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Latest laptop Configuration you must be looking for

With technological changes taking place so fast, it doesnt take much time for latest technology to become late. Many people get confused while buying a laptop thinking of waiting for upcoming models or buy the current one available in the market. Well !!! as far as the configuration is concerned this is my suggestion : CPU-The latest CPU available in market is Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo . There is also AMD turion 64 bit dual core processor available which you can get at a cheaper price. The only thing you would have to compromise if you are buying a AMD Turion 2X64 processor will be the FSB ( front side bus ) and the L2 cache (512kb to 2mb in AMD ). I would suggest Intel’s Centrino Core 2 Duo processor. Well !!! announcements are already made of Intel’s extreme series laptop which will be available by September on a wide scale, also not to forget intel’s quad core processor. You might have heard about intel’s Santa Rosa Platform which will boost the core 2 duo processor’s FSB to around 800 MHZ. But be careful, many laptop’s I have seen with 800 MHZ fsb have just 2 MB CPU Cache. Santa Rosa is not widely available all over the world other than US. RAM-Why I suggest that you can go for the current Merom CPU i.e Centrino Core2 DUO with 667 MHZ FSB if you dont want to wait till September for Santa Rosa platform is because that FSB is the only difference between these processors with some extra power saving capabilities in Santa Rosa platform. Hence minute increase of FSB can very very well be compensated by increasing the RAM. The latest type of RAM available is DDR2 SD RAM with 667 MHZ speed optimal for Core 2DUO with 667 MHZ FSB . DDR3 ram will be available early next year ,and I am sure you are not gonna wait till then.So just satisfy your operating system with 2gb RAM. Moreover, many shopkeepers will try to lure you with 1GB DDR2 Ram (i.e 512 X 2 ) but just ask them to upgrade it to 2GB (1GB X 2) . Many laptops have only 2 RAM slots and hence upgrading to 2 GB will cost you high amount as many shopkeepers refuse to take the 512 mb RAM. Hence, try to get it done at the shop ( from where you are buying ) , by exchanging 512 X 2 Ram with 1GB single Stick RAM. Graphics Card Many people say that they dont want to use the laptops for playing games so they dont care whether a Graphics Card is present or not. Well !! as per my advice graphics card is must for any laptop as its not only used for playing games but rendering your videos etc also. Inbuilt Graphics chipset will share your RAM and wont be able to provide the optimal performance in many cases. You may feel bad at times when after spending so much on a laptop, you compromised on this. Well, two options are available in Laptop Graphics. 1. Nvidea 2. ATI Radeon Well !! look for nearly 256 MB or more dedicated memory graphics card. Dont get confused by Nvidea’s Turbo Cache and Ati’s Hypermemory concept. These have come into picture to reduce the cost of the graphics card and are synonym to technology where the graphics card also share the system memory i.e RAM.

World's biggest source of spam e-mails shut down

London:The world's most prolific source of spam e-mails an international network of virus-infected computers -- has been shut down in a series of coordinated raids by Microsoft and U.S. federal authorities. The Rustock botnet had for years generated billions of e-mails per day, promoting unlicensed online pharmacies and cut-price anti-impotence pills. A botnet is a collection of software agents that run autonomously and automatically. But early last week, security firms noticed that e-mail traffic from Rustock completely collapsed. The scale of the shutdown is unprecedented. A report last month by SecureWorks, a computer security firm, said Rustock was the world's biggest source of spam. It has now been revealed that Microsoft, backed by US marshals acting on a court order, seized servers that it's estimated covertly controlled almost a million Windows PCs. "We think this has been 100 percent effective," said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney at Microsoft's digital crimes unit. The criminals behind the spamming business were named in Microsoft's lawsuit only as "John Does 1-11". To get the court order, which empowered it to seize equipment and so "decapitate" the botnet, Microsoft alleged the "John Does" infringed its trademarks in some of their e-mails. "The reasons for this are due to the author's relentless development of stealth tactics," it said, referring to how Rustock was frequently updated to stay one step ahead of anti-virus packages.

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Robot system to test 10,000 chemicals for toxicity  Washington: A new high-speed robot screening system can test 10,000 different chemicals for potential toxicity. These chemicals include compounds found in industrial and consumer products, food additives and drugs. A thorough analysis of more than 200 public databases of chemicals and drugs used in the U.S. and abroad was conducted to select the initial 10,000 chemicals for testing, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) statement. Testing results will provide information useful for evaluating if these chemicals have the potential to disrupt human body processes enough to lead to adverse health effects. The system marks the beginning of a new phase of an ongoing collaboration, referred to as Tox21, that is working to protect human health by improving how chemicals are tested in the U.S. Tox21 has already screened more than 2,500 chemicals for potential toxicity, using robots and other innovative chemical screening technologies. The robot system, which is at the NIH Chemical Genomics Centre (NCGC) in Rockville, was purchased as part of the Tox21 collaboration. Tox21 was established in 2008 between the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Toxicology Program (NTP), the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the addition of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2010. "Tox21 has used robots to screen chemicals since 2008, but this new robotic system is dedicated to screening a much larger compound library," said NHGRI Director Eric Green. "Understanding the molecular basis of hazard is fundamental to the protection of human health and the environment," said Paul Anastas, assistant administrator of the EPA Office of Research and Development. A robot is a mechanical intelligent agent which can perform tasks on its own, or with guidance. The term robot can also apply to a virtual agent. In practice it is usually an electro-mechanical machine which is guided by computer or electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous or semi-autonomous and come in those two basic types: those which are used for research into human-like systems, such as ASIMO and TOPIO, as well as those into more defined and specific roles, such as Nano robots and Swarm robots; and helper robots which are used to make or move things or perform menial or dangerous tasks, such as Industrial robots or mobile or servicing robots. Another common characteristic is that, by its appearance or movements, a robot often conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own. When societies began developing nearly all production and effort was the result of human labour. As mechanical means of performing functions were discovered, and mechanics and complex mechanisms were developed, the need for human labour was reduced. Machinery was initially used for repetitive functions, such as lifting water and grinding grain. With technological advances more complex machines were slowly developed, such as those invented by Hero of Alexandria in the 4th century BC, and the first half of the second millennium AD, such as the Automata of Al Jazari in the 10th century AD. They were not widely adopted as human labour, particularly slave labour, was still inexpensive compared to the capital-intensive machines. Men such as Leonardo Da Vinci in 1495 through to Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739, as well as rediscovering the Greek engineering methods, have made plans for and built automata and robots leading to books of designs such as the Japanese Karakuri zui (Illustrated Machinery) in 1796. As mechanical techniques developed through the Industrial age we find more practical applications such as Nikola Tesla in 1898, who designed a radio-controlled torpedo, and the Westinghouse Electric Corporation creation of Televox in 1926. From here we also find a more android development as designers tried to mimic more human-like features including designs such as those of biologist Makoto Nishimura in 1929 and his creation Gakutensoku, which cried and changed its facial expressions, and the more crude Elektro from Westinghouse in 1938.

TECHNOLOGY “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Intel completes $ 7.68 bn buyout of McAfee  The world’s largest chip-maker, Intel Corp, today announced the completion of its $ 7.68 billion acquisition of security software company McAfee. ”... The acquisition of McAfee Inc is complete,” the company said in a statement. Under the terms of the agreement, McAfee would become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel and would continue to develop and sell security products and services under its own brand. Both the companies have a good presence in India. In August last year, Intel said it will acquire McAfee in an all-cash deal worth $ 7.68 billion that will bolster the chip-maker’s computing portfolio, especially in terms of wireless mobility offerings. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel, McAfee will be under Intel’s Software and Services Group. The group is managed by Intel Senior Vice-President and General Manager Renee James. “McAfee plan to bring the first fruits of their strategic partnership to market later this year, with the intent of tackling security and the pervasive nature of computing threats in an entirely new way,” Intel said. McAfee, which employs about 6,100 employees, offers a suite of software-related security solutions, including McAfee Antivirus and McAfee Firewall, with many products targeted at mobile devices such as smart phones.

 'Anti-laser' built for first time

   An anti-laser – which absorbs light rather than emitting it – has been built for the first time.

A laser shines by producing a cascade of photons that bounce around inside a light-amplifying material before exiting from one or both ends. In 2010, Douglas Stone at Yale University and colleagues devised a way to reverse the process, with a material that absorbs rather than amplifies light.

The researchers calculated that if they used a light-absorbing material like silicon, then at certain wavelengths, two identical laser beams shone directly at each other would cancel out inside the material.

Now, a team led by Hui Cao of Yale has done just that using a 110-micrometre-wide slab of silicon.

The researchers chose the wavelength of the laser light so that light waves hitting the outside of the slab from the laser beams were in just the right phase with the waves transmitted through the material to trap the light inside the slab.

The silicon absorbed 99.4 per cent of near-infrared light with a wavelength of 998.5 nanometres, turning it into heat. "Theory and experiment matched very well," says Stone. "We couldn't have expected to do any better."

Future computers may use light to transmit signals efficiently between their chip processors. Anti-lasers could be used to modulate the intensity of that light, or to convert light signals into electrical form for on-chip processing, the researchers say.More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world's first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiologyConventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called "gain medium," usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light -- light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

Last summer, Yale physicist A. Douglas Stone and his team published a study explaining the theory behind an anti-laser, demonstrating that such a device could be built using silicon, the most common semiconductor material. But it wasn't until now, after joining forces with the experimental group of his colleague Hui Cao, that the team actually built a functioning anti-laser, which they call a coherent perfect absorber (CPA).

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Incredible cardboard sculptures created by algorithms

 The latest 3D printers can build flutes, thumbs and even themselves, but some shapes are still beyond the reach of current technology. For amazingly detailed sculptures like the ones above, you need to turn to more advanced materials - like cardboard.

These are just two of many sculptures created by Michael Hansmeyer, an architect and programmer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. To make these, Hansmeyer started with a computer model of a simple Greek column and ran it through a subdivision algorithm which repeatedly splits the surface, creating more detail with each iteration.

The result is a 3D model with between 8 and 16 million faces, but 3D printers can only handle half a million, so Hansmeyer needed an alternative solution to transform his creations from virtual to physical reality. He sliced the column into 2700 pieces and used a laser cutter to create each slice from 1mm-thick cardboard, then reconstructed the column by layering the slices together with a solid wooden core. The whole process only cost $1500 and took about 15 hours, with three laser cutters working in parallel.
Incredible cardboard sculptures created by algorithmsNew Scientist (blog)To make these, Hansmeyer started with a computer model of a simple Greek column and ran it through a subdivision algorithm which repeatedly splits the surface, creating more detail with each iteration. The result is a 3D model with between 8 and 16 …and more »

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Robots as chefs in Chinese restaurant 

 Shanghai: Visitors to a fast-food restaurant in Shanghai may be pleasantly surprised when they are served food cooked by two robot chefs.

The robot chefs at the Wishdoing restaurant on Shanghai's Nanjing Road can cook delicious Chinese cuisine within three minutes. They can serve customers eight popular dishes, including "crowd-puller dishes" like Kung Pao chicken, spicy diced chicken with peanuts and Mapo Tofu, bean curd with chilli sauce. The workers only have to press buttons on the robots to choose a dish and they will display the name of the ingredients and their quantities, the Shanghai Daily reported.

In appearance, the robots look like huge kitchen surfaces equipped with iron pots.

It only takes three minutes for a robot to clean the pot from a previous meal, stir the ingredients, finish cooking and then move the food onto a plate for serving.

Although the robots cost 200,000 yuan ($30,350) each, the fast food chain is planning to install them in all of its 100 outlets across the country, said an official surnamed Ma, working with the restaurant's parent company, Shanghai Qi Ding Food Development Co.

The robots were earlier displayed at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 and attracted a lot of attention, Ma said.

"We believe the cooking robots will become a trend in the future for the fast food industry as they guarantee low-carbon emission, food safety and standard tastes that don't change from one outlet to another."

The coming of the robots has, however, raised concerns among some chefs, who are worried they could lose the jobs.

But Ma said the concern was totally unnecessary.

"The robot chefs will be one part of the restaurant, but it doesn't mean that we would abandon traditional cooking methods."