Something to Share - Which wolf have you been feeding ?

An old man was telling story to his grandchildren,"There is always a battle between two wolf inside all of us. One is Evil (i.e. anger, envy, sorrow, greed, lies and guilt) and other one is Good (i.e. joy, peace, love, kindness and humility)"

The boy curiously asked, "Which wolf wins?"

The old man quitely replied, "The one...... you feed."

So, which wolf you are feeding?


Source: WebTrafficROI

BUILDING BRIDGES....!!!

Once upon a time two brothers who lived on adjoining farms fell into conflict. It was the first serious rift in 40 years of farming side by side, sharing machinery, and trading labor and goods as needed without a hitch.

Then the long collaboration fell apart. It began with a small misunderstanding and it grew into a major difference, and finally it exploded into an exchange of bitter words followed by weeks of silence.

One morning there was a knock on John's door. He opened it to find a man with a carpenter's toolbox. "I'm looking for a few days work," he said.

"Perhaps you would have a few small jobs here and there. Could I help you?"

"Yes," said the older brother. "I do have a job for you. Look across the creek at that farm. That's my neighbor, in fact, it's my younger brother. Last week there was a meadow between us and he took his bulldozer to the river levee and now there is a creek between us. Well, he may have done this to spite me, but I'll go him one better. See that pile of lumber curing by the barn? I want you to build me a fence - an 8-foot fence - so I won't need to see his place anymore. Cool him down, anyhow."

The carpenter said, "I think I understand the situation. Show me the nails and the post-hole digger and I'll be able to do a job that pleases you."

The older brother had to go to town for supplies, so he helped the carpenter get the materials ready and then he was off for the day.

The carpenter worked hard all that day measuring, sawing, nailing.

About sunset when the farmer returned, the carpenter had just finished his job. The farmer's eyes opened wide, his jaw dropped.

There was no fence there at all. It was a bridge... a bridge stretching from one side of the creek to the other! A fine piece of work handrails and all - and the neighbor, his younger brother, was coming across, his hand outstretched.

"You are quite a fellow to build this bridge after all I've said and done."

The two brothers stood at each end of the bridge, and then they met in the middle, taking each other's hand. They turned to see the carpenter hoist his toolbox on his shoulder. "No, wait! Stay a few days. I've a lot of other projects for you," said the older brother.

"I'd love to stay on," the carpenter said, "but, I have many more bridges to build."

Something to share: Sony launches Xperia P, Sola and U in India

Sony Mobile India has officially launched the Xperia U, Xperia Sola and Xperia P devices in the country, and finally provided the retail prices - Rs. 17,399, Rs. 19,999, and Rs. 25,449, respectively.

Speaking at the launch, Sony Mobile India MD, P. Balaji, said: “The Xperia smartphones have been designed around user experiences of listen, watch, play and create and share to improve their personal, professional and social life. The Sola smart phone boasts of 'floating touch' for accessing web services by holding any finger on the screen to open the links."

As a promotional offer, Sony has tied up with Tata Docomo, to provide up to 3GB free data plans, apart from 30 games. For more details about the three new Xperia devices, in terms of specifications and features, refer to our previous coverage (Xperia Sola, Xperia P and Xperia U).

At the Kolkata launch event, Sony Mobile also announced it would stop shipping feature phones from September onwards, globally depending on its smartphone presence. The company currently has around eight feature phones in the Indian market. Speaking to ET, P. Balaji said:

"The smartphone segment is growing by a compound annual growth rate of nearly 70 per cent. We as a company want to focus only on this segment. By the end of September this year, we plan to phase out all our feature phone models."

"Our research tells us people are willing to pay more for a smartphone to enjoy genuine mobile internet experience. We expect the trend to get stronger as 3G data services become more affordable and gain traction."

The move certainly is an interesting one, with Apple and RIM the only two major global manufacturers to not have feature phones on the market (Apple's was 3rd place overall in 2011). Some, like HTC, have very few. Of course, with budget Android devices from major manufacturers available for less than Rs. 10,000, smartphones now encompass a large extent of the mobile market, and are slowly eating up feature phone share.

Xperia Sola, P and U (left to right)

AMD chips top 8.4 GHz, a new speed record...!!!

 

AMD said Tuesday that the company's FX processors had been overclocked to an astounding 8.429 GHz. AMD said in a blog post that the eight FX processors had been overclocked at speeds up to 8.429 GHz, beating the prior record of 8.309 GHz, using a third-party team of overclocking enthusiasts. More importantly to the average consumer user, however, AMD found that the company's FX chips could reach over 5 GHz using normal air cooling or water-cooling rigs that cost less than $100. 

 

"Based on our overclocking tests, the AMD FX CPU is a clock eating monster, temporarily able to withstand extreme conditions to achieve amazing speed," Simon Solotko, a senior manager with AMD, wrote. "Even with more conservative methods, the AMD FX processors, with multiplier unlocked throughout the range, appear to scale with cold. We also achieved clock frequencies well above 5GHz using only air or sub-$100 water cooling solutions."

 

 

 

Guinness is expected to certify the record, an AMD spokesman said Tuesday. AMD's announcement opens the Intel Developer Forum here in San Francisco, a developer conference hosted by AMD's arch-rival and much larger competitor, Intel.

 

What is overclocking? Historically, overclocking was a practice begun in the early days of the 486 and Pentium where a microprocessor was pushed past its rated speeds. Microprocessors are generally "binned," where each chip is tested to determine the fastest speed at which it can operate before it starts generating electrical faults and/or incorrect results due to the heat it itself produces. Within a PC, notebook computer or phone, these chips are generally either air-cooled using a series of "fins" that distribute the chip's warmth to the outside air via a fan. A sealed network of tubes, filled with water, can also be connected to a copper-based "heat sink," which thermally conducts heat away from the CPU.

 

Overclocking a chip can void its warranty, however, meaning that it's generally a risky practice even for enthusiasts. An overclocked chip that fails can essentially be destroyed, as can the motherboard or chipset components.

 

Extreme overclocking uses liquid helium and nitrogen to cool the chips; liquid nitrogen can push the chip's temperature down to less than negative 180 degrees centigrade. The risk here is a "cold bug," which can also prevent the chip from working. Fortunately for AMD, the team of overclockers found no such bug.

 

AMD's FX chips represent its enthusiast line of high-end chips, which are "unlocked," allowing users to set its operating voltage and clock speed multiplier in order to overclock the chips.

 

Nvidia releases the five-core Tegra 3 chipset....!!!

Nvidia has launched the much-awaited quad-core Tegra 3 chipset, codenamed Kal-El, destined to arrive in the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime later this month. According to the graphics giant, the Tegra 3 chipset is based on 40nm fabrication technology, and is expected to deliver five times the overall performance of the Tegra 2, and roughly three times the graphical performance, all while using about 40 percent of the Tegra 2’s power. While the Tegra 3 is meant primarily for the Android operating system, it also supports Windows 8 and Chrome OS.

The Tegra 3 will officially be the first ARM-based quad-core chipset to begin shipping, though others chip-makers, like Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and ST-Ericsson are also expected to unveil quad-core ARM offerings by 2012. While called a quad-core, the Tegra 3 actually contains five general processing ARM Cortex A9 cores, with the lower-clocked 500MHz fifth ‘companion’ core taking care of most non-intensive tasks for the system, to save power. The other four processor cores can run at a maximum core clock of 1.4GHz (up from 1GHz of the Tegra 2), though if all the cores are active at once, that figure drops to 1.3GHz.

The resource allocation is apparently “OS transparent”, meaning the operating system will not have to be modified to support Nvidia’s Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP) technology, which chooses which cores to activate. In low power mode, only the companion core will be running.

Check out a schematic of the die below (sized roughly at 80mm²), with the various components highlighted.

 

The Tegra 3 GeForce GPU features 8 pixel shader units, four vertex shader units, and 12 GPU cores, each with a larger cache than what the Tegra 2 had. For now, Nvidia has not confirmed the clock speed of the GPU cores, or how much higher it is than the Tegra 2’s 300MHz offering. The biggest graphical improvements with the Tegra 3 chipset include the ability to realistically render water simulations, smoke, blurs, damage, and lighting.

The new Tegra 3 also supports stereoscopic 3D, and, features expanded controller support for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii controllers. According to Nvidia, the Tegra 3 also features an improved video decoder and encoder, which can accelerate 1080p H.264 content to up to 40Mbps, and encode 1080p video at 30fps. Also new, is the Image Signal Processor (ISP), which is supposedly twice as fast as the one on the Tegra 2.

Still featuring a 32-bit memory interface, the Tegra 3 supports higher-frequency memory however, up to LPDDR2-1066MHz and DDR3-L-1500MHz. The SATA II controller is now on die. Looking at the recently released roadmap, the Kal-El's successor, Kal-El+ is expected to be released by mid-2012, before Wayne or Tegra 4 hits shelves in 2013. For now, while Nvidia hasn't drastically improved per-core performance compared to the Tegra 3, subsequent iterations are expected to start doing so, starting with Wayne. In the meanwhile, the Tegra 3 will still pack a punch, according to AnandTech's Mr. Shimpi, "Tegra 3 attempts to increase performance by exploiting thread level parallelism in Android."

Apple TVs to come in three sizes....!!!

There’ve been quite a few rumours of Apple working on developing a Apple-branded TV set, not just the relatively popular Apple TV set-top box it’s been selling in the recent past. Now, a report by Australian technology blog Smarthouse, says that it has confirmation of this, via sources at a major Japanese television manufacturer.

The report goes on to say that Apple will be releasing three sizes of televisions when it launches in late 2012, with 32-inch and 55-inch versions described. As for the third size, something smaller seems likely, probably a 24-inch offering. 

According to the sources quoted, Apple TVs will feature Siri integration, taking the fight to other smart, connected TVs out there, by such companies as Samsung and LG. Relevantly, Microsoft recently announced voice-based search for the Xbox 360 platform, powered by Bing and Kinect, as well as entertainment options, all of which will make Xbox TV a potential competitor as well, though more as set-top box.

As for branding, so far, industry speculation is rife with names, with iTV seeming like the most popular choice. This may of course cause trademark problems, as other iTVs exist across the world already.