LivePC

The brainchild of a faction of PhD graduates and their professor Dr. Monica Lam, all from the University of Stanford, is a virtual PC which they have tagged moka5. This is based on the platform of VMware Player and is available as freeware! Their objective was to radically evolve the consumer's experience of personal computing and simplify it and make it as easy and comfortable as watching television! Their research which has spanned five years has resulted in moka5 which is a platform that is apparently free of all troubles of security, maintenance and can run software without installations on the host system and simplify computing as far as possible for the end user. Although, there are many similar virtual PCs around, moka5 seems to have taken the lead in terms of the features, security and ease of use beating its competition hands down. If you don't believe us, try it out for yourself on www.moka5.com and get easy.

Cyber Sleuths

India's first regional cyber security and research centre was inaugurated in Chandigarh recently. This state-of-the-art organization called the Regional Cyber Security and Research Centre (RCSRC) is a joint project of Chandigarh Administration, Punjab Engineering College and NASSCOM and has been set up at the Punjab engineering College itself. The centre's mission will be to encourage, promote, facilitate, and execute interdisciplinary research in areas related to the nexus of the society and the digital world. It holds a lot of promise to cut down on cyber crime and its backing by the distinguished Board of Mentors from the IT industry, academia, and administration and defense services proves its mettle.

Closer look

Technology in sports has been constantly making groundbreaking equipment to take you as close to the sportsperson and their experiences across sports. With the craziest of angles and analysis technology, sport technology has been in the lead lately. Be it a game of cricket or extreme sports, bull fighting or river rafting, each sport has now found new insight in presentation thanks to miniature cameras which can be mounted just about anywhere. It's not novel to find cameras on the helmets of sky divers or on the headlight of extreme bikes to give you a thrilling perspective. This trend has been further enhanced with a new eye! Sports broadcasts could appear more realistic to TV viewers in the recent future.

A mini camera developed by the Fraunhofer-Institut for Integrierte Schaltungen can transmit receptions taken from the view of a Formula-1 racing driver or a ski jumper in HDTV quality, yes HDTV quality! With a size of 4x4x8 centimeters, the camera is small enough to find its place in the F1 cockpit or on top of a helmet and yet give an HD quality output. According to Stephan Gick, researcher at the Fraunhofer-Institut(IIS), this innovation has became successful with two main principles: The dissipation of the electronics and thus the heat generated was maintained very low for the mini casing and the highly integrated. All its camera settings can be controlled through the web -- because finally the sportsperson cannot be the cameraman as well!

Don't quite know and would not prefer where all inventors are planning or projecting to put wee little HD quality cameras but then again it's a boon!

Inkless Printing

Printing is on its way to be revolutionized and how! ZINK is a breakthrough technology which promises to utilize zero ink, yes NO ink at all! It generates the required color images and photos without using ink, ribbons or toner! The ZINK technology enables a new category of color printers and paper that work as an integrated system to print with a unique technique. The key to this process is the patented ZINK paper, an advanced composite material with dye crystals embedded inside and a protective polymer overcoat layer outside. Before printing, the embedded dye crystals are colorless, so ZINK paper looks like regular white photo paper.

The ZINK printer uses heat to activate and colorize these dye crystals. The printing process is now radically simple. Just add paper and press "print". The result is high quality, long-lasting, durable, and affordable images and no the paper is pretty affordable and highly durable! Because Zink doesn't use most of the components of normal printers it can be miniature in size and according to the claim on their website it will be portable and highly compatible with other consumer electronic devices making all of these capable of executing a print. So, this leaves the printer with only requirement of paper and you are through with the finest quality print! The advantages of ZINK include the compression of space because it does not use ink cartridges besides it is not affected by gravity! The ZINK printing process leaves no waste stream. The photo itself is the only artifact of the printing process. We are waiting and watching for now!

Google just got better

Recently, Google announced its critical first steps toward a universal search model that will offer users a more integrated and comprehensive way to search for and view information online. The company also introduced an updated homepage design with several new navigation features that make it faster and easier to users to find the information they are looking for. Google's vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for.

Google is also in the process of deploying a new technical infrastructure that will enable the search engine to handle the computationally intensive tasks required to produce universal search results. The new navigation includes dynamically generated links. For example, a search for "python" will now generate links to Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Groups, and Google Code, to let user know there is additional information on his or her query in each of those areas. Search seems to be getting more and more advanced and this is only going to make it much easier for us!

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