Afsath gave us a good review. The news on
- super computer by IBM
Yet another some details on IBM supercomputer
The computer, called Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative White, or ASCI White, covers 9,920 square feet of floor space, equal to two NBA basketball courts, and weighs 106 tons. It is able to perform 12.3 trillion operations per second, three times faster than the next-fastest computer.In creating ASCI White, IBM exceeded one of the most venerable axioms of computing, Moore's Law.
Good work my dear students. Too happy to see that you are giving efforts..
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Road Runner- Latest Super Computer
$120-million supercomputer crowned the fastest around
Roadrunner was always expected to be fast out of the blocks. And after a test run one night in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, its creators are far from disappointed.
Built from microchips originally destined for games consoles, Roadrunner is the world’s latest supercomputer. On June 9, it was officially crowned the fastest computer around, having performed a record million billion calculations per second.
As an indication of how fast this is, manufacturers explained that if six billion people were to do one sum a second on calculator, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner could do in a day. The world’s first supercomputer, the Cray 1 built in the mid-1970s, would take 1,500 years to finish a calculation that Roadrunner would perform in two hours.
The $120-million supercomputer was named after New Mexico’s state bird, and is more than twice as fast as the previous record holder, another IBM machine called Blue Gene.
By harnessing the power of 116,640 processors working in concert, Roadrunner surpassed a milestone in computing power, to enter a new era of what those familiar with such things call petaflop computing. Peta means a million billion, while a flop is a type of calculation.
“We had teams working around the clock,” said IBM’s Kevin Roark. “Once they got it hooked up, it was just a couple of days before they broke the record. Everyone here is ecstatic. There were people who doubted it was even possible.” The record was broken at 3.30 a.m. on May 26.
Next month the machine will become the American military’s latest toy, when it is installed, along with 57 miles of fibre optic cable, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb.
For six months, the computer will direct its formidable processing power at scientific problems. It will analyse how HIV vaccines should best be administered, and map the region of the human brain that governs vision.
In another series of tests, it will churn out data on whether firing laser beams into plasmas will trigger nuclear fusion, which advocates believe could one day bring us almost limitless cheap energy. Other projects will focus on testing and improving the accuracy of climate change models.
Advanced Secure Digital Cheques
Over 900 million corporate cheques are issued each year within the UK. Cheques remain a favoured method of payment due to the financial control, flexibility and ease of use they offer.
Advanced Secure Digital cheques
Digital Cheques is a secure payment system created for the issue and control of company cheque payments.
Key features of the system include:
• Maximum cheque security
• Efficient cheque issuing
• Multi-bank account capability
• Reduced stock holding
• Eliminated obsolescence
Typical Cheque Systems
Systems for the issue of corporate cheques have been in use for many years and largely remain unchanged to this day. As a result the security, control and efficiency they provide is often limited due to to the outdated technology in use.
A typical cheque issuing process
This typical process illustrated below involves many labour intensive and time consuming tasks when issuing corporate cheques. The potential for fraud is increased due to the complexity and manual nature of the operation.
A typical cheque issuing process
Advanced Secure Digital Cheques System
Advanced Secure Digital Cheques has been designed as the Chip and Pin solution for corporate cheques. It replaces the conventional multi-step cheque issuing process with a digital integrated system that produces corporate cheques, utilising secure lased technology. This dramatically increases security and efficiency of the payment process.
Digital Cheques is a Windows based system, password protected for security. system capabilities let you define different user permisions, providing increased control by assisting the separation of duties. This allows purchase ledger preparation, cheque print approval, signature application and audit reporting to be carried out, if required by different people.
Full customisation, interfacing with your current accounting package and training is provided by Advanced Secure.
Advanced Secure Digital Cheques Process
Advanced Secure Laserprotect cheques are placed in the lockable printer tray. The batch of cheques is then imported from the accounting package, the audit report is approved, swipe cards authourise signature release and cheques are printed.
What is the difference between a call centre and a BPO organisation?
A Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) organisation is responsible for performing a process or a part of a process of another business organisation; outsourcing is done to save on costs or gain in productivity.
A call centre performs that part of a client's business which involves handling telephone calls. A call centre, for example, might handle customer complaints coming in over a telephone.
Thus, a call centre can be considered a BPO organisation. The converse is, however, not true because there exist BPO organisations, such as medical transcription agencies, which handle their business through websites, and do not process any telephone calls on behalf of their clients.
-> These two terms are very often confused to be the same in India. Because, most of BPOs India deal with the call centres only. In fact, a call centre may be or may not be the part of BPO. If an organisation does not outsource it's operation of call centre, on the contrary it handles it itself, the call centre won't be called a part of BPO.
Laptop or PDA
->Many mobile office professionals debate whether they should bring both their laptop and PDA on business trips or just one mobile gadget. Keeping in mind what the purpose of your business trip is and what work you hope to accomplish will aid you in your decision.
->Taking Your PDA
Pros
* Instant on convenience
* Lightweight
* No space required for use
* Longer battery life
* Easier to maintain privacy of date being accessed or entered
* Compact size makes it less of a target for thieves
Cons
* Small size can be awkward for people with large hands trying to enter data quickly
* Inputting large amounts of data can be tedious
* Difficult and expensive to add wireless components after purchase
* May have to commit to a wireless carrier at time of purchase
* Special software is required and some can only be downloaded to a laptop and then transferred
* Software is not always compatible with company programs
Each gadget has its fair balance of Pros and Cons which can make the decision of which gadget to pack even more difficult.
My solution based on experience and keeping in mind the axiom "Be Prepared" is to pack both gadgets. While you might not always have need for your laptop during a business meeting or conference, it is good to know that information you need can be easily accessed from it as required. With your PDA, given it's compactness, why not take it?
During a business meeting or conference it's much easier to use your PDA to add important data and note of importance.
The added benefit of having both mobile gadgets available, is that if the worst happens and one should fail, you still have the other gadget available and ready to be put to use.
What is M-Commerce?
Multiple Definitions
There is no precise definition for mobile commerce or mobile e-commerce. Every analyst, vendor and trade magazine appears to have a slightly different interpretation of the term. In fact, there appears to be a consensus now on the meaning of its big brother "e-commerce or e-business" which came first. Perhaps, in another six months or a year, we would come to a similar consensus on m-commerce. Meanwhile, here are a few sample definitions:
"M-Commerce is the use of mobile devices to communicate, inform transact and entertain using text and data via a connection to public and private networks." (Lehman Brothers)
"The core of mobile e-commerce is the use of a terminal (telephone, PDA, PC device, or custom terminal) and public mobile network (necessary but not sufficient) to access information and conduct transactions that result in the transfer of value in exchange for information, services or goods." (Ovum)
"Business-to-consumer transactions conducted from a mobile device." (J.P. Morgan)
"E-Commerce over mobile devices." (Robinson-Humphreys)
"Mobile Commerce refers to any transaction with monetary value that is conducted via a mobile telecommunications network." (Durlacher)
"The use of mobile handheld devices to communicate, interact via an always-on high-speed connection to the Internet." (Forrester)
"The use of wireless technologies to provide convenient personalized and location-based services to your customers, employees and partners." (Mobilocity)
MobileInfo.com’s Definition
MobileInfo.com defines is closer to that of Ovum. We define m-commerce as "any electronic transaction or information interaction conducted using a mobile device and mobile networks (wireless or switched public network) that leads to transfer of real or perceived value in exchange for information, services or goods. "
Typical examples of m-commerce are:
* Purchasing airline tickets
* Purchasing movie tickets
* Restaurant booking and reservation
* Hotel booking and reservation
XML or HTML
So is XML better?
To be honest this question has no real answer: XML is a meta language, meaning a language for defining other languages, while HTML by itself is a more or less well-defined language. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, which is actually a bit of a misnomer as it should actually mean extensible Meta Language. The easiest way to understand the difference is to note that XML by itself does not define any tags, it only describes a way of defining your own set of tags and attributes, hence the name extensible. HTML in contrast has a fixed set of tags, and their meaning is defined in the W3C standards specifications or the implementation of a particular browser, whichever came first. So in directly comparing XML and HTML one would compare apples and oranges.
There are many good things to be said about HTML:
* It is relatively simple, therefore quick and easy to learn.
* It is now pervasive in the Internet space, not least because of its simplicity.
* It can be viewed with minimal client requirements, namely a browser.
* It is well suited for describing the visual appearance of a human-readable document, including text and images.
But there are also some shortcomings:
* It mixes data structure, e.g. the articles in the shopping cart in our example above, with presentation instructions such as a table border of one pixel width, and a row background color of red.
* It does not identify the data elements, so the information that pens and pencils are articles, and that 3.99 and 2.95 are their respective prices, is lost.
* It uses a fixed set of well-defined tags, it is not extensible to allow for user-defined tags. There are no tags for describing vector graphics in HTML, for example.
* It is good enough for humans, i.e. to be displayed in a browser, but not good enough for use by machines: Could you easily write a program to calculate the total order price for our shopping cart above?
System Development
Once upon a time, software development consisted of a programmer writing code to solve a problem or automate a procedure. Nowadays, systems are so big and complex that teams of architects, analysts, programmers, testers and users must work together to create the millions of lines of custom-written code that drive our enterprises.
To manage this, a number of system development life cycle (SDLC) models have been created: waterfall, fountain, spiral, build and fix, rapid prototyping, incremental, and synchronize and stabilize.
The oldest of these, and the best known, is the waterfall: a sequence of stages in which the output of each stage becomes the input for the next. These stages can be characterized and divided up in different ways, including the following:
* Project planning, feasibility study: Establishes a high-level view of the intended project and determines its goals.
* Systems analysis, requirements definition: Refines project goals into defined functions and operation of the intended application. Analyzes end-user information needs.
* Systems design:
Describes desired features and operations in detail, including screen layouts, business rules, process diagrams, pseudocode and other documentation.
* Implementation:
The real code is written here.
* Integration and testing:
Brings all the pieces together into a special testing environment, then checks for errors, bugs and interoperability.
* Acceptance, installation, deployment:
The final stage of initial development, where the software is put into production and runs actual business.
* Maintenance:
What happens during the rest of the software's life: changes, correction, additions, moves to a different computing platform and more. This, the least glamorous and perhaps most important step of all, goes on seemingly forever.
GSM Vs CDMA
In cellular service there are two main competing network technologies: Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA).
Data Transfer Speed: With the advent of cellular phones doing double and triple duty as streaming video devices, podcast receivers and email devices, speed is important to those who use the phone for more than making calls. CDMA has been traditionally faster than GSM, though both technologies continue to rapidly leapfrog along this path. Both boast "3G" standards, or 3rd generation technologies.
The GSM Association is an international organization founded in 1987, dedicated to providing, developing, and overseeing the worldwide wireless standard of GSM. CDMA, a proprietary standard designed by Qualcomm in the United States, has been the dominant network standard for North America and parts of Asia. However, GSM networks continue to make inroads in the United States, as CDMA networks make progress in other parts of the world. There are camps on both sides that firmly believe either GSM or CDMA architecture is superior to the other.
In the beginning, GSM was in fact superior. It had more services and allowed more data transfer. But CDMA, facing the advantages of the competitor standard, soon delivered the same features found on GSM. Nowadays, it is not possible to say that GSM services are better than CDMA. Multimedia messages, video, high-speed Internet access, digital camera and even PDA function are some of the features we can found on both technologies. The new CDMA 1XRTT technology, which previews what G3 cell phones will bring, is more advanced than EDGE, technology from the beginning of 3G generation, allowing higher transfer rates.
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