. Banzi wondered if they could create similar software tools to code a microcontroller instead of graphics on a screen.

A student in the program, Hernando Barragán, took the first steps in that direction. He developed a prototyping platform called Wiring, which included both a user-friendly IDE and a ready-to-use circuit board. It was a promising project that continues to this day, but Banzi was already thinking bigger: He wanted to make a platform that was even simpler, cheaper, and easier to use.

VIVEK KANISSERY

technology from the age of dinosaurs..!!
it seems that the designers have found out that dinosaur like tails make terestrial vehicles more agile..that will help these robots to traverse through almost all kinds of surfaces at high speeds..

read more

AJAY PAUL


sabayon


Sabayon Linux or Sabayon (formerly RR4 Linux and RR64 Linux), is a Gentoo-based Linux distribution created by Fabio Erculiani and the Sabayon development team. Sabayon follows the "Out of the box" philosophy, aiming to give the user a wide number of applications ready to use and a self-configured operating system. It is named after an Italian dessert, zabaione which is made from eggs.^[1] Sabayon's logo is an impression of a Gentoo Penguin foot.
 Latest version of Sabayon is sabayon 7 which are in kde,Gnome,xfe etc versions
the screenshot of sabayon 7 kde version is given below

With Sabayon 7, you not only have just about every desktop environments available and cutting edge features, but can also boot it into a top-notch media centre environment all off the Live CD…

With Sabayon 7, you have the latest of everything. The latest versions of all of the big desktops are present, including GNOME 3.2, KDE 4.7 and Xfce 4.8. In previous versions, Xfce was only available in the experimental branches – now you have it available as its own ISO


REESHMA


Blogging May Help Teens Dealing With Social Distress     ScienceDaily (Jan. 4, 2012)

Blogging may have psychological benefits for teens suffering from social anxiety, improving their self-esteem and helping them relate better to their friends, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.Maintaining a blog had a stronger positive effect on troubleWith Sabayon 7, you not only have just about every desktop environments available and cutting edge features, but can also boot it into a top-notch media centre environment all off the Live CD…

With Sabayon 7, you have the latest of everything. The latest versions of all of the big desktops are present, including GNOME 3.2, KDE 4.7 and Xfce 4.8. In previous versions, Xfce was only available in the experimental branches – now you have it available as its own ISOd students' well-being than merely expressing their social anxieties and concerns in a private diary, according to the article published online in the APA journal Psychological Services. Opening the blog up to comments from the online community intensified those effects.

The researchers randomly surveyed high school students in Israel, who had agreed to fill out a questionnaire about their feelings on the quality of their social relationships. A total of 161 students -- 124 girls and 37 boys, with an average age of 15 -- were selected because their scores on the survey showed they all had some level of social anxiety or distress. All the teens reported difficulty making friends or relating to the friends they had. The researchers assessed the teens' self-esteem, everyday social activities and behaviors before, immediately after and two months after the 10-week experiment.

Four groups of students were assigned to blog. Two of those groups were told to focus their posts on their social problems, with one group opening the posts to comments; the other two groups could write about whatever they wanted and, again, one group opened the blog up to comments. The number and content of comments were not evaluated for this experiment. The students could respond to comments but that was not required. Two more groups acted as controls -- either writing a private diary about their social problems or doing nothing. Participants in the writing and blogging groups were told to post messages at least twice a week for 10 weeks.Four experts, who held master's or doctoral degrees in counseling and psychology, assessed the bloggers' social and emotional condition via their blog posts. Students were assessed as having a poor social and emotional state if they wrote extensively about personal problems or bad relationships or showed evidence of low self-esteem.

Self-esteem, social anxiety, emotional distress and the number of positive social behaviors improved significantly for the bloggers when compared to the teens who did nothing and those who wrote private diaries. Bloggers who were instructed to write specifically about their difficulties and whose blogs were open to comments improved the most. All of these results were consistent at the two month follow-up.The authors conceded that the skewed sex ratio was a limitation to the study. However, the researchers analyzed the results separately by gender and found that boys and girls reacted similarly to the interventions and there were no major differences.