How Touch Screen Works?

Touch-screen monitors have become more and more commonplace as their price has steadily dropped over the past decade. There are three basic systems that are used to recognize a person's touch:

• Resistive
• Capacitive
• Surface acoustic wave

The resistive system consists of a normal glass panel that is covered with a conductive and a resistive metallic layer. These two layers are held apart by spacers, and a scratch-resistant layer is placed on top of the whole setup. An electrical current runs through the two layers while the monitor is operational. When a user touches the screen, the two layers make contact in that exact spot. The change in the electrical field is noted and the coordinates of the point of contact are calculated by the computer. Once the coordinates are known, a special driver translates the touch into something that the operating system can understand, much as a computer mouse driver translates a mouse's movements into a click or a drag.

In the capacitive system, a layer that stores electrical charge is placed on the glass panel of the monitor. When a user touches the monitor with his or her finger, some of the charge is transferred to the user, so the charge on the capacitive layer decreases. This decrease is measured in circuits located at each corner of the monitor. The computer calculates, from the relative differences in charge at each corner, exactly where the touch event took place and then relays that information to the touch-screen driver software. One advantage that the capacitive system has over the resistive system is that it transmits almost 90 percent of the light  from the monitor, whereas the resistive system only transmits about 75 percent. This gives the capacitive system a much clearer picture than the resistive system.

On the monitor of a surface acoustic wave system, two transducers (one receiving and one sending) are placed along the x and y axes of the monitor's glass plate. Also placed on the glass are reflectors -- they reflect an electrical signal sent from one transducer to the other. The receiving transducer is able to tell if the wave has been disturbed by a touch event at any instant, and can locate it accordingly. The wave setup has no metallic layers on the screen, allowing for 100-percent light throughput and perfect image clarity. This makes the surface acoustic wave system best for displaying detailed graphics (both other systems have significant degradation in clarity).

Another area in which the systems differ is in which stimuli will register as a touch event. A resistive system registers a touch as long as the two layers make contact, which means that it doesn't matter if you touch it with your finger or a rubber ball. A capacitive system, on the other hand, must have a conductive input, usually your finger, in order to register a touch. The surface acoustic wave system works much like the resistive system, allowing a touch with almost any object -- except hard and small objects like a pen tip.

As far as price, the resistive system is the cheapest; its clarity is the lowest of the three, and its layers can be damaged by sharp objects. The surface acoustic wave setup is usually the most expensive.

source: www.howstuffworks.com

Apple MacBook Airs Vs Ultrabooks: what are major differences

Ultrabooks are creating waves in tech markets. Even the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show was dominated by lots of fresh Ultrabooks from various computer makers. Apple was the first computer maker that started slim revolution in laptops with its MacBook Airs in 2008. Later, Intel coined up the concept of Ultrabooks, which are notebooks with Intel’s high-performing 2nd gen Core i-series CPUs, thin and lightweight body and SSD storage options.

Over the last several months, almost all leading computer makers have launched Ultrabooks that comply with the standards set by Intel. Asus, Acer, Samsung, Toshiba Lenovo, HP and Dell are some of those Ultrabook makers. Here we compare the new Windows-based Ultrabooks with Apple’s MacBook Airs, which come in two screen sizes 11-inch and 13-inch.

Intel Core processors
Most of new Ultrabooks, which were announced at CES 2012, highlight Intel’s third generation Core i-Series Ivy Bridge processors. MacBook Airs, which were upgraded last year, run on Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors. The new Intel processor technology provides 30 percent better graphic performance and 20 percent better processor performance compared with the Sandy Bridge processors. In addition, the new processors bring USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0 standard support to Ultrabooks. Apple MacBook Air falls short to Ultrabooks here; however, Apple may soon upgrade its flagship notebooks with the Ivy Bridge processors.

Affordable prices
There is a huge variety of Ultrabooks out in stores. Various tech makers have launched their own products and so you can find Ultrabooks with different price tags. Models like Acer Aspire S3, Toshiba Portege Z835-P330 and many others come for a price under $1000. It is when Apple sells its MacBook Air’s higher end version for $1,299. It is a big threat for the Cupertino technology maker and it will be forced to cut its price tags in future.

Windows 8
All upcoming Ultrabooks will run Microsoft Windows 8, which is touted as the most advanced version of Windows operating system. Windows 8 is Microsoft’s first unified Windows version, which will support both a tablet and notebook. The new Windows 8 is also touch-enabled and has a tremendous Metro-style interface. A state-of-the-art Windows App Store will add into the strength of Windows 8. Meanwhile, MacBook Airs run Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple’s latest Mac OS version.

Long battery life
Intel’s Ultrabook guidelines request tech makers for a back up of five hours of battery life for their notebooks. In fact, this battery life standard seems to have set by the performance MacBook Air has been offering. Whatever, many of high end forthcoming and available Ultrabooks offer long battery life than a MacBook Air.

Storage capacity
It is yet another area Ultrabooks have simply surpassed the levels set by Apple MacBook Air. You have 128GB of SSD with a Core i5 CPU version of MacBook Air. Meanwhile, many Ultrabooks come with additional hard drives besides SSDs for enhanced storage. Some devices also provide better SSD storage itself.

Portability
MacBook Airs might be the thinnest and lightest notebooks we had for a long time. But the Ultrabooks revolution has brought up many slimmest notebooks from many manufactures. Moreover, some Ultrabooks come with less weight and instant on technology to compete with MacBook Airs in almost all aspects.

What others say?
PCMag’s Brian Westover, comparing the Ultrabooks with Apple MacBook Air, says that even the first flock of Ultrabooks could hoist critical threat to MacBook Airs.

“There are certainly compelling reasons not to dismiss the Apple MacBook Air, but when all things are taken into consideration, the first crop of Ultrabooks makes a strong showing and gives the Apple MacBook Air a run for its money.”

On the other hand, Craig Simms of CNet says MacBook Air seems to be the favorite and best notebook we can find on market even it is filled with lots of svelte notebooks.

“So which would we go for? It’s still the MacBook Air, despite all the new svelte laptops vying for the crown. The combination of usability, build quality and performance ensures it’s still our favourite thin and light laptop.”

Sum-up
It is now up to you to decide whether you want an Ultrabook or Apple MacBook Air. Indeed, as far as performance, thinness, battery life and price are considered, we have lots of better Ultrabook options in stores rather than MacBook Airs.

source:http://nvonews.com/

Consume Less Energy With Blade Servers

In this extremely competitive market, well-informed business owners know that reducing power consumption is a smart and environmentally friendly way to cut operating expenses without reducing product quality or employee output. Switching IT processing to a Dell Blade system can save money while increasing productivity.

Improved Design

Traditional rack servers bundle components into individual cabinets along with separate energy consuming devices like graphics cards and keyboards. Each server requires a power source and extensive cabling and patching. A single optimized blade system can replace an entire room of rack servers and operate from a solitary source of power. The innovative design improves the effectiveness of internal fans and cooling systems, reducing current draw by as much as 65 percent for a fully loaded blade chassis over similarly configured rack systems. Since a single cabinet houses an entire block of servers, the need for external cooling systems or “cold rooms” drops as well.

Virtualization

Server virtualization improves power consumption by reducing the hardware requirements of businesses and institutions. A blade server can comfortably maintain information and applications that were formerly housed in a dozen or more rack servers. Standard servers that run only one application often operate at or below 20 percent capacity. Blade systems maximize efficiency by ensuring that each server component is working to its full capability. By allowing systems and applications to network freely between servers, blade systems increase productivity and eliminate unused or underutilized CPU storage space. Data transfers easily between machines. Once configured, individual components can be removed, repaired and/or replaced while the system is fully operating, decreasing the need for shutdowns.

Increased IT Performance

While utilizing blade servers increases the energy efficiency of your computer operations, they also reduce the energy expended by your IT personnel. Blade systems are easy to install, easy to manage and easy to maintain. Switching to a virtualized blade server limits end user responsibility, employee calls to IT, and the resulting time consumed in solving simple operator errors. Since they successfully integrate interfaces among many servers, blade systems also reduce the time spent in updating or installing new software and in reconfiguring applications.

Once employed exclusively by large corporations, small and mid-sized businesses are embracing new technology to become more environmentally friendly while increasing productivity and cutting costs. Dell blade servers can take your business to a higher level and a bite out of your utility bill.

source:http://www.techpark.net

Cloud Hosting for ZEROES

What is cloud hosting?

If you run a website, there are two kinds of cloud computing you might have heard about: cloud servers and cloud-based content delivery networks (CDNs). What are they, how do they work, and what benefits do they bring?

Cloud servers

Traditionally, web hosting came in two flavors: high-cost managed hosting, in which you have your own private server (an actual computer!) dedicated to running only your website and its applications, and low-cost shared hosting, where your site and apps run on a large server with a number of other sites operated by other people. Now there's a third option, widely marketed as cloud hosting in which your site runs on a virtual server somewhere up in the cloud; depending on how it's set up, a cloud server might be an actual computer, but it's just as likely to be a chunk of a much bigger machine—as with other kinds of cloud computing, the point is that it shouldn't matter either way to you as an end user. Rackspace's Cloud Servers, Liquid Web's Storm on Demand, and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are three examples of this kind of cloud hosting—and there are many more.

An example cloud server

So what's a cloud server like in practice? It's relatively easy to sign up to cloud services and see for yourself. With Storm on Demand, one of the cloud services I've used, you simply create a billing account and then tick the kind of server you want from a list of common examples (running from 1GB memory and 1CPU up to 96GB memory and 32 CPUs). Then you tick the "server image" (essentially the software you want on the server at startup, including the operating system) and specify whether you want a managed or self-managed server. Finally, you specify whether you want backups of your data and how you'll pay for bandwidth (either in large, specified blocks of GB or per GB used). When that's all done, you click to create the server and it's all "built" for you, on the fly, in a matter of minutes.

You can scale up or down any of the parameters you've chosen at any time (so at a time of peak demand—an end-of-season sale, perhaps—you could double or triple the power of your machine for a week or two before scaling back down again when traffic returns to normal).

Once the server's created, you can configure it in the usual way (just like a physical server) with software like WHM and cPanel—or however you wish. If you decide you no longer want your server you can destroy it just as easily, and you simply pay for what you've used (an hourly rate for the server and a per GB rate for the bandwidth). It's extremely easy to use. Even with only previous experience of shared hosting and no previous experience of WHM whatsoever, I had this website up and running on a Storm cloud server in a couple of hours.

Photos: Liquid Web's Storm on Demand allows you to set up a cloud server in a matter of minutes, simply by ticking a few boxes. Every aspect of the service is pay-as-you-go. It's easy to use even if you have little or no experience of setting up or managing dedicated servers.

Cloud servers or virtual servers?

How do cloud servers work? The important thing to remember is that "cloud server" is essentially a marketing term and not a technical description or explanation. Hosting products described as "cloud servers" are generally virtual slices of large, physical servers running what's called virtualization software(the most common types being VMware® and Xen® hypervisor for Linux and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ for Windows). In other words, they are effectively "virtual servers" (entirely independent virtual machines) running on a real, physical server. How is that different from shared hosting? The virtual servers are essentially independent of one another (though they do use the same processors and memory), so you're not at risk from other people's applications or websites. You have full root access to your virtual server (unlike on shared hosting, where different users' files are simply subdirectories of a single server running a single operating system), and you can reboot or reimage, as you wish—you can even run entirely different operating systems on the same physical server. The main benefit of using virtualization is reducing the number of physical servers you have to buy and manage. However, that doesn't necessarily translate into the cost savings you might expect because support costs may be higher and you may still need multiple software licenses for each virtual server.

Cloud-based content delivery networks (CDNs)

Your website can benefit hugely from cloud computing even if you don't want to migrate it to a cloud server. Information-rich sites like this one, with a lot of static content, typically use over 90 percent of their bandwidth serving up images (and other media) and CSS files that probably don't change from one month to the next. With traffic split equally between Europe, America, and Asia, there's no easy way to decide where to locate your main server: wherever you choose, some users will benefit and others will lose out. But putting the static content on a content delivery network (CDN) , dispersed across the cloud, will benefit everyone. Simply speaking, a CDN makes multiple copies of your static files and stores them at key "edge locations" around the world so that different users in different continents receive whichever files are nearest (and therefore quickest to download).

How do you set up a CDN in practice?

Suppose you want to speed up your website by moving all your images on to a CDN. You can sign up for a pay-as-go CDN in a matter of minutes (Amazon's Cloudfront and Rackspace Cloud Files are two popular, instant options, but there are plenty of others). Once you've sorted out the billing, you simply upload your files (in a similar way to using FTP) and you'll receive a web address (such as abcdefg123456789.cloudservice.whatever) that you can use to link to them. You can either use this address explicitly (referring to it directly in your IMG tags) or (more sensibly) refer to it through a CNAME (effectively a DNS alias) based on your own domain name. When people download your pages, the images are no longer pulled from your main server but from one of the edge locations around the world—ideally one that's geographically close to where they happen to be.

How does it work behind the scenes? It's easy to see if you do a DNS lookup for whatever domain name you're using for your CDN. Instead of a single IP address, you'll find the name resolves to different IP addresses in different parts of the world. In other words, the files resolve to a different IP address depending on where the end user happens to be. So for a person on the West Coast of the United States, abcdefg123456789.cloudservice.whatever might resolve to a server in Mountain View, California, while for a user in Europe, the same domain might resolve to a server physically located in Paris, France or London, England.

Pros and cons? There is almost always a significant performance boost from moving to a CDN, but if you're paying a fixed-price for your web hosting (or server) bandwidth, it's probably going to work out as an extra cost. CDNs rely on your files being copied, periodically, from the central server where you upload them to the edge locations around the world where they're served to users and typically cached for anything from a few days to several weeks or more (you can generally specify the cache expiry time)—so file management and updating can sometimes be a problem. For example, suppose you set a 30-day cache on your main CSS file but suddenly want to change the way some aspect of your site is presented. You can either upload a new CSS file and wait up to 30 days for all the edge locations to reflect the change or rename your CSS file (and all the pages that reference it), then upload new versions. Either way, you lose a certain amount of flexibility in file management and it's important to remember that different users in different locations may see different versions of the same file for a period of time. That's why CDNs work best for static (rarely changing) content.

Worth a go?

One of the best things about cloud services is that they're generally pay-as-you-go—so it's very easy to try them out, at relatively little cost, and see what difference they make.

2012 Gadgets

LYTRO CAMERAS

Entry-levels, SLRs, DSLRs, digicams, Micro Four Thirds – there's a lot of hullaballoo around the fancy cameras out there, but there might just be one device that could put an end to it all – the Lytro.

This small rectangular camera is made of anodised aluminium, making it lightweight yet sturdy. The USP of Lytro is the fact that it lets you change the focus of the picture after you click it.

And you can do this days, weeks or even years after they were shot. There is no conventional delay caused by the lens auto-focusing when you press the shutter button. The Lytro's compact design is driven by its 8x optical zoom lens, which features a constant f/2 aperture.

By using all of the available light in a scene, the Lytro performs well in lowlight environments without the use of a flash. And who wouldn't want this camera in their backpack when it weighs just about 220grams.

The Lytro is available in both 8GB and 16GB models, storing 350 and 750 pictures respectively.

NINTENDO WII U

You might already know what you want from Santa next Christmas - the next from the Nintendo stable is the ‘Wii U'.

This will be the first gaming console from Nintendo to deliver 1080p high-def graphics. The controller boasts a 6.2-inch touchscreen and a stylus to work on it.

The display on the controller will not support multi-touch, however, there are a host of sensors installed in it such as a gyroscope and accelerometer. The unit also has a built-in microphone, speakers, and a camera.

The console uses SD cards and flash memory to load and save games and doesn't come with a hard drive.

A preliminary list of games compatible with the Wii U is already out and includes some exciting names - Super Mario, the Legend of Zelda – Skyward Sword, Luigi's Mansion 2 and Kid Icarus: Uprising.

SMART GARMENTS

The concept of smartphones getting ‘smarter' sounds a little overdone. How about your shirt getting a new brain or two? Companies like Ultra Armor, that specialises in sports gear and clothing, has an ace up its sleeve. It has produced the Ultra Armor E39, a shirt that can track your athletic abilities.

The E39 tracks your biometric signals and transfers it to the ‘heart' of the shirt. The ‘heart' is a Physiological Status Monitor (PSM) technology, which the US Special Forces and connected health enthusiasts have already signed up for.

WINDOWS 8

By now, we've all seen the numerous screen grabs from the developer's version of Windows 8.

Not only does it look bright and enticing, it already has a couple of OEMs swearing by the Windows 8 experience. The Metro-style app, tiled on the homescreen make for an interesting interface and gives you updates on almost anything you want, right on the homescreen.

You'll have an exclusive Windows Store where you can download these Metro-style apps from. A major plus is the freedom to sign in through one's Windows Live account and not just a localised user profile. This means you will still have the same personalised settings and files on multiple devices running on the Windows 8 OS.

The latest buzzword around Windows 8 is ‘Picture Passwords'. The official blog says the interactive picture password will work in two ways. One, you get to choose a picture you like and a preset gesture on it. So if I have a picture of my pup, I can draw a circle or a heart around his face to unlock my Windows 8 tablet. How cute is that!

APPLE IPAD 3

The first Apple iPad was a gamechanger and the second just about a better version of its predecessor. What does the third have in store? Well, if rumours are to be trusted, we might just see not one but two new iPads – a higher-end version and a ‘budget' version.

The costlier one might ship with a 8-meg camera while the cheaper one might just sport a 5-megger. Both are rumoured to feature 9.7-inch screens but with an advanced retina display. Apple also filed a patent for facial recognition recently. This could result in a software that lets you use the front camera to log in to your profile, to use your chosen apps and settings on the iPad.

What's better, the higher end iPad might have a battery double the capacity of a regular one now. The regular ones are usually around 6,000 mAh. This could means days and days of unbarred tab usage!

SAMSUNG GALAXY S III

In 2011, the Samsung Galaxy S II was the ultimate phone of the year. Something that good absolutely deserves a quick successor considering how quickly things change in techland.

Not only is there talk about Samsung including its stunning Super AMOLED Plus display, quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM in the device but also a 3D display to gain an edge over the Apple iPhone. It might go a notch higher and have a 10-megger as its primary clicker. The handset will incorporate Google's Ice Cream Sandwich as the user interface.

It's not clear if the 3D version will only be a variant of the third Galaxy S iteration. But, if you go by the quality and success of 3D smartphones already in the market, Samsung might want to keep its options open.

For more on gadgets, visit http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/smartbuy/