Books are said to be the most faithful friends. We all reading different kinds of books. This tendency has been digitized when books evolve into digital media equivalent – E-Books. Now a days, more and more people are realizing the ease and comfort offered by ebooks vs traditional paper books. E-books are fast to download, easy to read and a lot of classics are free to download at sites like Gutenberg.com and Scribd.com
You probably know the strain of watching and reading your computer monitor for long periods of time. It is in fact harmful for our eyes to stare at a traditional TFT or LCD monitor for long periods of time. Thus comes the roles of e-book readers based on E-Ink. E-Ink is a revolutionary technology of electronic paper display developed by E-Ink Corporation. It gives the user comfortable reading experience with minimal strain on the reader's eyes and real paper feeling. The E-Ink technology is used in Amazon Kindle, the Indian ebook readers Infibeam Pi and the recently released Infibeam Pi2.
Many of you might be considering to buy one of these ebook readers for ease, portability and the great experience of reading with E-Ink. Well , I am here to help you give an overview of the best EBook readers currently in market. I am going to compare two ebook readers well known to Indian readers : The Amazon Kindle 3 and The Infibeam Pi and the recently released Infibeam Pi2.
Infibeam Pi2 vs Infibeam Pi vs Amazon Kindle 3
02 Mar 2011
Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube', IBM says
17 Nov 2010
A pioneering research effort could shrink the world's most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists say.
The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one.
The aim is to reduce computers' energy use, rather than just to shrink them.
Some 2% of the world's total energy is consumed by building and running computer equipment.
Speaking at IBM's Zurich labs, Dr Bruno Michel said future computer costs would hinge on green credentials rather than speed.
Dr Michel and his team have already built a prototype to demonstrate the water-cooling principle. Called Aquasar, it occupies a rack larger than a refrigerator.
IBM estimates that Aquasar is almost 50% more energy-efficient than the world's leading supercomputers.
"In the past, computers were dominated by hardware costs - 50 years ago you could hold one transistor and it cost a dollar, or a franc," Dr Michel told BBC News.
Now when the sums are done, he said, the cost of a transistor works out to 1/100th of the price of printing a single letter on a page.
Now the cost of the building the next generation of supercomputers is not the problem, IBM says. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.
"In the future, computers will be dominated by energy costs - to run a data centre will cost more than to build it," said Dr Michel.
The overwhelming cause of those energy costs is in cooling, because computing power generates heat as a side product.
Cube route
"In the past, the Top 500 list (of fastest supercomputers worldwide) was the important one; computers were listed according to their performance.
The Aquasar - built on a series of water-cooled servers - is the size of a chunky refrigerator
"In the future, the 'Green 500' will be the important list, where computers are listed according to their efficiency."
Until recently, the supercomputer at the top of that list could do about 770 million computational operations per second at a cost of one watt of power.
The Aquasar prototype clocked up nearly half again as much, at 1.1 billion operations per second. Now the task is to shrink it.
"We currently have built this Aquasar system that's one rack full of processors. We plan that 10 to 15 years from now, we can collapse such a system in to one sugar cube - we're going to have a supercomputer in a sugar cube."
Mark Stromberg, principal research analyst at Gartner, said that the approach was a promising one.
But he said that tackling the finer details of cooling - to remove heat from just the right parts of the chip stacks - would take significant effort.
Third dimension
It takes about 1,000 times more energy to move a data byte around than it does to do a computation with it once it arrives. What is more, the time taken to complete a computation is currently limited by how long it takes to do the moving.
Air cooling can go some way to removing this heat, which is why many desktop computers have fans inside. But a given volume of water can hold 4,000 times more waste heat than air.
The Aquasar system is made from green record-breaking Blade servers
However, it adds a great deal of bulk. With current technology, a standard chip - comprising a milligram of transistors - needs 1kg of equipment to cool it, according to Dr Michel.
Part of the solution he and his colleagues propose - and that the large Aquasar rack demonstrates - is water cooling based on a slimmed-down, more efficient circulation of water that borrows ideas from the human body's branched circulatory system.
However, the engineers are exploring the third dimension first.
They want to stack processors one on top of another, envisioning vast stacks, each separated by water cooling channels not much more than a hair's breadth in thickness.
Because distance between processors both slows down and heats up the computing process, moving chips closer together in this way tackles issues of speed, size, and running costs, all at once.
In an effort to prove the principle the team has built stacks four processors high. But Dr Michel concedes that much work is still to be done.
The major technical challenge will be to engineer the connections between the different chips, which must work as conductors and be waterproof.
"Clearly the use of 3D processes will be a major advancement in semiconductor technology and will allow the industry to maintain its course," Gartner's Mark Stromberg told the BBC.
"But several challenges remain before this technology can be implemented - issues concerning thermal dissipation are among the most critical engineering challenges facing 3D semiconductor technology."
Princy Garg
2010-11-17T15:44:43.000Z
nice article providing new information....
Valley companies fighting for talent--must read for all future job seekers
04 Nov 2010
In the midst of a jobs crunch that has thousands of people out of work in Silicon Valley, there's a hiring frenzy going on among startups, social networking companies and some of the valley's tech giants.
The Googles and Apples of the valley are competing with nimble, fast-growing social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Startups are scrambling for good hires, offering the thrill of creating something new instead of big salaries.
While a hiring boom may seem a contradiction when so many people are unemployed, the reality is that many of those out of work don't have the skills some of these companies are looking for.
"There is not even nearly enough engineers, developers and research scientists here in the Bay Area," said Greg Mikulin, co-founder of Clarity Technology Partners in Palo Alto, a staffing agency. "The motivated people who have this pedigree are all working."
The hiring began in earnest last fall, according to those who follow the social media and search business, and really picked up steam at the beginning of this year. It helps explain why the valley posted its first year-over job increase in 23 months on Friday, although unemployment remained unchanged at 11.2 percent.
Google has lost some high profile people to Facebook and is reportedly offering large retention bonuses to a few key employees while aggressively expanding its sales and engineering side. It added about 3,500 people globally in the first three quarters of the year, putting pressure on smaller but fast-growing companies that are hiring from the same select pool of candidates.
"There's definitely a war for talent between the large companies and the startups," said Tom Silver, vice president of tech job listing service Dice.com.
Overall, tech job listings are up 38 percent nationally from last year on Dice.com, Silver said, but they have jumped 64 percent in Silicon Valley.Indeed.com, which aggregates thousands of employment sites, says the leaders in the number of jobs open are Apple and Google.
Valley companies are looking for Java programmers, network engineers, network security analysts, cloud computing specialists, virtualization programmers, user interface engineers and mobile technology specialists, Silver said. The average salary for these jobs in the valley is $96,299.
Redbeacon, which offers multiple price quotes on local services like gardening and home repair and was founded in 2008 by ex-Google employees, recently hired an in-house recruiter to "work every single day on hiring," said co-founder Ethan Anderson. "We're seeing definitely one of the most challenging recruiting environments in memory, especially in the technical area."
That's partly because of the rise of angel and micro-venture investing, he said, which involves individuals and small groups raising $1 million to $2 million to fund startups. "That means there are more engineers starting more companies," Anderson said. "Each will have two or three engineers, but there are hundreds of them, so that on a per-company basis there are fewer engineers available."
A second challenge is the sheer volume of hiring by larger companies like Google, he said. Or Cisco, for that matter, which expects to add 2,000 to 3,000 people worldwide in the next several quarters.
While the hiring frenzy has spawned a seller's market for top talent, it's leaving some midlevel technical workers sitting on the sidelines, Mikulin of Clarity said. With the rise of cloud computing -- the Internet-based sharing of software and information -- some desktop and support positions are disappearing, he noted. "It's some of the lower level jobs that are starting to go away, unfortunately," he said.
"The cloud and enterprise spaces right now are absolutely on fire," said Aaron Levie, founder of Box.net, an online work space information sharing company that's moving into bigger quarters this week to house a staff that's grown 70 percent this year.
Krish Parikh, 27, an M.I.T. grad in engineering and computer science, came to Box.net from Oracle a month ago. He said he has no regrets. "It's very exciting, the atmosphere is great, and there's a lot of energy. People come in early, stay late -- it's the make-it-or-break-it aspect of startups."
LinkedIn, an online professional network based in Mountain View, will nearly double in size this year, from 450 to 850 people, said Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's vice president of people operations. "Reading a lot of the articles about what's happening with unemployment, I feel like I'm living in a different world here," he said.
While Google expands its work force, other companies lure the workers Google already has. Facebook has hired away some of Google's top talent, but the Palo Alto social networking company failed to land one person after Google offered him a six-figure bonus, according to several recruiters.
Google declined to comment on that story, but said its attrition is well below the industry standard, and when it has made counteroffers to employees tempted by Facebook, 70 percent decided to stay at Google.
Tech recruiter Robert Greene, of GreeneSearch in San Mateo, said "Google's doing what they can do to retain people. They've re-priced their options; they're paying people a lot of money to stay there. They've done a really good job of it. It is still hard for me to recruit people out of Google."
But "Facebook is the hottest company around," he added.
Jay Parikh, director of engineering at Facebook, said Facebook isn't "going after Google" and declined to comment on the hires from the Mountain View search company. "We're just trying to find the best talent."
"We work hard to find these people," said Parikh. "If you're hiring at Google, Facebook, Cisco or Yahoo, you face the same challenges. It's a constrained resource and the supply is lower than the demand." Facebook began the year with about 1,000 employees and is now at a little more than 1,700.
San Francisco game developer Zynga, which started the year with about 400 or 500 people, will reach 1,300 next week and has an additional 300 openings, said chief people officer Colleen McCreary.
McCreary said Zynga is attracting people from much larger, traditional software companies.
"Google has done a great job of building their work force," she said. But, "for people who have been there a long time, as soon as they get a reach-out from a recruiter or hear from their friends, 'I'm doing this neat thing,' they get interested."
The Googles and Apples of the valley are competing with nimble, fast-growing social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Startups are scrambling for good hires, offering the thrill of creating something new instead of big salaries.
While a hiring boom may seem a contradiction when so many people are unemployed, the reality is that many of those out of work don't have the skills some of these companies are looking for.
"There is not even nearly enough engineers, developers and research scientists here in the Bay Area," said Greg Mikulin, co-founder of Clarity Technology Partners in Palo Alto, a staffing agency. "The motivated people who have this pedigree are all working."
The hiring began in earnest last fall, according to those who follow the social media and search business, and really picked up steam at the beginning of this year. It helps explain why the valley posted its first year-over job increase in 23 months on Friday, although unemployment remained unchanged at 11.2 percent.
Google has lost some high profile people to Facebook and is reportedly offering large retention bonuses to a few key employees while aggressively expanding its sales and engineering side. It added about 3,500 people globally in the first three quarters of the year, putting pressure on smaller but fast-growing companies that are hiring from the same select pool of candidates.
"There's definitely a war for talent between the large companies and the startups," said Tom Silver, vice president of tech job listing service Dice.com.
Overall, tech job listings are up 38 percent nationally from last year on Dice.com, Silver said, but they have jumped 64 percent in Silicon Valley.Indeed.com, which aggregates thousands of employment sites, says the leaders in the number of jobs open are Apple and Google.
Valley companies are looking for Java programmers, network engineers, network security analysts, cloud computing specialists, virtualization programmers, user interface engineers and mobile technology specialists, Silver said. The average salary for these jobs in the valley is $96,299.
Redbeacon, which offers multiple price quotes on local services like gardening and home repair and was founded in 2008 by ex-Google employees, recently hired an in-house recruiter to "work every single day on hiring," said co-founder Ethan Anderson. "We're seeing definitely one of the most challenging recruiting environments in memory, especially in the technical area."
That's partly because of the rise of angel and micro-venture investing, he said, which involves individuals and small groups raising $1 million to $2 million to fund startups. "That means there are more engineers starting more companies," Anderson said. "Each will have two or three engineers, but there are hundreds of them, so that on a per-company basis there are fewer engineers available."
A second challenge is the sheer volume of hiring by larger companies like Google, he said. Or Cisco, for that matter, which expects to add 2,000 to 3,000 people worldwide in the next several quarters.
While the hiring frenzy has spawned a seller's market for top talent, it's leaving some midlevel technical workers sitting on the sidelines, Mikulin of Clarity said. With the rise of cloud computing -- the Internet-based sharing of software and information -- some desktop and support positions are disappearing, he noted. "It's some of the lower level jobs that are starting to go away, unfortunately," he said.
"The cloud and enterprise spaces right now are absolutely on fire," said Aaron Levie, founder of Box.net, an online work space information sharing company that's moving into bigger quarters this week to house a staff that's grown 70 percent this year.
Krish Parikh, 27, an M.I.T. grad in engineering and computer science, came to Box.net from Oracle a month ago. He said he has no regrets. "It's very exciting, the atmosphere is great, and there's a lot of energy. People come in early, stay late -- it's the make-it-or-break-it aspect of startups."
LinkedIn, an online professional network based in Mountain View, will nearly double in size this year, from 450 to 850 people, said Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn's vice president of people operations. "Reading a lot of the articles about what's happening with unemployment, I feel like I'm living in a different world here," he said.
While Google expands its work force, other companies lure the workers Google already has. Facebook has hired away some of Google's top talent, but the Palo Alto social networking company failed to land one person after Google offered him a six-figure bonus, according to several recruiters.
Google declined to comment on that story, but said its attrition is well below the industry standard, and when it has made counteroffers to employees tempted by Facebook, 70 percent decided to stay at Google.
Tech recruiter Robert Greene, of GreeneSearch in San Mateo, said "Google's doing what they can do to retain people. They've re-priced their options; they're paying people a lot of money to stay there. They've done a really good job of it. It is still hard for me to recruit people out of Google."
But "Facebook is the hottest company around," he added.
Jay Parikh, director of engineering at Facebook, said Facebook isn't "going after Google" and declined to comment on the hires from the Mountain View search company. "We're just trying to find the best talent."
"We work hard to find these people," said Parikh. "If you're hiring at Google, Facebook, Cisco or Yahoo, you face the same challenges. It's a constrained resource and the supply is lower than the demand." Facebook began the year with about 1,000 employees and is now at a little more than 1,700.
San Francisco game developer Zynga, which started the year with about 400 or 500 people, will reach 1,300 next week and has an additional 300 openings, said chief people officer Colleen McCreary.
McCreary said Zynga is attracting people from much larger, traditional software companies.
"Google has done a great job of building their work force," she said. But, "for people who have been there a long time, as soon as they get a reach-out from a recruiter or hear from their friends, 'I'm doing this neat thing,' they get interested."
morro antivirus.
27 Oct 2010
25 Jun 2009 ... Microsoft has finally released their free anti virus solution codenamed “Morro” and AKA Microsoft Security Essentials to limited public beta ...
The download is available to users of Microsoft Connect, so you will need to sign in using your Windows live id and then take part in a Microsoft Connect survey before you can download the software.
What is Microsoft Security Essentials?
You’re too busy to spend a lot of time worrying about protecting your PC. With Microsoft Security Essentials Beta, you get high-quality protection against viruses and spyware, including Trojans, worms and other malicious software. And best of all, there are no costs or annoying subscriptions to keep track of.
Security Essentials is easy to install and easy to use. Updates and upgrades are automatic, so there’s no need to worry about having the latest protection. It’s easy to tell if you’re protected – when the Security Essentials icon is green, your status is good. It’s as simple as that.
When you’re busy using your PC, you don’t want to be bothered by needless alerts. Security Essentials runs quietly in the background, only alerting you if there’s something you need to do. And it doesn’t use a lot of system resources, so it won’t get in the way of your work or fun.
This beta is available only to customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel (English only), People’s Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).
The download is available to users of Microsoft Connect, so you will need to sign in using your Windows live id and then take part in a Microsoft Connect survey before you can download the software.
What is Microsoft Security Essentials?
You’re too busy to spend a lot of time worrying about protecting your PC. With Microsoft Security Essentials Beta, you get high-quality protection against viruses and spyware, including Trojans, worms and other malicious software. And best of all, there are no costs or annoying subscriptions to keep track of.
Security Essentials is easy to install and easy to use. Updates and upgrades are automatic, so there’s no need to worry about having the latest protection. It’s easy to tell if you’re protected – when the Security Essentials icon is green, your status is good. It’s as simple as that.
When you’re busy using your PC, you don’t want to be bothered by needless alerts. Security Essentials runs quietly in the background, only alerting you if there’s something you need to do. And it doesn’t use a lot of system resources, so it won’t get in the way of your work or fun.
This beta is available only to customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel (English only), People’s Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).