EDITORIAL
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK Credenz Tech Days (CTD) is a series of technical seminars organised by the PICT IEEE Student Branch. It is a platform for all inquisitive minds to listen to some of the exemplary professionals from the industry who are invited to our campus to deliver a seminar in any technical field of their expertise. P.I.N.G. has and shall always remain a testament to the earnest work and effort of creative minds, forever innovating and creating a marvel of technical literature and design. It is another proud moment for us as we publish this CTD ‘12 issue of P.I.N.G. During Credenz ‘11, we endeavored to include experts, as our contributors to the newsletter. As a result of the same, we garnered a maginificent response from our college professors and from the industry alike. It is noteworthy that P.I.N.G. was distributed and appreciated at PyCon, a conference held on Python in Pune on 17th September 2011. This success has inspired us to put in more efforts, coupled with zeal, to achieve greater heights. This issue of P.I.N.G. is dedicated to the people who revolutionized our world. Dennis Ritchie invented C which is considered to be the backbone of programming languages and Steve Jobs who made Apple what it is today - a part and parcel of life for a large population. Lastly, we would acknowledge all the contributors for their movtivation, which is the driving force for us to take P.I.N.G. to greater summits!
“It is overwhelming to see our hardwork being praised by one and all! The interactions with industry experts, professors and students from various walks of life, has been a valuable learning experience. This issue is a tribute to two exemplary people who have made unparalled contributions to the field of technology. I hope that the variety of topics incorporated in this compilation interests all its readers!” - Dimple Shah (sdimple252@yahoo.com)
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“My association with P.I.N.G. has been a marvelous experience.The appreciation for the last issue and the turn out of this issue are truly indelible.I would sincerely like to thank all the professionals and Students whose contribution to PING has made it an outstanding newsletter in this world of changing technology.I hope this issue will edify and enlighten your minds!!” - Fareen Magdum (fareen.magdum4@gmail.com)
“As always compiling this issue of P.I.N.G. has been a fun journey which taught us a lot.After the tremendous response to the last issue of P.I.N.G. we have tried to reach a new zenith by compiling together a set of articles on new technologies around the globe. This issue is dedicated to two of the most prominent contributors to the world of technology. So jump right in and enjoy the wide array of topics covered in this issue!” - Pooja Bhurke (bhurke.pooja@gmail.com)
Design Courtesy - “Making facts seem louder than words has been the niche of graphic designers since long and I am honored to have been in that league. As the Creative Head of PISB, it has been an exhilarating two years that I shall cherish forever. It has given me joy, innumerable values and recognition. This issue, as depicted on the cover page, is a tribute to two great minds of the Twentieth century, who changed the way of modern technology.” - Abhimanyu Bhosale (bhosleabhimanyu@yahoo.co.in) 1
The difference between Student Programmers and Professional Programmers
7.Stick to deadlines: That’s called professionalism. So stick to a deadline even if you have to work without sleep for 48 hours to hit the deadline. (The second part of the rule is that you should not agree to such deadlines.)
Programming in a job and programming as a student are very different. Here are the things you should start doing as a student if you want to stand out from the other students (because these are the things that you’ll be taught as soon as you join.)
These tips were inspired by Joel Spolsky’s 12 Steps To Better Code and the book “The New Programmer’s Survival Manual” both of which should be easy to find on the internet. The book contains a lot of other advice too – some related to programming, but also covers more general people skills, and is recommended reading for anyone interested in a career in the software industry. If you're already following most of the above advice, then congratulations, you are exceptional. But if you're a typical student, then a lot of these things will be new to you, and starting to follow all of this advice might be too much work for now. But just pick one or two of these tips and start implementing them on a day-to-day basis for a few months until you have become very comfortable with them. Then pick up one or two more, and repeat.
1. Use source control: Give yourself one point for familiarity with CVS, two points for familiarity with SVN, and three points for familiarity with a DVCS like git or hg or bzr. 2. Write tests for your programs. Give yourself one point if you write automated tests to test parts of your programs, two points if you write automated tests that tests the entire code of your programs, and three points for writing the tests before writing any program. 3. Handle failures in your programs: Check all inputs for boundary conditions or garbage data. (Will your ‘factorial’ program work if someone gives an input of -1?) Check error return codes or exceptions for all library/external calls. Check for errors on file or network I/O. Unlike student projects, in professional programs, a very large fraction of code exists to deal with error conditions.
Dr. Navin Kabra Co-founder of ReliScore.com, a Punebased startup that allows job seekers to showcase their software skills. He has more than 15 years of experience in the software company in large companies as well as small startups.
4. Rewrite bad code: Most students will never touch a piece of code if it is working. Replacing bad code with good code on a regular basis (refactoring) is one of the most important activities in programming.
GREEN ELECTRONICS - The Second Green Revolution
Electronics has made life easier for us. Our day-to-day life is dominated by several electronic gadgets like desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, computer monitors, mobile phones, smart phones as well as television. But the omnipresence of electronics in modern life also has a dark side. Certain materials used in electronic products are toxic and pose a threat to the environment. The situation is becoming serious with the increasing use of electronics. In today’s alarming times, everybody must be made aware of eco-friendly products i.e. green electronic products. For moving towards green electronics, we need to respond positively to this Green Revolution. Green electronics focuses on
5. Automate repetitive tasks: A real programmer who finds himself (or herself) doing similar things over and over again, will quickly write a script or a program to automate this. It is painful to watch students typing the same long and complex commands over and over again while demo-ing their projects. 6. Learn typing: Again, it is painful to watch students hunt and peck for keys while typing things. You’re going to spend a lot of your time typing with a keyboard. Increasing your typing speed will pay rich dividends for the next 40 years.
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elimination of harmful elements and components and recycling of electronic products at the end of life. Electronic devices are a complex mixture of several hundred materials, many of which can contain hazardous chemicals such as heavy metals – highly toxic compounds of lead, mercury or cadmium, polyvinyl chloride (PVC). This article focuses on how to stop energy wastage, what gadgets are greener than others, and what to do about e-waste and electronics recycling.
hazardous chemicals currently being used in the manufacture of electronics products, recycling can bring its own problems. Even with the best available technologies in recovering metals can be polluting, with potential exposure to metal fumes for workers and residents of recycling areas and the formation of dioxins from smelting PVC-coated cables or BFR treated plastics. Recycling of hazardous products has little environmental benefit -it simply moves the hazards into secondary products that eventually have to be disposed off. Unless the goal is to redesign the product to use non- hazardous materials, such recycling is a false solution.
What is Green Electronics? Green Electronics are advanced product designs, technology and manufacturing processes that have less impact on the environment. It is a branch of science and technology that work with a philosophy to transform all electronic products into environmental friendly products.
Top 5 Green brands: 1. HP 2. DELL 3. Nokia 4. Apple 5. Philips
Why should I go for Green Electronics? Green Electronics design and manufacturing processes are optimized to reduce energy consumption, use less natural resources, increase the use of reclaimed materials, reduce waste and reduce or eliminate toxic substances like lead, mercury and brominated flame retardants which are harmful to the environment and human health. Owning green electronics and green computers can save up to 60% of your home electronics energy consumption that is typically wasted by non-green electronics - most of which is expended when sitting idle or turned off. Green electronics are also manufactured with cleaner materials and chemicals that reduce or eliminate chemicals like lead, mercury and brominated flame retardants, all of which emit airborne toxins that are linked to human health issues like cancer or neurological damage.
Recommendations for going GREEN: 1. Living green: Lessen the environmental impact of your product through measuring usage, being efficient, looking for newer, more efficient technology and use multifunction device like smart phone. 2. Buying green: Purchase Energy Star labelled and environment friendly product. 3. Recycling responsibility: Find someone who needs, recycle it. 4. Emerging trends: Use of LED lighting, keeping abreast with latest green technology. Let us strive to make our ambience more green and environment-friendly for the better future. Dr. Nitin M. Kulkarni, Vice Principal, Fergusson College, Pune
How do we go green? Recycling of electronics devices is one way of reducing environmental hazards associated with early production stages. However, recycling in this case is not the whole solution because of 3
Security & Privacy Features in Internet Explorer 9
Cross Site Request Forgery detection / Click-Jacking and Cross Site Scripting (XSS): One of the most subtle and interesting web application security vulnerabilities is called Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). A vector that enables CSRF is known as Click-Jacking. Click-Jacking is used to trick the user into unwittingly clicking an obscured or hidden web element, usually resulting in an unwanted transaction. E.g. a legitimate webpage may be “framed” inside a malicious page. When you click in the malicious page, you’re actually clicking on something else. It’s a complicated attack, Internet Explorer 9 includes a cross-site scripting (XSS) filter that can detect these types of attacks. If vulnerabilities are found, Internet Explorer disables the harmful scripts. Internet explorer allows website developers to protect their sites from these kinds of attacks by preventing their legitimate pages from being “framed”. Developers can send a HTTP response header named X-FRAMEOPTIONS with HTML pages to restrict how the page may be framed.
The web today is increasingly interactive, personalized and a social place to share information. The more the web becomes part of our everyday lives, the more complex the issues of online trust and browser trust become. While rich web applications and performance dominates the user experience, users need to be secure on the web. Hacking attacks pose a significant risk to individuals and organizations by threatening to compromise, damage or acquire sensitive personal and corporate information. As a result security and privacy is of paramount importance to every user. Let’s understand the key engineering innovations behind this significant achievement for IE9.
Secure your Internet : Smart Screen URL Reputation Filters: SmartScreen URL filter is a dynamic security feature designed to warn users when they attempt to visit known phishing sites. As you browse the web, it analyses webpages and determines if they have any characteristics that might be suspicious. SmartScreen Filter checks the sites you visit against a dynamic list of reported phishing sites and malicious software sites. If it finds a match, theSmartScreen Filter will show you a warning notifying you that the site has been blocked for your safety. Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser that uses download reputation to the user to help make safety decisions. It recognizes EV certificates for businesses that have completed this process, and visually represents them by coloring the Address Bar in green. Clicking on the security status bar displays the security report for the site.
Protecting your privacy : InPrivate browsing and filtering: InPrivate browsing ensures that no information regarding your form data, cookies, passwords ext. will be recorded during your browsing session. InPrivate filtering blocks third parties from tracking your behavior across multiple sites, however no content will be blocked until certain levels of frequency of third party content are reached. Online tracking: A website that you visit may be providing content hosted by other websites. In many cases this third party content, such as add-ons, maps, stock tickers, videos, or images collect information to build a profile about you that can include your likes, 4
Intouch-Id Stay in touch... Forever!
dislikes, sites you visit, shopping habits, income, demographic information and other details. Tracking Protection is an opt-in feature that lets you filter out content in a page that may be used to track you and convey your preference- not to be tracked- to websites. Tracking Protection Lists are like “Do Not Disturb” lists for content that has an impact on your privacy. W3C has accepted tracking protection as member submission for “Web Tracking Protection”. In order to filter out such third party content, users need to add a Tracking Protection List (TPL) created by third parties to Internet Explorer or enable a Personalized Tracking Protection List. Internet Explorer will now prevent your information from being sent by limiting data requests to websites in the list. You can manage Tracking Protection lists via the tools menu. Even you can build a tracking protection list and add it to the IE add-ons gallery. “Do Not Track” is a preference that users can set in web browsers to inform websites that they do not want to be tracked. Internet Explorer 9 supports various ways that web sites can detect user preference. These methods include: HTTP Header, requesting a property on the browser, or checking whether a TPL is enabled.
Our phonebook contacts represent our real-life connections with friends, family, acquaintances, businesses, emergency services etc. These connections grow over time as we meet more people, travel around the world, switch jobs etc. This network is invaluable to us as these are the people and businesses we care about and who might open an opportunity for us in the future in terms of jobs, clients or even relationships! Our phonebook today is “self-managed” and contains only “static” information. The contact information is entered manually and we try to keep it updated ourselves. Over time, it is impossible to keep up with the changes and we are left with an incomplete phonebook that is only partially useful. Imagine a phonebook that is “dynamic” and “auto-updated” by the contacts themselves. The information for each of your contacts would come directly from them. After all, they are the right people to know what their contact information is! Any changes they make would dynamically update in your phonebook. Say a local hospital adds another phone line, people would get the new number in their phonebook automatically. You thus never have to worry about dialing a wrong number or not reaching someone. In addition, you do not want to lose any of your precious contacts. People loose contacts via lost phones, broken phones, and software errors all the time. Won’t it be nice if the contacts were safely stored in one place and retrievable any time? To think of it, such a system existed for years in a primitive form. It was the thick, printed white pages we would get from the phone company. Users would update their information with the telephone company, and the updated information would appear in the next release of the white pages. Imagine this cycle happening dynamically and the changes reflecting directly in your phonebook! Introducing IntouchId, an innovative product from our small startup in Pune, that brings what we just imagine, to reality. IntouchId lets users securely store their contact information in one place and then
In Conclusion
Internet Explorer 9 offers layered defenses to protect against and mitigate each of three major classes of threats that browser users face when surfing the Web: 1. Technological attacks designed to exploit the browser or operating system. 2. Web attacks designed to exploit vulnerabilities in Web sites. 3. Social engineering attacks against the user’s trust. IE9 blocks 99.2% of socially engineered malware and in addition to being a safe and trusted, IE9 is also a clean, fast and standards compliant browser. Aditee Rele Enterprise & Web: Architect Evangelist at Microsoft (This article has been published in collaboration with ReliScore.com, a new platform for Student-Industry collaborations.)
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An overview of Business Intelligence
selectively share it with people and businesses. Any changes made by the user are dynamically sent to all the contacts and vice-versa, helping our users stay in touch… forever! IntouchId is a unique ID assigned to users. It starts with an asterisk (*) and contains up to 12 numbers / characters. A variety of information can be stored under this single ID and exchanged selectively. This provides a powerful means of promoting yourself by letting others explore who you are and what you do. By providing your complete info, links to blogs, social presence, etc, you can let others know more about you. So when one of your contacts has that next big opportunity that fits you, they are sure to find you! IntouchId also facilitates instant exchange of contact info via the mobile apps when people meet or interact, eliminating the need to carry business cards. You can also get contact info of any business on your phone by simply typing their IntouchId on the app. Under the hood IntouchId is cloud and mobile based product. The back-end cloud is hosted on Google App Engine and written in Python using the Django framework. Clients are available across mobile devices and browsers. The mobile clients are a mix of native and web-enabled components. The native components do the “magic” of ensuring that changes are dynamically pushed to your phonebook whenever your contacts make any changes to their own information. Similarly, when you make a change, the change propagates to the phonebook of all your contacts. Getting started Head over to http://www.theIntouchId.com and watch how the magic works. Get yourself an account at http://www.theintouchid.com/register (enter MYCONTACTID as the invitee), or get our mobile app and register directly: http://apps.intch.me Then, explore the authors and editors of this magazine by simply typing their IntouchId in the apps or scanning the QR code. Some useful IntouchIds BSNL Helpline: *IN.BSNL.HELP Pune Rickshaw complaints: *IN.PUNE.RICK.00 Pune Traffic police: *IN.PN.TRAFFIC Connect and stay in touch with them… forever! Dr. Sarang Lakare Founder and CEO of IntouchId 6
Business Intelligence is an area that covers a number of different technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing and providing access to data that can help a large company to make better business decisions. Includes decision support systems (i.e. databases that run complex queries (as opposed to databases that run simple transactions), online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining. This is a huge market, with major players like Microsoft, Cognos, IBM, SAS, Business Objects, SPSS in the fray. What kind of decisions does this help you with? BI gives you ideas on how to cut costs. It gives you a better understanding of customers (e.g. Which ones are credit worthy? Which one are at most risk of switching to a competitor’s product?). You can plan the flow of goods or information in your enterprise better. This is not easy because the amount of data is exploding. There’s too much data and humans can’t make sense out of all of them. To manage this kind of information you need a big storage platform and a systematic way of storing all the information and being able to analyze the data (with the aforementioned complex queries). Collect together data from different sources. Pull from various production servers across the company (and across the world) and stick it into a single, offline, big, fat database. This is called a data warehouse. The data needs to be cleaned up quite a lot before it is usable. There are inconsistencies between data from different data sources. Duplicates, mis-matches etc. If you are combining all the data into one big database, it needs to be consistent and without duplicates. Then you start analyzing the data. Either with a human doing various reports and queries (OLAP), or the computer automatically finding interesting patterns (data mining). Business Intelligence is an application that sits on top of the Data Warehouse.This area has lots of difficult problems to be solved. We will give just one example – that of data sources. There are many different data sources from which data needs to be loaded into a data warehouse: flat files, CSVs, legacy systems, transactional databases. You need to pick updates from all these sources on a regular basis. How to do this incrementally and efficiently? How often – daily, weekly, monthly? You need to be able to do
Quantum Computing
parallelized loading for speed, otherwise loading of the data will take too long. And you need to be able to do all of this without slowing down the production system. Amazon can’t afford to have their main website respond slowly because some BI system is doing data analysis. Hence you might have to do this during a small window at night. So now you have to ensure that the loading finishes in the given time window Similarly, there are a number of very interesting problem areas in BI. The interested reader should look up these topics:
The theory of quantum physics has played a significant role in explaining several phenomena and has boosted technological advancement in many fields. One such important outcome is development of more intelligent computers, which can process data efficiently. The subject of quantum computing combines together ideas from classical information theory, computer science and quantum physics. It is possible that in the future, the technology we deem improbable and impossible to materialise today, may become the reality. Today’s advanced lithographic techniques can accommodate fraction of micron wide logic gates and wires onto the surface of silicon chips. Soon this may further reduce in size to such an extent that they may comprise only a few atoms! When we talk at the atomic level, it is necessary for us to consider the fact that the matter will follow the rules of quantum mechanics due to the failure of classical theory of physics in this respect. For this to actually happen we need to explore new quantum technologies to supplement or extend our existing capabilities. Not only can this extend the existing resources but it can also support entirely new kind of computation with qualitatively new algorithms based on quantum principles. The main difference between a computer developed using quantum principles and its classical counterpart begins right at the most basic level of data storage. A classical computer stores data as bits, as everyone knows. Quantum computer’s basic information is also stored as bits. However the concept of quantum computing was first thought of when the use of an atom as a bit was suggested. If we choose an atom as a physical bit then this means that the atom can be both in state 0 and state 1 simultaneously. It is at this point that the concept of a quantum bit or a Qubit arises. A Qubit can store both the values 0 & 1 simultaneously. At a given time,a quantum register composed of three Qubits, is capable of storing all the possible eight numbers in a quantum superposition. As a result, we can generate a
1. The Data Management for BI: Various issues in handling large volumes of data, data quality, transformation and loading. These are big problems and need to be handled very carefully, to ensure that the performance remains acceptable in spite of the huge volumes. 2. Role of statistical techniques in BI: Just having the data is not enough. To make sense out of the data and convert it into effective information, there is lots of machine learning, probability and statistics that gets used. 3. Applications of BI: The different ways in which BI is used in the industry to achieve billions of dollars of cost savings (or revenue increases) is a fascinating topic for studies (and we might cover this in a future issue of PING ! ) (This article is based on a PuneTech report of a talk on this topic given by Vibhas Joshi,of SAS Research and Development, India, and is published here with permission.)
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BOTS ON THE FRONT LINE
massively parallel computation just in one piece of quantum hardware. Thus, a quantum computer offers better use of computational resources like time and memory. The memory grows exponentially as number of Qubits introduced increases. Thus it can be seen that classical computers need exponentially more time or memory to match the power of quantum computers.
“Boom! Boom!” is what Iraqi children would say whenever they would see a robot on the ground” -Sgt First Class Gregory Carroll, 184th Ordnance Battalion. The EOD or Explosives Ordnance Disposal unit is one of the elite units of the US armed forces. Finest men and women from all over the US serve in these units, risking their lives on a daily basis outing explosive ordnances on the frontline. The primary targets of these units are IEDs or Improvised Explosive Devices which pose a great threat to civilians as well as the ground personnel. Whenever an EOD technician heads down range, one thing is clear: the robot goes first. The cost of losing a robot is not nearly close as losing a trained EOD person. Robots eliminate the greatest threat to an EOD technician i.e. the time spent on target. These “man-portable” robots, dually serve as multi-versatile, lightweight machines extending the EOD teams on the roads of Iraq and Afghanistan. The primary operation of the bot is reconnaissance and delivering explosives to hazardous areas for detonation. These bots are fitted with tracks and numerous arms to facilitate ordnance handling and transport. The technician himself is at safety controlling the bot with a joystick and a panelled display hub. These bots are capable of achieving speeds in excess of 14 km/h. They incur damage from explosions and small arms fire. Some of these bots also have artificial intelligence simulations to gauge blast radius and effective hazard areas. After thousands of operations, taking sustainable damage on a day to day basis, these bots keep returning to service due to their impeccable strength and dexterity. Families of thousands of EOD personnel take assurance in the fact that there is always an EOD bot battle ready to take the hit for their loved ones.
Applications: There are a lot of applications of the quantum computers, but it is now-a-days mainly used in cryptographically secure communication, searching algorithms, factorizing very large numbers efficiently and simulating quantum models. It has application in many other fields apart from computing. It may very well be possible to teleport from one place to another in the future or have a million parallel universes! Obstacles: Despite the promising research and development in this field it has some huge obstacles in even creating a quantum computer with the configurations to rival the modern computers that are available today. We have only been able to create some two- and three-Qubit quantum computers capable of some simple arithmetic and data sorting. There are many difficulties that hinder progress such as error correction, de-coherence, and hardware architecture etc. Right now, in spite of the obvious benefits, more possibilities and their consequences need to be considered. Theories need to be tested extensively. Thus we can say quantum computing hardware development is still only in the beginning stages. However, with further research and advancement in quantum theory, it’s possible to make today’s way of life obsolete. Limitless possibilities and promising innovations can materialize in future with the help of quantum theory. Mathangi Krishnamurthi (SE) PICT
Aman Singh (FE) PICT
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GAME ON : KINECT
and see the environment in which the robot is operating at the current moment.
Originally known by the code name Project Natal, KINECT is a motion sensing input device developed by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral for the Xbox 360 console, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without touching the game controller. The user interface uses gestures and spoken commands. The device features an RGB camera, depth sensor plus multi-array microphone running proprietary software, due to which full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities are possible.
CoDAC Brings Kinect To Smartphones: MIT scientists were recently awarded a $100,000 grant for their breakthrough. With the technology called Compressive Depth Acquisition Camera (CoDAC), they have brought Kinect ,that was mainly limited by Xbox ,to handheld devices. Kinect Is World’s Fastest Selling Electronic Gadget Ever: Guinness Records confirm that Microsoft Kinect is the world’s fastest selling consumer electronic gadget ever! Microsoft Kinect sold about 1,33,333 units every day, totaling about 10 million Kinects sold so far. Microsoft also revealed that so far over 10 million Kinect games have been sold worldwide. The popularity of Xbox and Kinect is gaining new heights since their launch .Now it’s up to the gamers and developers to take these technologies to á new level of interactivity in various fields.
Lip Reading And Emotion Sensing On Kinect 2: A game development source confirmed that emotions of players can be sensed by tracking the facial expressions, pitch and volume of tone of the player’s voices. The new Kinect 2 won’t be having limitations faced by the current one and would be able to support higher resolutions.
Nutan Shinde (SE) PICT
Kinect + C# Make Your Boring PPTs Rock: Can’t come up with a solution to make your PPTs lively and interesting? Haruki Maeda from Meiji University has a fix for you .According to him, you can “enter” the presentation and actually play with the text & graphics in your slides so that your audience can stay awake and pay attention. It just took some smart C# programming and Microsoft Kinect SDK to achieve the hack that allows you to do things like playing with text and graphics, zooming in with your hand gestures and even pushing text out of screen.
These hormones “flow” and their levels are decided on the basis of how the robot is feeling. For that , on a psychological level , the robots are provided with an artificial intelligence that tracks their affective state , based on the MRI scans of the brain of their human counterpart. In simple words , the robot first analyses the instantaneous behavior of the human being , its hormone levels are adjusted accordingly and then the robot responds as per the situation. Thus similar to human relationships , lovotics is also based on interactions. The robot can display its anger, jealousy, affection, happiness according to how the human object of its desire interacts with it.Most of this interaction takes place through touching. For example- if you cuddle or pat your robot lovingly, it’ll love you back ; but if it sees you interacting with another human , it’ll become jealous! The robot’s emotions are communicated with the help of R2D2-in the form of movements, vibrations and color of a ring of LEDs under the robot. For example, bright yellow lights and rapid movements show happiness ; whereas pink lights convey love . Dark yellow light with quaking movements shows disgust. In this way one gets to know what the robot is “feeling”. The lovotics team aspires to create an era of meaningful human-robot relationship. Thus in future if you see a person celebrating Valentine’s Day with a robot, you shouldn’t be surprised…right? Jai .V. Chhatre (SE) PICT
CAN ROBOTS LOVE? There’s a classic saying – “you can’t buy love”…but in today’s times, we can certainly engineer it ! At least Hooman Samani , an artificial intelligence researcher of the National University of Singapore thinks so… In a layman’s language “lovotics” can be defined as love + robotics , i.e. engineering robots that are capable of loving human beings and being loved by them. Samani has outlined and begun to develop an extremely complex artificial intelligence system that simulates psychological and biological systems responsible for human love. On a biological level, these robots are provided with artificial versions of hormones necessary for inducing the feeling of love i.e. Oxytocin, Dopamine, Seratonin, and Endorphin.
‘Kinect’ed SmartPal Helps Mama Clean Kitchen 1000 Miles Away: The tele-presence boosted by Kinect enables you direct the robot’s movements. This means you can tidy up your house, pick up objects and do much more stuff just by sitting in your office or friend’s place. The robotic engineers at Yaskawa have designed the robot that can adapt to its surrounding. “SmartPal “uses two cameras which can zoom in and zoom out. Thus you can have a better look at things 9
THE BIOLOGICAL COMPUTER Have you ever given it a thought to what life would be if biology and technology come together for the development of mankind? With the advent of ‘Biotechnology’, of course, this dream has already turned into a reality…and it is creating wonders !! But that’s not enough, there’s more to it, scientists all over the world are set to combine the intricacies of the huge I.T sector and the detailed knowledge of the biological systems and that has lead to the idea of generation of a “Biological Computer”. Biological computers are microcomputers that are specifically designed to be used for medical
applications. The biological computer are implantable on our body and is mainly used for tasks like monitoring the body’s activities or inducing therapeutic effects, all at the molecular or cellular level. Imagine a computer the size of cellular components that could interact with the cellular apparatus. The tiny computer, in response to predetermined events, can synthesize RNA that would directly control the production of proteins. Researchers are trying to synthesize a sub-cellular computer that would interact with cellular organelles. Biological computers can find a lot of applications such as synthesizing drugs inside the cells. Researchers further hope that with the advancement of molecular synthesizing techniques, the computer could be built from actual bio-molecules. Since the ultimate aim is to produce the device from bio-molecules, all of the programmatic instructions are derived from current cellular processes such as polymer elongation and ligation. The main advantage of this technology is that through it, a doctor can focus on or find and treat only damaged or diseased cells. Selective cell treatment would be a reality. Simple mathematical calculations can also be performed by a biological computer. Owing to this, researchers can build an array or a system of biosensors that would be able to detect or target specific types of cells that could be found in the patient’s body. This could also be used to carry out or perform target-specific medicinal operations that could deliver medical procedures or remedies accurately. Along with the ability of biological computers to accurately focus only on the damaged, diseased and cancerous cells it also makes the healing process easier. Such a device could have wide ranging effects on a cell. The device could respond to a cellular state, such as a certain concentration of various molecules, and produce an effect based on that cellular state. Thus, it would allow doctors to have a potential in vivo (within the living organism) 10
cellular aid. Biological computers would help us in monitoring intercellular activities including mutation of genes. Some scientists believe that, in the future, small biological computers would be roaming in our bodies monitoring our health and rectifying any problems that they encounter . This could further lead to complete eradication of some non-curable diseases like cancer.
desktop operating system based on Unix and an advanced object oriented development system, rather than being an embedded mobile OS with a pedigree of running PDAs, pagers, and handheld organizers. The reason the iPhone greatly benefited from having a mature kernel and development APIs is because it was actually this “age” and sophistication that enabled Apple to disrupt the Smartphone market with a brand new product. Google’s Android, based on existing Danger,Linux and Java technology, has changed enough of its core design so that it has taken quite a while for the platform to achieve a level of stability and maturity so that it can be considered in the same league as Apple’s iOS. The Smartphone market now has become an intense tournament between Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms. There is a very little customisation and personalization that is offered by iOS. You can only operate it within the protected cave carved out by Apple. It’s either Apple’s way or not. On the other hand the best thing about Android is its Open Handset Alliance. And being open source, developers can take it to any level of customization they want. iOS is not tailor-made for multitasking or juggling several bits of information at once .Android provides unrestricted multitasking with its excellent background processing. iOS has a cleaner and more dynamic interface. Google’s OS is customizable with widgets providing an easy view everything in one glance. But being flexible it can also be considered more complex and confusing compared to iOS especially for new users. Having come from different lineages and having different abilities, both are same at the core. Just one is reserved and the other is open- hearted. It is for you to choose who is better!
The day this ‘Biological Computer’ actually takes its form, would mark the beginning of a new era in the life of Homo sapiens….or should I just say Homo ‘I.Tians’? Madhura Murar (S.Y. BSc.Biotechnology) Abasaheb Garware College,Pune
ANDROID vs. iOS With the number of smartphone users increasing each day, there is an equal increase in the number of apps developed for the same. Though the developers have numerous platforms to choose from but the two most sought after operating systems in the market are -Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. From its kernel to its developer tools, the iOS has a direct lineage dating back to 1988,when the NeXT computer was first showcased by Steve Jobs. Rather than age, the biggest difference between Apple’s iOS and the initial wave of Smartphone operating systems was that Apple’s iOS was derived from a platform-agnostic
Chandrika Parimoo (FE) PICT
11
CYANOGENMOD
window is closed. 3. Lock screen Gestures: You can draw out anything you wish on your lock screen which will then launch an application associated with the drawing.
CyanogenMod is a replacement firmware of over 60 smart phones and tablet computers, based on the Android mobile operating system. It offers a plethora of new features and options not found in the official firmware distributed by vendors of these devices.
History
Right after HTC phones based on Android were released, a method was perfected to attain privileged control (termed “root access”) within Android’s Linux-based subsystem. Root access combined with the open source nature of the Android, allowed the phone’s stock firmware to be modified and re-installed onto the phone. Later in 2009, several modified firmwares were developed and distributed by Android enthusiasts such as Jesus Freke who stopped work on his firmware and suggested users switch to a version of his rom that had been further enhanced by developer Cyanogen (Steve Kondik) called “CyanogenMod”. CyanogenMod quickly grew in popularity, and a small community of developers, called the Cyanogen Mod Team made contributions. In due time, the number of devices and features supported by CyanogenMod increased and CyanogenMod quickly became one of the most popular Android firmware distributions.
4. Themes: Theme manager lets you build a single app that can theme entire system. 5. DSP equalizer: Gives enhanced sound processing capabilities. DSP manager is provided to adjust new sound parameters like bass boost, virtual room effect etc.
6. Open VPN: CyanogenMod’s main purpose is to make your smartphone a better, faster, and more versatile device. Recently CyanogenMod surpassed 1 million installations. Proper care should be taken while installing Cyanogenmod or it may brick your phone. Another important thing is that after rooting and installing Cyanogen, the phone is not covered under warranty. To install CyanogenMod visit www.cyanogenmod.com. Nikhil Lagwankar (SE) PICT
Why should one use CyanogenMod instead of stock OS?
Rather than the usual pre-installed apps or a flashy interface, CyanogenMod is a simple ROM that focuses mainly on performance and stability. Also rooting the phone will improve its performance and stability and more frequent updates are available.
Memristors NEVER FORGET
Key features of CyanogenMod: 1. Phone goggles : This filters outgoing communications and avoids any unwilling call or sms to be sent. 2. Incognito mode: Mod provides incognito browsing mode. Web pages opened and files downloaded aren’t recorded in this mode. All new cookies are deleted after 12
All of us know about the three basic two-terminal passive electrical components. But,the fourth element has always been a mystery. This fourth element is known as the Memristor. The memristor was postulated by Leon O. Chua, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior IEEE member, in a 1971 IEEE magazine. According to him, the laws of symmetry would state that there would be a fourth component in the electrical circuit.
GADGET CAGE: Top 10 Green Gadgets to Stay Green in 2012
The memristor is a cleverly used acronym for ‘Memory Resistor’. The name is memristor because it has the ability to ‘remember’ the current passing through it. But at that time, nobody could experimentally prove the existence of the memristor. A few futile years later, a team of HP engineers accidentally discovered a mysterious component while trying to discover the cross-bar switches (the cross-bar switches were going to be used for bit memory). They made some circuits. Some of them worked, some wouldn’t & some were just weird. For years, they tried to figure out why. Then, one of them remembered seeing Dr Chua’s paper from the 1971 IEEE magazine. And it hit them, they had actually discovered a memristor. Their research then got a new direction. In 2008, they could finally create a memristor. The memristor will change the face of computer storage as we know it. HP is marketing it as a replacement for flash, but as it has the ability to ‘remember’ the current flowing through it, it can also couple up as a permanent storage. This will bring a greater integration. New and smaller devices will be available. This would blur the line between a notebook PC and a cell phone. In 2013, new types of RAM known as MRAM and RRAM will be sold by HP in collaboration with Hynix solutions. One great property of the memristor is that it can be made literally minuscule. HP states that they can make a memristor as small as 4 nanometers in size. That is just 7 atoms across ! Advanced circuits nowadays use transistor gates which are just 32 nanometers in size. The entire transistor is 10X the size. This could open up the possibility for the nanotechnology revolution. As the memristor was discovered very recently (in 2008), the research is in its initial stages. There are endless possibilities as to what this component is capable of. This could just be the technology for the next generation.
Is there anything cooler than being in the middle of this technological revolution? Sure. Being in the middle of the green revolution of technology at the same time! 2012 proved to be a treat for the “green geeks” as it introduced many green gadgets. Here are some of the gadgets that topped the list: 1. The Dell Studio Hybrid “The Dell Studio Hybrid is our Greenest Desktop” This is the headline that captures your attention on Dell’s website. It uses an energy efficient Intel Core Duo Processor, contains with75% less written documentation than other desktops and comes packed in recyclable materials. 2. The Bedol Water-Powered Clock Amazingly, this clock works only on water! The salty water (even lemon juice can be added if necessary) corrodes the clock’s electrodes, generating electricity. Moreover it comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Also it offers a small price to pay . 3. Philips Eco TV Now even eco-friendly LCDs exist (we all know how much power they consume compared to regular TVs).The best example is Philips Eco TV. Its main eco-feature is the ability to dim the lights whenever it detects the low intensity of surrounding light. Thus, it uses less power in dark rooms than regular LCDs. 4. ts02+mic earphones from ThinkSound Music lovers will love these eco-friendly earphones. The earphones are made of wood, which is a very good sound resonator. This enhances the sound quality. And the best part – it is compatible with iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and many other devices!
Mayuresh B. Hooli (FE) PICT
5. Nokia 3110 Evolve Nokia 3110 Evolve is a wonderful 13
Squaring away the code
combination of technology and ecology. It is made of biodegradable materials (package included) .Even the battery life is great: 4 hours in talking mode and 370 hours in stand-by.
Have you ever mused over some square shaped box with weirdly placed dots in it? Well, that is known as a QR code used to encode data. Quick Response or QR codes are a type of two-dimensional barcode that can be read using smartphone or dedicated QR reading devices. It is named so because it is extremely quick to scan. QR codes contain information horizontally as well as vertically. Hence QR codes are also called as 2D codes. Encryption is a process of converting messages, information or data into a form unreadable by anyone except the intended recipient. Encoded data must be deciphered or decrypted, before it can be read by the recipient. This is precisely what QR codes follow. For a layman, a QR code might seem gibberish but it encodes data. You can use QR code to encode anything. An ‘image based hypertext link’ can be encrypted. You want your Facebook URL encrypted; QR code can do the job. URL of a video or a website can also be encrypted. It can even encrypt a mobile number which would prompt the mobile to make a call to that number. The options are endless and it depends on the creators to use their innovations to make the most out of QR codes. Denso-Wave, a subsidiary of the Toyota Group, created the QR code in 1994. Originally it was designed to be used to track parts in the vehicle manufacturing industry, but its use has since grown tremendously. QR codes are a huge success in Japan and across the East, and are slowly beginning to capture innovative minds of the West. Soon enough you will see QR codes on product packaging, shop displays, printed and billboard advertisements as well as in e-mails and on websites. A standard 1D Barcode stores up to 30 numbers, whereas a QR can store up to a massive 7,089 characters. This very feature of QR code enables it to link to websites, URL of videos and images. Also a QR code relatively requires less printing space than a barcode .It does not matter how
6. The Voltaic Solar Backpack Mountaineers would certainly love an off grid charger that attaches itself to any backpack. This special backpack has solar panels attached to the back. These little cells charge up while the person is walking, thus providing the facility to recharge cellphone or iPod on top of the mountain. 7. The Shakenergy Mint Battery by MintPass You just shake this innovative battery and it recharges! It looks like any regular AAA battery. MintPass found the solution: to transform mechanical energy into electricity. 8. Solio Classic Hybrid Solar Charge Not only its design is impressive , but it can also reduce your electricity bill. At a reasonable price, it’s compatible with over 3,200 devices , according to the producer. Solio has been a huge hit and now the company is putting all their efforts to improvise it. Since it comes with a USB cable, it is possible to charge it with your own laptop or desktop. 9. The Battery BOS from RollerGlen If you love cycling, then why not use ‘The Battery BOS’ ? It can be attached to your bicycle and recharges when you pedal. After that you can use it to charge your cell phone. 10. Solarbulb This eco-friendly lamp allows you to be romantic and a “greenie” at the same time!.The interesting part is that the Solarbulb can be screwed to any bottle with a 28mm neck. If it’s charged, you’ll see light emerging from your bottle. Surely these 10 great gadgets that are cost-effective made 2011 a bit more greener…thanks to technology. Priyanka Methikar (SE) PICT 14
From a raw processing standpoint, the hardware is capable of delivering on a graphical standard that lies somewhere between the PS2 and PS3 (although much closer to the latter), while being able to multi-task effortlessly with a range of social apps. A popular user verdict goes “I wish I had more fingers to be able to fully handle all of the input-controls of the Vita!” The games and other media shall be available on “Vita-cards” rather than on Universal Media Discs (UMDs) used by the original PlayStation Portable. By combining a familiar console button layout with a large capacitive touch-screen, it offers something that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else on the market and even just from the launch titles we have an impressive range of decent quality games, and the kind of heavyweight first-party backing that was lacking from the Nintendo 3DS launch. But let’s try to answer the question: Is it worth the money? If you’re buying the Vita as a flexible multimedia device with the added perk of web browsing functionality, then you’ll likely be just as well served by the many tablets and smart-phones available today. The media apps and web browser are lacking in their current form, but are constantly subject to change through firmware updates so we would hope that Sony improves them over time as it did with the PSP. If it’s a pure handheld gaming machine you’re after, however, and if you subscribe to Sony’s vision of taking the home console experience on the go, PlayStation Vita is precisely catered towards your needs. The Vita releases on the 22nd of February worldwide this year, with the exact date of release in India subject to changes.
you scan the QR code, it works just the same even if you scan it upside down. An additional feature of QR code is its error correcting capacity which makes it possible to read a partially torn or dirty code. Some regard QR codes as a hassle because a QR reader needs to be installed. According to a survey, the general crowd either is unaware of or feels uncomfortable using a QR code. On the other hand, marketers perceive this technology to be interactive and a great tool for promotion, as most people today own smart phones. Simple uses include magazine advertisements that link to websites, details on a business card while Android uses QR codes to link directly to apps in the Android Marketplace. Hence the future of QR code is what the users make out of it!
Rahul Baijal (SE) PICT
ULTIMATE GAMING -PLAYSTATION VITA It was the 11th of February 2011 at the E3(Electronic Entertainment Expo) that Sony proudly announced and showcased the powerful successor to one of the most revolutionary gaming devices, the Playstation Portable. This, initially codenamed the NGP (Next Generation Portable), was later christened as ‘Playstation Vita’. All units were sold out within the first hour of its release on the 17th of December last year in Japan. Even as you read this, the count for its pre-orders in the rest of the world steadily keeps rising. With all its features and control methods, PlayStation Vita is the complete package. In hindsight, additions such as the multi-touch screen controls and a second analogue stick may well have been exactly what the PSP needed to stand out from the crowd, and it’s a pleasure to see these ideas finally realized all together on a single handheld platform.
Here are a few tech-specs you may want to know: 1. Available in Two Models: w/ 3G and w/o 3G, both supporting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. 2. 5” inch (960×544 pixels) multi-touch OLED Display. 3. Rear touch-panel. 4. Dual cameras – front and rear, also to be used for Augmented Reality games. 15
5. Quad-core ARM Cortex A-9 CPU and a Quad-core GPU. 6. Full backwards-compatibility with the PSP. 7. Dual analog Joystick with 6-axis motion sensors. 8. Location based gaming. 9. Multiplayer Gaming, Social Community to Interact, Real-time Chat and Voice Application. Games: 10. Uncharted: Golden Abyss offers vibrant cinematic visuals and most intuitive 3rd person shooter gaming experience. 11. ‘Ruin’ offers the ultimate social action RPG experience. 12. ‘Little Big Planet’ allows users to Play, Create and Share with the system front touch screen and rear touch pad as well as its front and rear cameras. 13. Other Games: Asphalt Injection, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy X, Wipeout 2048, Killzone, Mortal Kombat, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, etc. Debojeet Chatterjee (SE) PICT
ANIMATION DOMINATION “In most instances, the driving forces behind the action is the mood, the personality, the attitude of the character—or all three. Therefore, the mind is the pilot. We think of things before the body does them” -Walter Elias Disney.
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The picture shown above is from ‘Steamboat Willie’, a black and white American short film directed by Walt Disney long back in 1928. The true animation film industry developed from here. An old concept of animation was just a hand drawn Key-Framing which later was simplified with computers. But still then you need to create one key-frame, and then move your time slider and then again create another one and the loop goes on and on until you are done with your complete scene. Then there came a concept of Motion Tweening. This was actually a better method to animate than key-framing. You just need to define the first and last position of your object and rest of the motion in between was manipulated by computer itself. It really works well in 2D animations. You can easily design your scene in lesser time than you require in key-framing. Nowadays, experts in 3D animation can easily astonish people with amazing 3D modeling and animation skills. We often get surprised while playing a game like GTA 4, COD (and the list goes on!) but only the animator knows how hard he tried to make his scenes more interactive and realistic. Imagine a situation where thousand balls are being poured out of a Box. If you try to animate this in 3D then you need to make sure that no two balls pass through each other during the simulation, and that they behave realistically while colliding with each other and the environment. If you think it can easily be done by hand animation then you need to redefine your thinking process. So here comes a Reactor in picture which would functionally make you feel it easy. As the name implies “it reacts to whatever you try to do and simulates the same results obeying some laws of physics”. You can easily simulate your results just in 10 minutes using Reactor by producing thousand balls and a box and just defining their physical properties such as mass, elasticity where key-framing and motion tweening
which would have been time consuming. So, what you are going to read next is all about a Reactor named as ‘Havok’ The basic building blocks of Havok reactor are Rigid Bodies. You can manually add your created objects to the ‘Rigid Body Collection’. From the reactor drop down menu, ‘Property Modifier’, you can assign physical properties to your object. There are some properties such as mass, friction, elasticity which construct your realistic animation and behavior of objects (rigid bodies). Eg. If you construct one sphere and add it to your rigid body collection then its non zero mass would indicate it’s not a stationary object and vice versa.
first appeared. 1. First Wave - Mainframe computing era: one computer shared by many people, via workstations. 2. Second Wave - Personal computing era: one computer used by one person. 3. Third Wave – Pervasive (initially called ubiquitous) computing era: one person, many computers. Pervasive computing systems (PCS) and services may enhance user knowledge of, or control over, the surrounding environment, from anywhere. They may also show a form of ‘intelligence’. For instance, a ‘smart’ electrical appliance could anticipate its own impending failure and proactively notify its owner as well as a maintenance company, to arrange a repair. Pervasive computing has been in development for almost 15 years but it is yet to become a fully operational reality. It may be another 5-10 years before complete PCS become widely available. There have been calls for more widespread debate on the implications of pervasive computing while it is still in the nascent stage of development. To put it simply, pervasive computing is computation that’s freely available everywhere. Pervasive computing aims at a scenario viewed where all devices are networked, human-centric, and interacting smoothly with each other. It’s primary objective being to bestow quality life to the user. What’s so beautiful about pervasive computing is that it is an important part of our lives even now, but in ways that we don’t really notice. Earlier, television used to be a source for entertainment while the computer was used for work-related functions only. But, today, their functions don’t adhere to any rigid boundaries anymore. What this suggests is that pervasive computing is soon going to be invisible. The way it interfaces with users will also become intuitive. Progress has continued till a point where the greatest innovations transcend our notions of personal computing.
Havok reactor is truly a powerful tool to create and analyze your realistic 3D animations. So this is how an animation is getting transformed into its more sophisticated form day by day. Surely, if Newton was on earth he would have been happy watching his third law of motion getting modeled as ‘virtual realism.’ Shreyas Shrikant Panhalkar (SE) PICT
Pervasive Computing Pervasive computing is the result of computer technology advancing at exponential speed. Pervasive computing goes beyond the realm of personal computers: it is the idea that almost any device can be embedded with chips to connect the device to an infinite network of other devices. The goal of pervasive computing is to create an environment such that the connectivity is unobtrusive and always available. Pervasive computing is the third wave of computing technologies to emerge since computers 17
Near Field Communication
Applications Pervasive computing could have a range of applications:
NFC has a lot of exciting potential. Soon enough, we’ll be able to share files, make payments, unlock our houses, stop worrying about our cumbersome Wi-Fi passwords, and hop on the subway without a transit pass, all from our phones. Here’s how.
1. Logistics: Tracking logistical goods along the entire transport chain of raw materials, semi-finished articles, and finished products (including their eventual disposal) closes the gap in IT control systems between the physical flow and the information flow.
What Is NFC?
NFC is a short-range, low-power communications protocol that exists between two devices. One device known as the initiator, uses magnetic induction to generate a radio-wave field capable of being detected and accessed by another device known as the target. This permits small amounts of data to be transferred wirelessly over a comparatively short distance (in NFC’s case, the distance must be less than 4 inches).
2. Motor traffic: Automobiles already contain several assistance systems that support the driver invisibly. Networking vehicles with each other and with surrounding telematics systems is anticipated for the future. 3. Production: In the smart factory, the flow and processing of components within manufacturing are controlled by the components and by the processing and transport stations themselves. Pervasive computing facilitates a decentralised production system that independently configures, controls and monitors itself. 4. Smart homes: In the smart home, a large number of home technology devices such as heating, lighting, ventilation and communication equipment become smart objects that automatically adjust to the needs of residents.
NFC Vs. Bluetooth:
When compared to other wireless protocols like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, NFC is painstakingly slow. The maximum data transfer speed is just 0.424 Mbps, less than a quarter to that of Bluetooth. On the other hand, NFC scores over Bluetooth in these areas:
Pervasive computing will be able to sense our situations and anticipate our needs and proactively act in our best interests, much like a very good human friend or our parents. -Prof. Dr. Daniel Siewiorek, Carnegie Mellon University, United States
1. It consumes negligible amount of power with respect to today’s jumbo smartphone batteries. 2. Highly secure. 3. It bypasses the “pairing” process of Bluetooth entirely. Bluetooth needs to be configured; NFC is completely hassle-free, requiring nothing more than a tap.
Stephy Mathew(SE) Sinhgad Academy of Engineering
What Can You Do With NFC?
The three main aspects of the NFC technology are: Transaction : By configuring a smartphone with an NFC chip, it can easily imitate a credit or debit card. 18
REVOLUTIONALIZING THE DIGITAL WORLD:DENNIS RITCHIE
The only effort needed is to tap your phone against an NFC-enabled payment terminal, and your money is spent! Further advancements in NFC technology could provide better substitutes for public transit passes, library cards, hotel room keycards, office building pass-cards, driver’s licenses , passports .Who knows, in future, even the concept of keys would become obsolete as a mere tap of your phone would unlock your door.
12th October, 2011 saw the demise of a true revolutionary and a pioneer in the computing world, Dennis Ritchie. He was best known as the creator of the C programming language and the co-author of the operating system UNIX. With these developments, he changed the very fabric of the digital world and transformed it for the better. Ritchie’s work with Ken Thompson in developing the UNIX operating system was awarded the Turing Award in 1993, the IEEE Hamming medal in 1990, the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and, most recently, the Japan Prize for Information and Communications in 2011.
Sharing : An active NFC-enabled device like a smartphone can interact either with another active NFC device or with a passive tag to enable data transfer. That tag is just a miniature chip that’s embedded with some data like a printed ad that provides a URL for further information. As these tags depend on the RF field created by the NFC-enabled phone, they don’t require power. So you just have to tap your phone on the tag and acquire a little bit of data on your phone.. Pairing : Just tap your phone to another one to instantly configure a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection, omitting the need for passwords. Security, Privacy And Distortion: The main problem with NFC is that it promotes the transmission of extremely sensitive data through the air, and that data could theoretically be snatched. More advanced security like encryption can be used to avoid eavesdropping. Destruction of the signal is also possible. This might prove to be a hindrance to NFC’s popularity.
C In the early 1970’s, Ritchie invented the C programming language. It fundamentally changed how software programs were created. For the first time ever, Ritchie introduced the concept of portability and made C portable. C also brought along a concept called ‘data structures’ which revolutionized the programming paradigm forever.
Will It Succeed? With the support from banks, hardware makers, and retail shops, NFC is likely to get popular. With proper implementation of NFC, the days of paper money and forgotten passwords may become a history.
UNIX Dennis Ritchie along with Ken Thompson created an operating system called UNIX. Earlier, UNIX was first developed in assembly language but later in 1973, it was completely recoded in C. UNIX was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration. UNIX systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data, a hierarchical file system and the use of a large number of software tools, small programs that can be strung together through a command line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to using a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the UNIX philosophy.
Revati Joshi (S.Y.BCS) Fergusson College, Pune Gaurav Khatavkar (SE) Pune Vidyarthi Griha
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Impact C language undeniably is the basis for almost all the modern programming languages. C++ is an immediate derivative of C and Java too owes a lot to C. C is still one of the most popular programming languages for system programming. The elegant way in which he handled data influenced not only C, but C++, objective C and Java which together account for the majority of the code which exists in the world today. UNIX is one of the most influential and powerful piece of software ever written. UNIX governs the web as we see it. Almost everything on web works on UNIX and C. Right from web browsers to web servers to network hardware, all are written in C. If not C, then C++ or Java is used which are derivatives of C or, Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. Hence web, without C, collapses. To make sure that people understand the importance of UNIX, everything from GNU/Linux, iOS, even MS Windows has taken at least something from UNIX. Most of the modern digital computation, sophisticated system and application programming and the Internet deeply rely on two of the greatest inventions in which Dennis Ritchie was directly involved. Dennis Ritchie and his team on the Unix Operating System have etched a deep impression in all the modern operating systems. There’s no denying the fact that Dennis Ritchie’s contribution to all the technological advancements in the modern computing is immense. Dennis Ritchie’s impact on the world was and c ontinues to be tremendous and ubiquitous.
The Way Steve Jobs Changed Our World An insight into how Steve changed the life of Indian youth (and not what effects he had on the world and stocks etc.)
Music iStyle!! At the dawn of the new millennium, our generation of youth experienced for the first time the craze of Jobs’ products-the iPod- a sleek, digital white box that has all your entertainment needs in one. Not only could it store more than a 1000 songs, it could play music for days too, without being charged! Plus the small size and the metallic apple back logo just made it an instant gadget of the cool and happening.
iPhone With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple introduced a device that initiated the smartphone Praises revolution .Equipped with minimalistic design, large “It is impossible – absolutely impossible – to responsive touchscreen and solid operating system, overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis it blew away Palm and RIM’s(BlackBerry) efforts . Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent Again his importance to aesthetics and user for over thirty years.” friendliness was evident from the cover of the -Tim Bray (editor of XML specification) mobile. Jobs defined what a smart phone should be and overnight, it became a sensation. Even today, “It’s really hard to overstate how much of the owning an iPhone is a class apart, above the modern information economy is built on the work BlackBerrys, and rightly so- the way one can Dennis did.” personalize their phone with over a million -Rob Pike applications, redefined the definition of the smart phone! Chirag Kadam (SE) PICT iPad By now we all were just waiting for what the 20
CROSSWORD
next Apple product will be and in January 2010 when Jobs presented the concept of interbreeding a phone and a laptop to produce the iPad, again it sent a craze in the industry for his products! The reason his products are so successful is because they listen to the demand of the public- charming looks, high performance and lastly the cost.
Answers to this crossword lie within the included articles...
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. There is no reason not to follow your heart.... Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” -Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.
Apple Inc However, the most significant contribution of Job’s is Apple itself, a 12,000-strong organization that was once on the verge of bankruptcy. Since his return to the company in 1997, Jobs has rebuilt it into the most valuable technology company in the world, facing tough competitors such as Microsoft and HP. Job’s personalized touch reflected in each Apple product is in itself the greatest achievement of his life. In conclusion we feel that the most important contributions of Steve Jobs was not his empire or his products, but his words-
Siddhesh Yawalkar(SE) PICT
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Across 1.Term used to indicate integration of telecommunications and informatics 6.Apple Inc.’s own mobile operating system 10.Latest version of Playstation 11.Co-invented by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson 12.Original name for KINECT. 13.Google’s own mobile operating system. 15.A form of data storage 16.One of the world’s greenest brands 19.Guinness record for world’s fastest selling electronic gadget 20.Military supplies including weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, and maintenance tools and equipment 22.Name of a 3-D reactor 23.Specific character string that constitutes a reference to an internet resource 24.Change in genomic sequence 25. A computer program that provides services to other computer programs (and their users) in the same or other computers
Down 2.Postulated fourth electrical component 3.A vector enabling Cross Site Request Forgery(CSRF) 4.Combination of a hardware device and computer instructions and data that reside as read-only software on that device 5.Is a network that uses primarily public telecommunication infrastructure 7.Genetic macromolecule in living cell 8.Codes encrypted in a square box 9.Stores values 1 and 0 simultaneously 14.A small file or part of a file stored on a World Wide Web user’s computer 17.A hormone artificially induced in robots 18.The very small increments or parcels into which many forms of energy are subdivided 21.Telecommunications company caught in controversy with the Indian Govt.
Answers: 1.Telematics 2.Memristor 3.Clickjacking 4.Firmware 5.VPN 6.iOS 7.RNA 8.QuickResponse 9.Qubit 10.Vita 11.Unix 12.Natal 13.Android 14.Cookie 15.RAM 16.Nokia 17.Oxytocin 18.Quantum 19.Kinect 20.Ordnance 21.RIM 22.Havok 23.URL 24.Mutation 25.Server
Synchronization of your Apple products The concept which is generally seen in movies wherein all gadgets are in synchronization with each other was adopted and implemented by Apple to put us in the future again. The communication of our personal devices was never a hard thing to implement but since it had always been a concept from movies, it drew everyone’s attention and will hopefully pave the way for synchronization of all our gadgets!