Computer World

A career in IT

2007-02-14T23:43:00.000-08:00

Information Technology (IT) includes everything from website design to advanced telecomunications. London is a major centre for all things to do with IT, and many of its key businesses rely on it.

London is a centre for many companies involved in the Internet, IT, business to business trading and providing information networks.

The UK has been uniquely placed in the development of the Internet, pioneering much of the technology as well speaking the language that has come to dominate it.

Companies in this area include Internet service providers, digital marketing companies and firms specialising in designing and constructing websites like this one. There are many other companies that offer traditional services such as banking and financial products, travel and flight bookings, over the Internet.

London and the surrounding region is also a centre for software design and development. This includes everything from creating operating systems for handheld and wireless computers to computer games and special effects for Hollywood films. London is also constantly improving and investing in its network of cables, optic fibres, mobile masts and telephone wires as businesses and consumers demand more all the time.

There are also many jobs that involve specialised computer use such as maintaining databases and administering networks, as well as companies building and servicing computers.

There are many opportunities for trained IT workers in this industry and whichever part of it interests you, there are colleges offering courses in every area of the subject.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Careers in Computer Science and Computer Engineering

2007-02-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

Why Computing?

Today, computers are used in almost every aspect of our lives: in car engines, microwave ovens, video games, watches, telephones, desktops at home and work, mainframe computers in government and industry, and supercomputers expanding the frontiers of science and technology. The computer industry is one of the fastest growing segments of our economy and that growth promises to continue well into the next century.

To maintain a competitive edge, industry and commerce must continue to make creative scientific and engineering advances as well as produce high quality products. More than ever, there is a demand for a prepared work force with the scientific and technical training necessary to perform effectively on the job. Now is the time to plan your future in computing.

Preparing for College

Academic Preparation

Most professionals in the computing industry have at least an undergraduate degree in mathematics, computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information systems, or electrical engineering. Many have advanced degrees. They, however, all started preparing for their careers long before they began their undergraduate degrees.

You can start investigating a career in computing as early as four years before you enter college, but certainly no later than the year before. The different degrees mentioned in the paragraph above each have different requirements and you could get a head start on them by finding out what they are. For example, some of the degrees require a lot of math and science; so, it would be to your advantage to take up to four years of math courses (including Calculus) and up to two years of science courses prior to entering college. Taking courses in programming would be helpful as well. In addition, some secondary or prep schools may allow students to take college courses if there is a college located nearby during their last year. You could have some college hours completed before you even graduate!

You should also make a plan for applying to different colleges with computing degrees and locations that interest you. Be sure to check on things like financial aid, how competitive it s to get into that particular college or university, entrance tests and scores required, student housing expense, tuition, degree requirements, and courses available. If you have the money and time, it is always helpful to make a campus visit and meet the professors and students.

Enhancing Academics

A great way to boost knowledge and understanding of computing careers is by teaming up students with working professionals. Selecting any of the activities below for individual or class development, can prove invaluable for career and technical education. The exposure will provide insight into computing careers, and prove a valuable life experience. Contact your school's administrators or career education office to see how you can start a program.

Classroom Demonstrations and Presentations -- Professionals speak about careers and technical topics.
Club Sponsorship -- Start a computer science club, or join the chapter of an existing organization.
Field Trips -- Plan field trips to places of employment.
Mentor Programs -- Match students with working professionals and plan work site visits, personal and career advice sessions.
Internships -- Plan work experiences (paid or volunteer) at places of employment, or observations during summer or spring breaks.
Student Fairs -- Enter computer science categories in local student fairs and other competitions.
Pre-College Programs

Pre-college programs help boost your technical expertise and supplement your educational experience before you embark on a full-time computing curriculum. There are many pre-college education activities and programs that take place in many cities. Contact the sponsors of these programs for information on the activities in your area and how you can get involved. Below are a few examples:

International engineering and national fair:
The Computer Society presents awards in the Computer Science category. Each winner receives a plaque, and $500, $300, or $150 for first, second, and third place winners, plus $300, $200, and $100 for first, second, and third place team award winners. The ISEF is held annually in May.

National Engineers week
Each year the IEEE works in cooperation with other organizations to promote engineers and engineering during National Engineers Week. As many as 50,000 engineers will volunteer their time in schools as part of this effort.

The College Experience

Curriculum

Colleges offer a variety of programs in computing. Depending upon the country, your program may be three years of concentrated work in your major field or four years where 35% of your work will be in your major field of science or engineering, 25% in math or science (outside your major field), 25% in arts and humanities, and about 15% in electives. The computing course work will usually include abstract or theoretical material as well as hands-on programming exercises or engineering labs, often with state-of-the-art systems.

Accredited Programs

Many undergraduate computing programs are accredited in their respective countries. For example, in the U.S., the accrediting body is the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Accreditation ensures that a program meets a defined standard in instruction and physical facilities. Go to your country's accreditation web site for a list of accredited undergraduate computing programs.

Join the IEEE and Computer Society

Joining a professional organization, such as the IEEE Computer Society, provides many beneifts. The IEEE Computer Society offers reduced fees for student membership.

Student Chapters of the Computer Society

The IEEE Computer Society has over 150 student branch chapter throughout the U.S. and the world. Joining your local chapter provides many opportunities including a way to network with working professionals, expand technical education, and build leadership skills. Visit the student activites Web site for further chapter information.

Career Opportunities

Computing Careers

Computing professionals might find themselves in a variety of environments in academia, research, industry, government, private and business organizations -- analyzing problems for solutions, formulating and testing, using advanced communications or multi-media equipment, or working in teams for product development. Here's a short list of research and vocational areas in computing.

Artificial Intelligence -- Develop computers that simulate human learning and reasoning ability.
Computer Design and Engineering -- Design new computer circuits, microchips, and other electronic components.
Computer Architecture -- Design new computer instruction sets, and combine electronic or optical components to provide powerful but cost-effective computing.
Information Technology -- Develop and manage information systems that support a business or organization.
Software Engineering -- Develop methods for the production of software systems on time, within budget, and with few or no defects.
Computer Theory -- Investigate the fundamental theories of how computers solve problems, and apply the results to other areas of computer science.
Operating Systems and Networks -- Develop the basic software computers use to supervise themselves or to communicate with other computers.
Software Applications -- Apply computing and technology to solving problems outside the computer field - in education or medicine, for example.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Tracking new computer technologies

2007-02-09T22:52:00.000-08:00

CISL tracks emerging computer technologies to ensure the efficient use of current computing resources and the selection of the most appropriate computers for NCAR/UCAR's future computational needs. To meet the objectives of the institution, CISL works with the scientific community to formulate and evaluate the system requirements.

CISL assesses capabilities of new systems available from vendors and plays an active role in evaluating programming languages and paradigms. Keeping up with the latest developments, CISL staff review computer literature, attend technical conferences and vendor presentations, run benchmarks, and research experimental systems.

Periodically CISL executes open, competitive procurements, soliciting vendor proposals and evaluating them on a best-value basis—taking into account technical, business, and price factors to maximize the benefit to the researchers who will utilize the system.

Stan McLaughlin, a CISL computing facility technician, and George Fuentes, head of CISL's Supercomputer Systems Group, speak with IBM site engineer Bob Wood about a component of BlueGene/L during installation of the new system.

Aaron Andersen, manager of CISL's Enterprise Services Section, monitors progress during delivery of pegasus, an IBM e1350 supercomputer used to support Antarctic weather forecasts.

A look inside BlueGene/L, a low-power, densely packaged, massively parallel computer system from IBM. CISL is using BlueGene/L for experimental computational research.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Computer Software Engineer

2007-02-09T22:50:00.000-08:00

What is this job like?

The impact of computers on our lives means there is a need to develop new software. Computer software engineers apply computer science, engineering, and math to design, develop, and test software. (computers hardware engineers) design computer chips, boards, systems, modems, and printers.

Software engineers first analyze users' needs. Then they design, construct, test, and maintain the needed software or systems. In programming, or coding, they tell a computer, line by line, how to function. They also solve any problems that arise. They must possess strong coding skills, but are more likely to develop algorithms and solve problems than write code.

Software engineers often work as part of a team that designs new hardware, software, and systems. A core team may have engineering, marketing, factory, and design people who work together until the product is done.

Computer applications software engineers design, construct, and maintain computer programs based on what people need. They can develop a program for just one person or for many people to use separately.

Computer systems software engineers construct and maintain computer programs for companies. For example, they might develop programs that do recordkeeping and payroll. They might also set up an "intranet"—an internal and secure computer network—for a company. Many software engineers work for companies that make or install new and more advanced computer systems.

Software engineers normally work in well-lighted offices or labs. Most work at least 40 hours a week. If a big project is due, they may have to work nights or weekends to meet deadlines. Like other workers who sit for hours at a computer, they are susceptible to eyestrain, back ache, and hand and wrist syndromes.

Software engineers who are employed by vendors and consulting firms spend time away from their offices to meet with customers. As networks expand, they may be able to use modems, laptops, e-mail, and the Internet to identify and fix problems from their own office.
How do you get ready?

Most employers prefer to hire people who have at least a bachelor's degree and experience with a variety of computer systems. The most common degrees are computer science, software engineering, or computer systems. Some of the more complex jobs require graduate degrees.

Students seeking software engineering jobs enhance their opportunities by signing up as interns to get some experience. Large firms that can train new hires may take new grads with no experience.

Persons looking at jobs in this field must have strong problem-solving and analytical skills. They also must be able to work effectively with team members, other staff, and customers. Because they often deal with many tasks at the same time, they must be able to focus and pay close attention to detail.

As technology advances in the computer field, employers want workers to keep up. Software engineers must learn new skills if they wish to remain in this very dynamic field. To help them keep up, employers, vendors, private training schools, and others offer a large number of courses.
How much does this job pay?

The middle 50 percent of computer applications software engineers earned between $59,130 and $92,130 in 2004. The lowest-paid 10 percent earned less than $46,520, and the highest-paid 10 percent earned more than $113,830.

The middle 50 percent of computer systems software engineers earned between $63,150 and $98,220 in 2004. The lowest-paid 10 percent earned less than $50,420, and the highest-paid 10 percent earned more than $118,350.
How many jobs are there?

Computer software engineers held about 800,000 jobs in 2004. Although they have jobs in most industries, about 30 percent work in computer systems design and related services. Employers range from startups to well-known industry leaders. A growing number of these workers get jobs on a temporary basis, or work as consultants.
What about the future?

Software engineers are projected to be one of the fastest growing occupations from 2004 to 2014. Rapid growth in the computer systems design industry should mean good opportunities for college grads with a degree and some experience. Employers will look for software engineers with a strong background in programming and systems analysis, along with business and interpersonal skills.

The number of computer software engineers is expected to rise much faster than the average, as businesses are looking for new ways to get ahead of competition and make their computer systems the most efficient. Also, increasing concerns over "cyber security"—making sure only certain people can see private information—will mean more jobs for these engineers. Job growth will not be as rapid as during the last decade however, as the industry matures and some work is outsourced to foreign countries.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Intel’s next-gen transistors to hit shops by 2008

2007-02-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

Intel Corporation, the world’s largest computer chip maker has announced its next generation level of transistors; and the surprising element is that they will have metal and not silicon grade electrodes.
The chips will have insulating walls made of a "high-K" hafnium compound, which is transparent to electric fields, instead of silicon dioxide, Intel said in a statement.
According to New Scientist, the changes mean that the 45-nanometre transistors on Intel's next suite of computer processors will not only be faster and smaller than today's 65-nanometre ones, but will also be more power efficient.
"The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate transistors in the late 1960s," said Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
The new transistors will make their way into Intel's next generation products, currently codenamed "Penryn", which include the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Xeon processors. These will run Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux, he said.
The manufacturing will begin later in 2007 and the products will be available in 2008.
Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with VLSI Research in California, US said: "It's no longer a research project, it's real. This is a really big breakthrough".
A transistor consists of an electrode that switches the current on and off within a "channel" using an electric field.
In the past, to make the transistor switch faster, and thereby up its performance, chipmakers shortened the electrode and thinned the insulating wall that separated it from the channel, but this was not very suitable, as thinning the wall often caused current to leak from the channel into the electrode, wasting heat and electricity.
Now, in an effort to continue shrinking and speeding up its transistors, Intel has come up with an insulator that transmits a fast-switching electric field even at a relatively large size.
Though the exact composition of this "high-K" material is a secret, Intel has said it contains hafnium, which increases transistor-switching speed by 20 percent and leaks five times less current.
According to Intel, the new 45-nanometre transistors dual-core processors will contain 400 million transistors, while quad-core will contain 800 million.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Internet to revolutionise TV in 5 years: Gates

2007-02-01T22:52:00.000-08:00

The Internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.
"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had," he told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.
The rise of high-speed Internet and the popularity of video sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube has already led to a worldwide decline in the number hours spent by young people in front of a TV set.
In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates said.
"Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it," he said.
At the moment, watching video clips on a computer is a separate experience from watching sitcoms or documentaries on television.
But convergence is coming, posing new challenges for TV companies and advertisers.
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said the impact on advertising would be profound, with the future promising far more targeted ads tailored to each viewer's profile.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Make a Linux Home Data Server of an Old PC

2007-02-01T22:51:00.000-08:00

So, how do you do it? Well, if it's already set up for Windows Networking, you've got the basics set up for a Windows file server, and can simply use your local area network for transfering/working with files, however, this article is going to show you the more effective, and more powerful way: setting up a Linux file server.
The first step is to pick a Linux distro, DistroWatch.com lists the most popular distributions, and reviews a range of distributions, we're going to use the Ubuntu [5.10] operating system, with a server installation, simply because it's the operating system this author uses for his desktop, and is quickly becoming the most popular distribution around.
Your old computer likely has enough memory, and a powerful enough CPU to run Ubuntu, however, if you intend to use this server as a major central file server, it will likely need a new hard-drive. You can deal with that on your own.
When you insert the Ubuntu CD, and boot to it, instead of just pressing [enter] at the boot screen, type 'server' then press enter - this will prevent it from installing any of the *-desktop packages, and not setting up any unneeded applications.
After following the steps of installation, you will be prompted with a logon screen - enter the username and password you provided during installation, and you are in your brand new Linux system. From here, you can do everything from browse the web, to set up the computer for various networking tasks, to play a range of Linux-based games.
Package management is a critical part of running a Linux system, luckily Ubuntu comes with two distinct and useful tools to aid in your package managing. Aptitude [which, is actually just a UI for apt-get] and apt-get.
A package called "samba" will allow you to set up proper networking between Linux and Windows computers (at least, we hope you've got your networking issues sorted out). Running "sudo apt-get install samba" in your new command line will tell the apt-get application to install the samba package, and set it up with default settings.
Once samba is installed, you'll want to set it up to share certain files/directories, and set them up on your network - samba networking is a massive topic of it's own, and way beyond the scope of this article, however, running "man samba" will give you the samba manual file, which lists off a series of other manuals to look at. Google's always helpful too.
Now, once you have networking and samba set up, you should be able to transfer files between Windows and Linux through Network Neighborhood/smbclient - you've now got a basic data server set up. That was easy, wasn't it?
For those who want to go further, Pure-FTPd will allow you to set up a fully featured FTP (file transfer protocol) server on this box, which you could use to access your files remotely from any computer set up with an FTP client (Windows Explorer has one built in!), setting up an Apache based web-server is fairly simple with Ubuntu's apt-get packages, and OpenSSH allows the user to remotely log in to the Linux shell from any computer equipped with an SSH client.
A slight advancement to this system could allow you to set up Bash scripts combined with cron would allow you to set up scripts which immediately backup files every X days, or scripts to do certain processing to files at certain times - the possibilities are effectively endless.
Adan X. Knife is a computer scientist, entrepreneur and web developer. He currently runs a network of websites including one about High Definition Technology and a Free Games Library. He also runs a range of communication related sites including his cellular phone reviews site.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Floppies-The Portables of the Past - YRU Still Using Floppies?

2007-02-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

New computers today are usually sold without floppy drives. This can be annoying if you have been saving data on floppies. Why should you give it all up? Well, maybe you shouldn’t. It is nice to have that option. But these days you have many other ways to portate data. (I like the sound of that; “portate data“. I wonder if that phrase is copyrightable).
So, what are your options?
1. CDs. Cds hold 700 or more megabytes of stuff. If you buy them on sale in bulk you can pay less than 20 cents apiece. Of course you will want to have paper or plastic sleeves so that adds to the cost. Let’s say a total of 50 cents maximum. Cheaper than toothpaste at a dollar store.
2. DVDs. This is not really a useful portating option unless you want to load up gigantic amounts of data to take from home to the office or to home from the office. Then it certainly is worthwhile, but you should see a therapist if you are doing that.
3. Digital Card Drives. You can buy a small digital card drive (The kind cameras use) for a few dollars. It can hold at least 8 megabytes of data and is easy to lose in your pocket. Nifty for small needs and can even be sent by surface mail (I refuse to say “snail mail”) if you are too dumb (scratch ‘dumb’, replace with ‘techno-ignorant’ or ‘digitally-phobic‘) to email the data. You may also need to carry a card reader with you though most recent computers have them built in.
4. USB Flash Drive. The cost of these little key chain drives is so low now you can afford to give them out like peanuts. Well, maybe not peanuts, but, well, let’s say a dozen roses, the cheap kind at the supermarket. A USB Flash Drive is utterly rewritable and real handy. Just about every computer in the modern world has at least two USB ports so the drive is almost universally usable. This may be the single best replacement for the floppy.
5. Mini-hard drive. About the size of a small matchbox, this device can hold multi-gigabytes of data. Costs less than $200 and can store half your world in the palm of your hand. A far cry from a floppy but our needs do change in this fast growing world.
6. Storage on the web. You can easily find places to store your data on the web. If nothing else you can email yourself the data and have it sitting there when you want to retrieve it. You can even send it to several places in case of apocalyptic disaster on one or more of them.
So, you can still use floppies; who is to stop you, but you have lots of other choices which probably will serve you better. If you are looking for a pile of used ones, I can get ‘em for you wholesale. Formatability not guaranteed.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Computer Networking Fundamentals by Sue Jan

2007-02-01T22:43:00.000-08:00

Computer network is an integral part of our daily lives, with the most important reason being that of communication. The use of computer networking is to share resources like fax machines, printers, modems, files etc., and its other uses are database server, computer server, email, chat, internet etc. The computer to which the resources are attached is called the server and the other computers that access the resource are called clients. In peer-to-peer computer networks there are no servers.
The sharing of fax machines, printers, and modems amongst many computers and users reduce the operational cost. A database on a computer network is a very important application as it stores and runs many important data and jobs. Emails and chats can be used for instantaneous communication and sending of files on a computer network.
The computer networks are classified, depending upon the size, as Local Area Networks (LAN), Wide Area Networks (WAN), Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) and Personal Area Networks (PAN). The topology (topology is the way the computer networks and network resources are connected) of the networking can be classified as Bus Network, Ring Network and Star Network.
The networking hardware basically consists of wiring, network cards and a hub. Computer network cards are required so that one computer can understand what the other computer is “talking”. Network cards have a unique MAC address to identify computers on a computer network. Hubs connect all the computers in the network. Hubs can also be used to connect to other hubs to increase the size of the computer network. Two computers can be connected using Ethernet cards or phone lines or power lines for communication, with hardware kits available at roughly a cost of $100.
As the number of computers in an office or a home increases, so do the number of cables, so wireless networking is a viable solution. In wireless networking radio transreceivers or infrared signals are used to communicate between computers and devices. Examples of wireless networking include Wi-fi and Bluetooth technology, though there may be security issues involved in wireless networking. However there definitely is a stronger preference towards wireless networking nowadays among consumers.
Computer networks have added a new dimension to the 21st century. Today the cyber world is much faster and wider than the real world. This has all been made possible due to computer networks. Computer networks have revolutionized business, communication, travel, research, defense, society and almost all human endeavors. The evolution of computer networks has helped the technological revolution take a big leap forward.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Writing for the Web

2007-02-01T22:41:00.000-08:00

How to write for the web? The rule of thumb when writing for the Web is to keep the information well structured, and to respect some basic, very simple directions. Failure to do so will result in web users never attempting to access your web page again.
When you're browsing the Web for information, you're coming across variously structured pages. Some contain the exact information that you need, while others are full of details that prove to be inconclusive. The rule of thumb when writing for the Web is to keep the information well structured, and to respect some basic, very simple directions. Failure to do so will result in web users never attempting to access your web page again.
Theoretical Basis
In 1997, John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen have conducted a study to determine the way users read various texts on the Web. Their conclusion was that people tend not to read the text thoroughly, but they scan it instead. They browse through it, looking for the relevant information at the surface.
Web users are people that want to find information as quickly as possible. They seem to prefer short, right-to-the-point pages, and factual information to the overcharged, insipid and sometimes incomprehensible (due to the hyped language) "marketing fluff" that characterizes most of the writings that populate the Web nowadays.
The quality, credibility and relevance of the information are of utmost importance. Failure to satisfy any of these needs will determine users to never access a web page that has not provided concise, scannable and objective information.
In support of the above, the following paragraphs will attempt to cover some of the most important details that you should consider when writing for the web.
Text Format
• Sections
Since scanning is the universally accepted norm for web texts, do try to make your text short, or, if not possible, split it into sections/chunks with relevant headings and subheadings. Web users are usually in a hurry. They need bite-size information, and fast. Help them and you will also do yourself a favor.
• Headings and Subheadings
The first heading on the page is the most important. It tells the reader why the text is worth reading.
The next headings that you use must have more of an objective value than a stylistic one. They should sum up the content of the corresponding paragraph or sub-paragraph.
• Bulleted and Numbered Lists
The purpose of the bulleted lists should be to make information more obvious. It also contributes to reducing the amount of text on the web page and improves scannability. Information that is obvious is easier to remember.
For example (See our Usability Evaluation Services):
The usability concept
A usable sales website is one where:
o Your visitors can easily find what they are looking for;
o Your answers to frequently asked questions are helpful and easy to locate;
o Your ordering system is easy to use and intuitive;
o Your visitors feel comfortable trusting you, the company that operates the website.
• Tables
A table that contains relevant results of a study, for example, can be useful. It draws the reader's attention and also adds to the scannability of the text. Tables of contents are also useful, since they give users the opportunity to see right from the beginning if the information that they are looking for could be found in the text.
• Captions
When you write for Web users, include pictures, tables, flowcharts, or diagrams in the page structure to support the text. Make sure that you also insert captions that identify the illustrations or table. Remember though that illustrations need captions only when the context is not clear enough.
• Links
Use links to support the text's credibility. According to the nature of the text on your web page, you could provide links to glossaries that explain certain terms and concepts that you use in your text or to resources that you have used.
Nevertheless, refrain from using too many links. Users may think that what they read does not have a significant personal touch, and this will affect the credibility of your text. Avoid using terms such as "Click here" or "follow this link".
If your text is long, or split on several pages, add navigation links to other sections in your text, as this also improves scanning. Always make sure that you have no broken links (either internal or external) and that it is clear enough where the internal links will take the Web user.
• Highlighting
If you want to bring something to your reader's attention and add to the scannability of the text, highlighting is a good policy. Highlight only key information-carrying words. Do not highlight entire sentences or long phrases because a reader that scans your page is only able to pick 2-3 words at a time, and larger chunks of highlighted words may become tiresome.
Highlight words by using:
o boldface characters
o italics
o colors
o upper case letters
Text Content
• Clarity
Writing for the web means that you have to be a good organizer. The information that you will place on your page for the whole world to see must be carefully organized. Use words that make sense to the audience. Use simple, meaningful language.
Check your spelling (use a spell checker). You wouldn't want your readers to encounter something like "Our software provides state-of-the-art soultions that "?.
Use correct grammar. Make sure that you know the difference between "it's" (contracted form of "it is" or "it has") and "its" (possessive pronoun, 3rd person singular), between "you're" (contracted form of "you are") and "your" (possessive pronoun, 2n person singular and plural), or between "they're" (contracted form of "they are"), "there" (adverb of place, antonym of "here"), and "their" (possessive pronoun, 3rd person plural). These examples may sound a bit "too much", but you'd be surprised how often they occur.
Avoid word play (puns), euphemisms and metaphors: you could be taken literally. Also, think of your non-native speaker audience. If you have to have abbreviations in your text, use only the standard ones. If you use your own abbreviations, explain them (between brackets), at least once in the beginning.
• Quantity
Since web users are usually people in a hurry, they need information that can be seized easily. Limit each paragraph to only one idea (topic sentences). Be concise: web readers prefer short texts, from which they can extract the information with minimal effort. Studies show that web reading is slower than regular reading by 25%. The information that you offer must be condensed enough to fit in one screen. Users don't enjoy scrolling too much. They want to get the information fast, so web texts must have half the word count used when writing for print.
• Relevance
Do not overcharge your page with information. Provide only what is necessary. The text that you write for the web page must be relevant for the target audience, organized in an intuitive manner. The short bits of text that constitute your paragraphs must be self-explanatory, so that your readers will understand your point on the spot and will not require much mental effort to do that, or additional information to support them.
• Style
o Verbs
Use active verbs (provide, assess, implement, focus, validate, etc.) rather than passive ones (is being done, are solved, were built). Active verbs give a sense of vivacity to the text, which becomes more energetic and powerful.
o Pronouns
Use "you" rather than "I", "we". Like this you will show readers that they are the target, and your text will have a greater impact on them.
o Language
Use easily understandable language, with familiar, everyday words, short and simple sentences.
Avoid jargon by all means: jargon is usually technical or abbreviated and difficult to understand for people not in the profession.
Establish a balance between promotional (marketing) style and the useful information that you include in your text. For example, when writing a presentation web page for a product, it is understandable that it is meant to help sell the product. Nevertheless, avoid marketing exaggerations and overstatements. Too much enthusiasm can be a turn-off. Refrain from using (too much) humor. All Web users have different perceptions on humorous instances.
o Keywords
Identify the keywords in your text. Highlight them to add to the scannability of the text and to add to the probability of your web page being found much easier when searching the Web.
o Graphics
Graphical elements must complement text. Insert only images that have relevance to the text, and avoid full-page graphics, as they can take quite a while to load and this gets users annoyed.

Source:Hindustanis.org

The Jackson 45 - a New Search Angle for Google

2007-02-01T22:39:00.000-08:00

internet portal opens door on 200 years of patents - Filings reveal inventive ideas from entertainers.
In 1992, in happier times, Michael Jackson had an idea. Wouldn't it be cool to have a pair of shoes that allowed the wearer to lean forward at an angle of 45 degrees. The gravity-defying feat would surely inspire awe in the legions of Jacko fans.
The entertainer consulted his tailors and one of the more improbable devices to receive a US patent was born. Patent number 5255452 was issued on October 26 1993: "A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his centre of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface."
The invention put an end to a period of stage dysfunction for Jackson: how to repeat the leaning forward trick he did in videos, accomplished with the aid of wires and harnesses, in a live concert. Shoes with a hole in them to latch on to a hook in the floor seemed the answer.
Whether Jackson ever used the device remains unknown, but the existence of the patent comes courtesy of the latest tool unveiled by the search engine Google. Following its attempts to map the globe, place world literature on the web, provide a directory of images and offer streaming video, Google has turned its attention to the world of invention.
Seven million US patents, dating from 1790 to mid-2006, are available for search, with the site offering scanned images of the original filings. Although the information was previously posted online by the US patent office, Google claims to offer a better search facility for the information.
"It's a natural extension of our mission to make this public domain government information more easily accessible," said Google's Doug Banks.
While the records offer users a chance to peruse the filings by some of the most celebrated inventors - Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers - they also give an insight into the musings of those who turned their hands to inventing in their down time.
Take Jamie Lee Curtis. In February 1987, the actor was knee deep in nappies, looking after her adopted daughter, Anne. Then she had an idea. Why not make a nappy with a built-in pocket containing a baby wipe? In June 1988, patent number 4753647 was born: "A disposable, integrated, multi-piece infant garment."
Star Wars director George Lucas also had children on his mind, for different reasons. In April 1980, a month before the release of The Empire Strikes Back, the first Star Wars sequel, he filed a patent for "the ornamental design for a toy figure". The line drawings accompanying the filing show the diminutive figure of Yoda.
Other Hollywood figures feature on the list of patent holders. In 2002 Marlon Brando, possibly with a view to setting up a lucrative sideline on his private island in Tahiti, claimed the patent for a "drumhead tensioning device and method".
Unfortunately, Brando's invention of a tuning ring "threadedly coupled by a tuning linkage to a retaining member fixed to the drum" was not granted until November 2004, four months after the actor's death.
A contemporary of Brando, the actress Julie Newmar, whose career highlight was playing Catwoman in the Batman TV series, had a second career as a pantyhose mogul, selling the Nudemar range. Her design for Pantyhose with Shaping Band for Cheeky Derriere Relief was granted patent number 3914799 in 1975.
Another actress, Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr, holds one of the most important patents, a "secret communication system" she filed in 1941. "An object of the invention is to provide a method of secret communication which is relatively simple and reliable in operation, but at the same time is difficult to discover or decipher," Lamarr and her husband, the composer George Antheil, wrote in the application.
The device, to guide radio-controlled torpedoes, is considered ahead of its time, and was not used until 1962, after the patent had expired, when the US military employed it in the blockade of Cuba.
The device's frequency-hopping idea is seen as providing the basis for today's spread-spectrum communication technology, which is used in mobile phones and wireless technology. Lamarr made no money from her invention.
Other entertainers had less weighty matters on their minds. Both Prince and Eddie Van Halen received patents for portable musical devices - a musical instrument support and a portable keyboard respectively - while Gary Burghoff, aka Radar in the long-running TV series MASH, patented an "enhanced fish attractor device" to dangle from the side of a boat.
In 1873 Samuel L Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, filed an application for an "improvement in scrap books". The author's improvement consisted of sticky sections on the pages: "The scrap book is, so to say, self-pasting, as it is only necessary to moisten so much of the leaf as will contain the piece to be pasted in." The idea did not catch on.
Google's idea probably will. Like any search engine it will provide amusement for the idle, but will also be a useful resource for garden shed inventors.
Anyone toiling away on their design for a shark protector suit, for example, may like to put that eureka moment on hold while they check out patent number 4833729. As with most good ideas, someone else got there first.

Source:Hindustanis.org

China Soon to Be World's Biggest Internet User

2007-02-01T22:38:00.000-08:00

Online leap reported despite heavy censorship - Web activity to surpass US within two years.
China could overtake the US as the country with the most internet users within two years, according to its government, which released figures showing that the nation's online population had increased to 137 million people in the last 12 months.
Statistics from the China Internet Network Information Centre show that more than a 10th of the country's 1.3 billion people now use the internet, with the figure increasing by 23.4% last year. "We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the United States," the official China Daily newspaper quoted a centre official, Wang Enhai, as saying.
About 210 million out of 300 million Americans are online - a figure China will surpass in 24 months if it keeps up this pace. "The growth is now gaining much momentum. We are expecting even faster growth in 2007 and 2008," the official was quoted as telling reporters.
The China Daily admitted that the two-year estimate for overtaking the US was "bullish", citing a recent report by JP Morgan which forecast that China's internet population would reach 190 million by 2010. But there is little doubt that the country is experiencing a breathtaking rise in internet usage, despite Beijing's forceful censorship of web content. The state often blocks foreign websites and closes down local news outlets with little notice. Dozens of people have been jailed for posting political essays online.
Beijing is aware that the internet is a powerful tool in shaping public opinion and encourages web use for education and business, saying its aim is to only block material the authorities consider subversive or obscene.
Last month Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia with content shaped by contributors, found itself at the centre of a war of words over Chairman Mao. Its English version says the Communist party leader was the founder of modern-day China but also a man whom many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese".
In the Chinese version there is no mention of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which historians say led to the world's worst famine, or the bloody purges of the Cultural Revolution. Both English and Chinese sites have been targeted by the censors.
China's struggle to keep control of information has also seen the emergence of a bold online culture which many believe will be difficult to tame.
There are now 20 million Chinese bloggers, and more than 3 million active writers. When a 29-year-old news anchor blogged two weeks ago to say that having a Starbucks inside Beijing's hallowed Forbidden City, was an "erosion of Chinese culture" and that it should be removed there was outrage about the coffee shop's existence. The ensuing row highlighted the risks to foreign companies of offending Chinese nationalist sentiment.
Some observers say Chinese political culture is slowly adapting. Defenders of the government point out that the editor of a prominent website, Freezing Point, was sacked not imprisoned, ostensibly for printing an article on Chinese history that challenged Communist party orthodoxy.
Despite the curbs, foreign firms have flocked to Beijing, willing to set aside principles for profit. Human rights activists have been angered by the argument that moral compromise is the cost of doing big business. Many denounced Yahoo, Microsoft and others for online search services that exclude sensitive topics, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The issue is climbing the political agenda in Washington, where China's rise is often seen as a threat. Politicians in Congress last year attacked Google for accepting curbs on its search engine.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Basic: A Human Language Computer Program

2007-02-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

How do you talk to a computer? What language do you use? One of the earliest and easiest to understand is the Basic programming language.
Can you imagine using punch cards to communicate with your computer? That’s how researchers interacted with early computers; they formulated a program to solve a real world problem and then punched holes in a series of cards to tell the computer what to do. This may not seem like such a big deal until you consider that some complex programs took tens of thousands of cards, which had to remain in the correct order. Pity the researcher who tripped and dropped a stack of cards.
The cards were entered into the computer by an operator, who returned them hours, or days, later, along with a printout showing any errors. Usually the stack of cards had to be run more than once before satisfactory results could be obtained. In addition, only one program could be run on the computer at a time. These were some of the contributing factors leading to the development of the higher level programming languages, including Fortran, Cobol, and Basic.
The name Basic stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was developed in 1964 by two Mathematics Professors at Dartmouth College: Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny. Their goal was to create a language that would be easy for anyone to learn and that would serve as a stepping stone to the more complex computer languages of the day. They certainly succeeded in this goal. Basic quickly became extremely popular, with multiple versions created in the 70s and 80s. It was so easy to learn that both elementary and high schools across the U.S. acquired computers with the Basic language built in, and students as young as seven years old began to learn it. At the same time, although it was called a "Beginner’s" language, it was powerful enough to be used by serious researchers in the scientific community.
One version of Basic has the distinction to be the first product sold by Microsoft, and reportedly, the first major piece of software ever pirated. According to the story, Bill Gates somehow lost a paper tape copy of the program while attending a computer show. The later widespread copying of the program prompted Gates to write an open letter stating that software copying was theft. This letter was published in a number of computer magazines.
The Basic language in its many versions has several advantages. The earlier versions used line numbers to make debugging easier. Programmers often incremented their lines by 10. In this way, new lines could be inserted later without the need to renumber everything.
In Basic, each line has one fairly self-explanatory command or statement. For example, PRINT "test" means to print the word "test" on the screen. Actions can be repeated by using a simple recursive command, called a FOR NEXT statement, again with one command per line. An example of this would be:
10 FOR x=1 TO 7
20 PRINT x
30 NEXT x
On line 10 the variable x is first given a value of 1. Line 20 prints the number 1 on the screen. Line 30 is a simple counter, incrementing x each time it is reached, first making it equal to 2, then 3, etc. and making the program repeat the sequence until the number 7 is reached, printing the value of x each time. This means that when the program runs, it prints the numbers 1 to 7 on the screen. Other commands follow a similar common sense approach.
The Basic programming language is more than just a part of the early history of computers and computer programming. Many modern programming languages, such as Visual Basic, can trace their roots directly back to the language first developed at Dartmouth College back in the 60s. Computers have come a long way since those early years. Users and programmers alike can be grateful that we no longer have to use paper punch cards, thanks at least in part to the developers of programming languages like Basic.

Source:Hindustanis.org

New Computer Program Prevents Crashes And Hacker Attacks

2007-02-01T22:36:00.000-08:00

Today's computers have more than 2,000 times as much memory as the machines of yesteryear, yet programmers are still writing code as if memory is in short supply. Not only does this make programs crash annoyingly, but it also can make users vulnerable to hacker attacks, says computer scientist Emery Berger from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

With such problems in mind, Berger created a new program that prevents crashing and makes users safer, he says. Dubbed DieHard, there are versions for programs that run in Windows or Linux. DieHard is available free for non-commercial users at www.diehard-software.org.

Berger developed DieHard together with Microsoft researcher Ben Zorn. Berger has received a $30,000 grant from Microsoft, a $30,000 grant from Intel, and a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for his work on DieHard.

Almost everything done on a computer uses some amount of memory--each graphic on an open Web page, for example--and when a program is running, it is constantly requesting small or medium chunks of memory space to hold each item, explains Berger. He likens the memory landscape to a row of houses, each with only enough square footage for a certain number of bytes. The problem, says Berger, is that sometimes when memory real estate is requested, programs can unwittingly rent out houses that are already occupied. They also might request a certain amount of square footage when they actually need more, so an item can spill over into another "house." These mistakes can make programs suddenly crash, or worse.

"Ironically, crashing is the best thing that can happen," says Berger. "An overflow also can make your computer exploitable by hackers."

One way that the computer becomes more vulnerable results from the fact that "addresses" that are designated for a password, for example, will be on the same lot on the same street in every version of the program. So if a hacker overwrites a password, he or she can easily locate the password address on any of the umpteen versions of the program that are out there.

DieHard presents several remedies to such problems. First, it takes a compact row of memory buildings and spreads them around in the landscape. It also randomly assigns addresses--a password that has a downtown address in one session may be in the suburbs next time around. And in some versions of the program, DieHard will secretly launch two additional versions of the program the user is running--if a program starts to crash, that buggy version gets shut down and one of the other two is selected to remain open. DieHard can also tell a user the likelihood that they'll have been affected by a particular bug.

These problems wouldn't arise if programmers were a little less focused on speed and efficiency, which is rarely a problem these days, and more attentive to security issues, says Berger.

"Today we have way more memory and more computer power than we need," he says. "We want to use that to make systems more reliable and safer, without compromising speed."

Source:Hindustanis.org

Researchers Use Wikipedia To Make Computers Smarter

2007-02-01T22:33:00.000-08:00

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have found a way to give computers encyclopedic knowledge of the world to help them "think smarter," making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does.

The new method will help computers filter e-mail spam, perform Web searches and even conduct electronic intelligence gathering at a much more sophisticated level than current programs, according to researchers Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Shaul Markovitch of the Technion Faculty of Computer Science. The findings will be presented next week in Hyderabad, India during the Twentieth International Joint Conference for Artificial Intelligence.

The program devised by the Technion researchers helps computers map single words and larger fragments of text to a database of concepts built from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which has over one million articles in its English-language version. The Wikipedia-based concepts act as "background knowledge" to help computers figure out the meaning of the text entered into a Web search, for instance.

Giving computers this deeper knowledge has been a long-standing problem in artificial intelligence, according to Markovitch. "Humans use a significant amount of background knowledge" to understand text, "but we didn't know how to have computers access such knowledge," he said.

Most Web search and e-mail filter programs appear smart by calculating how often certain words appear in two texts, Markovitch explained. "But what is common to all these applications is that the programs that actually do this kind of thing don't understand text. They treat text as a collection of words, but they don't understand the meaning of words."

This shallow understanding is what makes an e-mail spam filter block all messages containing the word "vitamin," but fail to block messages containing the word "B12." "If the program never saw "B12" before, it's just a word without any meaning. But you would know it's a vitamin," Markovitch said.

"With our methodology, however, the computer will use its Wikipedia-based knowledge base to infer that "B12" is strongly associated with the concept of vitamins, and will correctly identify the message as spam," he added.

Or, computers could look at a chunk of text about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction and know that it is conceptually related to topics such as the Iraq war and U.S. Senate debates on intelligence--even if those terms do not appear anywhere in the original text.

The method also helps computers figure out ambiguous terms--deciding, for instance, whether the word "mouse" refers to the computer device or the fuzzy animal. This can be especially important in translated documents, Markovitch said.

In the near future, the Technion researchers hope to improve their method by adding information from the Web page links inside Wikipedia articles. They are already pursuing a patent on their work, which they say will be of interest to the intelligence community and Web search engine companies, among others.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is Israel's leading science and technology university. Home to the country's winners of the Nobel Prize in science, it commands a worldwide reputation for its pioneering work in nanotechnology, computer science, biotechnology, water-resource management, materials engineering, aerospace and medicine. The majority of the founders and managers of Israel's high-tech companies are alumni. Based in New York City, the American Technion Society is the leading American organization supporting higher education in Israel, with 17 offices around the country.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Countries Share Good Times Using GPS And The Internet

2007-02-01T22:31:00.000-08:00

The Sistema Interamericano de Metrologia (SIM) time and frequency network spans a large geographical area, connecting Canada, the United States, Mexico, Panama and Brazil. The baseline from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to the Brazilian national metrology institute is 9500 km. (Credit: NIST)
International time coordination is improving throughout the Americas thanks to a low-cost system relying on Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and the Internet, which enables much faster time comparisons and gives small countries the opportunity to evaluate easily their measurements in relation to others and to world standards.

The time and frequency network of the Sistema Interamericano de Metrologia (SIM), or Inter-American Metrology System, began operation in 2005. The system includes national metrology institutes in member nations of the Organization of American States (OAS). The SIM network currently compares time and frequency measurements made in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Panama and the United States. Costa Rica and Columbia are expected join the network soon, and additional OAS members have expressed interest.

As the U.S. civilian timekeeper, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) participates in the SIM network and also calibrates other members' equipment, which consists of a computer-based measurement system and a GPS receiver provided by OAS. Institutes simultaneously compare their time scales to clocks on the same GPS satellites, and then automatically compare their results over the Internet. Time differences can be viewed on the Web by all laboratories in the network, with updates every 10 minutes.

"Canada, Mexico and the United States now have better time coordination than ever before," says Mike Lombardi, a NIST scientist who is a member of the SIM working group on time and frequency. The three countries' times remained within 50 nanoseconds of each other for an eight-month period in 2006, according to a recent status report.* Measurement precision is good enough to calibrate the best regional standards.

Lombardi says the SIM network boosts the stature and capabilities of tiny metrology institutes, which cannot establish traceability to fundamental measurement units unless they make international comparisons. "Some SIM laboratories never have compared their standards to anybody before, so that's where the real beauty of the network will come into play," he says. "The larger laboratories also benefit because they now can see the measurement results in near real time, instead of waiting from two to seven weeks as they had in the past, using other reporting methods."

Source:Hindustanis.org

IBM Advancement To Spawn New Generation Of Chips

2007-02-01T22:30:00.000-08:00

IBM has announced it has developed a long-sought improvement to the transistor -- the tiny on/off switch that serves as the basic building block of virtually all microchips made today.

Working with AMD and its other development partners Sony and Toshiba, the company has found a way to construct a critical part of the transistor with a new material, clearing a path toward chip circuitry that is smaller, faster and more power-efficient than previously thought possible. As important, the technology can be incorporated into existing chip manufacturing lines with minimal changes to tooling and processes, making it economically viable.

The achievement is expected to have widespread impact, leading to improvements in electronic systems of all kinds, from computers to consumer electronics. IBM has inserted the technology into its state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing line in East Fishkill, NY and will apply it to products with chip circuits as small as 45 nanometers (billionths of a meter) starting in 2008.

"Until now, the chip industry was facing a major roadblock in terms of how far we could push current technology," said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president of Science and Technology, IBM Research. "After more than ten years of effort, we now have a way forward. With chip technology so pervasive in our everyday lives, this work will benefit people in many ways."

The technology, called "high-k metal gate," substitutes a new material into a critical portion of the transistor that controls its primary on/off switching function. The material provides superior electrical properties compared to its predecessor, enhancing the transistor's function while also allowing the size of the transistor to be shrunk beyond limits being reached today.

As a result, the use of this material could allow the industry to continue on the path defined by "Moore's Law," the chip industry axiom that predicts a doubling of the number of transistors on a chip every 12-18 months, thereby allowing chip performance and function to increase as well. The semiconductor industry has been able to maintain this rate of improvement for decades, but was reaching the limits of current technology, threatening a slowdown in further advancements.

As important as the new material itself is the method for introducing it into current manufacturing techniques. The creation of this transistor component with the new material was accomplished by the IBM team without requiring major tooling or process changes in manufacturing -- an essential element if the technology is to be economically viable.

Incremental work leading up to this achievement had been published earlier by IBM in scientific journals and presented at chip technology conferences. IBM plans to publish the summary of this final achievement in a similar forthcoming venue.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Hardware Vendors Launch Powerful Vista PCs

2007-02-01T22:24:00.000-08:00

Dell, HP, and others launch souped-up PCs to support Windows Vista.

PC vendors rushed to launch souped-up computers today, offering faster chips and larger hard drives to handle the demands of Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system.

Microsoft will begin selling Vista to consumers at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, following its launch for corporate users in November. The vista launch fever sparked the introduction of new desktops and notebooks from Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo Group, and others.

Vista offers users a brazen graphical interface, demanding PC upgrades to provide optimal performance for its Aero glass translucent desktop windows and other features. In an era when sinking prices for chips and memory have pushed PC makers to slash their prices, vendors are jumping at the opportunity to add advanced components to each PC--and add dollars to its sticker price.

Dell's Vista PCs

Dell recommended that Vista customers upgrade their PCs from single-core to dual- or quad-core processors, from 1GB to 2GB of memory, from graphics integrated on a motherboard to a dedicated graphics card, from standard display to wide-screen, and from standard to fast-spinning hard drives. Vista can run on slower PCs as well, but it will automatically disable certain features, said Alex Gruzen, senior vice president of Dell's product group.

"If you installed Vista on an older system with a minimum performance level, you would frankly be overpaying if you paid for Premium or Ultimate, because the operating system scales itself to the capability of your hardware platform," he said.

Dell opened a vista oriented website with advice for consumers looking for the best PC to support their flavor of Vista--whether Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, or Ultimate.

"Vista has changed the user experience. In the past, for gaming you might get a discrete graphics card, but otherwise all those recent hardware advances went largely untapped if you were simply editing a document or browsing the Web," Gruzen said. "What's exciting about Vista is that it brings those hardware advances to bear in your day-to-day experience, instead of saving all that horsepower for discrete applications."

Vista, for example, allows users to play a video instead of displaying a static photograph as the "wallpaper" on their everyday desktop. Dell began taking orders for those computers on Saturday, and reported a 20 percent rise in Web activity compared to the previous weekend, leading to the sale of 10,000 Vista-loaded PCs. Microsoft will allow vendors to start shipping those PCs tomorrow.

HP's Offerings

Hewlett-Packard launched its own fleet of Vista-ready PCs, including its full HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario lines, led by the tochsmart IQ770PC desktop and the Pavilion tx1000 notebook, which allow users to augment Vista's graphical interface by navigating via a touch-screen display instead of a mouse. Some of those PCs are further upgraded to support the greater computing demands of Vista Premium.

The company is also selling migration consulting services, helping users transfer files, photos, and system preferences to a new PC. Its technicians can even do the work remotely by connecting to a user's PC over the Internet. HP charges $60 for a 45-minute session of that SmartFriend service. The company also has a vista information webpage.

Vista: The New Standard

PC vendors acknowledge that many consumers and businesses will wait to upgrade their PCs until they are more comfortable with Vista's new features. But the makers say that Vista is here to stay, whether a buyer is upgrading tomorrow or next year.

"Vista will become the new standard. The only question will be which version of Vista you want--are you a gamer, a writer, someone who does 3D design work or digital video?" said Ken Walker, chief technologist for Gateway.

"You will be hard-pressed after [this] week to find an XP system available on store shelves," though Gateway will continue to sell the old OS through its online store, Walker said.

Gateway's designers used the Vista launch as an opportunity to make more changes than just the necessary graphics and memory upgrades, Walker said. They also switched from Intel's BTX desktop motherboard design to the more common ATX, and moved from a USB 1.0 to a high-speed 2.0 data port. Gateway, which also has a Web page devoted to vista, will support Vista on its DX430 desktops, NX270S notebooks, and eMachines Q1 line.

XP-Based Systems in the Bargain Basement

Indeed, retailers like Microelectronic microcenter offered deep discounts for Windows XP-based PCs from Acer, HP, and Toshiba over the weekend, granting $150 rebates in an effort to clear the outmoded notebooks off their shelves. The stores also plan to stay open between 12:01 a.m. tonight and 1 a.m. tomorrow to accommodate eager buyers.

Source:Hindustanis.org

A Brief History of Computers and Networks,

2007-02-01T22:19:00.000-08:00

Webster's Dictionary defines "computer" as any programmable electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data. The basic idea of computing develops in the 1200's when a Moslem cleric proposes solving problems with a series of written procedures.

As early as the 1640's mechanical calculators are manufactured for sale. Records exist of earlier machines, but Blaise Pascal invents the first commercial calculator, a hand powered adding machine. Although attempts to multiply mechanically were made by Gottfried Liebnitz in the 1670s the first true multiplying calculator appears in Germany shortly before the American Revolution.

In 1801 a Frenchman, Joseph-Marie Jacquard builds a loom that weaves by reading punched holes stored on small sheets of hardwood. These plates are then inserted into the loom which reads (retrieves) the pattern and creates(process) the weave. Powered by water, this "machine" came 140 years before the development of the modern computer.

Shortly after the first mass-produced calculator(1820), Charles Babbage begins his lifelong quest for a programmable machine. Although Babbage was a poor communicator and record-keeper, his difference engine is sufficiently developed by 1842 that Ada Lovelace uses it to mechanically translate a short written work. She is generally regarded as the first programmer. Twelve years later George Boole, while professor of Mathematics at Cork University, writes An Investigation of the Laws of Thought(1854), and is generally recognized as the father of computer science.

The 1890 census is tabulated on punch cards similar to the ones used 90 years earlier to create weaves. Developed by Herman Hollerith of MIT, the system uses electric power(non-mechanical). The Hollerith Tabulating Company is a forerunner of today's IBM.

Just prior to the introduction of Hollerith's machine the first printing calculator is introduced. In 1892 William Burroughs, a sickly ex-teller, introduces a commercially successful printing calculator. Although hand-powered, Burroughs quickly introduces an electronic model.

In 1925, unaware of the work of Charles Babbage, Vannevar Bush of MIT builds a machine he calls the differential analyzer. Using a set of gears and shafts, much like Babbage, the machine can handle simple calculus problems, but accuracy is a problem.

The period from 1935 through 1952 gets murky with claims and counterclaims of who invents what and when. Part of the problem lies in the international situation that makes much of the research secret. Other problems include poor record-keeping, deception and lack of definition.

In 1935, Konrad Zuse, a German construction engineer, builds a mechanical calculator to handle the math involved in his profession. Shortly after completion, Zuse starts on a programmable electronic device which he completes in 1938.

John Vincent Atanasoff begins work on a digital computer in 1936 in the basement of the Physics building on the campus of Iowa State. A graduate student, Clifford (John) Berry assists. The "ABC" is designed to solve linear equations common in physics. It displays some early features of later computers including electronic calculations. He shows it to others in 1939 and leaves the patent application with attorneys for the school when he leaves for a job in Washington during World War II. Unimpressed, the school never files and ABC is cannibalized by students.

The Enigma, a complex mechanical encoder is used by the Germans and they believe it to be unbreakable. Several people involved, most notably Alan Turing, conceive machines to handle the problem, but none are technically feasible. Turing proposes a "Universal Machine" capable of "computing" any algorithm in 1937. That same year George Steblitz creates his Model K(itchen), a conglomeration of otherwise useless and leftover material, to solve complex calculations. He improves the design while working at Bell Labs and on September 11, 1940, Steblitz uses a teletype machine at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to transmit a problem to his Complex Number Calculator in New York and receives the results. It is the first example of a network.

First in Poland, and later in Great Britain and the United States, the Enigma code is broken. Information gained by this shortens the war. To break the code, the British, led by Touring, build the Colossus Mark I. The existence of this machine is a closely guarded secret of the British Government until 1970. The United States Navy, aided to some extent by the British, builds a machine capable of breaking not only the German code but the Japanese code as well.

Part II

In 1943 development begins on the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) in earnest at Penn State. Designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the Moore School, they get help from John von Neumann and others. In 1944, the Havard Mark I is introduced. Based on a series of proposals from Howard Aiken in the late 1930's, the Mark I computes complex tables for the U.S. Navy. It uses a paper tape to store instructions and Aiken hires Grace Hopper("Amazing Grace") as one of three programmers working on the machine. Thomas J. Watson Sr. plays a pivotal role involving his company, IBM, in the machine's development.

Early in 1945, with the Mark I stopped for repairs, Hopper notices a moth in one of the relays, possibly causing the problem. From this day on, Hopper refers to fixing the system as "debugging". The same year Von Neumann proposes the concept of a "stored program" in a paper that is never officially published.

Work completes on ENIAC in 1946. Although only three years old the machine is woefully behind on technology, but the inventors opt to continue while working on a more modern machine, the EDVAC. Programming ENIAC requires it to be rewired. A later version eliminates this problem. To make the machine appear more impressive to reporters during its unveiling, a team member (possibly Eckert) puts translucent spheres(halved ping pong balls) over the lights. The US patent office will later recognize this as the first computer.

The next year scientists employed by Bell Labs complete work on the transistor (John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956), and by 1948 teams around the world work on a "stored program" machine. The first, nicknamed "Baby", is a prototype of a much larger machine under construction in Britain and is shown in June 1948.

The impetus over the next 5 years for advances in computers is mostly the government and military. UNIVAC, delivered in 1951 to the Census Bureau, results in a tremendous financial loss to its manufacturer, Remington-Rand. The next year Grace Hopper, now an employee of that company proposes "reuseable software," code segments that could be extracted and assembled according to instructions in a "higher level language." The concept of compiling is born. Hopper would revise this concept over the next twenty years and her ideas would become an integral part of all modern computers. CBS uses one of the 46 UNIVAC computers produced to predict the outcome of the 1952 Presidential Election. They do not air the prediction for 3 hours because they do not trust the machine.

IBM introduces the 701 the following year. It is the first commercially successful computer. In 1956 FORTRAN is introduced(proposed 1954, it takes nearly 3 years to develop the compiler). Two additional languages, LISP and COBOL, are added in 1957 and 1958. Other early languages include ALGOL and BASIC. Although never widely used, ALGOL is the basis for many of today's languages.

With the introduction of Control Data's CDC1604 in 1958, the first transistor powered computer, a new age dawns. Brilliant scientist Seymour Cray heads the development team. This year integrated circuits are introduced by two men, Jack Kilby and John Noyce, working independently. The second network is developed at MIT. Over the next three years computers begin affecting the day-to-day lives of most Americans. The addition of MICR characters at the bottom of checks is common.

In 1961 Fairchild Semiconductor introduces the integrated circuit. Within ten years all computers use these instead of the transistor. Formally building sized computers are now room-sized, and are considerably more powerful. The following year the Atlas becomes operational, displaying many of the features that make today's systems so powerful including virtual memory, pipeline instruction execution and paging. Designed at the University of Manchester, some of the people who developed Colossus thirty years earlier make contributions.

On April 7, 1964, IBM introduces the System/360. While a technical marvel, the main feature of this machine is business oriented...IBM guarantees the "upward compatibility" of the system, reducing the risk that a business would invest in outdated technology. Dartmouth College, where the first network was demonstrated 25 years earlier, moves to the forefront of the "computer age" with the introduction of TSS(Time Share System) a crude(by today's standards) networking system. It is the first Wide Area Network. In three years Randy Golden, President and Founder of Golden Ink, would begin working on this network.

Within a year MIT returns to the top of the intellectual computer community with the introduction of a greatly refined network that features shared resources and uses the first minicomputer(DEC's PDP-8) to manage telephone lines. Bell Labs and GE play major roles in its design.

In 1969 Bell Labs, unhappy with the direction of the MIT project, leaves and develops its own operating system, UNIX. One of the many precursors to today's Internet, ARPANet, is quietly launched. Alan Keys, who will later become a designer for Apple, proposes the "personal computer." Also in 1969, unhappy with Fairchild Semiconductor, a group of technicians begin discussing forming their own company. This company, formed the next year, would be known as Intel. The movie Colossus:The Forbin Project has a supercomputer as the villain. Next year, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes was the first feature length movie with the word computer in the title. In 1971, Texas Instruments introduces the first "pocket calculator." It weighs 2.5 pounds.

With the country embroiled in a crisis of confidence known as Watergate, in 1973 a little publicized judicial decision takes the patent for the computer away from Mauchly and Eckert and awards it to Atanasoff. Xerox introduces the mouse. Proposals are made for the first local area networks.

In 1975 the first personal computer is marketed in kit form. The Altair features 256 bytes of memory. Bill Gates, with others, writes a BASIC compiler for the machine. The next year Apple begins to market PC's, also in kit form. It includes a monitor and keyboard. The earliest RISC platforms become stable. In 1976, Queen Elizabeth goes on-line with the first royal email message.

During the next few years the personal computer explodes on the American scene. Microsoft, Apple and many smaller PC related companies form (and some die). By 1977 stores begin to sell PC's. Continuing today, companies strive to reduce the size and price of PC's while increasing capacity. Entering the fray, IBM introduces it's PC in 1981(it's actually IBM's second attempt, but the first failed miserably). Time selects the computer as its Man of the Year in 1982. Tron, a computer-generated special effects extravaganza is released the same year.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Programming Language

2007-02-01T22:18:00.000-08:00

An artificial language used to write instructions that can be translated into machine language and then executed by a computer.

The different notations used to communicate algorithms to a computer. A computer executes a sequence of instructions (a program) in order to perform some task. In spite of much written about computers being electronic brains or having artificial intelligence, it is still necessary for humans to convey this sequence of instructions to the computer before the computer can perform the task. The set of instructions and the order in which they have to be performed is known as an algorithm. The result of expressing the algorithm in a programming language is called a program. The process of writing the algorithm using a programming language is called programming, and the person doing this is the programmer.

In order for a computer to execute the instructions indicated by a program, the program needs to be stored in the primary memory of the computer. Each instruction of the program may occupy one or more memory locations. Instructions are stored as a sequence of binary numbers (sequences of zeros and ones), where each number may indicate the instruction to be executed (the operator) or the pieces of data (operands) on which the instruction is carried out. Instructions that the computer can understand directly are said to be written in machine language. Programmers who design computer algorithms have difficulty in expressing the individual instructions of the algorithm as a sequence of binary numbers. To alleviate this problem, people who develop algorithms may choose a programming language. Since the language used by the programmer and the language understood by the computer are different, another computer program called a compiler translates the program written in a programming language into an equivalent sequence of instructions that the computer is able to understand and carry out.

Machine language

For the first machines in the 1940s, programmers had no choice but to write in the sequences of digits that the computer executed. For example, assume we want to compute the absolute value of A + B ? C, where A is the value at machine address 3012, B is the value at address 3013, and C is the value at address 3014, and then store this value at address 3015.

It should be clear that programming in this manner is difficult and fraught with errors. exiplicit memory locations must be written, and it is not always obvious if simple errors are present. For example, at location 02347, writing 101… instead of 111… would compute |A + B + C| rather than what was desired. This is not easy to detect.

Assembly language

Since each component of a program stands for an object that the programmer understands, using its name rather than numbers should make it easier to program. By naming all locations with easy-to-remember names, and by using symbolic names for machine instructions, some of the difficulties of machine programming can be eliminated. A relatively simple program called an assembler converts this symbolic notation into an equivalent machine language program.

The symbolic nature of assembly language greatly eased the programmer's burden, but programs were still very hard to write. Mistakes were still common. Programmers were forced to think in terms of the computer's architecture rather than in the domain of the problem being solved.

High-level language

The first programming languages were developed in the late 1950s. The concept was that if we want to compute |A + B ? C|, and store the result in a memory location called D, all we had to do was write D = |A + B ? C| and let a computer program, the compiler, convert that into the sequences of numbers that the computer could execute. FORTRAN (an acronym for Formula Translation) was the first major language in this period.

FORTRAN statements were patterned after mathematical notation. In mathematics the = symbol implies that both sides of the equation have the same value. However, in FORTRAN and some other languages, the equal sign is known as the assignment operator. The action carried out by the computer when it encounters this operator is, “Make the variable named on the left of the equal sign have the same value as the expression on the right.” Because of this, in some early languages the statement would have been written as ?D ? D to imply movement or change, but the use of ? as an assignment operator has all but disappeared.

The compiler for FORTRAN converts that arithmetic statement into an equivalent machine language sequence. In this case, we did not care what addresses the compiler used for the instructions or data, as long as we could associate the names A, B, C, and D with the data values we were interested in.

Structure of programming languages

Programs written in a programming language contain three basic components: (1) a mechanism for declaring data objects to contain the information used by the program; (2) data operations that provide for transforming one data object into another; (3) an execution sequence that determines how execution proceeds from start to finish.

Data declarations

Data objects can be constants or variables. A constant always has a specific value. Thus the constant 42 always has the integer value of forty-two and can never have another value. On the other hand, we can define variables with symbolic names. The declaration of variable A as an integer informs the compiler that A should be given a memory location much like the way the variable A in example (2) was given the machine address 03012. The program is given the option of changing the value stored at this memory location as the program executes.

Each data object is defined to be of a specific type. The type of a data object is the set of values the object may have. Types can generally be scalar or aggregate. An object declared to be a scalar object is not divisible into smaller components, and generally it represents the basic data types executable on the physical computer. In a data declaration, each data object is given a name and a type. The compiler will choose what machine location to assign for the declared name.

Data operations

Data operations provide for setting the values into the locations allocated for each declared data variable. In general this is accomplished by a three-step process: a set of operators is defined for transforming the value of each data object, an expression is written for performing several such operations, and an assignment is made to change the value of some data object.

For each data type, languages define a set of operations on objects of that type. For the arithmetic types, there are the usual operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Other operations may include exponentiation (raising to a power), as well as various simple functions such as modula or remainder (when dividing one integer by another). There may be other binary operations involving the internal format of the data, such as binary and, or, exclusive or, and not functions. Usually there are relational operations (for example, equal, not equal, greater than, less than) whose result is a boolean value of true or false. There is no limit to the number of operations allowed, except that the programming language designer has to decide between the simplicity and smallness of the language definition versus the ease of using the language.

Execution sequence

The purpose of a program is to manipulate some data in order to produce an answer. While the data operations provide for this manipulation, there must be a mechanism for deciding which expressions to execute in order to generate the desired answer. That is, an algorithm must trace a path through a series of expressions in order to arrive at an answer. Programming languages have developed three forms of execution sequencing: (1) control structures for determining execution sequencing within a procedure; (2) interprocedural communication between procedures; and (3) inheritance, or the automatic passing of information between two procedures.

Corrado Böhm and Giuseppi Jacopini showed in 1966 that a programming language needs only three basic statements for control structures: an assignment statement, an IF statement, and a looping construct. Anything else can simplify programming a solution, but is not necessary. If we add an input and an output statement, we have all that we need for a programming language. Languages execute statements sequentially with the following variations to this rule.

IF statement. Most languages include the IF statement. In the IF-THEN statement, the expression is evaluated, and if the value is true, then Statement₁ is executed next. If the value is false, then the statement after the IF statement is the next one to execute. The IF-THEN-ELSE statement is similar, except that specific true and false options are given to execute next. After executing either the THEN or ELSE part, the statement following the IF statement is the next one to execute.

The usual looping constructs are the WHILE statement and the REPEAT statement. Although only one is necessary, languages usually have both.

Inheritance is the third major form of execution sequencing. In this case, information is passed automatically between program segments. This is the basis for the models used in the object-oriented languages C++ and Java.

Inheritance involves the concept of a class object. There are integer class objects, string class objects, file class objects, and so forth. Data objects are instances of these class objects. Objects inherit the properties of the objects from which they were created. Thus, if an integer object were designed with the methods (that is, functions) of addition and subtraction, each instance of an integer object would inherit those same functions. One would only need to develop these operations once and then the functionality would pass on to the derived object.

All objects are derived from one master object called an Object. An Object is the parent class of objects such as magnitude, collection, and stream. Magnitude now is the parent of objects that have values, such as numbers, characters, and dates. Collections can be ordered collections such as an array or an unordered collection such as a set. Streams are the parent objects of files. From this structure an entire class hierarchy can be developed.

If we develop a method for one object (for example, print method for object), then this method gets inherited to all objects derived from that object. Therefore, there is not the necessity to always define new functionality. If we create a new class of integer that, for example, represents the number of days in a year (from 1 to 366), then this new integerlike object will inherit all of the properties of integers, including the methods to add, subtract, and print values. It is this concept that has been built into C++, Java, and current object-oriented languages.

Once we build concepts around a class definition, we have a separate package of functions that are self-contained. We are able to sell that package as a new functionality that users may be willing to pay for rather than develop themselves. This leads to an economic model where companies can build add-ons for existing software, each add-on consisting of a set of class definitions that becomes inherited by the parent class.

Current programming language models

C was developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories during the early 1970s. At the time, Ken Thompson was developing the UNIX operating system. Rather than using machine or assembly language as in (2) or (3) to write the system, he wanted a high-level language.

C has a structure like FORTRAN. A C program consists of several procedures, each consisting of several statements, that include the IF, WHILE, and FOR statements. However, since the goal was to develop operating systems, a primary focus of C was to include operations that allow the programmer access to the underlying hardware of the computer. C includes a large number of operators to manipulate machine language data in the computer, and includes a strong dependence on reference variables so that C programs are able to manipulate the addressing hardware of the machine.

C++ was developed in the early 1980s as an extension to C by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell Labs. Each C++ class would include a record declaration as well as a set of associated functions. In addition, an inheritance mechanism was included in order to provide for a class hierarchy for any program.

By the early 1990s, the world wide web was becoming a significant force in the computing community, and web browsers were becoming ubiquitous. However, for security reasons, the browser was designed with the limitation that it could not affect the disk storage of the machine it was running on. All computations that a web page performed were carried out on the web server accessed by web address (its Uniform Resource Locator, or URL). That was to prevent web pages from installing viruses on user machines or inadvertently (or intentionally) destroying the disk storage of the user.

Java bears a strong similarity to C++, but has eliminated many of the problems of C++. The three major features addressed by Java are:

There are no reference variables, thus no way to explicitly reference specific memory locations. Storage is still allocated by creating new class objects, but this is implicit in the language, not explicit.
There is no procedure call statement; however, one can invoke a procedure using the member of class operation. A call to CreateAddress for class address would be encoded as address.CreateAddress( ).
A large class library exists for creating web-based objects.

The Java bytecodes (called applets) are transmitted from the web server to the client web site and then execute. This saves transmission time as the executing applet is on the user's machine once it is downloaded, and it frees machine time on the server so it can process more web “hits” effectively.

Visual Basic, first released in 1991, grew out of Microsoft's GW Basic product of the 1980s. The language was organized around a series of events. Each time an event happened (for example, mouse click, pulling down a menu), the program would respond with a procedure associated with that event. Execution happens in an asynchronous manner.

Although Prolog development began in 1970, its use did not spread until the 1980s. Prolog represents a very different model of program execution, and depends on the resolution principle and satisfaction of Horn clauses of Robert A. Kowalski at the university of endniburgh That is, a Prolog statement is of the form p:- q, r which means p is true if both q is true or r is true.

A Prolog program consists of a series Horn clauses, each being a sequence of relations concerning data in a database. Execution proceeds sequentially through these clauses. Each relation can invoke another Horn clause to be satisfied. Evaluation of a relation is similar to returning a procedure value in imperative languages such as C or C++.

Unlike the other languages mentioned, Prolog is not a complete language. That means there are algorithms that cannot be programmed in Prolog. However, for problems that are amenable for searching large databases, Prolog is an efficient mechanism for describing those algorithms.

Source:Hindustanis.org

Microprocessor

2007-02-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

A microprocessor consists of multiple independent function units. The memory interface fetches instructions from, and writes data to, external memory. The control unit issues one or more instructions to other function units. These units process the instructions in parallel to boost performance.

An integrated circuit that contains the entire central processing unit of a computer on a single chip.

A device that integrates the functions of the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer onto one semiconductor chip or integrated circuit (IC). In essence, the microprocessor contains the core elements of a computer system, its computation and control engine. Only a power supply, memory, peripheral interface ICs, and peripherals (typically input/output and storage devices) need be added to build a complete computer system.

A microprocessor consists of multiple internal function units. A basic design has an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), a control unit, a memory interface, an interrupt or exception controller, and an internal cache. More sophisticated microprocessors might also contain extra units that assist in floating-point match calculations, program branching, or vector processing (see illustration).

The ALU performs all basic computational operations: arithmetic, logical, and comparisons.

The control unit orchestrates the operation of the other units. It fetches instructions from the on-chip cache, decodes them, and then executes them. Each instruction has the control unit direct the other function units through a sequence of steps that carry out the instruction's intent. The execution path taken by the control unit can depend upon status bits produced by the arithmetic logic unit or the floating-point unit (FPU) after the instruction sequence completes. This capability implements conditional execution control flow, which is a critical element for general-purpose computation.

The memory interface enables the microprocessor to maintain two-way communication with off-chip semiconductor memory, which stores programs and data. This interface typically supports memory reads and writes in blocks of words (the number of bits that the processor operates on at one time). The block size facilitates burst data transfers to and from the chip's internal cache.

The interrupt or exception controller enables the microprocessor to respond to requests from the external environment or to error conditions by allowing interruptions of the ongoing operation. An interrupt might be an external peripheral requesting service, while an exception typically consists of a floating-point math error or an unrecognized instruction. The interrupt controller can prioritize and selectively handle these interrupts.

The internal cache is an on-chip memory storage area that holds recently used data values or instruction sequences that are likely to be used again in the near future. Since this information is already on-chip, it can be accessed rapidly, thereby accelerating the computation rate. Items not in the cache can take several or more extra operations to access, which significantly degrades the computation rate. Software writers often organize a program's code and data structures so that the most frequently used elements often occupy the cache, thus maintaining a high level of computational throughput.

The design of instruction sets (the commands that produce basic work when executed by the microprocessor) often influences the design of the microprocessor itself. Instruction sets—and as a consequence, the microprocessor architecture—are of two types: reduced instruction set computers (RISC) and complex instruction set computers (CISC). Because of the limits of early computer technology, most computers were by necessity RISC machines. Since most of the software was written in assembly language (that is, a programming language that represented the program's intent in actual machine instructions), there was a drive to build instruction sets of greater sophistication and complexity. These new CISC instruction sets made assembly language programming easier, but they also made it difficult to build high-speed computer hardware. First, CISC instructions were harder to decode. In addition, since CISC instructions involved long and complex operation sequences, they incurred a major cost by requiring more complicated logic to implement. Second, such instructions were also difficult to interrupt or abort if an exception occurred. Finally, such instructions usually carried many data dependencies that made it more difficult to support advanced architectural techniques. By returning to a RISC design, much faster computers can be built. In fact, an enhancement in performance by a factor of 2 to 3 has been attributed to this simple organizational change. To achieve these efficiencies, most of the RISC microprocessor's function units must be kept as busy as possible. This requires optimizing compilers that can translate a program's high-level source code and then reorder the resulting low-level instructions in such a way as to ensure the high throughput.

Microprocessors are found in virtually every consumer product that requires electric power, such as microwave ovens, automobiles, video recorders, cellular telephones, digital cameras, and hand-held computers. High-performance microprocessors implement the servers that store and distribute Web content, such as streaming audio and video, desktop computers, and the high-speed network switches that constitute the Web's infrastructure. More modest-powered microprocessors are at the heart of notebook computers and electronic games. Low-power microprocessors provide the control and flow logic of hand-held devices, digital cameras, cellular and cordless phones, pagers, and the diagnostic and pollution control of automobile engines.

Source:Hindustanis.org

IBM renews Microsoft rivalry with new Web software

2007-01-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

IBM's Lotus unit will introduce on Monday a set of social networking services that functions like a MySpace for office workers and which analysts say marks a renewed challenge to Microsoft Corp.

Lotus is going back to its roots as a pioneer of business collaboration software with a service called Connections that features the latest ways for users to share information via the Web, while giving businesses controls over who sees what data.

Lotus Connections offers the business equivalent of Web meeting places like MySpace.com or Facebook, Yahoo Inc.'s bookmark sharing site del.icio.us and blog search tools like Technorati.com -- stitched together in one package.

Peter O'Kelly, a collaboration software expert with Burton Group, said the new software from IBM Lotus promises to shake up a market dominated by Microsoft, where IBM, Oracle Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. also compete.

"This is going to rekindle the competition between Microsoft and IBM," O'Kelly said. "I think IBM is playing offense here."

The new offering could chip away at Microsoft's lead in the collaboration and e-mail messaging market, where five years ago Microsoft Outlook e-mail and its newer SharePoint collaboration software began to surge past rival IBM products, O'Kelly said.

While exact numbers are hard to come by, last year IBM said Lotus Notes had 125 million users. Adding in collaboration software, Lotus users number around 150 million, O'Kelly said. Microsoft has 200 million Outlook users and signed up another 80 million licensed users of SharePoint software, he estimated.

TEAM PRODUCTIVITY

IBM officials see a shift in focus from the quest for personal productivity that characterized computer advances of the 1990s to the "team productivity" which Web-based collaborative tools have begun to enable in recent years.

Connections combines five components: member profiles, activities, blogs, communities and "dogear" -- IBM's word for how users identify and share Web bookmarks with colleagues.

Connections uses the popular Web navigation technique of "tagging" to help users track popular discussion topics and figure out who may have expertise on any subject.

The software provides a way for individuals to quickly set-up ad hoc groups to collaborate on projects, storing relevant documents, e-mails and Web sites together. Each user can publish blogs to share ideas with colleagues.

"What Web 2.0 has demonstrated is that self-defining communities often do a better job of locating relevant information," IBM software chief Steve Mills said. "This helps with the rapid identification of expertise and experts."

Lotus Connections will become generally available later in the first half of 2007. Pricing hasn't been disclosed.

It is designed to run as a separate set of Web services that work for both existing and potential new Lotus customers.

It acts as an enhancement to, but independent of existing Lotus software such as IBM's e-mail, group collaboration and document management system, Lotus Notes, and IBM's business instant messaging system, Sametime. It's also meant to work for customers of Microsoft's database, e-mail and Web software.

"We believe it is relevant for non-Lotus Notes users as it for Lotus Notes customers," Jeff Schick, vice president of social software for Lotus, said in a phone interview.

O'Kelly said IBM's Web software could cause many corporate buyers who stopped considering Lotus Notes a decade ago to reconsider their reliance on Microsoft's rival software suite.

Revenue in the Lotus division grew 30 percent during the latest quarter compared with the final quarter of 2005, IBM reported last week. The company will demonstrate the service at its annual Lotusphere customer conference this week in Orlando, Florida.

Source:Hindustanis.org

2007-Jan-4 - basic computer concepts

2007-01-19T23:06:00.000-08:00

This document includes a brief overview of basic computing concepts. It is the first in a series of three self-instruction Internet tutorials produced by the Bedford Public Library.
You can scroll through the document or jump to any of the topics listed below. You can also print the entire document by printing this page.

What is a Computer?
Software and Hardware
Hardware Components
Hardware Accessories
Operating System Software
Software Applications
Reference

What is a Computer?

Computers are not very intelligent devices, but they handle instructions flawlessly and fast. They must follow explicit directions from both the user and computer programmer. Computers are really nothing more than a very powerful calculator with some great accessories. Applications like word processing and games are just a very complex math problem.

Software and Hardware

If you use a player piano as an analogy, the piano can be thought of as the hardware and the roll of music as the software.

The software a series of very simple computer instructions carefully organized to complete complex tasks. These instructions are written in programming languages (like BASIC, PASCAL, C...) to help simplify the development of applications.

The hardware is what sits on your desk and executes the software instructions. The player piano is useless unless the roll of music has been written correctly.

Hardware Components

Input Devices -- "How to tell it what to do"

- A keyboard and mouse are the standard way to interact with the computer. Other devices include joysticks and game pads used primarly for games.

Output Devices -- "How it shows you what it is doing"

- The monitor (the screen) is how the computer sends information back to you, whether it be surfing the web or writing a memo. A printer is also an output device.

Storage Devices -- "How it saves data and programs"

- Hard disk drives are an internal, higher capacity drive which also stores the operating system which runs when you power on the computer.

- "Floppy" disk drives allow you to save work on small disks and take the data with you.

Memory -- "How the processor stores and uses immediate data"

- When you use a program, the computer loads a portion of the program from the hard drive to the much faster memory (RAM). When you "save" your work or quit the program, the data gets written back to the hard drive.

Microprocessors -- "The brain of the computer"

- PCs primarily use microprocessors (sometimes called the chip) manufactured by Intel. The older Intel versions include the 386, 486 and now the Pentium line.

- Macintoshes use PowerPC processors by Motorola.

- Megahertz (MHz) is the internal processor speed in which computer instructions are performed. The MHz speed does not always indicate the power of the microprocessor. Newer processors can execute more instructions at the same or slower MHz. For example, an Intel 486 @100MHz is less powerful than a Pentium @75 MHz (but the MHz is "faster").

Hardware Accessories

Modems

- Modems allow you to communicate with other computers using a phone line. Modem speeds are in bits per second (14.4, 28.8 and 56 thousand bits per second are standard).

CD-ROM Drives

- A CD-ROM drive is a high capacity storage device which lets you read data from the disk, but not write data back. The speed of the drive (how fast the CD platter spins) is measured in multiples from the first generation drives. New drives are up to 24X (or 24 times the first drives), but while the CD spins faster, it is not really 24 times faster in actual output.

Printers

- There are different types of printers (laser, ink jet, dot matrix) with differing quality of output. They are measured in dpi (dots per inch) and ppm (pages per minute), the higher the better.

Scanners

- Scanners "digitize" printed material (like photos and graphics) and save it to a graphic file format (like .GIF or .JPG) for display on the computer.

Operating System Software

Operating system software provides a "user interface" for users to manage files, start programs, customize computer settings, and other tasks. The operating system also provides the fundamental core computer functionality for programmers.

Intel based PCs use Microsoft Windows version 3.1 (older) or Windows 95 as the operating system. Macintoshes use the Macintosh operating system.

Software Applications

Application software uses the operating system software and provides the real functionality of a computer. Applications include:

- Word Processing (MS Word, WordPerfect, Ami...)
- Spreadsheets (Lotus 123, MS Excel...)
- Database (DBase, Fox Pro, Oracle...)
- Presentation (MS PowerPoint, Persuasion...)
- Internet Browsers (Netscape Navigator, MS Internet Explorer)
- Games

Source:Hindustanis.org

2007-Jan-5 - 3D computer graphics

2007-01-19T22:51:00.000-08:00

3D computer graphics are works of graphic art created with the aid of digital computers and 3D software. The term may also refer to the process of creating such graphics, or the field of study of 3D computer graphic techniques and related technology.

3D computer graphics are different from 2D computer graphics in that a three-dimensional representation of geometric data is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images. Such images may be for later display or for real-time viewing.

3D modeling is the process of preparing geometric data for 3D computer graphics, and is akin to sculpting or photography, whereas the art of 2D graphics is analogous to painting. Despite these differences, 3D computer graphics rely on many of the same algorithms as 2D computer graphics.

In computer graphics software, the distinction between 2D and 3D is occasionally blurred; 2D applications may use 3D techniques to achieve effects such as lighting, and primarily 3D may use 2D techniques.

Technology

OpenGL and Direct3D are two popular APIs for generation of real-time imagery. Real-time means that image generation occurs in 'real time', or 'on the fly', and may be highly user-interactive. Many modern graphics cards hardware acceleration based on these APIs, frequently enabling display of complex 3D graphics in real-time. provide some degree of

[edit] Creation of 3D computer graphics

Architectural rendering compositing of modeling and lighting finalized by rendering process

3D model of a suspension bridge spanning an unusually placid body of water

The process of creating 3D computer graphics can be sequentially divided into three basic phases:

Content creation (3D modeling, texturing, animation)
Scene layout setup
Rendering

[edit] Modeling

The modeling stage could be described as shaping individual objects that are later used in the scene. There exist a number of modeling techniques, including, but not limited to the following:

Modeling processes may also include editing object surface or material properties (e.g., color, luminosity, diffuse and specular shading components — more commonly called roughness and shininess, reflection characteristics, transparency or opacity, or index of refraction), adding textures, bump-maps and other features.

Modeling may also include various activities related to preparing a 3D model for animation (although in a complex character model this will become a stage of its own, known as rigging). Objects may be fitted with a skeleton, a central framework of an object with the capability of affecting the shape or movements of that object. This aids in the process of animation, in that the movement of the skeleton will automatically affect the corresponding portions of the model. See also Forward kinematic animation and Inverse kinematic animation. At the rigging stage, the model can also be given specific controls to make animation easier and more intuitive, such as facial expression controls and mouth shapes (phonemes) for lipsyncing.

Modeling can be performed by means of a dedicated program (e.g., Lightwave Modeler, Rhinoceros 3D, Moray), an application component (Shaper, Lofter in 3D Studio) or some scene description language (as in POV-Ray). In some cases, there is no strict distinction between these phases; in such cases modelling is just part of the scene creation process (this is the case, for example, with Caligari trueSpace and Realsoft 3D).

Particle system are a mass of 3d coordinates which have either points, polygons, splats or sprites assign to them. They act as a volume to represent a shape.

Process

A 3D scene of 8 red glass balls

[edit] Scene layout setup

Scene setup involves arranging virtual objects, lights, cameras and other entities on a scene which will later be used to produce a still image or an animation. If used for animation, this phase usually makes use of a technique called "keyframing", which facilitates creation of complicated movement in the scene. With the aid of keyframing, instead of having to fix an object's position, rotation, or scaling for each frame in an animation, one needs only to set up some key frames between which states in every frame are interpolated.

Lighting is an important aspect of scene setup. As is the case in real-world scene arrangement, lighting is a significant contributing factor to the resulting aesthetic and visual quality of the finished work. As such, it can be a difficult art to master. Lighting effects can contribute greatly to the mood and emotional response effected by a scene, a fact which is well-known to photographers and theatrical lighting technicians.

[edit] Tessellation and meshes

The process of transforming representations of objects, such as the middle point coordinate of a sphere and a point on its circumference into a polygon representation of a sphere, is called tessellation. This step is used in polygon-based rendering, where objects are broken down from abstract representations ("primitives") such as spheres, cones etc, to so-called meshes, which are nets of interconnected triangles.

Meshes of triangles (instead of e.g. squares) are popular as they have proven to be easy to render using scanline rendering.

Polygon representations are not used in all rendering techniques, and in these cases the tessellation step is not included in the transition from abstract representation to rendered scene.

[edit] Rendering

Rendering is the final process of creating the actual 2D image or animation from the prepared scene. This can be compared to taking a photo or filming the scene after the setup is finished in real life.

Rendering for interactive media, such as games and simulations, is calculated and displayed in real time, at rates of approximately 20 to 120 frames per second. Animations for non-interactive media, such as feature films and video, are rendered much more slowly. Non-real time rendering enables the leveraging of limited processing power in order to obtain higher image quality. Rendering times for individual frames may vary from a few seconds to several days for complex scenes. Rendered frames are stored on a hard disk then can be transferred to other media such as motion picture film or optical disk. These frames are then displayed sequentially at high frame rates, typically 24, 25, or 30 frames per second, to achieve the illusion of movement.

Several different, and often specialized, rendering methods have been developed. These range from the distinctly non-realistic wireframe rendering through polygon-based rendering, to more advanced techniques such as: scanline rendering, ray tracing, or radiosity. In general, different methods are better suited for either photo-realistic rendering, or real-time rendering.

In real-time rendering, the goal is to show as much information as possible as the eye can process in a 30th of a second (or one frame, in the case of 30 frame-per-second animation). The goal here is primarily speed and not photo-realism. In fact, here exploitations are made in the way the eye 'perceives' the world, and thus the final image presented is not necessarily that of the real-world, but one which the eye can closely associate to. This is the basic method employed in games, interactive worlds, VRML. The rapid increase in computer processing power has allowed a progressively higher degree of realism even for real-time rendering, including techniques such as HDR rendering. Real-time rendering is often polygonal and aided by the computer's GPU.

An example of a ray-traced image that typically takes seconds or minutes to render. The photo-realism is apparent.

When the goal is photo-realism, techniques are employed such as ray tracing or radiosity. Rendering often takes of the order of seconds or sometimes even days (for a single image/frame). This is the basic method employed in digital media and artistic works, etc.

Rendering software may simulate such visual effects as lens flares, depth of field or motion blur. These are attempts to simulate visual phenomena resulting from the optical characteristics of cameras and of the human eye. These effects can lend an element of realism to a scene, even if the effect is merely a simulated artifact of a camera.

Techniques have been developed for the purpose of simulating other naturally-occurring effects, such as the interaction of light with various forms of matter. Examples of such techniques include particle systems (which can simulate rain, smoke, or fire), volumetric sampling (to simulate fog, dust and other spatial atmospheric effects), caustics (to simulate light focusing by uneven light-refracting surfaces, such as the light ripples seen on the bottom of a swimming pool), and subsurface scattering (to simulate light reflecting inside the volumes of solid objects such as human skin).

The rendering process is computationally expensive, given the complex variety of physical processes being simulated. Computer processing power has increased rapidly over the years, allowing for a progressively higher degree of realistic rendering. Film studios that produce computer-generated animations typically make use of a render farm to generate images in a timely manner. However, falling hardware costs mean that it is entirely possible to create small amounts of 3D animation on a home computer system.

The output of the renderer is often used as only one small part of a completed motion-picture scene. Many layers of material may be rendered separately and integrated into the final shot using compositing software.

Renderers

Often renderers are included in 3D software packages, but there are some rendering systems that are used as plugins to popular 3D applications. These rendering systems include:

[edit] Projection

Perspective Projection

Since the human eye sees three dimensions, the mathematical model represented inside the computer must be transformed back so that the human eye can correlate the image to a realistic one. But the fact that the display device - namely a monitor - can display only two dimensions means that this mathematical model must be transferred to a two-dimensional image. Often this is done using projection; mostly using perspective projection. The basic idea behind the perspective projection, which unsurprisingly is the way the human eye works, is that objects that are further away are smaller in relation to those that are closer to the eye. Thus, to collapse the third dimension onto a screen, a corresponding operation is carried out to remove it - in this case, a division operation.

Orthographic projection is used mainly in CAD or CAM applications where scientific modelling requires precise measurements and preservation of the third dimension.

[edit] Reflection and shading models

Modern 3D computer graphics rely heavily on a simplified reflection model called Phong reflection model (not to be confused with Phong shading).

In refraction of light, an important concept is the refractive index. In most 3D programming implementations, the term for this value is "index of refraction," usually abbreviated "IOR."

Popular reflection rendering techniques in 3D computer graphics include:

Flat shading: A technique that shades each polygon of an object based on the polygon's "normal" and the position and intensity of a light source.
Gouraud shading: Invented by H. Gouraud in 1971, a fast and resource-conscious vertex shading technique used to simulate smoothly shaded surfaces.
Texture mapping: A technique for simulating a large amount of surface detail by mapping images (textures) onto polygons.
Phong shading: Invented by Bui Tuong Phong, used to simulate specular highlights and smooth shaded surfaces.
Bump mapping: Invented by Jim Blinn, a normal-perturbation technique used to simulate wrinkled surfaces.
Cel shading: A technique used to imitate the look of hand-drawn animation.

[edit] 3D graphics APIs

3D graphics have become so popular, particularly in computer games, that specialized APIs (application programming interfaces) have been created to ease the processes in all stages of computer graphics generation. These APIs have also proved vital to computer graphics hardware manufacturers, as they provide a way for programmers to access the hardware in an abstract way, while still taking advantage of the special hardware of this-or-that graphics card.

These APIs for 3D computer graphics are particularly popular:

OpenGL and the OpenGL Shading Language
OpenGL ES 3D API for embedded devices
Direct3D (a subset of DirectX)
RenderMan
RenderWare
Glide API
TruDimension LC Glasses and 3D monitor API

There are also higher-level 3D scene-graph APIs which provide additional functionality on top of the lower-level rendering API. Such libraries under active development include:

Source:Hindustanis.org

2007-Jan-10 - HP TouchSmart: The Social PC

2007-01-19T22:49:00.000-08:00

Last Gadget Standing Finalist: See all the finalists in the Last Gadget Standing competition, and cast your vote for the winner!
Social networking has been the talk of 2006, but so far there's been little talk about how to make the PC more of a social fixture in the home. Now HP has a new and very different-looking computer that's been designed from the ground up to claim its rightful place in the family.

What's different about it? Well, to begin with, it's the design. Weighing in at almost 40 pounds, it's designed to be an attractive, eye-catching piece of furniture that will look at home in your kitchen, living room, family room, or anywhere else people congregate in your house. The unit is black and silver with sleek lines and a large 19-inch LCD screen as its centerpiece. The base houses a wireless keyboard that tucks neatly away when it's not in use. The CPU (an AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core) is housed in a slim notebook PC-sized chassis that sits as the base of the monitor. Ample storage is provided by a 320GB hard drive. Graphics are game-quality excellent, thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics card, and everything about the system is optimized for a top-notch media experience. The front panel has a few smart buttons for quick, simple access to music, photos, video, and common applications. A slot-loading DVD burner (that also uses HP's LightScribe technology to label your DVD) makes it convenient to play or burn a DVD. The entire feel of the unit is more like a consumer electronics appliance than a PC.

But the real essence of the machine is the combination of software and hardware that makes it a socially friendly place. With a single click from the main menu you can access the weather or your email, check the day's schedule, or just watch TV. The TouchSmart runs the new Microsoft Windows Vista, which only adds to the attractive, modern feel of the machine. A built-in webcam and microphone, along with accompanying software, make it an inviting place to send a quick video email or record a voice message for someone else in the family. The calendar provides you with a central place to manage the family's activities or leave a quick note or even a voice recording for someone. The idea behind the unique calendar application is that the PC becomes the central place for a family to keep organized and in touch.

You can imagine the type of family usage HP envisions. A cook will be able to look up a recipe on the Internet, watch a video clip of how to prepare the dish, order ingredients, and even record and watch a TV cooking show all from the kitchen PC. (The unit has a built-in NTSC TV tuner and over-the-air ATSC high-definition television tuner.) A photo album can keep a slide show of family favorites going, and there's software to create custom media from music playlists and video clips.

Input is another strong suit in this "more social" PC. You've got your choice of using the wireless keyboard and mouse, a stylus, or the remote control device depending on what you'll be doing. Bluetooth and wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g make it a relatively cable-free existence, and there are slots for CompactFlash, Secure Digital (SD), Memory Stick, and xD media, to name a few. One of the fun features is the option to install the HP PhotoSmart printer right into the base of the machine and print those snapshots you love.

The TouchSmart PC represents a design breakthrough, a PC that doesn't feel like an outsider in the family room. And despite the state-of-the-art features, the unit will sell for less than $2,000. There are a couple of notable omissions. The calendar doesn't import and export from Outlook, so it's sort of a world unto itself, which makes it tough to use as the family calendaring headquarters. An iPod dock might have been a nice addition; so would some sort of VoIP or Internet phone functionality. And the TouchSmart takes up a bit too much real estate for me to feel comfortable with it in my kitchen or family room. I'm thinking that if you're going to go to the trouble of integrating technology in the kitchen, for example, you're going to want a mounted PC that drops down from something like a cabinet, not a machine that's going to hog valuable cooking space.

HP's got the speeds and feeds as well as much of the functionality and design that busy connected families are going to want, but it suffers because the machine you want in your kitchen (cooking and communications) is different than the one you want in your living room (entertainment and media). It's going to be a slow cultural change before PCs claim their rightful place in these rooms. For now, the HP TouchSmart is a very unique PC for an early adopter of the PC lifestyle. It combines Windows Media PC entertainment functions with a nod toward calendaring and messaging—the cornerstones of family life. It's going to take a few iterations to fine-tune the concept.

Source:Hindustanis.org

2007-Jan-10 - How to Break Into IT

2007-01-19T22:48:00.000-08:00

Do you like working with computers?
You might be able to convert your interests and skills into a challenging and lucrative career in IT. This guide will help you get started.

You don't have any technical training, but when the office computers crash everyone turns to you for assistance. Your coworkers think of you as a bit of a computer geek--and you suspect they may be right. The big challenge: How do you shed your current career and break into information technology?
Changing careers is never easy. Among the hardest tasks is acquiring enough real-life exposure to different types of information technology (IT) jobs (which number in the hundreds) to determine if you have the aptitude to develop your secret techie side into a salaried career.

Take low-risk first steps
Consider volunteering your way into the IT division of your current company. Example? One of my colleagues, Cindy, was a special education teacher. She suspected she'd be happier in an IT career, but she didn't know what types of careers were available. She took a computer programming course at a local college, but she disliked writing code. Still, she felt if she could get inside an IT department and learn about different IT jobs, she'd be able to accurately match her interests to job titles.

Cindy's school district operated a small IT department. The staff in the IT department ran the school's computer network, designed the school's Web site, and helped teachers learn how to integrate technology into their teaching. Cindy volunteered to help the IT department instruct teachers on how to use computers two evenings a week. In exchange, Cindy got an inside look at the IT department. She tried her hand at developing educational Web pages. She helped teach her coworkers to use the Internet in their teaching efforts. Finally, she gained an insider's view on what happens when a computer network crashes.

By volunteering, Cindy learned that she did not like Web site design. She somewhat liked training teachers to use the Internet. What fascinated her, however, was learning how computers communicate over a network. Computer networking: She'd not known this existed as a discrete career area. Cindy now had a specific IT area to explore in more detail.

Taking courses to explore your new interests
After you've identified the types of jobs that might interest you, take an introductory course or two. Taking courses--whether it's a nearby evening class or an online learning experience--is a great way to test your interests and aptitudes in a low-risk way.

Cindy's first stop after her volunteer stint was the local community college. She signed up for an

How much new education is enough?Don't buy more new education than you need. Many people mistakenly believe that they need a bachelor's degree to enter the IT field. Not so. Many entry-level technical careers do not require a four-year degree; for those that do, most employers will accept a bachelor's or associate degree earned in a

style="font-size:100%;">To enter most IT fields, it's more important to show evidence that you have a specific set of workable skills than that you have a degree. You can acquire most entry-level skills by taking a series of short courses.

Certificates have become quite popular among technology career changers. Unlike degrees, which may require liberal arts courses such as history and psychology, certificates commonly consist of four to six sequential courses, all of them focused in a single IT career area. Most certificates can be completed within a year. Degrees, on the other hand, take two to four years of full-time study.

Cindy already had a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's degree in education. She groaned at the thought of having to start all over again and earn a new bachelor's in computer networks. Instead, she focused on identifying and taking the exact sequence of courses that would allow her to pass an exam certifying her as a computer network specialist.

Six courses later, after passing a single private vendor exam, Cindy was certified. Employers who advertised for applicants holding a "bachelor's degree in computer science" gladly accepted Cindy's old psychology and education degrees coupled with her new networking certificate as the equivalent of the educational preparation they were seeking.

Give your current career an IT twist
IT is a rich career area. Hundreds of different techie job types exist, ranging from C++ programmer to security expert to new media journalist. I know a journalist who had written sports features for a decade; he decided to remain a writer but to satisfy his passion for tinkering with technology by becoming a technical writer.

He kept his steady job writing sports features while simultaneously taking on freelance jobs writing end-user manuals for software companies. A year of odd jobs as a freelancer gave him enough of a technical writing portfolio to interview for and secure a position as a staff technical writer with a large software firm. To bolster his formal credentials, and his entry-level salary, he took a series of online courses and earned a certificate in technical writing before seeking a staff position.

IT touches every career sector. The IT sector employs workers with specialties gleaned from working in many career areas. Nurses retrain as medical database managers. Lawyers become specialists in Internet law. Marketers become e-marketing gurus. Teachers become designers of instructional software.

You don't have to have a formal technology degree or be a math whiz to land a job in today's diverse IT arena. Find a niche that matches your natural interests and aptitudes. Chances are good that after you complete a few courses, you too can qualify for an entry-level IT position.

Source:Hindustanis.org