Mobile phones and Gadget Technology

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

How are educational institutions taking advantage of technology to compete and win students?

Technological advances are rapidly changing the way in which educational institutes operate; from campus to classroom. The metal detector has replaced the friendly instructor inactivity to greet you at the school gates; the abacus has gathered dust in favour of the calculator; and the good old-fashioned blackboard seems to be as much a part of the past as the tablet. To be up-to-date with the modern world, educational institutes realize that they must make the most of technology, especially when providing an education becomes a business. Whether it be advertising the institute, deciding when and where the class should be, or the modern technology that today’s classrooms are equipped with, the evidence shows that modern educational institutes are making the most of modern technology to entice students. 

Before the birth of the world wide web, educational institutes had to rely on word-of-mouth, advertising in newspapers, at other educational institutes, in newspapers, and at events specifically designed for showcasing further learning institutes such as open days and seminars. Nowadays, each modern educational institute has a website, and links to the websites via other associated websites. These websites not only appeal to prospective students, but are also used as a platform to advertise for teachers. For example, www.ajarn.com and www.daveseslcafe.com are both well known websites where ESL instructors can post there resumes for potential employees to view, as well as browsing the sites jobs page. 

Another way in which the world wide web has changed the way in which institutes compete for students is online learning. Universities and colleges in particular a keen to utilize the world wide web and more specifically, e-learning. The typical university student is no longer seen as being a young twenty-something; people from all places and all ages are potential students and the higher learning institutes are aware of this. By using emails and MSN it is now doable for students to correspond with instructors at the click of the button. WebBoards are used as virtual classrooms where students and instructors alike can post messages, have discussions, and upload files. The captivating features of e-learning give students the flexibility to study during hours that suit them from the comfort of their own home or the nearest world wide web café. 

However, the traditional classroom can't be forgotten about just yet. The classroom is still the main learning environment for any institute and the technology used in the classroom has come a long way. Most schools are equipped with personal rooms and it is common for there to be a personal in the class for the use of the teacher. Overhead projectors (OHPs) are also used to display images from the personal onto a massive white screen. This feature is particularly useful for instructors who wish to use software such as PowerPoint when presenting their lesson. Wireless microphones are also used in the classroom to wage perceptibility in massive classrooms whilst at the same time allowing unrestricted movement around the classroom. 

As technology advances, so do educational institutes, be it in how they advertise, where they wage an education, or the use of equipment in the classroom. A student looking to attend university has no further to go than online in his search. Once there, he will find a multitude of options, including online Master’s degree programs from universities on different continents. The future of the classroom looks promising with interactive whiteboards becoming favourite in current years, podcasts being used by instructors who are technologically adept, and assignments, syllabuses, grades, and schedules posted online can all by found being used in the modern classroom.

A computer’s main processor (CPU) is designed to (basically) do one thing at a time. For example; execute the current instruction or operation. However; because of the way in which we humans work and use computers, we require the CPU to do many things at once (or at least to seem to be doing many things simultaneously). It is this projection of the impression that the CPU is performing many tasks simultaneously that is known as “multitasking”.

Multitasking – In reality there is no single technology that can be designated as being the definitive technology solely responsible for the provisioning of a personal system’s multitasking capabilities. This is because multitasking is in fact a whole bunch of interrelated and complementary technologies including dedicated system controllers, operating system support, supporting software, chipset support, drivers, BIOS support and device logic (logic boards and firmware).

Multitasking CPUs – Modern CPUs contain multiple processing pipelines and the newer CPUs of this day actually have multiple processing cores apiece with its own full complement of multiple processing pipelines. It is through the development of CPUs with multiple more or less independent complete processing cores that has indeed truly given the modern CPU the ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously and not merely just seem to be doing so.

For quite some time now we have had personal systems with multiple CPUs. The most extreme examples of systems composed of multiple CPUs can be found in supercomputers where big parallelism is a key player in the overall processing prowess of these high-end systems.

Importantly; the way in which processing tasks are managed and distributed among the multiple processing pipelines of the multiple cores is still reached in pretty much the same way that it has always been done.

Multitasking Operating System – One mandatory prerequisite bourgeois crucial to the successful implementation of multitasking abilities and the resultant systems performance parameters is that you must have an operating system that supports it (multitasking).

When using multitasking operating systems (like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux etc.) users tend to have multiple programs, utilities and applications running concurrently/simultaneously. For example: you might be concurrently editing a word document, downloading from the World wide web and listening to music.

In order to accomplish this; the CPU has traditionally shared its processing time among the tasks requiring its attention. For example: individual initiated tasks, the operating system, programs, utilities, memory management, automatic updates and quite a few “background” services and routines. Yet this is still an illusion. It only appears that the CPU is doing many things at once because of the astounding speeds at which modern CPUs are healthy to switch between tasks.

CPU and System/Device Communications – The majority of a PC’s subsystems need to send information to and receive information from both the CPU and system memory (RAM). Most also anticipate to be healthy to get the CPU’s attention when they do so.

Preferential Treatment – Some personal subsystems; such as input/output (I/O) devices and human interface devices (keyboard, mouse etc), tend to require “special” attention. That is to state that they want the CPU’s attention now. This class of devices also wants the CPU to drop whatever it is doing and attend to them regardless of the CPU’s current processing task or its relative importance.

Variable CPU Processing Time Requirements – The various system, subsystem and peripheral devices that comprise the modern personal all require different amounts of CPU time at various different irregular intervals.

The mouse; for example, needs far less attention than a hard disk involved in the transference of a massive multi-gigabyte file. Thus; in the interest of a more efficient use of a computer’s finite resources, it is most beneficial if the amount of CPU time assigned to apiece device reflects the type of device and the nature of the operation and processing tasks involved.

In the above example of the resource needs of the mouse versus those of the hard drive; more resources can be allocated (even dedicated) to the hard drive for the duration of its current operation(s) while the mouse gets a smaller amount of CPU time adequate for its needs.

When the hard drive is finished its current task(s) it might not be required to perform any transactions for various irregular periods of time. The system will then reassign those resources that were being used by the hard drive to other devices and processes as and when required.

Managing Processes – The personal (via the CPU) must also ensure that all active (running) processes and tasks are managed in the most efficient organized manner possible. There are basically 2 ways in which this can be done: CPU polling and device initiated interrupting.

Polling – Polling is the process whereby the CPU systematically locates and asks apiece device in turn if it requires any help or CPU processing time. This strategy (polling) is a very inefficient process because it is a waste of finite resources.

Interrupting – The other way that the CPU (processor) can employ to handle CPU required processes and data transfers is to have the devices requiring the CPU’s attention to issue a request for attention as and when they require it. This is the basic concept of disturb requests.

Interrupt Requests Prioritization – Because the CPU might receive an disturb request (IRQ) from multiple devices concurrently engineers created an IRQ priority table. Now when concurrent IRQs arrive the CPU simply looks up their priority ranking in its IRQ priorities table. The device with the highest priority will be attended to by the CPU first.

Data Transfers – In order to improve a computer’s overall efficiency the CPU also needs to equilibrise the data transfers between itself and the various other subsystems; including system memory (RAM), of the machine. Most transactions performed by a personal use system memory (RAM) as a “middle-man”. For example: CPU to Memory to Printer or Hard Drive to Memory to CPU. Originally these data transfers were under the direct control of the CPU.

Direct Memory Access (DMA) – Direct Memory Access (DMA) technologies have enabled the device to write to or read from memory without any assistance from the CPU thereby freeing the CPU to perform other tasks. Once the data transfer process is finished the CPU is notified and will then initiate/execute those actions required of it. Because the CPU can attend to other matters while a DMA controlled transfer is taking place the system truly is performing multiple tasks concurrently but the CPU isn’t.

Other Technologies – Other technologies that play a role in multitasking include: hyper-threading, bus mastering, the BIOS, memory technologies (cache, flash, DRAM, DDR etc), the system chipset, I/O controllers, Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), device logic (“smarter” devices) and the various system buses along with their associated supporting software and the operating system itself through superior memory management and support.

                               Importance of webdesign in monetizing with website

Well friends! Most of you must be doing affiliate marketing and many of you might be monetizing your website with ad networks. Affiliate marketing is an online marketing practice where the merchant of the product rewards the affiliates for bringing visitors and customers to the merchant’s product. Monetizing the website is a way of earning from your website whereby you display ads from ad network on your content rich website and acquire from the ads whenever the visitor clicks on the ad displayed by the ad network. But friends in both the cases many of you change in spite of promoting good products and in spite of superior ad deployment on your website. What is the reason? The basic reason is the layout and design of the website. You might be having a very good content on your website and offering very good servicer and displaying ads of utmost importance to the readers but still the visitors are paying no heed to your website because of the poor design and layout of the website. The importance of the webdesign can be highlighted below.

 The design of the website should be captivating to draw the attention of the visitors.

The background color of the website should be designed keeping in mind the content and the targeted audience.

Set yourself apart from your competition with clean, fast-loading graphics that express your indistinguishability and unify your site.

You must have lean, fast, easily maintained html, javascript, and style sheets that work on all major browsers.

Whatever server or various types of databases, your website needs the right combination of technologies to create a reliable, scalable solution that fits your needs so that the visitors find simple to use your website

Upload appropriate photos and images at the right place to draw the attention of the customers.

             Follow the above guidelines and your website will attract the visitors who can be your prospective leads or customers giving you a superior rate of conversions and earnings.

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Managing and moving contacts from one phone to another is definitely easier in the smartphone era, but for some, it can still be a challenge. Bring feature phones into the mix and it can be even more complex due to the devices’ demand of sophistication as compared to their smarter brethren. With contract consumers in the U.S. likely upgrading handsets each 18 to 24 months, and adding more contacts along the way, moving contacts from phone to phone can become a painful exercise on a recurring basis.

Google Android phones actually make this process easy if users tie contacts to their Gmail account, and Facebook can be used as well. The webOS operating system offers a Synergy feature that can automatically pull in Facebook contact data. Apple iPhone owners can use the yearly MobileMe service — which adds other benefits as well — for contact migration. But these, and many other similar solutions, become unwieldy if switching phones from one mobile platform to another. MoveMyContacts is a new cross-platform, subscription service that uses the cloud to manage, backup and migrate contact databases between hundreds of different phone models.

MoveMyContacts comes from Toffa, the same folks that built the favourite GooSync service I used in 2007 (before Android arrived) to sync my handset to Gmail and Google’s Calendar. That worked so well that I decided to pull out my notecase and try Toffa’s latest service. MoveMyContacts costs £4.95 (.33 USD) for a 30-day subscription or £9.95 to use for a full year. Clearly, it’s priced low enough for very occasional or one-time use, but folks that migrate through handsets more often won’t have to spend much to use the service for a year.

After signing up and checking out through PayPal, the MoveMyContacts website walked me through the easy step-by-step process, beginning with choosing the phone model that holds my contacts. I picked the generic Android option (which works on Android 2.0 and up) and was directed to install the free Funambol Sync app from the Android Market, which I did on my Google Nexus One. Funambol is an open-source, data-sync solution that supports hundreds of mobile devices using the SyncML standard many third-party apps use for synchronization processes.

Upon installation of Funambol, I just had to log in to the MoveMyContacts servers, which was a easy configuration step. Immediately, the software asked if I wanted to import contacts from all of the accounts on my handset: individualized Gmail, work Gmail and even Twitter. My only interest was for my individualized contacts, so I selected that option only. The app then imported my 712 Gmail contacts in about two minutes. One button press later, and they were all sent to the MoveMyContacts server, which took another two minutes over a Wi-Fi connection. That place my contacts in the cloud, which were viewable directly on the MoveMyContacts dashboard.

From there, I selected to add a second device to test the contact transfer. I could have chosen another Android device, but decided to test with another platform, so I picked iPod touch as my other “phone.” Again, the MoveMyContacts website offered similar easy instructions to proceed, but didn’t recommend using the Funambol client from the iTunes App Store. Instead, the service suggested that I install the free Synthesis SyncML Lite from the App Store, which I did. I suspect that the process would work with either app, as both support the SyncML protocol. Using the Synthesis software on my iPod touch, I simply logged in to the MoveMyContacts server and tapped the synchronization button. Roughly five minutes later, all 712 of the contacts from my Android phone appeared on my iPod touch.

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While the process might sound convoluted due to the application installations, it’s actually quite easy and fast. And because MoveMyContacts supports so many handset platforms from many hardware makers, the software part of the equation is bound to vary. The common denominator is the cloud, which does the heavy lifting and becomes your contact database book of record.

Even though the service is useful for one-time contact transfers between devices, it can be used as often as you’d like while your subscription remains active. That means a yearly subscriber, for example, could routinely backup contacts to the MoveMyContacts server; useful if the phone hardware fails or in the case of a lost phone. There’s bound to be other similar solutions for free or for less money, but overall, MoveMyContacts is an effective way to do exactly what its study states it does. If I weren’t so reliant on Google and the Android operating system to manage my contacts, I’d likely continue my subscription of this service.

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