GRAPHIC CARDS: HOW THEY WORK

voultion of computing over the last decade has seen a distinct differentiation based on the nature of the workload. On the one hand you have the computing heavy tasks while on the other, there are graphics intensive tasks. Rewind back a decade, and you will remember almost every other motherboard having a dedicated display port as the graphics processor was onboard. Also some present day processors which sport integrated graphics also have IGP ports on the board. But with the graphical workloads getting more advanced and outputs more realistic, you would need to invest in a dedicated graphics processing unit to divide tasks between the CPU and the GPU. Another advantage of having a dedicated graphics processing unit is the fact that it lets your CPU be free to perform other tasks. For instance you can rip a movie in the background while playing a game. We're used to seeing pixel crunching monsters that can spit out millions of polygons per second, and run even the most demanding 3D games at blistering frame rates

S.Alagiavanan 3rd CSE V.Narendran 3rd CSE

EVER WONDERED WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THE SCENES WHEN YOU POWER UP YOUR GAME? READ ON.

Yet very few of you know exactly how these marvels work. Today's graphic cards are marvels of engineering, with over 50 times the raw computational power of current CPUs, but they have far more specific and streamlined a task. There are two aspects to understanding how a graphics card works. The first is to understand how it works with the rest of the components in a personal computer to generate an image. The second part would be to understand the role of major components on video card.

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STAGES OF A GRAPHIC CARD WORKING IN A SYSTEM

At its most basic, a graphic card creates an image that you see on your screen from binary data that it receives from the CPU. This data is converted to an image in parts. First, wireframes are created out of straight lines, and elements like texture, lighting and colour are added. The largest part of this work is done by the GPU, or graphic processing unit, a unit that compliments the CPU that is responsible for pixel and texture crunching among other things. There are other components on the graphic card other than the GPU, video RAM is one such component, as well as a video-decoding chip enabling playback. A graphic card also has a lot of power circuitry and power controllers, for like any PC component, GPUs need precise power delivery. Graphic cards communicate with the CPU via a bus system on the motherboard. The current bus is PCI Express. As the need for more powerful cards arose, the need for faster, more efficient communication pathways between CPU and GPU also became more urgent. Therefore the AGP bus gave way to PCI Express, and currently we're at PCIe v2.0 with the next generation PCIe V3.0 boards already in circulation. We've already know that the GPU receives data in the binary form from the CPU. This data could be about a simple bitmap image with colour references to each pixel, or a complex 3D game, in which case there will be chaging pixel information, texture information, geometry information, shader information, as well as lighting information. In the past, CPU sent all data to the GPU which was only required to draw an output on the display and nothing more. But nowadays, apart from getting graphical data, the GPU also helps in certain computing tasks by working in tandem in a heterogeneous computing model with the CPU. For instance, offloading certain tasks from CPU which can be performed better & faster using parallel processing in the GPU (such as CUDA cores) the tasks range from transcoding to molecular dynamics and computational finance and many more. This is also known as GPU Computing or such a setup is known as a GPGPU computing.. So let's look at what happens when you hit that game exe file sitting on your desktop. The GPU itself performs quite a few tasks as we've listed. These tasks are completed in what is referred to as graphics pipeline. This pipeline is what converts all this 3D data into an image viewable on a 2D screen-your monitor. Both NVIDIA and AMD have slightly different pipelines, but the processes and stages are roughly the same, with a few unique steps in the form of tweaks, optimisations and such. Graphically or more accurately in terms of 3D rendering, these stages are shown alongside. In case you are using an analogue display, the RAMDAC present on the graphic card converts this digital data to an analogue signal to be sent to the monitor via a D-Sub cable. In you are using a digital connectivity, such as an LCD monitor, there is no digital to analogue conversion required.

STAGES IN GPU WORKING

TRANSFORMATION This stage involves computing on vertex data, which are points in 3D space and converting these number into polygons in a 2D space. Based on the coordinates these objects are placed relative to each other in what is a 2D space, although the objects remain 3D. LIGHTING These polygons are lit correctly, as they will appear based on the positioning and number of light sources and reflective surfaces.

VIEWPOINT The viewpoint or orientation of user is taken into account, closer objects will be larger and vice versa and all objects in the scene are manipulated on basis of the orientation.

CLIPPING This involves pruning off the objects that will not be visible to the user. This saves the GPU precious computation power as calculations for objects not in the viewable scene need not be done.

RASTERIZATION Objects are assigned to pixels, or in other words the scene is visualised as it would be on your monitor-a bunch of 2D pixels.

TRIANGLE SETUP More complex shapes are made from joining the vertex, points, and creating multi-sided wireframe models as are seen in 3D scenes.

CULLING Non-viewable pixels are removed. This is actually the second stage of culling after clipping.

TEXTURE AND SHADING This involves performing a makeup job on each pixel. A texture is a 2D image that is added to the surface of a 3D object giving it a realistic look, while a pixel shader involves defining properties like colour, texture and depth effects to a pixel to give it special appearance that mimics reality.

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Techxtravaganza
Round-up of Asia's largest technology symposium, Techfest 2012 held at IIT-Powai
G.KEERTHANA FINAL CSE D.SUGANYA FINAL CSE The big daddy of all the technology festivals not only in India but the whole of Asia- the IIT Techfest, happened in January. Just like last year, we were there this year as well. We got to see some cutting edge technology over the three days, attend some riveting talks, cheer participants of the Robowars and bridge building competitions and much more. Do check out the DVD for some exclusive videos of the event. Seen here are some things at the IIT Techfest that impressed us.

Nao
The humanoid robot Nao had everyone impressed with its ability to mimic human behaviour. Developed by Aldebaran robotics from France, Nao is finding application in the real world as an active lab assistant, assisting children with autism thanks to its ability to express happiness, sadness, anger and other emotions like humans.

Canyon cross
A very interesting bridge building competition, participants can only build a bridge using tooth picks, ice-cream sticks, white glue and thread! You need to apply all your knowledge of trusses here as the catch in the competition was that the bridge should be able to sustain certain load. At last some bridge which could sustain 200 kg plus of load has been constructed.

CrazyCopter
Touted to be the smallest Quadrocopter in the world and weighing

Micycle
This was a unique concept from university of Adelaide, Australia. This unicycle balances you by detecting the rate of fall both forwards and backwards and adjusting the motor speed accordingly. It uses a gyroscope and an accelerometer to measure the rotation and position of the device relative to the ground.

in at just 20 grams, CrazyFlie is the prototype of the CrazyCopter. It includes a PCB fitted with four motors which can be controlled by a PS joystick. Immediate applications we were told lie in the field of surveillance where the Quadrocopter fitted with a camera. (Think '3 idiots' but a very very miniscule Quadrocopter). It's developed by Arnaud Taffeanel, Tobias Antonsson, Marcus Eliasson of Daedalus projects.

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being rendered was streamed to the tablet as a

DINES KUMAR.G 3RD IT ARUN RAJ D 3RD IT

The future

video. . This allowed him to walk around the set and observe the elements as they would be seen in the movie (the blue screen would be replaced by the actual environment of the scene), enabling him to direct the actors in real-time in the context of an animated environment. Autodesk recently signed an agreement with Walt Disney for a tech called X-gen, developed by Walt Disney's top secret development division. The technology allows artists to procedurally insert various items and effects into a scene. A good example would be TANGLED were the character's head was rendered in this method. Even in THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, where Davy Jones's tentacles underwent the same treatment.

Autodesk is a company that needs no introduction .Some may say it's the world leader in 3D and engineering design software . Here is what something about it. THE NEXT BIG THING
There's so much going on in the 3D industry. Movies such as Avatar have spoiled the audiences with special effects and animations and their expectations have only gone up. We want more complexity, more detail, the next movie needs to further blow our mind. Designers are being asked to work on bigger and more complex projects, but with less time and a smaller budget. What Autodesk is trying to do is bridge the gap between expectations and resources. We are trying to do that with what we are calling Digital Entertainment Creation, which is basically to make the creation of content easier for everyone, while still giving them the power to be completely creative. To do this we are working primarily on standardisation.

is 3D

SOCIAL/CASUAL GAMING AND AUTODESK

Everybody plays games now. The gaming demographic has gone from 14-19 years of yore Autodesk has also adapted a format, which was developed by Sony Imageworks and Lucasfilms, known as Alembic. The main advantage of which is the comparatively small file size allowing for better portability. This has the added advantage that artists and production studios all over the world can work around 24x7, without worrying about compatibility and bandwidth issues. Autodesks has always been looked on as a to the current small kid-to-grandma stage. Autodesk realises that and has taken a close look at the social and casual games. While it really doesn't have suite or application specifically for this genre, it's working on it and hope to have one ready in the near future.

PARTING THOUGHTS
company that made the software for developing things like in-game assets and effects such as weapon models and muzzle flashes. Now, however Autodesk wants to improve on the middle-ware it provides and has been working on various pieces of software such as Kynapse and HumanIK as an AI and inverse Kinematics system for use in animation and games.

THE NEED FOR STANDARDISATION AND DISTRIBUTED PRODUCTION:

When it comes to creating something like a movie, there are a lot of tool set involved . These tool sets need to be able to talk to one another. It should be easy for artists to switch between such multiple tool sets and get the work done. Using just one software such as Maya or 3DS MAX is not necessarily the most efficient way about creating your work; you will need multiple tools that they work together .one way Autodesk wants to do this is by standardizing the formats and even the interface elements, allowing artists to switch between their tool sets and not feel lost .Autodesk also wants to work on providing a broader palette of tools for artists to draw from.

VIRTUAL PRODUCTION AND AVATAR!

Now, this is a very interesting concept. As you know, movies and games, in fact, a scene of any sort, starts off as a storyboard. The director works with an artist and sketches out a scene in the same way you would create a comic strip. This allows the director to visualise, in a very rudimentary fashion, what the scene would look like. Autodesk has taken this to the next level using Virtual ProductionYou can now generate a visual storyboard and even view a CG scene in real time, while the characters are enacting it. James Cameroon did this in Avatar by setting up his tablet as a virtual camera. His tablet was tracked by the software (using motion capture), and its position and orientation was interpreted as a camera within the software. At the same time, the 3D scene

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Virtual Storage
COMING WITH Microsofts Windows 8
N.CHITRA DEVI FINAL IT highlight it deserves. In Windows 7, it was the ability to mount and boot from a virtual hard drive. Windows 8 will feature a major upgrade to the way Windows can handle storage devices, with a new feature called Storage Spaces. This should end a majority of the storage woes that most people have. There are three key features of Windows Storage Spaces that we should all be excited about, and they are: Storage Pooling Thin Provisioning Resiliency to Hardware Failures

here are several new features that get added to each Windows

A better solution would be to pool, or combine all your hard drives into one storage space, and create partitions- without worrying about where one hard drive ends, and another begins. This is what storage pooling is. In Windows 8, you'll be able to simply add a new hard drive, and have its capacity available to you in one combined pool that encompasses all your hard drives. This way you can have a 600 GB partition across two 500 GB hard drives. Windows 8, however, will enable something even better, as you find out next.

drive, with the partition structure described. As your usage reaches 500 GB, you can just add another hard drive, say of 2 TB. Now Windows will transparently start using space from both hard drives till you start reaching 2.5 TB usage. You can further extend your available capacity by adding more hard drives. No need to worry about running out of space in one partition and having to re-partition. Windows will only use the storage capacity as it is available, and allocate it to the storage volume that needs it. Due to the inherent inflexibility of the older system, if you misestimate, and end up filling your documents drive before your videos drive, you have a problem. With thin provisioning, only the drives actually storing something will take up space so you might as well end up using all the 500 GB of your documents volume while your videos volume is empty. Extending the size of existing volumes is possible, so there's nothing to worry about, even if you use up a volume entirely.

version that doesn't get the

THIN PROVISIONING
Let's say you bought a 500 GB hard drive a few years ago, and created a 100 GB Windows partition, a 200 GB partition for your videos, a 100 GB partition for your music, and another 100 GB for your documents. Now, your partition for videos could get exhausted, while your partition meant for documents could have a lot of free space. There isn't much you can do to expand your videos partition to take up the space from the documents partition. You could at most take some space from the Windows partition. If you have pooled your storage in Windows 8, it will offer a new way to manage storage. You will be able to create partitions based on the amount of space required for them, instead of the amount of space available. Thin provisioning, means to give the appearance of having more resources than are actually available. In Windows Storage Spaces this means you will be able to create a 20 TB videos partition, a l TB music partition, and a 500 GB documents partition, all on a 500 GB hard drive. All of this storage won't really be available of course! There is no new magic compression scheme in use here. The partition capacities are mostly meaningless here. You can start with a 500 GB hard

What's interesting isn't just the availability of these three features, but also how they work together. Perhaps you're already familiar with these terms and are already excited about what Windows 8 could hold. We won't hold you back any longer.

STORAGE POOLING
Hard drives have this way of shrinking over time, don't they? Perhaps not in actual capacity, but in the adjectives used to describe them. In just a few year's time, 80 GB hard drives went from Wow! That's a lot! to Where do I backup the other half of this Blu-ray rip? One of the problems with the way storage works in Windows right now is that adding a new hard drive doesn't give you more space in each partition, instead it gives you another blank area to create new partitions in. This means reinstalling Windows, and/or moving all your documents and files over to a new hard drive; a tedious process. Over time, one tends to replace hard drives, even if they are working fine and is under warranty. It is just more convenient to have one larger hard drive than a few smaller ones having a few partitions each.

DATA RESILIENCY
Hard drive failures can be a tragic occurrence indeed, despite your best efforts. To protect from hardware failures, your data should be stored redundantly. Storage Spaces will help here as well, by supporting different levels of resiliency. For this, Storage Spaces support data mirroring across multiple separate hard drives. Data on storage volumes that have mirroring enabled will automatically be stored on multiple hard drives, or three. At any point you could then pull out any one of the hard drives- or if one of your drives should fail- your data would continue to be accessible. The faulty hard drive can be replaced with a new one, and Windows will rebuild your mirrored data on it to ensure that your desired level of resiliency is maintained.

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Of course, this also means that for any data stored on a mirrored partition, double the space would be used up- or even triple. This might be OK for really important, or really small data; however, for large data sets such as videos this can be really inefficient and expensive. For those, Windows supports another form of resiliency, parity. Parity has lower storage space requirements than mirroring, which blindly maintains multiple copies; however, it is more CPU intensive, and performs a lot more random I/O.

Tongue Drive System to Operate Computers

Scientists developed a new revolutionary system to help individuals with disabilities to control wheelchairs, computers and other devices simply by using their tongue. Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology say that a new technology called Tongue Drive system will be helpful to individuals with serious disabilities, such as those with severe spinal cord injuries and will allow them to lead more active and independent lives. The motions of the magnet attached to the tongue are spotted by a number of magnetic field sensors installed on a headset worn outside or an orthodontic brace inside the mouth. The signals coming from the sensors are wirelessly sent to a portable computer that placed on a wheelchair or attached to an individual's clothing. The system is developed to recognize a wide array of tongue movements and to apply specific movements to certain commands, taking into account user's oral anatomy, abilities and lifestyle."The ability to train our system with as many commands as an individual can comfortably remember is a significant advantage over the common sip-n-puff device that acts as a simple switch controlled by sucking or blowing through a straw.. The Tongue Drive system is touch-free, wireless and non-invasive technology that needs no surgery for its operation. During the trials of the system, six ablebodied participants were trained to use tongue commands to control the computer mouse. The individuals repeated several motions left, right, up and down, single- and double-click to perform Individuals using a tongue-based system computer mouse tasks. The results of the trials showed 100 percent of commands were accurate with the response time less than one second, which equals to an information transfer rate of approximately 150 bits per minute. Scientists also plan to test the ability of the system to operate by people with severe disabilities. The next step of the research is to develop software to connect the Tongue Drive system to great number of devices such as text generators, speech synthesizers and readers. Also the researchers plan to upgrade the system by introducing the standby mode to allow the individual to eat, sleep or talk, while prolonging the battery life.

WORKING IN SYNC
As we said before, it's not about these new features, but how everything works together that is more interesting. For one, all of this is now user-facing, with a graphical, easy

A STORAGE POOL OF MULTIPLE EXTERNAL HARD DISKS

to use interface in Control Panel. Secondly, most of this is transparent to the user once set upAll the user has to do is connect a new drive, and add it to the storage pool. You can even mix up USB drives with internal ones, so you can continue expanding even when your internal capacity for adding drives is reduced. With the combination of these features it is also easier to continue expanding your storage capacity even when you run out of internal and external ports. If you have enabled mirroring or parity on all your storage volumes, you can just remove your smallest hard drive and replace it with a larger one. Since the data is stored in a redundant manner, there will be no data loss, and Windows will automatically detect the new storage added to the pool and start copying data back to it to ensure that the level of redundancy you required is maintained.

should only be able to move their tongue, which is especially important if a person has paralyzed limbs. A tiny magnet, only a size of a grain of rice, is attached to an individual's tongue using implantation, piercing or adhesive. This technology allows a disabled person to use tongue when moving a computer mouse or a powered wheelchair. Scientists chose the tongue to control the system because unlike the feet and the hands, which are connected by brain through spinal cord, the tongue and the brain has a direct connection through cranial nerve. In case when a person has a severe spinal cord injure or other damage, the tongue will remain mobile to activate the system. "Tongue movements are also fast, accurate and do not require much thinking, concentration or effort." said Maysam Ghovanloo, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

T.KEERTHANA IIIrd CSE

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ZOTAC ZBOX PLUS Id80

Cedar Trail is upon US!

G.SRIDEVI 2ND CSE

he ZBOX PLUS ID80 is the first

PC Mark Vantage gave an overall score

ZBOX to sport the Intel Cedar Trail of 2575 whereas for the E350 CPU we got 2550 D2700 processor clocked at 2.13 GHz Cinebench R10 multi-core rendering was found

along with 2GB of DDR3 RAM,320GB hard to be slightly better in the D2700(at 2600 drive and a discrete graphics solution -NVIDIA marks)over the E350(at 2030 marks ).Gaming GT 520M.It also bundles in quite a lot of goodies wise also we could get barely playable frame such as a WiFi antenna,a Windows Media player rates - 11FPS - even at 1280*1024 resolution for remote control and an IR receiver for the Resident Evil 5 at Medium settings. looks like any HD videos were played back same.Design wise the ZBOX

other ZBOXes we have tested in the past .It has flawlessly.CPU utilization was within the 5-7 per the blue coloured circular orb on its front black cent mark for majority of the playback time. glossy face. It is great for media consumption, Build quality is quite sturdy even watching TV, watching HD content along with though its a plastic body and we liked the stand casual web surfing, working on office that ZOTAC have provided so that the system is documents, etc. At a price point of Rs.19,999. we better than the AD03BR and HD-ID34 ZBOXes held vertically in place.The glossy surface is a felt it to be slightly on the higher side but much which sport a Blu-ray Drive. Decent buy finger-print and dust magnet. provided your needs are moderate.

DELL 4610X PROJECTOR

K.A.ABINAYA 2ND IT

The projector for the home office

Picture settings can be tweaked to a certain extent, but aren't as extensive as on some projectors targeted for home use. Brightness levels are very high. The remote responds well most of the time but the real fault lies with the design. Somehow, the fingers can never really remember the key placement, forcing you to look at it every time. No backlit keys as well, something that will be draw-back in a dark room during a presentation. Overall, this projector will do the task

4610x is built very well .The square designed control keys are on the top panel, with a classy illumination to them .All connectivity optionsAV, power and wireless antenna are on the rear panel. This projector has a native resolution of 1024x768,but with the HDMI input available, it can receive signals up to 1080i.This resolution is welcome considering it is meant for the home

he first thing that we noticed about the 4610x is the feature set vs. the price, and

the conclusion looked impressive .The

office use, and 4:3 aspect ratio is perfect for The built-in wireless capabilities mean you can its meant to do, very well. It is a budget projector, document viewing and presentations. Unlike a lot share files on the network, without having to and is meant to appeal to a limited of projectors we have reviewed recently, this one connect a PC every time. The range isn't a lot demo-graphic-the small office setup. Anyone buying it for home use will be disappointed. can handle audio, thanks to the build in speakers. though.

HOW COMPANIES RIP YOU OFF

When paying for one component and getting another free turns traumatic
K.JEEVANANDAM 1ST CSE
pay almost half the price of a new device just for the broken glass. It's not new to hear about companies charging exorbitant prices to replace spare parts. At times, these parts are not even essential, yet they're overpriced. For example, in Samar's

amar bought a branded notebook with an the front LCD and a dent around the keyboard.. extended three-year warranty. He was When the product was taken to the service center, satisfied with it until it randomly started he was told that the electric shocks were due to

giving mild electric shocks during charging. One the faulty earthing in old wirings of Indian day, while working he dropped it due to such a homes.When Samar claimed warranty for shock, which resulted in a crack in the top layer of repairs, he was denied benefits and instead told to

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notebook it wasn't even the motherboard or main LCD itself but a plain glass covering for which the company had quoted the unrealistic price. company justified its stand that it would change the entire LCD; but why should it? The consumer is being forced to pay for parts that are not even damaged. Interestingly, Samar found out that the same company was only changing and charging for the glass panel in the American market .Why this discriminatory practice in the Indian market?

Over-pricing of products and services without any reasonable basis amounts to abuseof dominant position which is actionable underthe Competition Law. Complaints can be filed before the Competition Commission of India situated at New Delhi. The company may directly and indirectly impose unfair and discriminatory conditions during the sale of products and services, which need to be indentified. In fact, in certain situations there's no competition left and

it virtually amounts to monopoly, prejudice to the interests of consumers. For example, a particular technology needed to repair or manufacture a product may only be available with a particular company. If its act limits your options, you can complain against it to the Competition Commission which in turn can initiate an inquiry under the provisions of the Competition Act. Acquainting yourself to companies' practices helps avoid being caught offguard.

Apple Mac mini

Style finally meets performance
M.NIVETHITHA 1ST IT
processor and a Thunderbolt I/O part at the Apple allowing Lion re-install through recovery back.Its unibody single-block aluminium design partition and USB sticks.But yes,You'l need an is much the same as its predecessor,the Mac mini external DVD writer to install an older looks so simple yet so elegant on the desk-not to program,which adds to the cost.Also the entryforget its tiny,solid,and compact form factor. level Mac mini comes with the Mac mini's hood In terms of bundled features,there are to access its RAM and Wi-Fi module-it is quite two main talking points.First,there's no optical easy - anything more requires a screwdriver drive on or bundled with the Mac mini - with and a lot of patience. The core i5 processor and AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics ensures high performance on the new Mac mini,with multithreaded apps and casual 3D games running just fine,it does tend to get heated up though .It's a great HTPC box as well,given the number of connectivity ports on the back.As far as mini PCs go, the Mac mini deserves consideration.

Airs,the Mac mini seems to be the forgotten child in Apple's product portfolio.Still with the latest revision of the most inexpensive Mac ever,the mini boasts of improved performance thanks to Intel's second - gen Sandy Bridge Corei5

hile the cupertino-based company dazzles the tech world with iphones, ipads and MacBook

Canon Legria HF R205

V.KARTHIKEYAN 1ST IT

An affordable camcorder, with HD capability

We must say that the videos are quite rich in terms of colour and crispness.Subject details are fully visible, and the HF R205 will do all this in 1080p HD.However, Electronic Video/Image stabilization is a huge drawback- it just doesn't seem to work..Unless you have a very steady hand there will be considerable amount of shake.The problem is even worse if you have zoomed to focus onto a distant object. There is no built-in storage on the LEGRIA HF R 205, but canon ships it with an stabilization as well. more and go for the sony HDR-CX130E/R, with much better image 8GB SD card.For just under Rs.20k, you could consider this if you can handle the annoying menu. Or consider spending a little

device.However, it is true that the smartphone's video recording capabilities are severely restricted, in terms of features and quality.The fightback has begun with the affordable camcorders-the LEGRIA HF R205 is one such device. It has a 1/4.85-inch HD CMOS sensor, shooting at approx.3.28 megapixels with 18x zoom.The 3-inch display is a touchscreen.Menu navigation is a bit of a pain and seemingly you can't access settings quickly, or make changes swiftly and get on with the clicking.

amcorders did take a back seat because most smartphones were also doing what the camcorder did as a standalone

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The incredibly useful smartphone apps

The camera needs to be in a Thought youd seen clear line of sight for this to them all? We bet youve not downloaded these,yet! work. However, it detects

E.GOKUL KRISHNAN 3RD IT K.ANBU 3RD IT

his month on App vehicles and objects in a V

watch, we take a look angle only, beyond which everything at some of the apps that is a blind spot.

you absolutely should While you should be attentive

have on your smartphone. Some add at all times while driving, we

a dollop of additional functionality, think this app can be very while others are fun to use as well. useful in case you just take Since all of them can be downloaded your eyes off the road for a second Can't find that data cable for free, we urge you to take them for and something pops up in your path. AirDroid Not only that, iOnRoad can also be Available for: android a spin. Extra assistance while driving set for speed alerts that notify you the Price: free iOnRoad Augmented driving moment you go above the limit. It's Accessing the data on android phones can be a very painful Available for: android more of an annoyance usually and is experience, particularly if you're Price: free better turned off. The SMS reader This app is possibly the perfect your phone WhatsApp and Skype Viber allows free voice calls and messages between Viber users, no matter what the phone platform. Much like WhatsApp, Viber will scan the phone's contact list to see who all signed up on Viber and

using Mac OS, or if you don't have a automatically add them to your Viber feature is immensely useful though. data cable readily available. contacts. The Viber-to-Viber calls driving companion, apart from a GPS You can set iOnRoad to route all calls AirDroid is a must-have app in and SMSes work over 3G and /or Winavigator. Requiring the phone to be mounted on one of the universal to the speaker while driving.The auto situation. Open AirDroid on your Fi. wind-shield mounts, the app keeps an d r i v i n g d e t e c t i o n f e a t u r e Android phone, the n enter the given eye on the road in front via the automatically starts up the app when web address in a browser on any PC connected on the same Wi-Fi camera. There will be a you start driving, if the phone is in the loud beep alert as well as a text alert mount on the dash. You'll need to buy network and enter coordinates the app throws up. Enter the autoon the display when the distance to a universalmount to put thus phone generated password and voila! All the car in front becomes in, for your car. There are a lot of phone data is right there contacts, uncomfortably less.There are two them available in retail stores and messages, media, apps, capability to settings for the distance which you online shops. send a message, copy data to and can preset. from the device and even browse and downloads apps from Android Market.

Early warning Winter wakeup Available for: iOS and Android Price: free
What if it was clear but chilly winter weather when you slept, but changed to snowy late at night or early in the morning? This is the app that does the checking for you. Winter wakeup will check the weather online some time before the alarm time that you had set, and modify your alarm time if it's snowing or if there's frost. You can set the time by which the alarm will be preponed in either weather condition. There's also a setting for don't bother to wake me...! You should download this app, just for the winters.

Free calls and messages:Viber Available for: iOS and Android; coming soon on BlackBerry Price: free
This is something of a mix of two apps that you may already have .

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Viber apps that add values to the smart phones

Make your boss download this app,right now!

Amazon launches fully managed, NoSQL database service

M.MALA 1ST IT

mazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, has announced the launch of

.complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers. Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and re-partitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding database read and write operations. Amazon applications.Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB's DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives and pay for only the resources they need. pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to dial in (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS

Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics.Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don't have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling.. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is

Amazon has spent more than 15 years Region to provide built-in high availability and tackling the challenges of database scalability, data durability. Businesses can get started with performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that systems and NoSQL technology, said Werner provides 100MB of storage, and five writes Vogels, CTO of Amazon. Amazon DynamoDB is the and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million result of everything we've learned from building requests per month) free of charge. Amazon DynamoDB also integrates large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Amazon EMR allows businesses to reliable cloud computing services at AWS. A m a z o n D y n a m o D B o ff e r s l o w, perform complex analytics of their large predictable latencies at any scale, and customers datasets using a hosted pay-as-you-go Hadoop typically enjoy single-digit millisecond latencies for framework on AWS.

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SECURING YOUR D ATA , T H E O P E N SOURCE WAY!

When it comes to security solutions, open source options are not as popular as their proprietary counterparts. In this article, we explore the open source security softwares and the usability of each for organizations. Antivirus and security solutions are like healthcare or medical insurances-you do not miss one until you wish you had one! As long as the person is healthy, healthcare investments seem to be burden, but when, or if , the same person falls ill, such investments coming handy. Similarly, security softwares do not make their presence felt; but in their absence, a lot of things can surely go wrong. As a result, many organizations do not prefer running the risk of trusting lesser known or 'open source' antivirus software and simply opt for the known names. But there is a set of anti-virus options available in the open source community that could be considered. Here are the noteworthy ones.

trojan horses, spyware, malware and other threats. Further more, it can also be employed in mail gateway scanning, running multithreaded scanning daemons and other command line utilities. The core ClamAV library comes loaded with file format detection, unpacking and archiving support and multilingual virus signatures. The prowess of the ClamAV engine can be adjudged from the fact that it powers IBM's Secure E-Mail Express Solution in part. ClamWin Free Antivirus Immunet 3.0- the former comes with a dedicated version for enterprises and is absolutely free to use while the latter's enterprise equivalent is the 'Plus' version that, though free to use, is backed by paid support. For Mac users, the counterpart software is ClamXav 2, but it does not offer a separate enterprise version . And of course, it goes without saying that ClamAV is also available in multiple variants for Linux machines, both in personal and enterprise versions.

over VirusHammer as the former seems to be more active in terms of activity and signature updates.

Samba-vscan
Samba-vscan is a module of Samba which uses Virtual File System (VFS) to provide an on-access anti-virus scanner for Samba. It natively supports and co-exists with proprietary solutions such as F-Secure AV, Symantec AV, McAfee, Trend Micro and many others, along with open source ones like ClamAV. Samba-vscan caters predominantly to enterprise usage only and is also part of the enterprise release of SUSE Linux. The latest build of samba-vscan can be downloaded from www.openantivirus.org

Clam Antivirus
No description of open source security options can be made without mentioning ClamAV. It does multiple things in one packageat the very crude level, it is a GPL-licensed antivirus engine that can be used by multiple applications and programs to fight viruses,

VirusHammer
VirusHammer is an antivirus solution written in JAVA and can be run on any JAVA-enabled platform. While it offers a good level of protection and it is absolutely free to use, from an organizational perspective, ClamAV should be preferred

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Google Chrome Finally Comes to Android

t's odd that it took Google so long, but finally they have released a version of Chrome for Android. Opera and Mozilla Firefox have long established a presence in the Android Market, Mozilla even offers multiple channels of Firefox for Android. Still, better later than never.Google Chrome for desktop has been steadily gaining a slew of features such as extensions, apps, syncing of browser data, cloud printing, instant and a lot more. Only some of these features have transitioned to the mobile version. It is still beta though, and does include a number of features not available in its desktop counterpart. Although Google does say that they will find their way to Chrome for desktops eventuallyDespite Chrome's minimal interface, its tab UI isn't exactly mobile friendly. So while the tablet version of Google Chrome does feature the desktop-style tab UI, the mobile version has a different tab mechanism that better suits mobile browsing. On Chrome for Android, one can switch from one tab to another by swiping left or right. An overview of open tabs stacks them on top of Just like Google Chrome for desktops, the Android each other like a deck of cards as Google version has Sync baked in. So if you connect it to a calls it. To see this in action, check out the video Google account also linked with Chrome for desktop, you will be able to see your bookmarks on mobile as at the end of this post. well.. The Android version also includes the Chrome The Google Chrome mobile tab stack omni bar, so if you have Sync enabled, the omni bar will take advantage of your browser history to give better o further ease browsing on small suggestions. Chrome has also been able to sync tabs for a screen, Chrome can zoom in on while, and now the mobile version can take advantage of links to make it easier to select and browse that as well, by giving you access to the list of tabs open links. on your desktop on the go.

Google Chrome mobile and tablet versions

f you are a developer, all the HTML5 goodness is there in the mobile version, Web Workers, Indexed DB, Web Sockets etc. are all supported. The bigger and more exciting feature though is support for remote debugging. This is accomplished by enabling debugging on the mobile version of Chrome, and then debugging it on Chrome on the desktop via and Android SDK debugger. ehind all this, Chrome still has a multi-process architecture so individual tab crashes don't bring down the browser. The mobile version also supports GPU-acceleration for the canvas. Google Instant, which starts loading pages while you are typing a URL, while a boon on the desktop can be a bandwidth hog on mobile; so while it is supported on the Android version, it is only enabled when WiFi access is detected.

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Highest Salaries of CEOs

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Millions of infected machines might be kicked offline March 8 K.R.RAMYALAKSHMI 3RD CSE
T.S.MOUNEKA 3RD CSE
In three weeks, the FBI could knock millions of infected systems offline by process hasnt been as quick as desired and many users could learn disabling some DNS servers. In Nov tember, Estonian authorities arrested about their infection the hard way next month.Come March 8, the court six men suspected of using "DNSChanger Trojan" malware to redirect order allowing the feds to replace the bogus DNS servers will expire. victims to malicious websites and block them from genuine security sites Unless that's extended, the surrogate servers will be unplugged and that might've removed the infection. According to a report by millions still plagued by DNSChanger will lose Web access. Even the order is prolonged, experts worry the cleanup will take years as with Conficker.

Brian Krebs, the Trojan was on over four

million computers in more than 100 countries, including 500,000 in the US

-- and not just home users, either. The malware is reportedly still present on "At this rate, a lot of users are going to see their Internet break on March computers at half of the Fortune 500 companies and at approximately half 8," said Rod Rasmussen, president and CTO of security firm Internet of all federal agencies. When the criminals were arrested, authorities replaced their malicious DNS servers with legitimate ones. Without doing so, victims would Identity. He added that pulling the plug might hasten the cleanup process. "It certainly would be an interesting social experiment if these systems just got cut off," he quipped.

bepresented with DNS errors as their machines sent requests to the Checking your system for DNSChanger is relatively simple. You can use disabled rogue servers. The clean servers allow infected users to visit their ipconfig /all in the Windows command prompt to get your DNS desired destinations as normal.With the fresh servers in place, information, which can be compared against the investigators could monitor the IP addresses of affected users and alert their Internet Service Providers From there ISPs aided users in cleaning their computers. Sadly, that

numbers here. The DNSChanger Working Group also provides a list of free resources that'll help you clean your machine(s).

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Researchers track mobile phone locations with cheap hardware and open-source software
R.VINOTH 3RD CSE M.RAJASEKHAR 3RD CSE
While cop shows have shown us that it's easy for service providers to track a person's location via their mobile phone, researchers at the University of Minnesota have revealed it's also an easy task for hackers. Using a cheap phone and open source software, the researchers were able to track the location of mobile phone users without their knowledge on the GSM network, which is estimated to serve 80 percent of the global mobile market. According to the new research by computer scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering a third party could easily track the location of a mobile phone user without their knowledge because cellular mobile phone networks "leak" the locations of mobile phone users. "Cell phone towers have to track cell phone subscribers to provide service efficiently," Foo Kune explained. "For example, an incoming voice call requires the network to locate that device so it can allocate the appropriate resources to handle the call. Your cell phone network has to at least loosely track your phone within large regions in order to make it easy to find it." To do this, mobile phone towers will broadcast a page to a user's phone and wait for the phone to respond when they get a call. Hackers would be able to ascertain the general location of the user by forcing those pages to go out and hanging up before the phone rings. Although the GSM standard assigns a phone a temporary ID to disguise its identity, it is possible to map the phone number to its temporary ID. Just by looking at the broadcast messages sent by the network, the researchers say it is possible to locate the device within an area of 100 , In their Paper, which was presented at the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California, the researchers highlight some possible personal safety issues arising from their discovery. "For example, agents from an oppressive regime may no longer require cooperation from reluctant service providers to determine if dissidents are at a protest location. A second example could be the location test of a prominent figure by a group of insurgents with the intent to cause physical harm for political gain. Yet another example could be thieves testing if a user's cell phone is absent from a specific area and therefore deduce the risk level associated with a physical break-in of the victim's residence." But it's not all bad news. Foo Kune and his group have identified lowcost techniques to plug the leaks that could be implemented without changing the hardware. They have contacted AT&T and Nokia to inform them of these techniques and are also in the process of drafting responsible disclosure statements for mobile service operators. square km (38 square miles). But by testing for a user on a single tower allows a user to be tracked to within a geographic area of 1 square km (0.38 square miles) or less. It has a low entry barrier," Foo Kune said. "Being attainable through open source projects running on commodity software."In a field test using an inexpensive mobile phone and open source software and with no direct help from the service provider, the researchers were able to track the location of a test subject within a 10-block area as they travelled across an area of Minneapolis at walking pace.

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COOL LAPTOPS

R.SANDHIYA 3RD CSE

otebook computers typically take a standard shape that doesn't necessarily afford the ideal ergonomic experience. The Homebook Laptop aims to change this by rethinking the arrangement of the electronic's key

componentsTo satisfy the usual configuration with which most people are comfortable, Carl Andersen began with the conventional foldable form with a keyboard on the bottom and monitor that can be closed on top of it.The Homebook Laptop can thus be alternatively optimized as a reader and a movie screen without interference from the keypad panel.

echnology is evolving faster than the human population can keep up with and the Tommaso

Gecchelin 2020 concept for MacBooks is a glimpse at what new gadgets are in store. This

concept design is so concise, it even entertains the possibility of fitting your entire laptop into a pocket. Now, that's compact.The Tommaso Gecchelin 2020 concept for Macbooks involves a laptop with no plug-ins or wires and the ability to view your work in both regular 2D as well as 3D. Although the Tommaso Gecchelin 2020 concept for Macbooks is just a notion, it nevertheless gives viewers a chance to ponder over what technology will look like in the future.

he Lifebook X2 concept by Park Hyun Jin is stunning in its design and function.It takes a different

approach to portability and compactness that everyone on-the-go can appreciate. It is ultra thin and

is able to fold into four different ways, showcasing very interesting features. When you unfold this nifty little laptop halfway, you are opened up to an ultra widescreen palm top. You can also unfold it completely to use it as a full-sized notebook. The LCD screen is a touchscreen so you hide away the keyboard and use it like a tablet. Because of this origami-inspired notebook, you can cut down on the bulky sizes of your tech.The uber cool Lifebook X2 is a concept that really needs to become a reality.

omputers are notorious for being electricity eaters, but the Plantbook Laptop concept aims to change that. This utterly irresistible design bridges the gap between artificial and organic matter in

a way that few could ever have dreamed of.Believe it or not, this cutting-edge notebook feeds on the food of trees. When the power is low, the long tubular battery can literally be placed in a glass of water, drinking in the H2O and experiencing a sort of photosynthesis. Like a leaf, the fuel cell soaks up the sun's rays through integrated solar panels, harnessing this energy to generate electrolysis with the clear liquid and discharging oxygen. Ingeniously conceived by Hyerim Kim and Seunggi Baek, the Plantbook Laptop actually improves its surrounding environment.

life with future computing' is the gift that keeps on giving if you consider yourself a fan of conceptual computers. For those who are, the Keyless Lifebook from Laura Lahti is one of the

competition's most kickass designs (there are many) as it has a touch keyboard that can be customized at the drop of a hat.The keyboard of the Keyless Lifebook can be changed to display keys in different languages, to be more ergonomic and even to cater to lefties. The keyboard can instantly be wiped away using what looks to be a magic erase whenever you grow tired of your current setting. If you love typing on your touchscreen then this is definitely one concept computer you don't want to miss.

he Logitech Cube is a small, mouse-like presenting tool released by the PC accessories maker Logitech and Pocket-lint was on hand to have a play at this year's CES in Las Vegas.The first

thing struck us is how damn small the cube is. When we first saw the official press pictures at the beginning of the month we expected the device to be the size of a pack of cards at least, but in the flesh it is smaller than a box of matches.That means that you are controlling it with your fingertips rather than it sitting with your hand cupping it like you would a normal mouse.The idea is that the top features a touchscreen surface that allows you to move your finger up and down to scroll. Left click is at the front of the top and right click in the middle.

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The Top 10 Tech Trends for 2012

1. Touch computing
New input methods will be the dominant trend of 2012. Tablet computers such as the iPad might seem like a nice alternative to desktop and laptop computers, but I believe they're more than that: They're replacements. Just as the command line (remember that?) gave way to graphical user interfaces, so the mouse will be superseded by touchscreens. The signs are obvious: Windows 8 and Mac OS X Lion, the latest desktop operating systems, borrow heavy from their mobile counterparts. These new interfaces essentially impose a touchscreen-inspired interface over the traditional desktop environment.

M.MIRUNALINI.M 2ND CSE

3. NFC and mobile payments

Google Wallet, Google's mobile-payment system, may become more widespread in 2012. Next year is likely to be the year when mobile payments blossom. While we've seen a great deal of innovation in mobile payments technology this year -- including the success of Square's iPhone dongle, allowing anyone to accept credit card payments -- 2012 is the year of NFC.

5. TV Everywhere

The cable companies have a cunning plan: They'll let you watch live TV, plus on-demand movies and TV shows, on your connected devices if you keep your cable subscription. Dish Network, Time Warner and Comcast are among those offering the service. TV Everywhere has been buzzed about since 2010, of course, and could be a dud -- but the rise of tablet devices would seem to create increased demand for a "TV in your hands."

o you thought you'd be able to watch all your favorite shows online and get rid of your cable subscription for good? Not so fast!

6. Voice control

H
What's that, you ask? Near Field Communication essentially lets you replace your credit cards with your phone: Wave an NFCenabled phone near the credit card reader in a store (or taxi cab), and the money is deducted from your account. By 2013, 1 in 5 cell phones are expected to be NFC-equpipped.. Early contenders include Google Wallet, Visa Wallet, Serve (by American Express) and ISIS.

ere's another trend that's got a moderate chance of taking off in 2012: Voice control.

Over time, this half-step will become a whole one, and mobile operating systems will dominate. The transition won't be complete by the end of 2012, but we'll be much further down the path, and using computer mice much less often.

4. Beyond the iPad

f touch computing is the future, then the iPad is surely king. And yet the iPad came up against serious 2. Social gestures competition in the latter part of 2011: As I wrote previously, I expect the new Amazon Kindle Fire In the social media realm, social to outsell the iPad in 2012. Why? Simply put, the gestures appear to be the leading trend of iPad costs $499 while the Fire costs $199. 2012. Launched by Facebook in September. Amazon's advantages don't stop at the this so-called "frictionless sharing" functionality removes the need to click a price point, however: The company owns an button to share media with your friends. entire content store of movies, e-books, TV shows Instead, everything you listen to, read or and other media. With tablet devices, the watch is automatically posted to your profile hardware is somewhat important but the content available for the device is absolutely critical: once you approve the relevant app. With plenty of media available for the Fire right If you've seen apps such as Spotify away, it's an appealing proposition. or Social Reader in your Facebook news feed, Why does one device constitute an you're already aware of these features. entire trend? Well, as a true competitor to the iPad The trend makes sense for social emerges, content producers, distributors and even networks: With 800 million people already on app developers may have an entirely new Facebook, its growth is bound to slow. But if platform on which to push their wares. (And yes, sharing becomes automatic, the volume of the Kindle Fire does indeed run Google's Android content on Facebook will grow at an operating system, but Amazon's version is so accelerated pace. There's a big problem, unlike other Android tablets that neither users nor however: Users may be creeped out by all app developers will perceive it as "yet another this automated sharing of their Web activity Android device" -- it's a whole new platform.) and grow suspicious of the apps using it.

Siri, the voice-control feature in the iPhone 4S, may spread to other devices.The novelty of Siri on the iPhone 4S -- which allows you to send texts, create reminders, search the Web and much more using just your voice -- may be the start of a new trend in voice controlled devices. Surely voice control has been around for years? Yes, but it wasn't very accurate.Siri and its ilk define a new era in which we talk, and our devices understand -- often on the first attempt. Other device makers will likely follow suit. What's more, Apple may use voice control to replace the TV remote.

7. Spatial gestures
Other input methods are gaining traction too: Microsoft's Kinect, for instance, has given rise to interfaces that use spatial gestures. Just like in "Minority Report," your devices can be controlled simply by waving your hands in the air. Thanks to the many innovators who have hacked Kinect to work with other platforms, we may see more devices using this input method next year.

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8. Second-screen experiences
"Second-screen experiences" is a buzz-phase among TV and movie execs these days. It refers to apps (mainly on the iPad) that listen to the audio output of your TV and display content related to the show or movie you're watching. The chances are that you already use your tablet computer or phone while watching TV, so there's ample opportunity to make the viewing experience a more interactive one. Disney already has second-screen apps for movies such as "The Lion King" and "Bambi," while multiple TV networks have similar offerings: We can expect many, many more to be released in 2012.

Robotic Puppy

9. Flexible screens
Personally, I just can't wait for flexible screens: These awesome new bendable interfaces will let you zoom in, zoom out and scroll around a page simply by twisting your phone or tablet.Nokia and Samsung have both hinted they may release phones with bendable displays in 2012. The really exciting stuff, however -- like paper-thin devices that roll up to fit in your pocket -- is still years away. We've been fascinated by Boston Dynamics' Big Dog ever since it was an adorable robotic puppy that couldn't even open its eyes. Now that the technology is all grown up, repackaged, and rechristened the Legged Squad Support System (or LS3), its eyes are very much open--and fixed firmly on the soldier in front of it. The new LS3 prototype has just undergone its first outdoor exercise, demonstrating the ability to see its surroundings and distinguish between objects and humans. Over the next year-and-a-half, DARPA plans to prove out LS3's technology and get it ready to support war fighters in the field. Its main battlefield role will be little more than that of a robotic pack mule, carrying hundreds of pounds of gear so that dismounted Marines and soldiers won't have to. These days, a lot of that weight is batteries, and here LS3 provides a two-fer: Not only can it carry troops' various batteries and battery powered handheld devices, but it also serves as a mobile power source that can recharge them on the move. The idea here is to create an animal analog--something that can haul lots of gear over rough terrain and interact with personnel naturally, in a way that is intuitive to the soldiers and Marines around it. In addition to its eyes, DARPA wants to give it auditory sensors that can respond to simple voice commands like come or stay. And ongoing tests aim to refine the vision system so it can distinguish between humans and learn to track specific individuals. At the end of the 18-month proving period, LS3 will embed with Marines conducting field exercises to see how it gets along in real maneuvers. Here's hoping those Marines don't require the element of surprise. LS3 can see and move better than ever, but it is still very, very loud.

10. HTML5
Can I squeeze in one more trend? It's HTML5 -- the fifth iteration of the HTML standard -- and it lets developers create richer, more interactive applications than ever.Why does this matter? As developers tire of building applications for every operating system out there -- from Android to iOS to Windows Phone and beyond -- HTML5 offers the opportunity to build an app once and have it work everywhere.

J.SINDHU 3RD CSE

The rise of HTML5 is bound to be accelerated by a recent revelation: Adobe is killing off Flash for mobile devices, meaning one of the primary methods of serving videos and rich applications on mobile phones is about to disappear. HTML5 will fill that gap. For us as consumers, that means richer applications and experiences on all our devices.

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NEXT GEN FILE SYSTEMS FOR OPEN SOURCE

P.Veeramani IIIRD CSE
The exponential rise in storage needs has compelled Open Source developers to improve the existing file systems to keep their data safe and organised. Some of the key next gen file systems for open source are discussed below:

CEPH
CEPH is a distributed network storage and file system created to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability.CEPH is based on a reliable and scalable distributed object store, with a distributed metadata management cluster layered on top to provide a distributed file system with POSIX semantics. CEPH is released under the terms of the LGPL, which means it is free. CEPH will provide a variety of key features that are generally lacking from existing open-source file systems, including the ability to simply add disks to expand volumes, intelligent load balancing, and efficient, easy to use snapshot functionality. CEPH is designed to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. CEPH is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients are more simultaneously access the same file, or write to the same

NEXT3
NEXT3 was developed by CTERA Networks, which has started shipping it on its C200 network storage device. It is not just an addition to ext3, but works by creating a special, magic file to represent the snapshot of the file system. The files have the same apparent size as the storage volume as a whole, but they are thin files, so they take almost no space at the beginning. When a change is made to a block on disk, the file system must first check to see whether that block has been saved in the most recent snapshot already. If not, the affected block is moved over to the snapshot file, and a new block is allocated to replace it. Thus, over time disk blocks migrate to the snapshot file as they are rewritten with new contents. Deleting a snapshot requires moving changed blocks into the previous snapshot, if it exists, because the deleted snapshot holds blocks which are logically part of the earlier snapshots.

ZFS ZFS is the feature rich file system developed by Sun for its UNIX version, Solaris. ZFS allows quick and easy snapshots of data, data check summing, and integration of several tools to manage disks and file systems. It is based upon a copy-on-write design that writes the new copy of the data every time it changes. Once the new version of the data is written the old version is marked as deleted and the space can be reclaimed. To implement a snapshot system you need to instruct the OS to not mark the old data as deleted and changes are preserved. All data that is written to a ZFS file system is check summed to ensure its validity. Hard drive corrupting data has always been an issue but due exponential growth in storage requirements data corruption has become a common phenomenon. To help mitigate the risk of silent data corruption ZFS stores a checksum of all the data it stores and validates the data again before relaying it onto the operating system. If one copy of the data has been corrupted it is identified on read and seamlessly copied from another source.

directory.

REISER 4
REISER 4 uses B-trees in conjunction with the dancing tree balancing approach, in which under populated notes will not be merged until a flush to disk except under memory pressure or when a transaction completes. Such a system also allows REISER 4 to create files and directories without having to waste time and space through fixed blocks. As of 2004, synthetic benchmarks performed by Namesys show that REISER 4 is 10 to 15 times faster than its serious competitor ext3 working on files smaller than 1 KB. The benchmarks suggest that it is twice the performance of ext3 for general-purpose file system usage patterns. As of 2012, REISER 4 hasnt been merged into the core Linux kernel and is still not supported on many Linux distributions; however, its predecessor REISER FS v3 has been widely adopted. REISER 4 is also available from Andrew Morton's mm kernel sources, and from Zen patch set.

EXOFS
EXOFS (Extended Object File System) is a traditional Linux file system built over an object storage system. EXOFS was initially developed by IBM and at that time was called the OSD file system, or OSDFS. Panasas, an object storage systems company, has since taken over the project and renamed it EXOFS based on its ext2 file system ancestry. EXOFS is a file system that uses an OSD and exports the API of a normal Linux file system. Users can access EXOFS like any other local file system, and EXOFS will in turn issue commands to the local OSD initiator. OSD is a new T10 command set that views storage devices not as a flat array of sectors but as a container of objects, each having a length, quota and time attributes. Each object is addressed by a 64bit ID, and is contained in a 64bit ID partition.

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Ubuntu to a TV near you!

V.ANITHA 2ND CSE
There are no surprises in the first batch of ideas or initial mock-ups that may blow your socks off. Shuttleworth noted that it will have to be a 10-feet interface for watching media with remote control support, cloud and server storage, physical media playback, Ubuntu one accounts, installable image, easy configuration, integration with other Ubuntu devices, portable devices control, as well as media sharing and the option for media purchases.

There are also more rumours that Apple will be releasing a true integrated Apple TV early in 2012, which will focus on content as well as intuitive user control, which could make Ubuntu-TV look old from the start at least if the software remains as it is currently described. The biggest challenge may be to create a consumer electronics perception for Ubuntu Linux that can match the acceptance level of the mainstream CE buyer. From a platform perspective, the integration with other Ubuntu devices will be critical, but the low penetration of Ubuntu Linux devices in the overall market decreases the value of this feature significantly.

Linux mixed clouds. A few years back Microsoft had made a similar shocking move by contributing some code to the Linux kernel---although it may just have been as the result of a GPL violation. The code would improve the performance of Linux when it was running on Microsoft's hyper-v hypervisor. Since this made it more feasible to run Linux on Microsoft's windows servers, it stands to improve the sales of windows licenses. Similarly now by opening up Azure to Linux servers it stands to make it more lucrative to those who need Linux servers as part of their cloud.

Microsoft embracing Linux?

Could Microsoft be opening up their Azure service to run Linux servers in addition to windows servers? It might seem rather odd for Microsoft to allow Azure customers to run Linux, but it might just make the best business sense. While windows Azure might be a It is very early in the process and thus difficult to judge what Ubuntu-TV may look like. There may be an opportunity for Ubuntu to deliver a unified TV platform, but we know that Google TV largely failed in its first version due to the lack of content and the rough edges of the software itself. Google may come back with a big swing that could correct the errors made with the initial product generations. lucrative offering for those looking for windowsbased cloud platform, it is unlikely that those who have invested in Linux-based solutions will switch to Azure. On the their hand Azure's competitors such as Amazon web services,rackspace etc. offer windows and Linux based cloud solutions, thus making them a lot more lucrative for those seeking Linux-based or hybrid windows and this year. It is expected that these features will be included in a technical preview coming later Another barrier to adopting Azure was the lack of support for persistent VMs. VMs being run on Azure had to be stateless since they could be rebooted and reset at any time, thus losing any data stored on it. This is ok for apps developed to take this into account, but for traditional applications that need persistence, it is a deal-breaker. Microsoft is looking to add support for persistent VMs to Azure as well.

K.PAVITHRA 3RD IT

Hacktivism
When the freedom of the internet is under-threat, there rises a breed of socially conscious hackers who stand up to protect the rights of the free world. These are geeks with a cause and the necessary skills to retaliate against tyrannical powers that be who seek to limit the freedom of ordinary netizens. They're white-hat hackers, with noble intentions of social change but their actions are certainly illegal.Some people describing themselves as hacktivists have taken to defacing websites for political reasons, such as attacking and defacing government websites as well as websites of groups who oppose their ideology. These include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other's mischief. In recent times Anonymous, who normally are interested in their daily Lulz, launched a series of DDoS attacks on US government web sites in protest of SOPA.Now this isn't a sub-culture we necessarily condone but what we're trying to say is that geeks are socially aware, take up causes and make their voices heard in the face of justice. Apart from these misunderstood miscreants, much of the tech world turned hacktivists in their own ways. Apart from biggies such as Wikipedia and google, many blogs posted anti-SOPA messages of their own and the geek universe galvanised united towards a common cause. Such is the power of Hacktivism.

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APPLE MACBOOK AIR 13

The new macbook Air 13 is faster and better than its predecessor with a core i5 processor and 256MB flash storage.

one are the days when the slimmest notebook weighed

pixels, rendering visuals clear and sharp. The glossy display has been improved with an anti-reflective coating to avoid it from shining under bright light. The speaker quality is passable and is the only deficit in the otherwise brilliant ultra-book. Its battery lasted a good 6 hours and is a significant boost for travelling workers, who can easily lug in their suitcases with other stuff.Besides having core i7 processor and 4GB RAM, the new Air features Intel HD Graphics 3000, which is not at par with modern day heavy games.The SSD is great boost to the app

more than 2 kg. Now the slim is really slim and is packed with stunning features running anything you want from games to video editing. Apple launched their first ultra-book, the Macbook Air a couple of years ago. What was lacking in that device has now been replenished in the new Macbook Air 13, which sets a benchmark for the upcoming ultra-books with its thin and light form and prominent features.Look wise, nothing seems to have changed as this upgrade looks just like its former self, except for the back-lit keyboard which is a welcome change with Macbook Air 13 has a real livewire black coloured and well-spaced keys. Thanks with Intel's cutting edge core i5 processors, a valuable to the unibody design; its free of clutter on its upgrade over its predecessor that ran on Intel's Core 2 aluminium body with matte finish, which Duo and priced beyond many folks' reach.Also, the makes it dust and smudge free. The few ports former has 4GB RAM and 256GB of SSD storage, comprise of two USB ports, one thunderbolt which is better than the latter's 2GB RAM and 64 GB port, one SD card slot, power port and a SSD. Apple has introduced this new range in 13 inch headphone jack. The keyboard is followed by and 11 inch variants. The device has missed on certain a quick to respond big multi-touchpad with key features, like not having an optical drive and an resting space on both. Ethernet port.Macbook Air 13 boasts of stunning bright display with native resolution of 1440 by 900 .

eneath the stunning exterior,

speed, which starts almost immediately without any hitch. Also, the flash memory helps in fast boot-up taking a couple of sec. Last, but not the least is the price. Starting from the 67k for the 11 inch variant, it goes upto 89k for the 13 inch, a price which is pretty decent for both, given the quality and weight it carries in its light body. Also, it is available with 1 year limited warranty.

VIGNESH 2ND IT

ASUS EEE PAD SLIDER SL101

D.PAVITHRA 1ST CSE K.RUBINI IST CSE

The tablet which slides to reveal a physical keyboard underneath might be good competition to the tablets which are no good for people requiring heavy typing.
There are netbooks and there are tablets. This Eee Pad Slider hopes to provide its users the best of both worlds. Perhaps another attempt at being the iPad killer! The Asus Eee Pad is a tablet by design; the top panel containing the screen lifts up and fixes at 45 degree to reveal a small and compact QWERTY keyboard underneath. The input options and the keyboard are designed to extend the tablet functionality to that of a network. The Slider SL101 sports a 10.1-inch, 1280 by 800 IPSLCD panel which is bright and color-rich and has a great viewing angles (178 degree). The display has 10 Fingers Multi-Touch Support and comprises of Scratch Resistant Corning Gorilla glass. However, one big flaw is that the top panel with the screen, when adjusted for keyboard usage, fixes itself at 45 degree and it can't be adjusted/tilted to optimize the viewing comfort. The plastic chassis is quite sturdy and drapped in a matt finish look which looks decent enough. The glossy screen, however, is a fingerprint magnet which might not really be a pro for the product. The tablet is heavy at 960 gms which is more than other standalone tablets. But considering the fact that it comes with a built-in physical keyboard, this weight is

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manageable and better than any tablet with a of flash storage, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and separate keyboard. Apart from the GPS. The slider comes with one year unlimited ASUS ergonomics, the tablet is armed heavily to be Web-Storage for easy sharing of files and data. Other considered as a replacement to the netbook, holes into the chassis are a Micro SD card slot, mini and beyond. The tablet has SRS sound which HDMI input, a USB port and a head phone 3.5mm is decent enough.The slider works on the jack port. The USB port can be used to connect a USB Android 3.1 Honeycomb version which is dongle for internet usage. There is a 40 pin connector upgradeable to Android 4.0. The slider is as well which can be used for charging the slider as powered by NVIDIA's Tegra-2 1GHz dual- sync with PC. core GPU, paired with 1GB of RAM, 16GB The slider has 2 cameras; a rear (5MP) and

a front cam (1.2MP) for video chats. The quality of the rear is decent. This camera is fine when using the slider in the tablet mode. However, when the tab slides to reveal the keyboard, the cam is now at the base of keyboard and is not really easy to use. The tablet offered a battery backup of around 9 hrs which was a tad bit on the lower side.

LENOVO THINKPAD TABLET

Aimed at business users, the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet is much more than just a tablet
Tablet market and manufacturers now seem to be ready to take on the laptop market and that's the reason why we are seeing tablet PCs with attached keyboards and ports. The ThinkPad Tablet from Lenovo runs on Android 3.1 Honey-Comb and has applications like print share. Citrix receiver and note and an additional stylus or ThinkPad pen that makes it ideal for corporates. The tablet is based on Nvidia's latest Tegra 2 dual-core 1 GHz processor, and comes with 1 GB RAM. It has a 10.1 inch Corning Gorilla glass touch screen that supports 1200x800 pixels resolution. The TFT screen provides for a bright and vivid display and supports a viewing angle of 178 degrees. But its weight can be a drawback. At 715 gms, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet is heavier than Samsung Tablet (565 gms) and Apple iPad2 (601 gms). At the bottom, it has 4-buttons 2 of which we usually don't see in tablets. There is home button, a back button, a button to open the browser and the fourth is to lock the orientation. You need to click the buttons with an angle since you have to click them towards the display rather than clicking them from center. Below these buttons, there are different ports like 3.5 mm audio jack, miniHDMI, micro-USB, dock connector, and then a cover hiding SD card slot and SIM card slot for 3G connectivity. Bottom left hand side has a full sized USB port which can be used to plug in the keyboard attached in the casing. Just above this USB port there is a speaker. On the top right hand side, it has volume keys Running on Android 3.1 Honeycomb, Lenovo has added widgets for games and Lenovo App shop. Yes in addition to Android Market, Lenovo has integrated its app shop where different categories like business, entertainment, finance, etc are given. There is a favorite button, integrated with the interface where you can add or remove your favorite applications. While unlocking the tab, we noticed a slight lag but that is not something to worry about. Tablet worked fine when we ran multiple applications on it like music and games (music stopped when we opened the game). But at all times, we noticed certain delays while closing applications. Notes Mobile, one of the preloaded applications, is a pretty nice application which comes handy while taking notes. It is where the stylus comes in use since this application supports handwriting recognition and you can also scribble and give a name to the cover of the notebook also (you can create different notebooks).if your palm is touching your tab while writing, then there is an option of palm rejection and same is applicable for left hand users. As compared to ThinkPad, Asus Eee Pad does not have stylus. ThinkPad tablet also has a rear and front camera. Front camera is 2 MP and placed at the top left corner (while holding in landscape mode) while the rear camera is 5 MP with a decent quality. Unlike Asus Eee Pad Slider, where you cannot adjust the screen, ThinkPad Tablet allows you to adjust the screen if you are using the keyboard folio.

R.ANTONY MICHALE REMILA 2ND IT march 2012

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HATERADE

SOPA 101

This essay looks at how the culture You must have heard a lot about o f t h e a n o n y m o u s i n t e r n e t SOPA and PIPA last month. It's an commenting is preventing people American piece of legislation that from taking part in a dialogue based was being discussed in the senate on sense and logic.The author takes and blacklisted by a majority of the

GOOGLE'S STORE VIEW

.

10 FREE ONLINE LEARNING RESOURCES

Coding, HTML 5, MIT open courseware and more- a list of top 10 learning resources online. And

her pre web 2.0 era article and popular websites. But what doesn't like the saying goes, the best thing in discusses how it wouldn't have had it mean to people and websites the What happens when you mash up life comes for free, so do the sites t h e s a m e i m p a c t t o d a y ; t h e US? ArsTechnica gives an analysis Google street view to take it inside listed here http://goo.gl/bQZEv. comments would have been the http://goo.gl /QCalZ. commercial stores of participating main news http://goo.gl/tUybH business. Here's an example of Google store view inside the B&H photostore http://goo.gl/UH5G8 .

FACEBOOK TIMELINE APPS: SHOULD YOU USE THEM?

V.SUBHA FINAL IT T.SUBHA FINAL IT

Is it worth it having your activity from other websites cluttering your Facebook stream?Read on to find out...

acebook officially relaunched Timeline with Timeline Apps. Timeline is an optin feature on Facebook that replaces a

user's wall and profile with a graphical and chronological timeline of events of his or her life on Facebook, as well as other life events that they choose to add. The new appTimeline integration, in a nutshell, posts activity from other Web sites and services that you use to your Facebook timeline. For example, enable the image scrapbooking site Pinterest to connect to your Facebook Timeline, and Pinterest will automatically post activity on your Timeline anytime you pin or save a new image to your account. All the activity from each app gets grouped into its own box on your Timeline, rather Rhapsody, Runkeeper, Slacker, Spotify, other apps, it's a little more apparent what you're than clobbering your stream with each individual S t u n H u b , Ti c k e t m a s t e r, Tr i p A d v i s o r, doing when you enable the integration from action you take on a thirdparty site. Is this new Tuntable.fm, Where I've Been, Words With within your Facebook Account Settings directly. integration a good thing? That depends on how Friends, Washington Post Social reader, and . you use Facebook, but here are some points that Yahoo news. might help you make up your mind.

Sharing and privacy

One nice feature of the apps integration is that you can toggle the privacy

Apps for Facebook Timeline

How to enable apps for timeline

settings for all timeline posts that come from the

At launch, 80 apps are promoted on To turn on app for Facebook Timeline, app in one shot. In your account settings, if you Facebook's Timeline Apps informational page. you'll need to first have the app connected to your tell the Washington post social reader app to To give you an idea of the breadth of topics and account .You can see what apps you currently make its timeline activity visible to only me or interests these apps cover, here are some of the have in Account Settings > Apps. For some just friends, it will always follows those rules. most well known: Airbnb, Buzzfeed ,The Daily, apps, it's clear how to turn on the post to Additionally, you can delete or hide Digg, Fab, Foodily, Foodspotting, Hulu, Timeline feature right from the app itself. See activity on your timeline post - by - post, although LivingSocial, MapMyFitness, Pinterest, the image from Pinterest for an example. With it's a little confusing and limited,Whats

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march 2012

KODAK'S MISTAKE
Kodak and Fujifilm were arch rivals at one point of time-in the predigital photography era. But Kodak has just gone downhill since the last couple of years, while it's competitor adapted to the changing

STAR WARS UNCUT

SMARTPHONE PATENT WAR INFOGRAPH

Samsung fighting Apple, Apple fighting HTC,Motorola fighting Microsoft ,Oracle fighting

THE WEEK THAT KILLED SOPA

googleyeah we know it's a hard scenario in the imaging and What happens when you break up a task keeping track of all the patent With all the web site blackouts and photography world. Economists star wars movie into 15-sec capsules lawsuits Using fought around the protests against the stop online takes a look at how Kodak's and request volunteers across the world. Here's an handy infograph piracy act[SOPA] and protect IP act complacency has led to it's eventual world to film/interpret it in their with an arrow diagram of who's [PIPA],it was hard to keep track of b a n k r u p t c y http://goo.gl/p4XJo. f i l i n g own way? http://goo.gl/0fGBk. fighting whom http://goo.gl/Pizkp. what happened when in that week http://goo.gl/EcTqo.

signed up for Timeline. Once you turn it on, you can't cancel it, so make sure you want the Timeline to permanently replace your wall and profile page before you start experimenting with Timeline app integration. That said, if you use Facebook as a way to share a lot of content that you like, whether it's articles you read or music you like, the Timeline often with news apps, like The WallStreet Journal app integration-like the Facebook Ticker, which and Yahoo News. If a friend reads an article that also posts about your activity from other sites and posts automatically via the app and you click it, confusing is the button that triggers the option is services via a small inset on the newsfeed page- you can't simply read the article. Instead, you're an X next to the post, which makes it seem like will make it more convenient for you to do so. invited to authenticate the app, too, and if you you'll be deleting the post. But press it and you'll You win. don't, you can't read the article. I am forever If you see yourself as more of an opening up another tab in my browser to search in fact be able to show, hide, or delete it. Below these options are more settings to stop the app absorber of content, picking up things other for the words in a headline because I don't want from posting to Timeline, or revoke its Facebook people post, the apps integration is a mixed these particular app integrations. I like the integration altogether. blessing. On the one hand, you'll likely be able to content, but I don't appreciate the inaccessibility. see more stuff that all those over-sharers make Another party to consider when

Who wins? Who loses?

public on their feeds and Timeline. On the other thinking about who wins and loses with Very important: If you opt-in to hand, you can't just click through a line to reach Facebook app integration is the businesses that Timeline, you cannot opt out. Many Facebook some of the content, a snafu that has frustrated makes these apps. Is there such things as too me (and others) for a very long time. I see it most much integration with Facebook? Is it good for business? On the one hand, I think the case has always been made that you have to reach the audience/market where they are, and they're all on Facebook. But on the other hand, letting the audience so easily stay on Facebook without ever landing on the business' Web site could result in less traffic for the business. The flip side of the business question brings up the biggest winner of all: Facebook. Integrating app activity onto users' Timelines is another way to keep Facebook traffic on Facebook. Users never have to leave the page to see where else their friends are active online. If it's all on Facebook , you're all on Facebook.

users I know didn't understand this when they

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SPHERO This translucent cricket-ball sized

orb may look like a child's play thing, but it packs in quite a punch in terms of technology. You basically control Sphero via Bluetooth from your iOS or Android-based smartphone or tablet. Capable of producing millions of colours on its surface, it reaches speeds of up to three feet per second. Precise control is achieved with the integrated gyro, accelerometer and compass. A host of apps centred around Sphero are available on the respective app stores. Priced at roughly Rs 6,530, it won't have you diving too deep into

SPHERO

POWERTREKK
Power cuts are common in our part of the world. But next time, instead of cribbing about the lack of basic amenities, you can charge your phone using water. Yes, you read that correctly, we said water. Perhaps the best gadget to be showcased at CES. Powertrekk from MyFC produces power equivalent to four AA batteries using just a tablespoon of water. You can charge your gadgets or external batteries. The magic happens in what MyFC calls the power pucks which are made of a material called Sodium Silicide, which reacts with water to produce electricity. One such fuel cell costs Rs.15, 000 and the puck used for recharging costs Rs.150 each

Products from CES 2012 thatll make you go whoa!

S.TAMILVAANAN 3RD CSE

your pocket.

MAKERBOT REPLICATOR
MakerBot Industries has been the most visible face of the personal 3D printing movement; its Thing-O-Matic printer has introduced both geeks and the public (through appearances on shows like The Colbert Report) to the technology of printing physical objects. The MakerBot Replicator can print larger objects than the Thing-O-Matic, up to the size of a loaf of bread. The two-nozzled (dual extruder) version of the Replicator is capable of printing objects in two colors using ABS and/or PLA plastics. Priced at $1,749 for the single-extruder model and $1,999 for the dual-extruder version, the MakerBot Replicator comes fully assembled and ready within minutes to start printing. At that price it will appeal more to hobbyists than typical households, but its ability to print larger objects, and in different color combinations, has the potential to entice a new wave of experimenters into trying their hands at personalized manufacturing.

FAVI A3-WIFI PICO PROJECTOR

Projector makers have been expanding the capabilities of pocketsized projectors, but the FAVI A3WiFi goes further. Not only does this pico projector integrate Wi-Fi, it runs Android, uses Google Chrome as a b r o w s e r, a n d h a s a b u i l t - i n touchpad.The FAVI A3 WiFi has a native SVGA resolution (800-by-600 pixels), 8GB of built-in memory, and a SD/SDHC/MMC card reader. Its lithium ion battery lasts for up to one hour between charges, and it has a built-in speaker, plus a USB port lets you connect the A3-WiFi to USB keyboards and mice. The projector can act as a personal media player, and be used for watching online videos or picture slide shows, playing music, displaying eBooks, Web browsing, and playing content from the internal memory or online.

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5 excellent, free online education resources

1.Code Year
If learning computer programming sounds way out of your reach, best left to the geniuses of the world, you're wrong. According to Code Year, anyone can learn the basics of computer programming in just one year. Code Year encourages people to make a New Year's resolution to learn enough code to build their own apps and websites. A lot of people seem interested; at the time of publication, Code Year has gained over 355,880 wanna be-programmersincluding New York City Mayor Michael Bloombergand more are joining every day. The creators of Code Year, a project of New York City-based startup Code academy, think that basic programming is an essential skill that everyone should learn.

S.T.SANGAR PRASANTH 2ND CSE M.SENTHIL KUMAR 2ND CSE

2. W3Schools
The largest site on the Internet for Web developers, W3Schools is a fantastic resource for those interested in brushing up on their Web development skillsor learning them for the first time. Want to make your own website? W3Schools offers tutorials and references on a large range of subjects, including HTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, and more. Though not as structured as Code Year, W3Schools is just as thorough. The HTML lessons, for example, are separated by subject, starting off with the most basic instruction and moving into XHTML. W3Schools offers a list of helpful references for each subject. Ever forget a tag name or need to know the color name for the website you're building? W3Schools has it all. If you think you've got your HTML skills down pat, you can test how much you really know (and determine what you need to keep working on) in the HTML quiz.

3. TED
The nonprofit started out as a conference in 1984 with the intention of "bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design." (It even saw one of the first Macintosh computer demos that year.) Fast-forwarding 28 years, TED now features more than 1,114 free, award-winning talks, with more added each week. Released under a Creative Commons license, the videos can be freely shared and reposted. TED speakers discuss a wide array of topicsfrom technology and design to science and cultureand present them in the most innovative and engaging ways possible within an 18-minute window of time. Past presenters include Microsoft's Bill Gates, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, a number of Nobel Prize winners, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Stephen Hawking, Bill Clinton, and Jane Goodall.

4. Massachusetts Institute of technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a slew of undergrad and graduate courses available online for free through its OpenCourseWare program. Over 2,000 courses cover architecture and planning, engineering, humanities, arts, social studies, science, and many other academic areas. Some of the most popular classes online include Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Physics I: Classical Mechanics, Linear Algebra, Single Variable Calculus, and Introduction to C++. Some classes include interactive Web demonstrations, streaming video lectures, and complete textbooks written by MIT professors. MIT's OpenCourseWare program lets users move through the lecture notes, suggested reading lists, and videos at their own pace.

5.. iTunesU
iTunes U hosts content from more than 800 universities and distinguished organizations. Stanford, Yale, and Oxford are on the list, as well as MoMA, the New York Public Library, Public Radio International, and PBS stations. iTunes U offers audio and video of lectures, plus slideshows, PDFs, books, films, exhibit tours, and audio books. iTunes U, which supports both the PDF and ePub file formats, allows educators to distribute schedules, syllabi, lecture outlines, study guides, notes, maps, and even entire books. Don't worry if you don't have an iOS device; these formats work on any compatible e- reader. iTunes U offers material on nearly every topic, so whether you're looking to educate yourself on app development or just want a Shakespeare refresher, iTunes U can help.

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Amazon Kindle Touch

The page turner is here
J.RATNA JENISHA 2ND IT
The kindle touch is slightly heavier than the kindle (the plain Jane edition), but is considerably less bulky than the one with the keyboard. The device has 4GB on-board storage. Amazon says that it is good for about 3000 books. On-board is an experimental web browser, and experimental for a good reason. Some flash heavy websites do not render properly, but most sites load just fine. With all the kindle devices till now, a lot of book lovers missed the feel of actually turning a page. The kindle touch brings that back, to a huge extent. Amazon have divided the fields on the display very well-tapping any where in the wide margin on the right side to flip to the next page, or tap anywhere in the thin margin will flip to the previous page. Alternatively, you can just swipe on the screen like you would swipe a page in a book.

Beetel Magiq Glide

One Level upgrade to a capacitive display
R.PRADEEPA 2ND CSE
Undeniable, but true-the Glide looks exactly like its predecessor. Competing against the likes of the Reliance 3G Tab, the Glide comes across as a bulky tablet. The use metal adds a solid feel. The integrated kickstand is a unique feature we haven't seen an any tablets.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y570

A very good all-purpose home laptop below `50k
V.SANDHIYA 2ND CSE
The Lenovo IdeaPad Y570 is a solid home entertainment laptop which is good for casual gaming as well. It has a brushed mental screen lid with a funky dot-pattern to lend the IdeaPad Y570 an air of premiumness on the outside, while the laptop's gunmetal gray deck with black eyes. The IdeaPad Y570 certainly isn't easy to carry around for a 15-inch home entertainment laptop, weighing just under 3-kg. As you can see from the specs alongside, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y570 comes with a potent mixture of latest hardware building blocks-it could've had a faster hard drive and higher resolution the display, lending the laptop a great foundation to deliver high performance, be it gaming with 3D games or watching HD 1080p movies or listening to audio on the laptop's JBL speakers, the overall user experience on the

A 1GHz single core processor, couple with 512M B of RAM, powers the Glide. The OS version-Android 2.2 remains unchanged. We expected to see atleast Android 2.3 comes with. However, the performance of the Glide seems to be slightly better than the Magiq. The 7-inch touchscreen (480 *800 pixels) is the capacity type. We had criticized the Magiq for having a resistive touchscreen that spoiled the entire table experience. While the display specs remain the same otherwise, the Glide's display seems to be a lot crisper. Text reads better, and images don't seem bereft of sharpness. The disappointing 2MP cameras are carried forward from the earlier version. The video call camera is heavily

IdeaPad Y570 is very good.

We liked the laptop's isolated keyboard with scalloped, curved keys which are great for typing, and the keyboard had no flex to deliver a top-notch typing experience. The touchpad has a nice dotted grid for haptic feedback while scrolling with your fingerif only the included mouse buttons were separate, everything would've been just perfect. The laptop's6-cell battery lasted just under 2 hours in our tests, which is very good for a high performing laptop. Overall, we're very impressed with the IdeaPad Y570 and have no hesitation in recommending it for your home entertainment use.

Amazon claims a battery life of about 2 months, with an hour of reading daily. We still haven't been able to drain the battery on our Kindle Touch! It has been with us for two weeks, and despite a couple of hours of reading daily, the battery is slightly above 50 percent. It had come out of the box with about 60 per cent charge. For someone who already has a kindle3, the Touch isn't an anticing enough upgrade. But for someone who is looking to buy their first e-book reader, then the touch is the smartest choice at the moment.

dependent on good lighting. A bit of video viewing, web browsing and half an hour of music in the background had the beetel MAGIQ running out of battery in about 4 hours. The Magid Glide is an alternative to the likes of the Reliance 3G tab. Performance wise it is same as its predecessor, but the upgrade to a capacitive touch screen is the best thing that could have happened. However, you are playing extra for something that should've been there in the first place.

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CYBEROAM NETGENIE NG11EO

Gone are the days where laptops were the only devices connected to your wireless router. New products like smart phones, tablets etc are the new additions list of devices that need connection over wireless bandwidth. The important aspect here is that being hooked to the internet also means same amount of threats to the system. Now instead of running a endpoint security solution on each device, it makes sense to have all security measures within the router. And besides the security features standard in most wireless routers, this device is unique in the sense it comes with a antivirus protection which gets constantly updated post-registration and is free for first three years. The other notable features of this router include built-in 3G data, data card support and a VPN. To check the performance of this router, we carried out two tests. We first checked the TCP, throughput using 'Qcheck 3.0', with a payload of 1000MB. It gave 22 Mbps speed. To check the speed of the transformation, we created an isolated network (N) with NetGenie connected to two machines one via Ethernet and other via wireless connection. Then we transferred 50MB of data from one machine to other. It took an average of 33 seconds to complete this data transfer.

S.LALITHA 3RD IT

NANDHINI 1ST IT

TRANSCEND STORE JET25H2 1TB

The latest USB2.0 hard drive from Transcend StoreJet 25H2, is not a everyday hard drive but also works as your backup solution which you can use to encrypt data and also sync it. With a storage capacity of up to 1TB, the new hard drive boasts of a sophisticated shock protection mechanism that includes the silicone outer shell, a reinforced hard casing and an internal hard drive suspension damper to make it highly resistant to shock and fall. The drive is easy to use and requires mere plug and play instead of wanting driver installation. A particular application is needed which is called StoreJet Elite that offers multiple storage related solutions. The drive claims high speed data transfer rates upto 480 Mbits per second and for transferring video data of 8GB from HDD to the PC and vice versa. It took about 6 minutes. Transcend Elite application offers instant backup and data synchronisation with your computer. It allows you to synchronise your IE favourites and Firefox bookmarks from your HDD, so that you can access them from anywhere if you have it near you. Also you can create backup for your files and organise them into different categories. Incase you lose it you can restore it via restore option. Elite offers you quick and easy way to protect files with powerful 256-bit AES encryption.

NORTON INTERNET SECURITY 2012

With the hackers trying everything to get into your accounts, security providers are also gearing up for the challenges in front of them. To keep with this pace Symantec has come up with Norton Internet Security 2012(NIS 2012). We installed Norton Internet Security 2012 on an i5-processor based machine with 4GB RAM and 500 GB hard disk space. Installation was quite easy and surprising fast. It took just 54 seconds to install the software on the machine. But before we proceeded we updated the NIS and the update was of 98MB. To make it more simple Norton has added details with each option so that a user can understand the functionality. To test features, we loaded around 500 viruses in the system. After we scanned the system, it detected almost all the viruses that we have loaded. It was very good in detecting viruses. After we ran a quick scan which took 6 minutes to scan a 100GB data, NIS detected 3 tracking cookies and resolved it. Next comes the parental control which actually blocks certain websites. You have to install it separately. We tried to visit certain websites, but we got the prompt that URL is blocked and that you have a request to the parent or the administrator of the system to let you open this URL. The request is received in the form of an e-mail. Next we checked the anti-spam ware feature with Outlook 2010. It integrated itself with the Outlook and there is a separate tab for Norton. We tried to block few e-mail addresses and tried to send e-mails from these addresses. We didn't receive any e-mail and also we downloaded a application Norton prompted us that it is a safe file.

J.DIVYA 3RD IT

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MAC OS X

MUTHU RATHINAM 3RD IT

save the image to the clipboard. Alternatively you can use Grab, the application which comes bundled with your Mac OS X.

Apple has always been the epitome of easy to use products; the Mac OS X is no exception.Here are a few handy tips to further increase ease of use, tricks you never knew and a few interesting software all mac users must have.

NTFS 3G and MacFuse

If you haven't already realized Mac can read a NTFS volume but can't write them. Go ahead and install NTFS 3G,which

Spotlight
Lets start with one of the highly used features of the MacOS X-spotlight. It rests on the top-right corner of the home screen represented by a magnifying glass, which you can click to open the feature.

More tips to further limit your search

If you know the exact name of the file for

will by itself install MacFuse. Volia! You can now read and write a NTFS volume on Mac. Now, you can also use disk utility to format a drive to NTFS format. Sadly, a Mac Os X Lion supported version is not out yet.

Alternatively, press [command]+[space bar]. You which you are searching, type name :file. If you probably already know that you can use it to search know the author of the file, use author :author for all files, folders or to launch applications. These name. if you know the type of the file use kind :type following tips will help you further filter your of file. You must be surprised by how much Mac search. lets you exploit this feature and understands exactly what you need. Your keyword for kind: can include almost any thing i.e movies, email, audio,

ShakesPeer
If you've been searching for a Direct Connect client for Mac OS X, look no further. ShakesPeer is an Open Source Dc client with an extremely easy to use interface. Plus, it 's absolutely stable.

Search in spotlight

If you search for anything using quotation marks, MP3, JPEG,PNG, images, keynote, Word, spotlight will only look up for files and folders that Powerpoint, Quick-Time, PDF, app, etc. you can also use a combination of all the above to further narrow down your search.

Other cool thing your Mac can do:

Slo-mo with Mac
While minimizing or maximizing windows or while using Expose or Space you can slow down the way the process takes place. All you need to do is hold down[shift] while doing the above mentioned tasks. This looks really cool, try it.

Calculate with spotlight

Yes, you can use spotlight as a calculator, all you need to do is type in the desired math equation. For example type 55*55/100+50 and you'll get the answer 80.25. It's as simple as that and you no longer need to find the calculator app unless you want to perform complex equations. To find the square of a number, just enter pow (5,2). Likewise you can enter sqrt(number) to find the square root. Alternatively you can use Alfred, a productivity contain the exact time inside the quotation mark. application. It's available in both free as well as You don't need to complete the quotation marks; paid package. The paid version of the app can starting the search with open quotes tells spotlight increase your productivity manifold. It's a great that it should search for items that include the app to have. words that follow.

Get the Apple logo

Ever wanted to put the Apple logo in your documents? Here's how you can: In TextEdit or Google Docs, hold down[option]+[Shift] +[K]. There!You have your very own logo.

Make your Mac talk

January 1984-the year Steve Jobs unveiled the first Apple Macintosh, the year we all first heard a Mac speak. For those of you who haven't been able to figure out how to make your Mac talk, here's how to do it. Open up terminal and fire in this command: say ``what ever you want it to say''. It's that simple. You can even ask your Mac to read out the from a .txt file. Fire in this command; say-f ~/Desktop/Test.txt. Replace ~/Desktop/Test.txt if the file you want to read from is placed elsewhere. In TextEdit go to Edit >Speech>Start talking and Mac will read out all the content from the .txt file.

Take a screen shots Search using metadata

Just press down[Command] Apart from searching for files and folders, +[Shift]+[3] and you'll hear a click sound. The spotlight further searches for metadata, viz file file image is captured and will to be saved to your information created during its generation. If you desktop. Pressing [command]+ [Shift]+[4] gives control-click any file or folder and open the Get you the option to choose the area you want to Info window you'll find all the metadata the file capture. Pressing [Command]+[Shift]+[4] stores. The interesting part here is that the file followed by [space] will allow you to take the information is not limited to that data, which means screenshot of a window without needing you to you can add your own keywords to every file. To do select the area manually. In case you want the so, in the same Get Info window , you'll find a box image to be saved to clipboard, you need to press that reads Spotlight Comments:; here's where [Control]+[Command] +[Shift]+[3]. The same you can add your comments. You can now direct applies to the other two commands; just remember to hold down the control button when you want to spotlight search for the file based on this data.

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Make your own QR code

Forget those boring black and white QR codes, add some colour and D.ALEX 3RD CSE customize your very own hip QR codes
Quick Response codes or QR codes are slowly but surely becoming mainstream what with every other person sporting a smartphone with a decent camera these days. It is the most convenient way to go from an offline to online experience. You just have to focus your phone camera on the QR code and you're automatically taken to the QR code's embedded destination (mostly an hyperlink).Nine out of ten times, you'll notice a QR code in its white and black avatar and this could be boring. So can you really change that colour combination? Add your personal touch to a QR code? Yes, you can. In this tutorial, we'll show you how you can change the colour of your QR code, add a personal logo bang in the middle of the code and even smoothen the sharp edges of the squares and rectangles that comprise of the QR code. There are many websites such as http://goqr.me/ to help you generate your QR code. You can program the QR codes to lead the scanner to a URL, phone number, text or even a visiting card. Move the slider alongside to a size of 300x300px. Under Options select the Error Correction Code as Q. You can change the Data Pixel colour to one that you like from its swatch. Though there's no rule saying that the background must be white, there has to be a strong contrast between the background and the code for the phone camera to be able to scan it easily. Once the QR code is generated, all you need to do is download the file for further editing. You can use any advanced image editing program. We used Photoshop, and here's what we did. We first opened a layer and superimposed the QR code on it. We then unchecked the background layer, leaving us with the white background of the QR code. To remove it, you need to convert the image to a Smart object.

Original QR code with black color

Then click Select menu > Color Range and keeping all things constant select the white colour and hit delete. Now you'll just get the QR code. Recheck the background layer. We tried adding an inner embossing on the code, while constantly checking if the QR code is still pointing to the web site, else you need to go slow on the modifications or even undo a few changes, so take care. We then added the Digit logo in an image layer and gave it an outer glow. It was placed in the centre.The tricky part was adding a gradient on the background. After a lot of trial and error with different colours, the blue/light blue combo seemed to work for us.

Modified QR code with the IQ logo

On a text layer we placed Your Technology Navigator below the QR code.There's so much more you can do with the QR code to personalise it. Google QR code enthusiast, Patrick Donnelly's Farmville design, which he spent months growing. You can even arrange real-life objects such as music instruments, animals, cartoons, etc into a scannable code. Up to 30 percent of the QR code image can be removed and replaced with an embedded image while ensuring the code is still stable. Let your imagination run wild.

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EYE SEE YOU

SATHYA 3RD IT
The contact lens used by William Brandt to take images to the Russian codes is a fascinating piece of the technology. It was one of the few pieces of tech in the movie that caught our eye. Wearing just a contact lens and still getting an augmented experience of the world is a very interesting concept and one that isn't far from reality.The fact that you can just look at a face and get details about the person on a mobile device might seem intrusive in a way. It's like taking cyber-stalking to the next level. Of course, if everybody starts wearing these, you won't need to keep drawing yourself up to your full height just to explain who you are.Scientists have found a way to embed miniature circuits in contact lenses and have also managed to transmit data to and from the lens. The outer ring can be lined with a fine, wireless antenna, with the circuit embedded in the middle.

Scientists have managed to take design one step further by focusing an LED mounted on one of the lenses onto the retina.

MegaUpload shutdown, Anonymous retaliates

S.PRABHAKARAN 3RD IT
The U.S. department of justice (DOJ) announced that it shut down MegaUpload, the one-click hosting online service and charged its members on five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy by trafficking and hosting pirated image and

This is much harder than it sounds as it involves a lot of micro-lenses being manipulated at a microscopic level. This means that you can have, say, one eye with a mechanism for taking images and transmitting it to a mobile device like your phone, while the other can be set up to display the processed data directly on your retina.

video content. Four out of seven of the site's owners and operators have been arrested.

Nokia says 3G tariffs need corrections

Jasmeet Gandhi, Nokia India's head said that the 3G pricing in India has to be corrected to ensure that it is affordable for the lower-end consumers. A lot of consumers in India want to future proof themselves in terms of technology at the right price point. So when the pricing of 3G will be affordable, they will definitely go for it. He also pointed out that the 3G technology was meant to revolutionise mobile experience giving high-speed internet and facilities such as video-calls, interactive gaming and mobile TV. The actual number of the 3G users is lesser than the expectations. Gandhi, however, turned down speculation that hefty prices of 3G services were hampering the sales of smartphones. Because people who buy smartphones at the high-end can afford 3G. it is not an issue. I think in smart phones segment 3G penetration is very decent. Meanwhile, hacktivist group, anonymous retaliated to the MegaUpload closure by shutting down the website of DOJ, universal music group, MPAA, RIAA and U.S. copyright office on 19th January. The group called it the single biggest strike its history.

A.PRAVEENA 2ND IT

Even passwords wont help you

i-Fi users in the country are vulnerable to

password for the wireless network or

Failed attempts to exploit the vulnerability could lead to a denial of service condition. The agency also pointed out its reports that revealed several WPS devices do not feature any king of lockout policy for such attack attempts. Users in India mostly use the WPS method to set up a wireless router for home network. The WPS procedure requires a PIN to be used during setup. The CERT-In alert elaborated that users should disable the external registrar feature of the WPS to protect their devices from virus attacks.

virus attacks, warns Indian computer

emergency response team (CERT-In).

The firm has discovered that the Wi-Fi protected setup (WPS) has a design error, increasing risks of virus attacks that potentially allow attackers to take control of even a password protected system. The CERT-In alert to consumers read: the virus is streaming in the Indian internet networks with a high severity. The combat mechanisms are being deployed. An unauthenticated, remote attacker within range of the wireless access point could use the PIN (password) to gain unauthorised access to the device to retrieve the . change the configuration of the device

A.M.F.NASREEN PARVEEN 3RD IT

D-Roll Scroll-Based Laptop

The D-roll, or "digital roll," is what designer Hao Hua considers to be a "next generation laptop design," as it does away with the book-like form factor in favor of one mimicking an artist's scroll. Whether or not something like this will even be possible in the near future seems to matter less when you look at how much effort Hua put in the design. Up above you can see the D-roll set up like a regular laptop, and it's easy to imagine how portable it'd be all rolled up. There's an in-between configuration that you could theoretically use to browse quickly, i.e You could check your email even with the screen rolled up, for there is an adaptation available on the roll. Designer Hao Hua has taken the thought to the next level, with options for the USB on the roller belt and even a detachable wearable web cam you could use on the computer or wear on your wrist. The mouse and web camera can also be used as the end caps for the laptop case, while the straps double as ports to plug in your USB These are going to be in market very soon in 1st quarter of 2012.

G.VINODHINI 3RD CSE

Sony Smart Watch is an Android Phones Best Friend

early hidden away at CES was a $149 Sony Smart Watch (due in March) that doubles as a Bluetooth command center for Android Phones. Featuring brushed chrome edges, the 1.3-inch OLED (65k color) touch screen features Bluetooth 3.0 and is compatible with Android phones from Sony, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and others. You may remember its predecessor, the Live View accessory that Sony Ericsson released in late 2010. The dust and splash proof Smart Watch is essentially the same story.

SASIKALA R

3RD CSE

The updated version is sleeker in appearance (and about 0.3-inches thick), has an accelerometer, can vibrate, and will launch with a colorful swatch of wristband accessories. A black wristband and wristband adapter is included. You can do many things through the techie timepiece, including the basics such as read SMS, e-mail, or the weather. In addition, a pop-up caller id prompt appears during incoming calls (allowing you to accept or deny), or check social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I liked how it displays user icons with the status updates.

WORLD'S FIRST DUAL SCREEN LAPTOP

This tablet has two touch screens, each with LED backlighting and 1,024 x 600 resolution. You will note the virtual keyboard, and it is billed as the world's first dual touch-screen Windows mini-notebook PC. It can be used both vertically and horizontally, thanks to a built-in accelerometer. The battery life is good for 2 or 4 hours with high-capacity battery. Other features include Intel Pentium U5400 CPU , 62GB SSD, 2GB RAM, WiNMAX, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, Micro SD/SDHC slot, USB port, and Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit. Toshiba' s Libretto W100 laptop, which garnered a lot of buzz earlier this summer with its dual-screen design, is now available in the United States. But for a little notebook, it sure has a big price to pay. The clamshell-style computer boasts dual 7-inch diagonal multi-touch WSVGA displays with several different virtual keyboards. Thus, users can alternate between using the

E.KARTHICK 2ND CSE

W100 as an e-book reader or for productivity. With Wireless-N and Bluetooth 2.1 technology plus its handheld size, it's an incredibly portable product that seems most appropriate when traveling, either for business or leisure. Additionally, with the built-in webcam and microphone, you could turn it into one big Zack Morris-esque cell phone. Just a thought. Some of the other notable specs on the Libretto W100 include:

Intel Pentium U5400 processor Windows 7 Home Premium Integrated Intel HD graphics 2GB of DDR3 memory 62GB solid state drive Memcard reader

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C.PRADEEP RAJ KUMAR FINAL IT S.MOHAMMED SHAHID FINAL CSE

TOMB RAIDER It's time to become a careless teenager and forget to act one's age because

Biggest Games of 2012

which games are you eagerly waiting in this year? we gaze into the crystal ball to give you the 15 most anticipated game releases of 2012. it doesnt get any bigger than this. the world may as well end after we finish playing these titles

MASS EFFECT 3 You bet your bottom dollar that every single person who played

mass effect 1 and 2 is eagerly awaiting to see the curtain raised on the third installment of this epic sci-fi RPG, whose mere mention is enough to send pleasure waves through fans all over apart from finally encountering earth, the ME3 also ventures into the largely untested waters of online multiplayer mode, which is sure to put a smile on a lotta faces. What's more, you can import your ME1 and ME2 saved game files into ME3 to have a direct impact on the final chapter of the upcoming game. Can't wait? Me neither.

you know what, a new tomb raider game is arriving next year. Yes, you read it right. Come on, let's be honest- no female archeologist's as famous(or attractive) as Lara Croft, and no quest half as exciting than exploring ruins with lara bouncing all over the place. The upcoming release next year is the 9th installment of the game with no ties to the past tiles, giving the franchise a much-needed reboot. The game reportedly focuses on combat, has a skill system, and new game dynamics previously unseen in any tomb raider game. Oh please let this release tomorrow!

DARKSIDERS 2 Darksiders was a good adventure game, and the upcoming dark siders 2

STREET FIGHTER XTEKKEN Ever since the marvel vs. Capcom game out, we've been waiting for

something similar to happen with street fighter. And we're glad for what's coming next year. Capcom's street fighter meets namco's tekken in this crossover fighting game, where you can pit legendary fighters from both these independent game series against each other. It's going to be interesting as street fighter character supports 6 button system, while tekken heroes retain their 4 button control system.

is no different. I mean, the game is about playing as death, the lead horseman of apocalypse. How cool is that? THQ points at the following features to watch out for that includes action over completely new maps and terrain, and a host of NPCs that issue side quests. Be prepared to travel between heaven and hell and all things in between. It's time to choose your fate and die!

6 5
HITMAN:ABSOLUTION One of the most dangerous assassin in video game history is poised to return soon next year. Look forward to seeing agent 47 leaner,meaner and at his dangerous best like you've never seen him before. Not to give away too much of the plot, suffice to say the game has an engaging storyline and agent 47 has some new moves. His killer instincts are honed to such a level in absolution that he can literally transform any item at hand into a deadly weapon. Improved AI helps keep gamers engaged and we have no doubt the game's certain hit.

BIOSHOCK INFINITE The original bioshock had one of the best game endings, in our

opinion. We hope the excitement and intrigue twisted metal game- and there have continues in bioshock infinite, the 3rd game in been quite a few over the years- is pure the bioshock series. The game leaves rapture unadulterated fun. Since the game debuted and its submerged murkiness to leap for the back in 1995, twisted metal has been a heavens-yes, the upcoming game is set in a city demolition derby of sorts, the game's heavy suspended in air called Columbia. And the focus on vehicular combat. The upcoming game's story isn't directly related to bishock 1 chapter in the twisted metal series comes after or 2, adding an element of mystery to it. a decade and it promises quite a bit to keep Whatever the plot, a bioshock game isn't seasoned fans happy. Multiplayer combat complete without its uncanny and acute sense plays an important role supporting up to 4 of art and design which we all love, and for player split screen action and 16 players infinite, we're back to the early 1900's. online arena. Let the mayhem begin!

TWISTED MEDAL Ah, how we love this game! Any

WORLD OF WARCRAFT: The big kingpin of MMORPG's, blizzard's world of warcraft is

slated for a cool new expansion pack next year called mists of pandaria. It's a whole new continent, pandaria, and it raises the current level cap from 85 to 90. With new expansion comes a whole new race(pandaren) and class (monk). With mists of pandaria, wow's existing talent tree will be overhauled by a new tiered system. Oh and players won't be able to fly around in the game until they've reached the highest level. That's about it. All set for pandaria?

10 9
DOTA 2 You thought dota was good? Wait till you see dota 2 early next year. That pretty much sums up valve and dota's fan base in anticipation of the title. Dota 2 combines elements of strategy and RPG effectively to deliver a mesmerizing experience. We don't want to say a lot about the game, as close beta testing.

MAX PAYNE 3 It has been closed to eight years since the last max

payne game. And words can't describe the agonizing wait of fans looking forward to the next game in take two's adored max payne franchise. Sao Paulo in brazil is the city of choice, and max payne 3 begins approximately eight years after the second game. Controls are similar to GTA IV and red dead redemption with a cover system deployed.

11

BORDERLANDS 2 We loved borderlands and we're eagerly awaiting its

12

THE LAST GUARDIAN If you loved lco and shadow of the colossus, you can expect similar

sequel slated for next year. The game's a sci-fi FPS with elements of RPG(sounds like deus Exx.no?) set in a picturesque world. The sequel stick to four playing characters, although all of them new compared to the original. We love the game's cel-shaded cartoony graphics and borderlands 2 will have plenty of that and more. Improvements over the original feature improved AI with cover system, customizable weapons system, four-seat vehicles, and a dynamic quest system. We are waiting.

visual and gameplay treats from the last guardian, an upcoming third-person actionadventure/puzzle game. The game features a small boy and giant creature called trico, with the boy trying to escape the ruins of a gigantic castle. Controlling trico is tricky and quite difficult as he's more an animal than a conforming side-kick. it's Like training a pet and promises to be equally challenging and fun.

13

WARHAMMER40K: Fans of the warhammer 40k games who always wanted to slug it out online have a

14

METAL GEAR SOLID:RISING Announced at E3 2009, the clock is finally ticking out on this much

awaited installment of metal gear solid. You reprise the role of raiden in rising and the game boasts some cool features like dismembering enemies or cyborgs and taking on their body parts for ammunition, energy, etc the gameplay focuses on two key elements: sword-fighting and stealth. Apparently, rising incorporates a new game mechanic called free slicing mode for efficiently slicing enemies in any geometric plane. Definitely something more than what fruit ninja offers, yes. Can't wait, just can't.

good reason to celebrate. Dark millennium is a proper MMORPG that throws you into the deep end of a war-ridden star system with no time to waste. Expect to fight in battlegrounds of epic proportions, choosing between the forces of order and destruction. Players will be able to fully customize their characters and have a whole host of accessories to go with. Expect plenty of blood and gore, and battle cries go up. For the emperor!

15

DIABLO III Twenty years have passed since the three prime evils have been layed in the land of sanctuary, but not before baal, the lord of destruction

managed to corrupt the worldstone, the very object that hid the mortal realm

of sanctuary from heaven and hell. Mysteriously, Diablo, the lord of terror is set to once again. Are ye shakin' in yer boots? No? ye better ye! Okay, notwithstanding the initial negative response to a small preview, we still expect blizzard to wow us when the game releases next year. It's blizzard we're talking about and this is Diablo, so wake up.

@LEISURE
AMAZING FACTS ABOUT THE INTERNET
Marc Andreessen founded Netscape. In 1993, he had already developed Mosaic, the first Web browser with a GUI. It was once considered a letter in the English language. The Chinese call it a little mouse, Danes and Swedes call it 'elephant's trunk', Germans a spider monkey, and Italians a snail. Israelis pronounce it 'strudels' and the Czechs say 'rollmops's...What is it? The @ sign. In the Deep Web, the part of it not currently catalogued by search engines, public information said to be 500 times larger than on the WWW. The first search engine for Gopher files was called Veronica, created by the University of Nevada System Computing Services group. Did you know that the original URL of Yahoo was http://akebono.stanford.edu/ The testbed for the Internet's new addressing system, IPv6, is called the 6bone. The first Internet worm was created by Robert T.Morris, Jr, and attacked more than 6000 Internet hosts. Researchers consider that the first search engine was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage,a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

T.JAYANTHI 2ND IT

Google got its name from the mathematical figure googol, which denotes the number 'one followed by a hundred zeros'.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ANDROID

Android has been available as open source since 21 October 2008. The updates for Android are named after Pastries. Android was developed by Android Inc in 2003 by Andy Rubin and Rich Miner. The first phone to run on Android OS was HTC Dream and was released on 22 October 2008. The first publicly available application was the Snake game. As of July 2010 App Market has around 75,000 Android applications. As of July 2010 reports Android is getting activated in more than 2,00,000 phones daily. The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++.

ANBU SELVAM.P 2ND CSE

TECHSPOT
New 7 and 9-inch Kindle Fire models may be on the way Microsoft opening new retail stores soon, coming to Canada by year's end Google Wallet PIN vulnerable on rooted Android devices. Swagg Security hackers hit Foxconn, release usernames and passwords Google's cloud storage service 'Drive' to launch soon AMD releases Catalyst 12.2 "pre-certified" driver. Microsoft reimagined logo for Windows 8 is official. HTML 5 Gaming: Old Classics and Modern Titles You Can Play for Free. Philips 2012 TV line-up to offer dual-view gaming

WINDOWS8 FEATURES
It Runs On ARM Chips It Has a New Interface It Has a Tablet -Centric Multitouch Interface Its Developers Preview Is Available Now It Has Xbox Live Support It Has Built -In Cloud Features It Has an App Store It Has Enhanced Securit y

MUTHURAMALINGAM 1ST IT

S.SUGUMAR 1ST CSE

STAY SAFE ! STAY AWAY FROM GOOGLE !!! Google analytics :

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use on around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites. Another market share analysis claims that Google Analytics is used at around 49.95% of the top 1,000,000 websites. GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents. If your site sells products or services online, you can use Google Analytics e-commerce reporting to track sales activity and performance. RAMCHAND II YEAR CSE

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