Top 5 eye catchers at CES 2011

1) Motorola Xoom/ Android Honeycomb

Oh yes... They had built up using that video.
This beauty is expected to hit the stores during April. That's in the US. In India and given Moto's track record... giving a date would be equivalent of suicide.(literary suicide). Its a 10.1 incher and sports that 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 (everyone seems to have it onboard thesedays). The star is obviously Android 3.0 OS a.k.a Honeycomb a.k.a the one for the tablets. We are watching for this one with bated breath.


2) Motorola Atrix


Why Motorola? Why? 
Why is it that this company struggling in India when it is coming up with mind blowing stuff abroad? 
This one has that Tegra 2 chip. A 1930 mAH battery, Android 2.2 and wait for it... 1 Gb of RAM. 
Talking of 1Gb of RAM. It must be sufficient of running a laptop? Ain't it? 

It does just that.

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The age of “CLUBS”

(I know cricket and football well, so I am using these sports as examples)

After the start of IPL, club cricket is becoming popular. Club football is more popular than football played between countries. In cricket, it’s exactly the opposite. Every aspiring cricketer’s aim will be to represent his nation where as in football; representing Real Madrid or Barcelona etc… will be their dream.

Let me start from the basic. A kid who wishes to play football joins a club’s academy. Thereby he will pursue his career there only. The competition is open he gets a chance to the main team of the club if he performs well. Else he will move on to another club looking for a chance to play.

If he wishes to play cricket, he joins an academy (not club) for training. First he has to play in zonal level then state level n finally national. The selection process is carried out by state n national cricket board members. In all these, he doesn’t represent any club. He has to perform very well to get into the national side.

Cricket unites the nation!

Even if club cricket is emerging, international cricket has not lost its charm. Number of international matches is much more than these “leagues”. People don’t hate anyone in other teams when they represent the nation. He gets the support from everyone irrespective of the club he represents.

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The Kingdom

The name of the movie goes the name ” The Kingdom”. Its got nothing to do with the middle ages or any of that stuff, in fact its about a modern kingdom.. Saudi Arabia to be precise. It stars Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Ashraf Barhom. Its about a group of FBI agents going to Saudi Arabia  to invetigate the bombings of American citizens in their oil company’s housing compound, Ashraf Barhom as Colonel Faris Al-Ghazi of  Saudi State Police does an extremely good job and the rest put up good performances.

The portrayal of the initial distrust, then the mutual respect makes it very interesting. There is almost non stop action and the pace is very high. Definitely worth a watch.

However the clincher for this movie is its ending from which we all must draw conclusions on where the world is heading… Don’t miss it.

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TiGER M@TE

Apparently this is the name of hacker(s) who are defacing a lot of Bangladeshi sites. It's latest victim is Google. Yes, the bangladeshi unit of google - www.google.com.bd has been defaced to show an animation instead of the usual Google home page. However it is reported that some of the users are able to use the website without any problem. 



Here is another video where TiGER M@TE owned the website of Airtel.

source:Techcrunch

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Quora API in alpha stage!

We wrote about the amazing real-time Q&A site Quora  before. The people at Quora have decided to release the Quora Extension API which helps developers to make extensions which work with Quora. This move come after the release of the Chrome and Firefox extensions for Quora. But the API is still in its alpha stages and has asked the Developers to be flexible to imbibe any changes in the future. Anyways this is a huge step forward for Quora which is growing a steady pace. Read below the actual excerpt regarding the API-

To support these extension-building efforts, we've released a json-based data API exposing information about the currently logged-in user at: http://api.quora.com/api/logged_... .

To request particular fields about the currently logged in user, add a 

fields

 query parameter with a comma-separated listed of desired fields.  Currently supported fields include 

inbox

, 

followers

, 

following

, and 

notifs

.  For example, to request inbox and notifications data, go to:

http://api.quora.com/api/logged_...

This call returns a json-encoded result about the user:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

while(1); { "name": "Edmond Lau",  "link": "http://www.quora.com/Edmond-Lau/",  "inbox":  {"unread_count": 0},  "notifs": {   "unseen_count": 1,  "unseen": ["<a href=\"http://www.quora.com/Lyle-Johnson\">Lyle Johnson</a> voted up your answer to <a href=\"What are some of the most useful extensions for Emacs?\">What are some of the most useful extensions for Emacs?</a>"], "unseen_aggregated_count": 1} }

The API is still in its alpha phases, and there's no guarantee that as we evolve the site that we'll be able to maintain the same interface, as certain fields may no longer be relevant or have the same semantics.  We'll try our best to work with developers to ease any necessary migrations.

source:techcrunch

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Top 10 Technologies of the Last Decade!

We have completed the first decade in the second millennium of the Gregorian calendar. So it is time to look back at technologies which shaped the first decade. IEEE has listed out the following as the 10 best technologies in the first decade-

1. Smartphones :
   
   Though at the begining of the decade the idea of a poketable PC was new everyone knew this was going to get big. Initially Blackberry and Nokia made up the almost the entire market of smartphones. These were the phones which had physical buttons and Microsoft was the only one which had gone completely touch. This was all going change come 2007. The think was that no one really expected Apple to make the first move. In 2007 Apple Inc. released the iPhone which introduced a phone without many buttons and most of it was the touch screen. This marked the rise of iOS. Then came the Android,Symbian^3 and now the Windows 7 for phones. Surely, there is every chance that at the end of the second decade(or even earlier than that) Desktops might get scarce.
   
   
2. Social Networking :
   
   At the beginning of the millennium internet itself was a growing business. in 2000 if anyone were to ask who is the "boss" of the internet , many would would answer it as AOL and the rest would ask what is internet. Now you see the trend is different , many cant live without the internet. One kind which is drawing a lot of people to the web is Social Networking Sites. It is not a Surprise that Facebook is the most visited site this year. Twitter is another popular website which has being adopted rapidly these days. No wonder Social Networking is second on the list.
3. Voice over IP :
   
   By 2000, a mobile phone was placed in the hands of many, in the next 2 years efforts were made to put internet on the phone. Now everyone wondered why the hell were they paying so much for a call being made. So some brainy guy showed the world VOIP. Now everyone has one or the other VOIP apps on their phone to save that extra penny. Example of VOIP apps-Skype,fring etc. and VOIP enabled phones are like Vonage etc...
4. LED Lighting :
   
   As technological advances were made , mankind understood that it is high time to become more greener. LED lighting are said to be more easy to dispose and last 25 times better than the Edison/Incandescent  bulbs. The LEDs have become 20% brighter and 90% cheaper through the last decade. They are going to replace those incandescent lights, you light in your house, in the coming years.
5. Multicore CPUs:
   
   Every CPU has a core(processor core). How did computer shrink from the size of a room to a small box? because we were able to pack the numerous transistors onto a small core. As new technologies were developed we started to increase the number of transistors on the core. But eventually we reached a stage when we could no more add transistors onto a core. So what we did was put more number of cores in the area of one. Thus improving the performance at same time conserving area. Now a days we don't get single core processors. Even if we manage to , we end up paying more for it than a processor with 2 or 4 cores.
6. Cloud Computing:
   
   As the dependence on the internet grew we realised that we needed to do everything a little faster on the web. When we actually visit a website what happens is that the browser fetches data from the server of the website and display the data in a neat manner. As the inter grew larger we started using hundreds of servers to support the ever increasing websites. So at the strat of the decade Salesforce started a new concept of "Cloud computing" i.e storing the files on a common server thus reducing the effort to fetch it when required. The popular example of cloud computing is Google's Gmail email service. Also, the idea which is now becoming every popular is Cloud Storage. You can store data onto the cloud server and access it anywhere through the internet. Everyone is running out of space these days and there are many adopters of this new concept.
7. Drone Aircraft:
   
   What are these ? they are unmanned aerial vehicles. Controlled by experts ,who are positioned far from the action , they unleash hell on the enemy land. Though unmanned vehicular operation is not a new technology but in the last decade it has been used extensively in war by USA and its allies (like anyone else is at war in the last decade ...duh! ). The first idea of 'drone' technology was made in 1898 by Nikola Tesla by showing remotely controlled boat through radio-telautomaton. Also in the same year Tesla wrote a paper showing how an aircraft can be used as an aerial torpedo - Of course the paper was rejected since it was too fanciful !
8. Planetary Rovers:
    
   The human is nevertheless very curious about our existence on this beautiful planet. This has made mankind to make every effort to cross the earth's atmosphere to find whether we are escapists from another planet. So far we have been successful in putting a man on our own moon only, we have achieved the feat of sending "Planet Rovers" to scour the planet's terrain to obtain invaluable data. Many believe that to sustain population there must be water. So we are basically looking for water in any form. And these rovers capture data in the form of soil samples which are researched to find any water to confirm presence of life forms. 
9. AC Transmission:
   
   The main system backing this technology is the FACT- Flexible AC Transmission systems. These systems enables us to send current (or rather power) to places where the conventional devices cannot be sent. These systems act like switches between the AC lines thus can redirect current to the place where it is required the most. The technology was invented in 1970s but started widespread implementation in the 2000s. Emerging economies such as India and China are using FACT based lines rather than the conventional ones because use of FACT systems reduces 1 transmission line for every 3 lines required. Thus being more economical. The FACT systems use the switching nature of solid state devices. Due to the technological advancement,FACT systems have an effciency of 94%. The efficiency can be further increased by using silicon carbide for switching which is supposed to happen in the coming years. Basically what this FACT system does is to create a smarter grid which manages power more efficiently.
10. Digital Photography:
    
    If we imagine ourselves thinking about photographs in the year 2000,it would remind us of Camera Rolls,cleaning the photos,printing them and storing (occasionally framing) them. Come back to the present , when was the last time you framed a photo? or at-least worried about getting the photos printed? Camera rolls? now? still in stone age ,eh? The past decade has just shown how our lifestyle can be changed in just 10years. Cameras no more use rolls everything is digital.As you take a snap you can see the shot. Think it is not so good? take it again, delete the previous one ,no problemo. We don't settle for that small resolution pictures anymore we need those big bright high resolution media. We need everything HD. Now we can videos at a clarity(resolutions) which we could not achieve through still cameras a decade ago. The technology is so good now that they are mounting these pieces of media on our mobile phones(yup, #2 tech). And it is true that we love to share our pictures. It is to be noted that a whopping 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over the new year day!!

From the year 2000, we have come a long way in terms of technological advancement and we do hope this brings remarkable achievements in the coming to solve the problems faced by mankind.

source:IEEE

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Dirt 2 Game Review (I know its really late)

The Dirt game series is developed by Codemasters also the creators of the
games series Grid. This being the second installment of a series of games
was dedicated to the late Colin McRae, a legend in rallying. Dirt 2 pretty
much attains legendary status among those gamers who swear by rallying.
The game’s layout is simple yet entertaining. Your main menu happens to
be inside your RV. You begin with none other than Colin McRae’s Subaru .
there is a tour map which lets you select the races from places like London ,
California, Morocco, Japan , Croatia and many more . As you win races ,
you earn more experience points and newer venues and race events are
unlocked. The races feature rally car drivers such as Ken Block and Travis
Pastrana.
Casual gamers better watch out as ‘ casual mode’ in this game still means
serious business especially rally rounds. The tag line(s) of the game are Push
it and get dirty. You need to do both if you want o win in the higher levels.

Coming to my favorite part : The gameplay . Representing reality in games
comes naturally to Codemasters. The cars look great. So also the damage on
them !! The driving is very realistic. Put a wheel on the loose gravel at the
edges of the track and you begin to lose control of the car. The tracks and
the environments are beautifully detailed. There are two damage modes :
Visual and ON mode. The visual mode you get err…. A visual treat. Leave
it in ON mode and you pay for every dent you make on the race track. Bend
a bumper and it will drag along and slow down the car. Get hit on the front
wheels and you can say good bye to your steering responsiveness. Pure bliss
for Hard core gamers, not so for casual.
There are various events like Gate Crasher, 2 lap race, good old rallying ,
and events which involve vehicles like SUV’s , dune buggies and trophy

trucks. In a career mode there are around 100 races. Total fun! What is a
respite for first timers is that you get a mode called flash-back in the race ,
where you can re-wind from a fatal crash i.e. a race ending crash and resume
a few seconds before the crash.

All said and done GRiD 2 is an amazing game which all simulation racing
gamers cannot afford to miss. R.I.P NFS.

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